Sunday, January 12, 2003

The X Factor: Apple Rolls Out New Version of X11 Windowing Environment. Latest move for OS X is intended to bring parity with other UNIXes and deepen its Open Source community involvement. [Linux Journal] Sweet! 8:20:41 PM    comment []

Gibb, Bassist for Bee Gees, Dies. Maurice Gibb, who was 53, wrote and sang in the Bee Gees through decades of hits and more than 120 million albums sold. By Jon Pareles. [New York Times: NYT HomePage] 8:08:04 PM    comment []

As you may or may not know, Zope rules.  Today I fully realized the power of the "version" capability of Zope.  Versions are useful when you don't want others who may be using the system to see what you are working on (or in my case breaking) until you are finished with development.  My father and father-in-law had mentioned that they were confused about navigating our photo albumn.  When you clicked on a folder that had nothing in it in my tree navigation, nothing showed up -- not even the folders below the one you clicked on.  This confused them because they were used to how Windows Exploerer lets you navigate through folders. I quickly realized that the users were right, and I set about changing it.  So, I added a new version to my Photos folder.  Then I made some changes to my methods and my style sheet.  I tested it all out and got it looking as good as I could.  Then, after I was satisfied, POW!  I saved the changes in my version and everyone could see them.  Tre cool! Love Zope!  Love it! 4:53:06 PM    comment []

Figured out a nice Jakarta Struts 1.0.2 trick.  If you are trying to do form validation, and you are storing your form bean in the session, you may get some validation errors from the validate method of your form bean.  Struts may try to validate your form on a normal display if your user has visited the form, left, and then returned to the form.  To prevent the form bean from validating when the user has not submitted the form, I put a hidden input field in my HTML form called "submitted" and set its value to "true".  In the validate method of my form bean, I put: // Check to make sure that the form was submitted if (request.getParameter("submitted") == null) {     log.debug("Form was not submitted, return no errors.");     return null; } This checks to see if the hidden input field was in the request when the form is displayed.  If it wasn't, it means that the user didn't actually submit the form.  So, the block returns null to tell Struts that there were no ActionErrors when validating the form.  When the user actually submits the form, the value of "submitted" will be "true" and the above block of code won't execute. 12:33:52 PM    comment []

JDEE 2.3.2 now has extremely nice Ant build support.  It will scan your build file for targets and do completion when it prompts you for which one to build.  If a build completes without errors, the window automagically goes away now instead of remaining and annoying you.  Love it. 12:22:06 PM    comment []

JDEE 2.3.2 now includes a code style checker!  Sweet!  There are many other improvements that I'll probably be writing about.  12:04:30 PM    comment []

I just stumbled onto a link for Radio Community Server. This looks like just what the doctor ordered for organizing an internal knowledge network. Right now, we're just using a Zope server for our internal blogs but this could take it to a new level (and save us some development effort). From what little I've read about it, it looks like it gives you a way to have your own internal radio.userland.com site. Pretty sweet. And it is priced to move--$0. [Jeff Potts] This may be exactly what we've been looking for.  I can also envision it working well for project teams that are not able to connect to the corporate network.  If the requirements aren't overwhelming, one user might be able to run it on their laptop and the project team could collaborate without having an intranet connection.  Only requirement would be the RCS laptop would have to have a static IP instead of DHCP.  We could probably work that out with the system administrators. 9:53:18 AM    comment []

Radio Resources from Jeff Radio resources. Here are some resources that might be useful in building personal or corporate blogs: Radio directory of documentation, tools, developer stuff: http://radio.userland.com/directory/6742 Radio Userland resource directory: http://ruminations.weblogger.com/directory/143 Tools and doc for building your own Radio themes: http://radiotools.evectors.it http://radio.userland.com/stories/storyReader$7024 Using XML-RPC and SOAP in Radio: http://www.fuzzygroup.com/go/?radioSOAP http://www.fuzzygroup.com/go/?radioXML-RPC http://www.fuzzygroup.com/go/?radioWebServices Getting under the hood: http://www.fuzzygroup.com/go/?radioExposed   I got these links from Essential Blogging. [Jeff Potts] 9:46:41 AM    comment []

