Tasty and del.icio.us

I'm riding a wave of hipness as I have switched my bookmarks to del.icio.us. I looked at del.icio.us before, but couldn't make the switch from my Yahoo! bookmarks. One of the things that made the difference this time was the Firefox add-on that replaces Firefox's bookmarking with del.icio.us. The add-on comes with a handy toolbar that provides me quick access to my bookmarks. You can organize by bookmark (most recent or most used) or tags. I like using the tags. Here are my shared bookmarks...

jrehfeld's bookmarks on del.icio.us

Almost as cool as a Mac user...

Because I now own a Nintendo Wii, I feel like I am so counter-culture. PS3? Bleh! XBOX 360? Pweh! My son and I were 48th of 69 in line at Super Target at 6:30 Sunday morning. By 8:42 am, we were proud owners of a Wii, and we spent the next 10+ hours playing tennis, bowling, and fishing (Zelda).

So my coolness factor increased, in my mind, to a level below a Mac user, in his mind.

Sticking it to the Man!

The client I am at blocks all IM and external email so staying in touch with friends and family is quite difficult, considering I don't like talking on the phone. Google Talk worked for a while, but was recently shut down (I cried myself to sleep that night).

In my constant fight for human (IMing) rights, I am resorting to using a shared Google document (i.e., Writely). This solution cannot be declared a success yet as the adoption rate from my friends is quite minimal. Ok, its zero.

By the way, I wrote this blog entry using Google Docs. The shared features are "pretty slick" as Brian commented. Give it a try ==> Google Docs

Java build scripts to build Java?

Dr. Dobb's Java Blog had a post about a Java-based approach to Ant build scripts. The author suggests that writing Ant scripts in XML is too challenging and complicated since XML isn't really a programming language, but the example in the post of the Java programmed scripts seems much, much harder to read.

Personally, I like the declarative nature of XML Ant scripts, and writing build scripts in Java seems over-engineered. However, I am open to alternatives to using XML for scripting, and a true scripting language may be better suited.

One of the comments mentions using Groovy for build scripts, which seems interesting, and needs more investigation.

This is slick...

...and also not related to development, Dr Lunch or anything else. But having said that, if you are one of the 6 people in the world that has a) all of your music stored in iTunes on a Mac, and b) you have an XBox 360, then run, don't walk, over to pick yourself up a copy of Connect 360 from nullriver. In literally 3 minutes you'll be streaming all your music and photos from your Mac to your XBox 360. As someone famous once said "It just works". Your music shows up, all of your playlists that you've built in iTunes are right there on your Xbox, and everything works beautifully (which the exception that you can't play FairPlay protected AAC files you bought from the iTunes Music store, but hey, that's a suckers game anyway, right?) Pay 'em their $10 registration fee and you have yourself the very functional equivalent of a Squeezebox for a fraction of the cost. (Assuming, you know, you already blew your kitty on the Xbox and the Mac and the nice receiver, and some nice B&W speakers. Slick as hell. I'd like to find the guys who wrote this and give them a big hug.

Java 1.5 by default from the command line on a Mac

Maybe someone else will find this useful, it was sure a head-scrater for me for a while. The good ol' Mac with its "oh, we have to have a non-standard UNIX file layout" was giving me quite a puzzler on how you are supposed to set your preferences for what version of Java to run from a command line. If you have the Java 5.0 Release 1 from Apple it comes with a little utility which lets you decide what order to use the JVMs on your machine. Setting it to use 5.0 before 1.4.2 does not affect items run from Terminal or any other command line application. Thanks for nothing Apple.

So to make this work (maybe this is intuitive for some people, but I'm not a big Mac developer or anything). Create or update the .profile in your home directory with the following:

PATH=.:/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/
Versions/1.5/Commands:$PATH
JAVA_HOME:/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/
Versions/1.5/Home

Presto! Anything you run from the command line goes via Java 5, or 1.5 or whatever the hell they are calling it these days. Simple, easy, and doesn't involve messing with any system links which some people seem to think is evil for some reason or another.

Hopefully one of these days Apple switches all machines over to run Java 5 by default. Sure would be nice for those of us who run Tomcat 5.5 and don't want to mess with the Java 1.4 compatability library.

Bright Lights, Big Battle Station

The light hurts my eyes....thanks to Drake and Phelps for letting me out of "the hole" now that the new and improved Dr. Lunch is a fully-functional battle station...er...a technological terror...oh forget it.

Anyway, now its on to reconciling the changes needed (i.e., the schema and Hibernate mappings) to support the current Java-based Dr. Lunch and a Rails-based Dr. Lunch. For example,

• the 'version' columns should be changed to 'lock_version' to take advantage of Rails' automatic optimistic locking.
• the 'created_date' columns should be changed to 'created_at' to take advantage of the Rails' automatic date population feature.

I have already created the model classes in Rails, but I need to also setup the test cases ('cause its the right thing to do!).

Well, back into "the hole."

CSS

Fine, fine.... now that I know this works, here is some real content.

So, both for my professional life and for Dr. Lunch, I've been looking into doing some real work with CSS. Previously I had kinda, sort of known about in the half-ass way developers who don't really want to know anything about design kind of intutively know how it works and then don't really worry themselves about it very much -- now that I'm getting into it, I can see that is really a powerful tool and slick as hell to boot.

Being a good and rightous person I went and picked up two O'Reilly books to get up to speed on CSS: Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition and CSS Cookbook.

Quick reviews after spending the weekend reading both of them (oh yes, exciting days around the Drake household this weekend. I did win $500 playing blackjack Saturday night though, if anyone cares, so its not like the weekend was a total waste). I usually really like O'Reilly books, and thought some of the Cookbook series were very good references -- I use my Java Cookbook quite a bit. CSS Cookbook though -- ugh. Save your money. If you are competent enough to do rudimentary CSS you aren't going to find anything in here that's actually useful. If you don't know CSS, I think you time is better spent reading other books. I see this one going on my bookshelf, gathering dust, and eventually turning into a beautiful butterfly or something.

Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, however, is an excellent reference and tells you everything you'd ever want to know on the subject, and has lots of useful advice for how to deal with various quirks you come across among the various flavors of browsers you might have to deal with on a public web site. I highly recommend it if you are getting into doing serious development using CSS.

Check The Mic

*tap tap*

Is thing thing on?