Raible Designs

My Review of Jaguar.

I'll probably be the first one to express disappoitment in the latest Mac OS X version. I received it in the mail yesterday and upgraded from 10.1.5 to 10.2 last night. The install was cake, and much smoother than any windows install/upgrade I've ever done, and definitely easier than Linux. However, I ran into a couple issues after I had everything installed.

• I had to hack my system to get Dave uninstalled (I'd give you the link, but www.thursby.com is down). 10.2 comes with Rendezvous now, so I don't need Dave anymore. After 10 minutes, I gave up on trying to figure out how to share my home directory - sounds nice, but I like Window's (XP) right-click on a folder -> Sharing and Security... feature.
• Eclipse 2.0 doesn't work, all the panels are jumbled and it looks like it got run over by a truck.
• I don't use Mail, I use Entourage - so I don't care about all the new features in Mail. Same goes for iChat - I use Yahoo and M$N Messengers.
• On 10.1.5, I could use a Courier New font in my Terminal window, and everything was smooth and sexy. Courier New on 10.2's Terminal window is boxy and blech.
• I tried TransparentDock (don't know where I got it from) and ClearDock 1.1 and neither of them worked to make my dock transparent. I was really looking forward to this enhancement.

I spent about an hour total trying to get the above problems solved - except for the Eclipse one, I just said, "yikes!" and left that one alone. All in all, I'm sure if I'd done a clean install vs. an upgrade, all of the above would not be an issue. I know I would never do an upgrade on a Windows machine, always a clean install. So I'm happy with the upgrade, just hoping for too much probably. I expected a lot more from the rave reviews it's been getting, but again, since I use it about 8 minutes per day - I probably wouldn't notice any sexy new features anyway.

In other Apple news, I had to boot into OS 9 at one point last night when hacking Dave - and WHOA - that OS screams! No wonder folks are having a hard time migrating to OS X. It's so fast and snappy that I almost "switched" to using OS 9 as my primary OS!

I recommend Eclipse.

In response to Russell's post on IDE's, I figured I'd give my opinion. I hate IDE's - for the past couple of years, I could never bring myself to use one for a few reasons (1) too slow, (2) I liked HomeSite too much and it worked for all my Java dev needs, and (3) I didn't like the UI's - not pretty enough for me. Granted, most of these are bad reasons, but we're allowed our opinions right? But with Eclipse 2.0, it's given me enough value-add that I now use it everyday, over IDEA and Sun ONE Studio 4 (a.k.a Forte for Java). It's still slower than HomeSite, but I really like it's look and it does everything I need (although I still use Ant to compile/deploy).

Adding a form element on the fly.

I used this code on my project yesterday and thought I'd share.

<script language="text/javascript">
    function addActionToForm() {
        // get the form to add the input element to
        var form = document.getElementById("noteForm");
        
        // Add a action input element
        var action = document.createElement("input");
        action.setAttribute("type", "hidden");
        action.setAttribute("name", "action");
        action.setAttribute("id", "action");
        action.setAttribute("value", "Save");
        
        form.appendChild(action);
        form.submit();
    }
</script>

This works great for me when I want to simulate a button named "action" being clicked, but I want to submit the form with JavaScript.

Hmmm, doesn't seem to work in IE5/Mac. Any tips?

A good story.

A friend of mine, Cliff Nellis, is riding his bike across America for charity and fun. He left last weekend, and had an opportunity to send us (friends) an e-mail today.

Towing 50 pounds of gear, the heat, no clouds, no shade, no breeze, running out of food and water with 15 miles left, and ending with one climb after another heading west into Walsenburg proved to be a test to say the least. FOUR miles outside of Walsenburg, I finally passed a house, and even though there was only four miles left, I knew I had to stop for some water. The lady was really nice...gave me some cold water and a popcycle. Still those last four miles were tough. I completely BONKED.

It was very enjoyable for me to read, so I asked him if I could share it. He said sure - [ full story ].

From Denver, I will bike to San Diego, and from San Diego, I will bike across the southern coast to Miami, FL. The total distance covered will be roughly 4,600 miles. On the way, I will bike through some of the areas that have been hit by wildfires this summer. I will pitch a tent at campgrounds most nights. I will carry my gear in a one-wheel B.O.B., which is essentially a trailer for a bicycle. I am excited to bike through many scenic parts of the country, including Moab, Lake Powell, the Grand Canyon, Lake Mead, the Mojave Desert, and the Rocky Mountains. I also look forward to biking through major cities, such as Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Houston, Mobile, Biloxi, Orlando, and Miami. Mostly, I look forward to meeting the people. On a previous cross-country bicycle trip, I found that the people make the trip. If all goes well, I am registered to compete in the Great Floridian Ironman on October 19, 2002, in Clermont, FL. [ Website ]

Bookmark a group of tabs.

A sweet tip from Russell:

I AM using Mozilla's awesome "Tab-Group Bookmarks" feature which basically opens up a folder of favorites all in one window with a tab per link. I've got everyone in the JavaBlogs section of my blogroll in one and I can just open it up and flip through the tabs one by one. The sites I want to respond to or read more in depth stay open, but the others get closed (quick middle-button click). It's working out really well to keep up with the blog list on the left.

To use it, it's very easy:

1. Open all your favorites sites using tabs.
2. Go to "Bookmarks" and "Bookmark this group of tabs..."

Doesn't get much easier than that, and he's right - it's WAY cool!

Mozilla 1.1 Released!

View Release Notes. Download: OS X, Windows, Linux.

Marc Fluery on Open Source

At JBoss, a lot of our professional motivation as developers is tied to the personal satisfaction that can be obtained through the Open Source lifestyle. It's about being your own boss, doing the work you enjoy, living and working where you want, collaborating with your peers worldwide, getting to see the kids grow up. [Full Article]

We've come a long way baby.

I stumbled upon The Internet Archive today. It's by far one of the coolest websites I've seen it a while. They have created the "Wayback Machine" which makes it possible to surf pages stored in the Internet Archive's web archive. In other words, you can checkout what Yahoo looked like in 1996. Kinda funny that 1996 is way back, eh?

Google ranks raibledesigns.com #1

in 2 different queries! I found via my usage statistics today that both "j2ee designs" and "raible" (of course) turn up this website as it's first choices. Cool, and after checking the cached versions, that was before adding new meta tags last week!

XDoclet and Struts Validator

From the struts-dev list and Erik Hatcher:

My XDoclet Struts Validator validation.xml (for Struts 1.1) has been posted to the XDoclet tracker.
I'm hoping it will be added to the codebase and put into the upcoming new release of XDoclet (although I'm using XDoclet from CVS builds). Read the HTML file attachment on the issue page above for an example of how it works. If you're hand-coding validation.xml and using ValidatorForm extensions then this is for you!

I can't wait to use XDoclet in my next project! On my current project, I've already written most of the ValidationForms I need. I used the Generator package to do this, but I hope to either (1) refactor my current project to use Castor/XDoclet like Roller, or (2) use it on my next project.

I ordered an Ant book this evening in hopes of learning a lot more about Ant. I think I know a lot, but there's always room for more knowledge.