Raible Designs

Pennies in the Radio

Julie took her car in to the stereo shop today b/c the radio was cutting out every once in a while. Actually, it was better than that - it'd quit working when she'd drive over a bump, and then start working again when she hit the next bump. The stereo shop called a few minutes ago to tell us what the problem was: someone has stuffed pennies into the radio, and they'd somehow fallen down and were shorting out the wiring below. I wonder who that someone was?

If you have a good "my life as a parent" story, I'd love to hear it.

What's a good DVI KVM?

I'm looking to get a KVM Switch for my home office. I used to have one when I had 2 19" Dell Monitors and it worked quite well. However, since I got a 23" Cinema Display, I haven't had one. This means that if I ever work on my PowerBook, I don't get to enjoy the comfort of a keyboard, mouse and huge monitor. This needs to change.

I bought a DVI KVM switch when I first got the monitor a year ago, and it didn't work. Apple's DVI connector was too big and didn't fit in the switch. So now I'm looking again - do you know of any that work well with a Cinema Display?

What's the best way to integrate Ajax into a Java webapp?

I received an e-mail over the weekend asking how to integrating Ajax into into the various web frameworks covered in my Java Web Framework Comparison Whitepaper. Below is my reply:

The best thing that I've seen is to use DWR, Prototype and Scriptaculous.
These will work with all web frameworks, and if you're using Spring on the backend -
DWR makes it easy to expose your beans as JavaScript objects.

Also, there's a number of tag library solutions that greatly simplify things:

  http://javawebparts.sf.net
  http://ajaxanywhere.sf.net
  http://ajaxtags.sf.net

I haven't used the first one, but I have used AjaxAnywhere and saw a demo of
AjaxTags from its developers.  They both look like they could be very useful.

For those of you using Ajax in your Java webapps - what's your advice? Do you use these same libraries or other ones?

This post was partially motivated by my desire to reiterate things that are so obvious.

Roller gets some respect

From A Baggins Under the Hill (nice looking theme BTW):

There's a surprising (or perhaps not so surprising) number of PHP programs, intricate ones at that, that have developers who didn't bother to abstract away the database layer, and wrote DB-vendor-dependent queries. That's a pretty horrible thing to do, since it ties you quite firmly down to one DB (in many cases MySQL). The SQL code is often very tightly integrate with the display code; it's bad enough in the business layer, but the view layer as well? Good gods.
...
Roller, on the other hand, uses things like Hibernate to abstract away queries from the underlying DB implementations, and Velocity to separate out the display logic from the business logic. And blogging software does have business logic, or a model; blog entries and categories and tags and authentication and the manipulation thereof are not simple. As a result, I see features being added to Roller that I'm surprised to see happening so quickly.

As far as solving the issue with Tomcat 5.5, that's just a matter of updating your $CATALINA_HOME/conf/Catalina/localhost/roller.xml file. Here's what I use for Roller on PostgreSQL:

<Context path="/roller" docBase="roller" debug="99" reloadable="false"
    antiJARLocking="true" antiResourceLocking="false">

    <Realm className="org.apache.catalina.realm.JDBCRealm" debug="99"
          driverName="org.postgresql.Driver"
       connectionURL="jdbc:postgresql://localhost/roller"
      connectionName="postgres" connectionPassword="postgres"
           userTable="rolleruser" userNameCol="username" userCredCol="passphrase"
       userRoleTable="userrole" roleNameCol="rolename" />

    <Resource name="jdbc/rollerdb" auth="Container" type="javax.sql.DataSource"
              maxActive="20" maxIdle="10" maxWait="100"
              driverClassName="org.postgresql.Driver"
              username="postgres" password="postgres"
              url="jdbc:postgresql://localhost/roller"/>

    <Resource name="mail/Session" auth="Container" type="javax.mail.Session"
              mail.smtp.host="localhost" />
</Context>

Integrating Axis into AppFuse

Via Technorati, I found Integrate Axis and Appfuse Part1. Good stuff - I'm looking forward to Part 2.

