bedeviled mojo slop

Love Spreads - Stone Roses

Two tools I've found indispensable in the work I'm doing with Ruby on Rails. They are available for OS X.

TextMate: Although I'd love an editor that can do code completion with Ruby, this is a great editor that understands a fair number of languages. One feature I particularly like is their concept of commands which can encompass editor commands, code snippets, and other template-type snippets. Those are configurable per-file type which is nice. I have also looked at Ruby Development Tools (built on Eclipse) and Komodo. Komodo might be something I migrate to eventually since it looks like it can do the code completion and "live" templates, but right now there is an incestuous relationship between TextMate and the next tool.

Locomotive: "Locomotive is a flexible one-click solution to Ruby on Rails development for Mac OS X 10.3+. In one self-contained application, it gives you a fully functional Rails development platform ..." This is pretty amazing. It's like getting your web server, application server, and database in one. Very compartmentalized and easy to add new bundles for different runtime configurations. For example, I can switch easily between different environments by changing a pulldown menu. And Locomotive is self-contained so it doesn't break any existing RoR setup you might have installed. Locomotive has, by far, bootstrapped my Ruby on Rails development the most.

Oh right, the incestuous relationship ... I can right-click on the application from the Locomotive applications menu and open the entire application structure in TextMate.

Locomotive also knew I had iTerm installed and allowed me to use that instead of Apple's terminal application. This is for dropping to the command-line to run the scripts to generate the various Ruby on Rails bits.

Hope this helps if you're considering any Ruby on Rails development under OS X.

Technorati Tags: ruby ruby on rails textmate locomotive

A step forward in a better browsing experience.

A step backward in OS X installation experience.

I'm sure they were following some UI Design Guidelines from Apple, but the Firefox 1.5 for OS X disk image is missing that helpful "To install ..." message I've seen in other applications.

"To install, drag the Firefox icon to your applications folder." I'd even be happy with, "To install Firefox, drag the icon to your applications folder." However, it is better than the Firefox 1.0.7 disk image which just had the Firefox icon.

All this is telling me is that if I bring a white cross near a fox's paw, I'll have folder anarchy

Technorati Tags: firefox humor

I stopped off at the tattoo studio on Sunday and booked an appointment for this coming Saturday at 6 PM. Looking forward to it.

Technorati Tags: tattoo

New area rug in the office.

Multi-colored equals fun.

Jacuba is ...

an online spell checker that you can apply to any text area.

They're also using blojsom for their blog. In their "Integrating Jacuba Spell into Blojsom" post, they show you how to tweak the comment page to add spell check to your comments. You could easily adapt your add and edit blog entry pages to use Jacuba Spell as well.

Technorati Tags: jacuba blojsom spellcheck

Apparently people can't wait until after Thanksgiving to put up Christmas lights. There were a small number of homes in the area that had Christmas lights up and turned on when driving home from Thanksgiving dinner last night. Driving into my development last night, there was also one home that had their Christmas tree lit up in the front window.

Don't get me wrong, I love these holidays as much as anyone else, but this is getting nucking futs!

Technorati Tags: thanksmas thanksgiving christmas

I took a few hours last night and banged out some code for blojsom to use a relational database for data storage. You can find this under the Experimental | Database download area. Note the release area. This code is experimental. Let me spell that out for you, E-X-P-E-R-I-M ... ahhh, screw it ... if you can't spell I don't want you downloading the source code But, in all seriousness, the source isn't a "hack" in as much as it was identifying threads of execution and seeing where things broke and needed to be changed. That's why the source has a smattering of // XXX: Hibernate comments.

My test setup is as follows: OS X, Java 1.4.2_09, Tomcat 5.0.28, MySQL 5.0.15-standard, Hibernate 3.0.5. To the extent your setup matches what I've got ... great. Otherwise, your mileage may vary. If you're not familiar with setting up any of the above software, don't download the source and try working with it. I'm not worried as it's all Write Once, Run Anywhere. If you want to build the system, you'll need Ant.

If you unpack the source bundle, you'll find a blojsom.sql script that you can use from a tool like YourSQL to create the database structure. Also, make sure your MySQL connector JAR file is installed. I put it in /TOMCAT_HOME/common/lib/.

The good news is that I got much of the system working. Login to the administration console, create a category, add a few entries, lather, rinse, repeat.