I just saw Hacker Packet in action.  It's a program that will generate Gibson-style cyberscapes from a computer network.  It's still under development, and it runs kind of slow on my laptop, but I can't wait to get on a bigger network and see what it looks like.  Really cool! 9:45:00 AM    comment []

Tom goes computer shopping I've started casually shopping for a new computer. Yesterday I actually screwed up the nerve to go in the Apple store. You see, I'm a die hard PC guy. I have built my last 3 systems, and I have been firmly anti-Mac in the past. (In fact, if I do purchase a Mac I'll have some explaining to do to Wes.) I've been a serious PC geek. So, when I say I had to work up the nerve, I mean I had to admit to myself that Apple is finally cooking up something that I'm interested in eating. I had played with the new Macs a little in CompUSA (neutral ground) and knew a little about Mac OS X. I decided it was time to have someone tell me about what made the Mac special. So, I went into the Mac store. First off, the guy I spoke to was really nice. I explained that I'm a long time PC geek (he smiled), a developer, and a soon-to-be dad. I said that I wanted something that I could do digital video and picture editing on, as well as burn DVDs. He showed me the Power Mac G4. The Power Mac G4 is definitely the high end of the home Mac line. It is a dual processor machine with very nice graphics and an Apple SuperDrive. The machine I looked at first was the middle of the line - a dual 1.0 GHz with 256 MB of memory. The machine was very smooth and responsive. I was definitely impressed. I opened iMovie and looked at the sample project. I noticed that everything was fluid. There was some very small lag time as things loaded (less than a second in most places), but the system was incredibly nice. Once the sales person started helping me, we also looked at the top end G4 which is a dual processor 1.25 GHz machine with 512 MB of memory and a 120 GB hard drive. Oooo. Daddy like. On this machine, everything was instant. Things were so snappy it was scary. We fired up iMovie and played with the same project, and it was incredible. My appetite for computing power was being whetted. Both machines include a built in network card, ATI Radeon 9000 Pro with 64 MB, AGP 4x slot, Mac OS X, Mac OS 9, QuickTime, iChat, iMovie, iPhoto, iTunes, iDvd, DVD Player, Mac OS X Mail, Microsoft IE, and Developer Tools. Zowie! Very nice. I left the Apple store feeling very different about the Mac. I'm still scared. I'm still reticent. However, I've definitely gained a new appreciation for the technology. I'm going to continue to do some research and ponder my purchase. After I went to the Apple store, I went to the Dell kiosk in my local mall. The guy was extremely nice and helpful. He was very knowledgeable about PCs and was able to answer most of my questions. When it came down to video editing, however, he didn't have any really good answers for me. Dell has a new video editing software out that they haven't trained the sales guys on yet. He let me use the kiosk to read the information about it on the website. No pictures. No demo movies. Hrmm... Definitely not the nice presentation and hands on demos you get with Apple. Also, I noticed that there was a "problem" with the machine we were using at the kiosk. This machine was a brand new Dell 4500. The machine had a Pentium 4 and 256 MB of RAM running Windows XP. The problem I'm referring to was that as you scrolled Internet Explorer, the refresh was CHOPPY! I'm not talking a little, either. You could hit page down and it would take at least half a second to refresh your scroll. I could tell it was frustrating the sales person too as he tried to prepare a quote for me on their web site. To the naked eye, the only things running were 2 instances of a program called Dell Kiosk and Internet Explorer. I was thinking, "I can't believe that this is their demonstration machine." Hell, my P3 laptop I use at work with Windows 2000 doesn't do that when I run it completely out of resources! (I do this daily by running a DB server, web server, and editing/debugging tools.) Dell, wake up! Make sure those machines you are showing your potential customers run right! I resolved almost immediately to give Apple more consideration. 9:14:51 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2004 Tom Pierce.