Blogging Roller: Dave Johnson on blogging, open source and Java

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Main | Next page of month (Jul 2002) »

Tuesday Jul 30, 2002

Roller was down for a while

Comments[0] 12:53PM Jul 30, 2002 by Dave in Roller

After dragging the baby tent, two beach umbrellas, two chairs, and a screaming 4 year old back from a morning in the surf, I took a break from "vacation" to check my email. Jeff Duska sent me an email saying FYI, Blogging Roller is down (thanks Jeff).

I had a copy of Putty with me so I logged in to Kattare and started poking around. Everything looked fine and I could not figure out what could possibly be wrong. After looking at some impossible error messages, I deleted the Tomcat working directories. That fixed everything. I'm sure a Tomcat bug is behind this problem, but I haven't the time/motivation to figure it out now. Back to the beach.

Sunday Jul 28, 2002

Roller status

Comments[0] 08:43AM Jul 28, 2002 by Dave in Roller

I'm still working on bookmark import and related Roller enhancements. I'm almost done, but I probably won't be making a release in the next week because I'll be on vacation.

Today, I upgraded to Ant 1.5, Velocity 1.3, and Struts 1.1b1. Everything went smoothly, but I found that the Jakarta Commons jars that came with the Struts 1.1b1 release caused problems with Tomcat connection pooling. I don't have time to investigate this now, so I'm sticking with the old commons jars (which the Roller install places in $CATALINA_HOME/common/lib) for the time being. There are a lot of new jars, so be prepared for a big download if you do a CVS update.

Roller Weblogger Brings it Together

Comments[0] 08:34AM Jul 28, 2002 by Dave in Roller

I went to download Velocity 1.3 and was pleased to find Roller featured prominently on the Velocity website. Thanks!

Friday Jul 26, 2002

Java Skills Shortage Set for 50% by 2003

Comments[0] 06:24AM Jul 26, 2002 by Dave in Java

Java Developers Journal is reporting that there is a big shortage of skilled Java developers. If that is the case then why have the recruiters been missing from the local JUG meetings for the last 12 months?

Wednesday Jul 24, 2002

diveintoaccessibility

Comments[0] 06:39AM Jul 24, 2002 by Dave in General

Mark Pilgrim has made his wildly popular 30 days to more accessible weblog into an online book at diveintoaccessibility.org. What a great resource. I wish I had been following along and implemented his recommendations because now it's basically just a big to-do list for me and my site.

The other Trove

Comments[0] 05:03AM Jul 24, 2002 by Dave in Java

"is a library of useful classes that is used by Tea and the TeaServlet. Trove includes the Class File API, the Logging API and a set of utility classes." The HttpClient looks pretty useful.

DMOZ as an open source Java directory

Comments[0] 04:55AM Jul 24, 2002 by Dave in Java

It's nifty but not really that useful to me, and besides - noone goes to DMOZ Mike Cannon-Brookes

True, DMOZ does not store the right meta-data to make it into a truly useful open source Java directory. We need all open source Java projects to register themselves into something like SourceForge's Trove, but more Java oriented. And, I think you are right - few people go to DMOZ even though it is the directory that is built into Google.

Tuesday Jul 23, 2002

Instant blogging

Comments[0] 07:19PM Jul 23, 2002 by Dave in Java

That was fast. Is this blogging or instant messaging? Thanks for the heads-up on Anthony Eden, I'll email him as soon as my mail-server comes back up.

Big Daddy

Comments[0] 06:56PM Jul 23, 2002 by Dave in General

Something my grand-dad used to say was:

   Once upon a time a goose drank wine and a 
   monkey chewed tobacco on the street car line.

Thanks to the net, I now know that it was a jump-rope rhyme from around 1900. Big Daddy was born in 1911.

XULUX

Comments[0] 06:40PM Jul 23, 2002 by Dave in Java

The Xulux (pronounced zoolooks) project is gathering steam. Its going to be an ASF licenced open source XUL framework. The aim is to simplify the development of rich/thick clients [by] using XUL to define more traditional, rich user interfaces. The XUL can then be transformed into HTML / DHTML / JavaScript for old HTML browsers such as IE while still supporting rich in XUL browsers such as Mozilla or Flash (thanks to ZULU). So the aim is to build a HTML, Swing and SWT clients for XUL as well as a server side framework for developing XUL applications. James Strachan on XULUX

Very cool. Time to learn XUL.

Brett and Mike

Comments[0] 06:39PM Jul 23, 2002 by Dave in General

With those aussies bloggin' like madmen (and I mean that in the nicest way possible), I barely need to surf the web for myself anymore. Don't slow down guys.