The bad news is that there's probably a lot that doesn't work. Indices and key relationships need to be put in place. Various methods are stubbed out. There is more work that needs to be done on the fetcher itself and probably needs to evolve to have all the persistence methods there instead of on the objects themselves.

I'll be posting semi-regular source bundles to this area as the discussion and code evolves.

If you'd like to be involved in any discussions about blojsom and its use of a database or other such blojsom nerdery, go subscribe to the blojsom-developers mailing list.

Technorati Tags: blojsom database

This is being edited in the OPML Editor.

Is this going to be another paragraph?

Let's see if this is another paragraph as well, and maybe some bold or other styled text.

I want to know if this is going to be another paragraph since it's another level indented. Hmmm, doesn't seem to work without the p tag wrappers.

And just in case other nerds out there wanted to try this with blojsom, the only change I had to make to get things to work was to change the user.metaWeblog.blogid preference to a String, not an int, and to use the category I wanted to post to as the value for that preference. Change that in opml.root. blojsom's MetaWeblog API implementation is based on the MetaWeblog API RFC where it says:

metaWeblog.newPost (blogid, username, password, struct, publish) returns string. The blogid, username, password and publish params are as in the Blogger API.

blojsom 2.28 is now available.

• Changelog
• Upgrading instructions
• Download updates
• Download Quickstart
• Bugs fixed

The 3 "biggest" additions in terms of functionality are:

• Events are now published when blog categories are added, deleted, and updated. Any blojsom components taking advantage of the event and listener API can now listen for category-related events.
• The Permissions Check plugin gives you an object that allows you to check permissions for a given user of a blog within your templates. This would be useful for the web administration console where menu options could be added or removed dynamically according to permission (I'm not currently doing this yet). There are a number of existing permissions for the web administration functionality, but since blojsom allows you to define any other permissions per-blog that are appropriate, you could probably use this in some creative ways.
• WebMacro is another template language written in Java. If you'd like to use WebMacro to write templates for your blog instead of JSP, Velocity, FreeMarker, or Groovy, you can use the WebMacro dispatcher. There was absolutely no one asking to use WebMacro for templating in blojsom, but I figured since they just released WebMacro 2.0, I'd personally take a look at what's what with WebMacro.

That about does it.

Technorati Tags: blojsom

On tonight's episode of House Hunters, the homeowners were Christopher and Chris and their real estate agent's name was Raymond Ray.

L-O-L!

Technorati Tags: hgtv house hunters

Over the past 2 days, I've been wiping a family member's computer clean of various adware, spyware, malware, etc...

I-N-S-A-N-I-T-Y!

Although Microsoft Anti-Spyware, Spybot Search & Destroy, AdAware, and AntiVir report "all clean" ... I'm not holding my breath.

The blojsom site is now running Confluence 2.0. Upgrading was as simple as they describe. Good work nerds.

Technorati Tags: blojsom confluence atlassian

At dinner last night, it was fun to tell people, "Sit by your first initial."

Thankfully there was nobody with the same name.

Wow ... just ... when you thought command-line progress bars were teh way of teh DOS ... think again! There are also honest to goodness issues being filed against the progress bar (GERONIMO-939). In 2005, you'd think the progress bar would be one of those ... ummm ... standard components?

But, in all seriousness, the folks working on Geronimo deserve a lot of credit.

In related news, blojsom deployed swimmingly on Apache Geronimo. Just download the Quickstart bundle, deploy via the web-based manager application or command-line, and you'll be up and running with blojsom in less than 5 minutes. Maybe less depending on your download bandwidth.

Technorati Tags: blojsom geronimo

Coming to you live from the repaired iMac. I guess it was a faulty power supply. All is well.

And so now the Powerbook sits to the side, its indicator light signaling it is sleeping, waiting patiently for its day to awaken ... yet again.

Technorati Tags: iMac

It looks like SourceForge has redesigned the look and feel of their site.

It's certainly more eye pleasing.

Technorati Tags: sourceforge

My iMac is now being repaired for what is probably a faulty power supply. Today was the worst of its spontaneous shutdown episodes. The machine probably didn't stay on for more than 5 or 15 minutes at a time. Thankfully I'm not more than 15 minutes from the local Apple store.

I have my trusty 800 MHz G4 Powerbook. Life with a slower Mac is better than no Mac at all.

Technorati Tags: iMac

You Belong To Me - Bob Dylan

See the pyramids along the Nile
Watch the sun rise on a tropic isle
Just remember, darling, all the while
You belong to me.

