Raible Designs

Awesome weekend

On Friday night, I skipped out on The Spring Experience's activities and headed out for a night on the town with Julie's Aunt and Uncle, who live in Miami. "Uncle Tim" married us and we had a great time - I even talked him into doing his first Irish Car Bomb. The cab dropped me off at my hotel room at 3:20 a.m.

I slept for 2 hours before getting up at 6:00 a.m. to catch my flight back to Denver. I arrived home safely, played with the kids for a few hours, and then headed to Castle Rock for the Virtuas Christmas Party. They had a "murder mystery" show during the party, and it was very entertaining. We left early (8:30) because our babysitter couldn't stay late.

Sunday: woke up, family breakfast at UPC and picked up a Christmas tree at the local Nursery. We decided to wait a few hours before decorating the tree, so I headed to the garage to work on the Bus. Within 5 minutes, I got a call from a good friend asking if I wanted to join them for the Broncos game. "Hell yes!" I said and 30 minutes later I was sitting in the South Stands. The game kinda sucked, but the Broncos won, and the tickets were free. All in all, quite a weekend.

The Spring Experience - what a show!

Last week, I traveled to beautiful South Florida to attend The Spring Experience conference. This show was put on by Interface21 and No Fluff Just Stuff. Keith Donald (from I21) and Jay Zimmerman (from NFJS) were the organizers and both did an excellent job. This was one of the best conferences I've attended this year, and I've been to many.

Well done gentleman, can't wait for the next one. To read my posts from the event, please see the links below:

• The Spring Experience: Rod Johnson's opening Keynote
• Spring Agile Development Challenges by Keith Donald
• WebWork and Spring with Matthew Porter
• Best coverage of The Spring Experience

This week, most of the Virtuas Practice Leaders are at ApacheCon. Let's hope they blog a little about the event.

New Computer - should I keep it?

When I arrived here in Florida on Wednesday, I got a call from Julie saying my Windows Desktop was hosed. When she started it up, she just got a black screen. This is the problem with having a 23" Cinema Display hooked up to a Windows box - you can never see if anything went wrong on startup. I told her she needed to hook up one of my humongous 19" CRT monitors from the basement, and plug it in to see what was wrong. 10 minutes later, she calls me back and tells me the problem: it can't find the hard drive. I walk her though putting in the XP CD and trying to repair the drive, but it doesn't work. I tried to convince her to live w/o e-mail and the internet until I got home, but that didn't fly either.

I got a call from her yesterday afternoon telling me that she'd just bought a computer from Best Buy. I cringed. "Best Buy?", I thought. Knowing my penny-pinching wife, I figured the machine would be a $300 eMachine. However, she sent me a link and I was pleasantly surprised. She bought a HP Pavilion a1250n, which seems to be a dual AMD 64. After further reading, it seems it's a dual-core and not a dual processor. Regardless, I was quite proud that she bought something that I've been thinking of getting. I've used AMD-based machines in the past and they've always seemed much faster than an equivalent Pentium box.

This machine does seem to be a "media center" PC, which is expected when you buy it from Best Buy. But what exactly does that mean? Does it mean it won't make a good development box? We have 14 days to return it, so I'm wondering if I should. I don't really want to buy a new desktop (unless it's a G5), but my 2.6 GHz Dimension 8300 has thrown up quite a few times in the last few months - so I'm probably due. I tried to talk Julie into a G5, but a lot of the software she's using for her new business is Windows-only ... and VirtualPC sucks.

Update: I've decided to keep the box, mainly because my Dell Dimension 8300 is getting old and this one seems much faster. It's unlikely I'll ever have a Mac desktop because we still need and enjoy using Windows for a lot of things. I'd love to, but it just won't fly with the wife - as well as many software vendors out there. To make things a bit speedier, I did buy 4 GB of RAM for the HP today. I'll likely turn my Dell into a Suse box for Subversion, CUPS and Samba.

Sunrise at Bal Harbour

I could get used to starting my day with this view. Don't tell Julie, she's ready to move back here.

New AppFuse Documentation: Axis, Handling Complex POJOs and Korean Translation

A few AppFuse enthusiasts have been hard at work, writing new documentation and tutorials. First of all, Mika Göckel has written a HowTo implement Axis tutorial - complete with an installation package! I tried it out last night, and it works quite well with AppFuse 1.8.2. If you're using a build from CVS, you'll need to make some modifications because web.xml is no longer generated. Hopefully we can fix that and get this "extras" package into CVS this week.

