Blog

Dear Oracle,

Alright, so I was really caught off guard by the announcement of Google Chrome (http://www.google.com/chrome). I’m REALLY impressed. It has every little key command I ever wanted: Ctrl+tab / ctrl + shift + tab moves you back and forward in your tabs. Ctrl + t create a new tab. Ctrl +L places the cursor in the location bar (and the location bar does double duty as your search bar, too! Nice! Even nicer: you can choose Microsoft as your search and they didn’t have to ask to get it that way!), etc. It even has the ability to drag tabs from the browser and 'attach' them, or detach them, at will. Again, very nice touch. It has every shortcut except one: F11. F11 (at least on IE, Firefox and Konqueror. Not Safari on Windows, I note!) maximizes the window and removes all the chrome. The reason for this should be stunningly obvious: it’s already as bare-minimal as you can get. But still, it’d be nice to have some way to go full screen. After all, how are the kiosk-esque apps supposed to work? What could be cooler than an entire application, full screen mode, written using GWT and the Google Gears extension library for GWT, deployed on Google Chrome, say at the library, or the airport? Who'd need the apple store? Imagine getting the Flash support up to snuff and deploying that on this crazy fast browser!

I'm not feeling so hot so I'm sleeping irratically and so I'm productive when I least expect it.

Did you know that mvn archetype:generate, by itself, on the command line, yeilds a listing of all the archetypes you have available? I just stumbled upon this today - great trick!

I recently had to upgrade a project to Subversion 1.5 which caused IntelliJ's Subversion support to lose its mind. It would paint the files blue as though it realized the file was "dirty" but then when I hit ctrl + k to submit the changes to Subversion, it would respond, "No Changes found". I did some sleuthing: IntelliJ IDEA build 7938 fixes the issue.

Keith Donald's going to be at this week's Phoenix Java User Group talking about Spring MVC and Spring WebFlow 2.5/2.0, respectively! I am bringing at least 3 friends, I suggest if you can make it, you should try and go. I had a weird month last month so I missed it, but I can't wait for this one!

Note this is an incomplete document. I have yet to confirm that this works 100%, but here are the things I noted while installing PostGIS' TIGER Geocoder. First and foremost, the source code is available via svn co http://svn.refractions.net/postgis/trunk/extras/tiger_geocoder. A lot of this information is an incomplete copy of what's available from : http://postgis.refractions.net/support/wiki/index.php?PostgisOnUbuntu

This took quite a bit of Googling to get right, so here it is summarized to help prospective journey makers. Spring's integration is very good for the common cases, but lack of insight can prevent you from achieving more complex integrations. For example, I wanted to be able to authenticate against Gmail (this is a program I'm writing to scratch a personal itch, but nonetheless knowing how to authenticate against SSL is a very useful thing in the enterprise.). Then I wanted to be able to send email messages that rendered as HTML for the sophisticated email clients that supported it (I suspect that's the overwhelming majority at this point - it's been a while since RFC 822 was relevant!) and have the content fall back to plain text content otherwise. Finally, I wanted to integrate with Velocity so that I could parameterize my emails readily. This begat the following method, a few stanzas of Spring configuration, and a properties file. NB: Replace the values in the properties file with your own information!

Most systems have context that lasts longer than the typical request/ response of the clients and servers involved in the system, but shorter than the lifetime of the business entities that define the domain model. This is called "conversational" state. The naïve way to handle conversational state is to clutter the domain model with "state" flags that mark benchmarks against some sort of process.

Roy Fieldings on Apache 3.0 (well, sort of -- more of a series of hopeful hypotheticals than anything else...). It's brilliant: my favorite idea? Using Samuel Jackson pictures and quotes for all HTTP error codes!

Webmonkey.com is back! I just noticed this -- it's laid dormant for years and was -- in my humble opinion -- one of the coolest places to catch up on technology in its heyday. Go webmonkey.com!

Uh oh! I guess I was asleep at the wheel on this one! SpringSource (the company that was formerly called Interface21 and (obviously) which funded the development / growth of the Spring Framework) has announced a Java application server. I am more than a little leary about this, however. It's not based on Java EE (yet, though apparently that's not out of the picture with Java EE6's "profiles"), and is instead a sort of best-of-breed setup of Tomcat and a slew of components from the "Spring Portfolio." (Think: Spring web flow, Spring web services, Spring LDAP.. is Spring batch in there?)