See the marketplace in old Algiers
Send me photographs and souvenirs
But remember when a dream appears
You belong to me.

I’ll be so alone without you
Maybe you’ll be lonesome too---and blue

Fly the ocean in a silver plane
Watch the jungle when it’s wet with rain
Just remember till you’re home again
You belong to me

The Waterford Crystal wine glasses purchased in Ireland arrived yesterday. Most of the Waterford patterns were too stodgy or ornate, but they do have designers put together collections that are more, shall we say, modern.

4 of these beauties arrived unharmed.

The ringing you hear when "clinking" these glasses seems to last an eternity. I imagine that's the case for any fine crystal.

Technorati Tags: waterford crystal

Trachtenberg Family Slide Show Players

We take vintage slide collections we've found at estate sales, garage sales, and thrift stores and turn the lives of anonymous strangers into pop-rock musical exposès based on their slides.

OK, this stuff is insanitah. Move over White Stripes!

Nerds rock!

Technorati Tags: trachtenberg family slide show players white stripes nerds

Dear JBoss,

The installer you've put together for JBoss pretty much rocks except for one thing. Certain URLs that might actually tell me something valuable about JBoss deployment are not clickable. I have to type them in by hand if I want to read all the details. For example, in the screenshot of the installer below, those wiki links are not clickable. It'd just be one of those nice to have changes for a future release.

Sincerely,

Me

P.S. - Continued thanks for using my software for your blogs.

P.P.S - I now have mad EJB 3 deployment with Spring dependency injection skills ... or something to that effect.

Technorati Tags: jboss ejb 3 spring

I consider the "gold standard" for internationalization and localization components to be IBM's International Components for Unicode (ICU). This API is ahead in some respects to the standard Java APIs for internationalization and localization. IBM's ICU components have bindings for C/C++ and Java.

I tried to come up with a list of APIs that might form a core set of components for internationalization and localization in Ruby. If there are specific instances of APIs that should be referenced here, please let me know.

• Locale: Ruby-Locale, How to Output Dates in Another Language (references Ruby-Locale)
• Resource Bundles: Ruby GetText API, Using GetText to Translate Your Rails Application (references GetText), Ri18n (Ri18n is an internationalization and localization library for Ruby applications.)
• Calendar: See below for Date. What about different calendar systems such as the Buddhist calendar or the Hebrew calendar? Check out the Ruby-Calendar API.
• Date: Date and DateTime
• TimeZone: Ruby on Rails TimeZone class. But, does this have support for daylight savings time? The TZInfo - Ruby Timezone Library page says no.
• Text processing APIs ala the java.text package: Formatting time. What about something like BreakIterator (finding the location of boundaries in text)? or Collator (locale-sensitive String comparison)? or NumberFormat (for formatting and parsing numbers)?

It looks like components in Ruby supporting internationalization and localization are there, but they are scattered across a number of packages instead of integrated into a cohesive set of APIs in the core language. There also wasn't an international components API for Ruby similar to IBM's International Components for Unicode.

Technorati Tags: ruby internationalization localization

You probably already know that blojsom lets you write page templates in JSP, Velocity, FreeMarker, and Groovy?

I just added a WebMacro Dispatcher allowing you to use WebMacro to write page templates. I don't know why I wrote it (maybe because it was just about 36 lines of new code), but maybe someone out there wants to use WebMacro with blojsom.

Ahhhhh ... Saturday morning nerdery!

Technorati Tags: blojsom jsp velocity freemarker groovy webmacro

Live action human skateboard nerdery. Click hm'yah for animated GIF enjoyment.

Technorati Tags: skateboarding

I'm in a Marriot outside of Chicago. My rental car is a red mustang. A quote from the Blues Brothers.

Elwood: It's 106 miles to Chicago, we've got a full tank of gas, a half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark and we're wearing sunglasses.

Jake: Hit it.

Unfortunately the rental car is an automatic. On a Mustang?! That's sacrilege.

However, the ride is damned sweet. And, if I passed you on I-90 W this evening ... my sincerest apologies

Technorati Tags: chicago mustang blues brothers

Last night I ate at Happy Sumo Sushi. If you're looking for good sushi in Salt Lake City, try it. It was good and the wait staff were all dolled up in proper Halloween garb.

Tonight I'm going to try to get to Park City since it's not too far of a drive.

Technorati Tags: salt lake city happy sumo sushi