The 2nd tutorial is titled Handling complex objects with XDoclet, Hibernate and Struts. This one is written by the AppFuse committer Thomas Gaudin. Thomas has now written 5 tutorials, all of which include source code and step-by-step instructions.

Last, but certainly not least, DongGuk Lee has translated a large amount of AppFuse's documentation to Korean. I'm amazed that the QuickStart Guide and Tutorials have now been translated to 6 Languages!

Thanks for the contributions everyone - you guys rock!

Remotely debug your app in Eclipse

Levent Gurses has a nice blog entry on Remote Debugging with Eclipse. I was able to use his instructions a couple months ago to attach to a remote instance of WebLogic (8.1 SP4) to debug an application. The beauty of his instructions is I had it all working in about 5 minutes. Yesterday I realized you could use the settings in *any* application server, and remotely debug it - or at least you should be able to. Today I noticed he added instructions for Tomcat and JBoss. Good stuff - thanks Levent!

Here's the settings you need in your startup script - just in case Levent's blog is down the next time I need this info.

-Xdebug -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,server=y,suspend=n,address=1044

Sun's "free" tools

Want to know what I think about Sun giving away it's server and tools away for free? If so, check out this post on the Virtuas Blog. Yeah, that's blog #3 for me.

Free Forums from Nabble.com

Nabble seems like a pretty cool site:

Our forums are truly public, democratic and absolutely free. Nabble's advanced community filtering gives you only the best content without the need for moderation. Find forums that interest you or easily start your own in minutes.

I first found out about Nabble a few days ago when I started seeing messages on the AppFuse mailing with a from address of "sent by Nabble.com". I did some searching and found they have a set of AppFuse Forums. The cool thing about these forums is they're not only a set of mailing list archives, but they also allow you post to the mailing list. Nabble forums are similar to Jive Forums (like OpenSymphony has) - they keep the forums and the mailing lists in synch, which is pretty cool IMO.

I spoke (via e-mail) with Will Lin - one of the co-starters of the Nabble project. Here are a few things he had to say about Nabble:

The goal of Nabble is to do the discussion right, just like Google did the search right. There are many problems with the current forms of discussions in mailing lists, message boards, user groups etc. Most importantly, (1) the search, most forum search are broken, a lot of people use Google's site:archive.domain.com to search discussion archive - what a hack, because Google does not index all the messages especially the recent ones.

In the mailing list case, developers get mad because users post dumb questions repeatedly, but the users don't have a good way to search past discussions ... (2) moderation, most discussions rely on one or two strong moderator to resolve spam and flame wars, with Nabble, all the members can work togeter to rate up (promote) top contributors, and rate down (drive out) spam and trouble makers; (3) cataloging - similar topic discussions should be able to be combined for browsing and search.

One of the coolest features of Nabble is you can create your own forum, and skin it however you like. I've done this for AppFuse, and created an easy to remember alias at http://appfuse.org/forums. You can also check out the easily-searchable Roller Archives, as well as many other OS project's mailing list archives.

Equinox: the name conflicts with an Eclipse project

I just received the following e-mail from an anonymous user via my contact page.

You might have already heard, but the Eclipse guys have started a new 
project also called Equinox, which is their implementation of the OSGi 
framework (which is my first choice for building modular enterprise apps 
these days).

http://www.eclipse.org/equinox

Not sure who had the name first, but I can see this getting more 
confusing as both products continue to gain mindshare and blog coverage.

First of all, I am aware of this thanks to Euxx. I don't know which project started first, but Google still seems to prefer mine over Eclipse's. Eclipse's Equinox project is #46 when searching for equinox, while mine is up to #9.

If I could think of a better name, I'd change. However, being #9 on Google makes it pretty tempting to keep the "Equinox" name.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I have to admit, Thanksgiving is one of the best American holidays there is. No gift giving, no marketing hype - just good food and hanging out with friends and family. This year, we took a break from the norm and canceled our trip to Florida - instead opting to stay home and relax a bit. We're certainly glad we did as things are much less stressed and we had a great dinner with friends this evening.

Like previous years, I have a lot to be thankful for. I owe you, the readers of this blog, a huge thanks. Your comments and feedback are always appreciated. I also owe a big thanks to Virtuas for hooking me up with a kick-ass job and fun folks to work with.

Last, but certainly not least - I'd like to thank Julie, Abbie and Jack. You guys are the best part of this whole world and make it tremendously fun to live in.

Happy Turkey Day Y'all!