Open source Java directory

Comments[0] 06:35PM Jul 23, 2002 by Dave in Java

O'Reilly has started up an Open Source Java Directory - this is something that is really needed in the J2EE world, but sadly it looks very poorly implemented. I've been saying this should exist for a while now. Freshmeat is just too non Java (apologies - FM is cool, but if you're just looking for Java stuff it's a pain in the ass). I tried to convince Floyd at The ServerSide to create a directory but was sadly rebuffed. I hope it improves. Mike Cannon-Brooks

Try the DMOZ Open Directory's Java category. DMOZ lists both open source and commercial products and lists the license of each (GNU, BSD-like, commercial, etc.). And Mike: last time I checked, Open Symphony projects were not listed there either.

Monday Jul 22, 2002

Freudian slip

Comments[0] 04:48AM Jul 22, 2002 by Dave in General

I just saw Helen Thomas on CSPAN answering questions at a book reading. First of all, I had no idea that she writes a column these days. I figured she'd retire after five decades in the White House press corpse. rc3, emphasis is mine

Sillyness aside, read Rafe's Andrew Grove: Stigmatizing Business. It is right on the money.

Sunday Jul 21, 2002

100 albums to jettison

Comments[0] 08:23PM Jul 21, 2002 by Dave in General

Interesting list and somewhat interesting commentary, but overall very snotty. Also, the damn page doesn't work in Mozilla, so I had to fire up IE to learn the great wisdom that "all live albums suck." How about this wisdom: all articles that don't render properly in Mozilla suck.

Saturday Jul 20, 2002

Lulu or just loco?

Comments[0] 09:52AM Jul 20, 2002 by Dave in General

I did not know that Bob Young had left RedHat to form a new company called Lulu. And, I have never heard of a 5-ring technology circus before. Lulu's tech circus concept was inspired by BASSmasters. I kid you not. I'm still waiting for a new company inspired by the BASS-o-MATIC concept. The first Tech Circus takes places here in Raleigh, September 27-29.

Here's to the complainers

Comments[0] 08:17AM Jul 20, 2002 by Dave in General

One thing I have learned from working on open source projects is that most people don't complain. Most people don't have time to write up an email note or a bug report when they notice a missing build script, or a broken image link in a user-guide. And furthermore, most people just give up when they try to build or use your software and recieve a error message.

As Mike Cannon-Brooks once told me, if you want people to use your software you've got to make things as easy as possible - drop dead simple. Little bugs in the build script or installer can be fatal. This is why complainers, the folks who really care enough to complain, are a wonderful thing. So if you like to bitch and whine about every little thing, here's to you.

Friday Jul 19, 2002

The crash of 2002

Comments[0] 03:57PM Jul 19, 2002 by Dave in General

Griffin can imagine, he said, a Japanese-style pullback from risk in the U.S., in which investors give up, banks refuse to lend and the economy languishes. He can imagine other countries, accustomed to the United States' role as the world's economic locomotive, not taking up the standard. He can imagine a crisis of capitalism of a 1930's order. CNN/Money

Pretty damn depressing.

Thursday Jul 18, 2002

Shout out

Comments[0] 04:20PM Jul 18, 2002 by Dave in General

Here is a shout-out to my bro Dan "CookieCo" Johnson. If you like the rock music, the brit-pop, the power-pop, Dylan, Replacements, and Costello you'll probably find his reviews useful and interesting.

Wednesday Jul 17, 2002

Roller status

Comments[0] 09:08PM Jul 17, 2002 by Dave in Roller

I have not been able to spend a lot of time on Roller development recently, but I have gotten a couple of things done. I took a look at at alternative webapp and persistance frameworks and decided to stick with Struts and Castor for the time being.

Also, I implemented a simple backup mechanism for Roller. I started working with Axis (the next generation of Apache SOAP) and I was hoping to create a SOAP-based blog-backup interface for Roller. But I ended up just writing a Servlet that blasts out the current user's data in Roller's own (Castor-generated) XML format - no SOAP needed for that.

Right now, I'm working on bookmark import. I've got a start-page of favorite links and I want to import them into Roller. To do this, I wrote a little command-line program that parses an HTML page and then writes all links from that page to an OPML file (maybe I should have used XBEL, but OPML was easier). Now I need to get that data into Roller, perhaps by file-upload perhaps by SOAP.

Once I complete bookmark import, I'll probably polish-up Roller's bookmark management and display features and put out a 0.9.5 release. Perhaps I should throw in Radio import as well.

Remote control Java

Comments[0] 08:04AM Jul 17, 2002 by Dave in Java

In this Java World article Tal Liron describes how to use VNC technology to create remote-terminals for your Java Swing, AWT, or command line app.

That Microsoft actually entrusted remote control technology to us idiots at home (Remember, Microsoft has to give us user support too!) represented a triumph for a 20-year-old model. With any computer acting both as host and terminal, all you need is an Internet connection to access any computer anywhere in the world.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Copyright 2002-2007, David M Johnson (dave.johnson at rollerweblogger.org)

This is a personal weblog, I do not speak for my employer.