Starting from scratch on OS X and Windows

Last night I began my quest to get rid of "OS Rot" on both my PowerBook and my Windows box. I bought new hard drives for both, so I wouldn't have to worry about losing any data. For the Mac, I bought a Lacie d2 (250GB) and for Windows, I bought an internal Maxtor 120GB. Thanks to everyone who suggested the Lacie.

To start, I cloned my PowerBook's drive to the Lacie drive using the free version of SuperDuper. It took about two hours and worked flawlessly. I then proceeded to format the PowerBook drive and install OS X. For the most part, I just copied a bunch of files back into place. I've been trying to restore my settings by copying individual folders from ~/Library to the fresh install - but it's not working so well. I'm thinking of just restoring my whole home directory (cruft in ~/Library and all).

The Windows install wasn't nearly as easy. Rather than backing up to an empty drive, I just installed the new disk as the primary and old one as a slave. I tried installing Windows on the new one twice (once w/ the slave installed, once w/o). After installing, when I boot up, it just sits there will a dark grey screen. So I gave up and put my old hard drive in as the primary. I think the disk might be bad. Regardless, I'm going to try again tonight. This time I'm going to use a ghosting/cloning program to backup to the new hard drive - and essentially go through the same steps I did on the Mac. I'll probably use Norton Ghost or PartitionMagic - but I'm open to other suggestions.

Comparing Ajax Frameworks

From the SpikeSource blog:

SpikeSource's Matt Harrison blogs about his latest interest, AJAX. He's been checking out the various frameworks for AJAX's and being a python lover he has even ported some of them to be used with python. Matt has also conducted mini interview's with one of the framework creators: Alex Russell of dojo, and Bob Ippolito of MochiKit. An interesting read.

http://panela.blog-city.com/ajax_explosion.htm

Harrison also references a nice AJAX Library Comparison on the Open Source Applications Foundation website. I'd love to see an AJAX Framework Smackdown at a future conference.

DWR and Script.aculo.us now included in AppFuse and Equinox

Last night, I integrated DWR into both AppFuse and Equinox. AppFuse has had Script.aculo.us integrated since 1.8.2 and it's been great to work with - so I added it to Equinox as well. I added these with the philosophy that it's easier to remove them than to add them.

Thanks to Joe Walker (DWR), Thomas Fuchs (Script.aculo.us) and Sam Stephenson (Prototype) for authoring (and supporting) these great open source projects.

Next up: integrating Ivy (or Maven 2's Ant Tasks) for downloading dependencies. Hopefully both will still allow bundling JARs in a release so both AppFuse and Equinox can stick with the 1-download-to-get-everything philosophy. The main reason I'd like to integrate a dependency downloading tool is to reduce AppFuse's size in CVS, as well as make it easier to upgrade dependencies.

What's a good external firewire drive?

I have a 60 GB firewire drive that we resurrected from Julie's dead PowerBook, but I'm interested in getting a bigger one to start regular backups. CNET recommends the Maxtor OneTouch II (300GB), but there's lots of bad reviews. 200 GB should be enough for the next year or two. Any recommendations? Is there one that can be used to backup OS X, Windows and Linux?

PowerPoint 2.0

From beyond bullets:

Larry Lessig has been called a PowerPoint virtuoso, and his approach recently inspired Dick Hardt, Founder and CEO of Sxip Identify, to use a similar film-inspired approach in his recent presentation, "Identity 2.0" at a conference called OSCON 2005.

You can view his presentation at this link.

It's very creative, visually interesting, and makes great use of visual humor. You're sure to be inspired to try some of the techniques he used on your own storyboards; and it's a good example of a completely bullet-free presentation.

Woah. I'm blown away. This is a great example of what your presentations can be. To be honest, this looks very hard to do. You basically have to know what every word you're going to say is, and you have to have a new slide for every 2-3 words. It sure would be fun to deliver this kind of presentation.