Soapbox Rants and Raves

What is up with this? I guess my domain must have ended up in some “target” file for a marketing campaign… It is amazing how many “spam” comments get posted to your website each month. Akismet blocked almost 14,000 spam comments THIS month. I used to only get about 50 per month; you can see that last November it started to ramp up (1,700), and then died back down… What is even more curious is that these comments must have gotten past reCAPTCHA…

I found this really cool poster when we were Christmas shopping last December and thought it would be great for my guitar playing son. Needless to say, I hid the poster in the basement and found it in January, oh well!

I have a quite a stack of ruff sawn cherry in the barn and thought it was actually time to make some sawdust! I planed down enough boards to make a couple frames and build a stand for our new TV. Friend of ours purchased some furniture at Artisan Hardwoods; they have a really nice shaped series of tables called Waterfall, but were a tab bit pricey for me! And besides, why would I buy anything out of wood, when I can build it! I plan to model our TV stand after this design, just a little bit narrower, more like a short console table.

The most interesting part of this project was the price of glass, it was outrageous. You can not even buy “cheap” Plexiglas anymore, it is even more expensive than real glass. No wonder nice picture frames are so expensive! Believe it or not, I had quotes from $35 to over $150. As you can see by the wonderful reflection in the picture, I did not spring for the anti-glare glass, I just could not justify spending $70 on a $10 poster; even if the frame did turn out pretty nice, IMHO.

Sorry for the random, non-technology posts, but I do have hobbies other than software development! So don’t give up on me, I have such a backlog of techo-drafts in the hopper… I have read so many interesting articles in the last couple of months, I just lost a little bit of “writing” incentive over the holidays…  

Maybe a topic for another post, but I was given a “smartphone” for my birthday last December and I actually have not tuned on my home computer since then… no need, what so ever. I can do everything I need to, on my phone; it was actually a pretty weird realization… The only thing I gave up was my ability to “blog”, hence the lack of postings!  I did install the free WordPress application on my Droid, but I like to type too much!

I ran across a website on my phone the other day and was very impressed with the presentation. I had tried some “mobile friendly” WordPress themes in the past, but was never very excited by them; they always looked too bland on high-resolution devices.  A quick Google search turned up the popular WPtouch plug-in. I was a curious how the plug-in actually integrated with WordPress, as I did not want to replace my current theme with a dedicated mobile theme. The WPtouch theme was the perfect solution (WordPress Site Installation).  I could keep my rich-content theme for high-resolution devices, and WordPress would automatically vend the alternate presentation for the low-resolution devices, such as the the iPhone and Blackberry.  I just can’t put my Droid in that low-resolution group, the screen is just too nice! Additionally, user’s can easily switch back to the primary theme by clicking a button at the bottom of the page, if they prefer that presentation.

Half of the fun of playing with Linux is trying out new stuff! I found a blog the other night that talked about Gnome 3.0 as well as installing it on Ubuntu. I don’t think that anyone would disagree that the current Gnome desktop seems a little dated; it is not vastly different from a pre-Vista Microsoft experience. Add in Avant Window Manager, Screenlets and/or Google Widgets, and you get a more modern Apple/Windows experience. I took the plunge and installed the 3.0 beta last week and have not looked back. I really like the interaction and thought the presentation was pretty slick. It is kind of funny how emotional people get (read the above blog comments) about change. People were going off on the usability and new look; saying it looked like Windows or Mac, or this feature was stolen from some other implementation. Who really cares? And why does everyone have to be so negative? I thought it was pretty creative!  Everything was very intuitive and easy to use; it might take a little more mouse movement to navigate, but the overall concept works for me. After using it for a couple days, I have learned there are multiple ways to navigate around, minimizing the clicks. The “Find” is one such short cut, you can quickly find an application in the menu system. It still has the good old fashioned alt-tab behavior to quickly switch between applications. The only option that was not obvious to me, was the virtual desktops. I’m not a big virtual desktop user any more (too much time on a Windows box during the day!); it did seam a little easier with the 2.x desktop (just needed to scroll the mouse wheel, I think).. Now you can dynamically (and easily) add new desktops through the activities menu (just click the plus icon). There is probably a nice short to to navigate between desktops, but I did not look for it.  One other usability note that is not completely obvious; you don’t actually have to click on the word “Activity” to get access to the menu, just push the mouse all the way to the corner and the menu pops up… Nice…

A couple of other interesting things I found on the Digitizor website.  Installing Chrome on Ubuntu and GIMP to be removed from next release of Ubuntu. I’ve also been playing with Chrome this week; it seems fine and fast. My “Wifi-based” Internet provider has so much latency, that it is hard to really hard to test “fast”.  I have been a fan of GIMP for quite a while and have only figured out the most simplistic functions to support my blogging; I guess I will have to give F-Spot a try in the future!

I have been so busy with work and life, that my blogging had basically stopped for the summer.  I keep sending myself topics and notes about things that I would like to write about. Unfortunately, I have not had a chance to do anything with them and the topics keep piling up! I was talking with one of my coworkers last month, and he mentioned that he also had a blog. I mailed myself the link to his site, http://blogs.averconsulting.com/, and forgot all about it!

I thought It would be a good idea to share it, since many of my readers are coworkers as well! He has written some good stuff on the Spring Batch Framework,  REST, and Flex.  Please check it out…

Here is a  link to another one of my coworkers blogs… He  like to write about blogging and web security, you might find that interesting too… http://tdot-blog.com/.

I’m sure that everyone has seen this little icon on some web page or blog. Probably, like me, you never bothered to really check it out. How many tools or services do we need to save our bookmarks? I never worried about bookmark synchronization in the past. I would just re-Google my search, nine chances out of ten, I would find the page I was looking for.  I generally don’t have time at work to read most (any) of the interesting articles I run across. To solve this problem, I started emailing the URLs to my home email and would read them in my spare time. This worked fine, but was kind of painful.  I decided to gave http://delicious.com a try. I know this is nothing new; many of my friends have been using Xmarks (Foxmarks) for many years, but I wanted something that was more social. I created an account, http://delicious.com/philbeiler  and use it pretty regularly. I have not gotten into the whole tagging thing yet, I use it mainly to save myself time.  The Firefox plug-in works great. It only takes a second to create new bookmarks or find one that I recently created.

The sad part is, that I have no one in my bookmark network! I think it would be really cool to see what my friends and co-workers were bookmarking. It my opinion, Web 2.0 is about sharing and learning; social bookmarking is just another method for enabling this information exchange. It is so easy for me to send someone to my bookmarks, to share what I have been reading or found interesting. It is also valuable to visit the home link on delicious, just to checkout the most popular bookmarks and tags. I guarantee, you will find something of interest!

I also in the process of migrating my RSS aggregator from NewsGator to Bloglines. Bloglines makes it easier to share what I’m reading as well, creating a public presence on their site, http://www.bloglines.com/public/PhilBeiler.  I have not moved over all of my feeds yet, but it has worked well thus far. More on the reason behind the move later! I have to save that for another blog post!  So, if anyone is using delicious, please add me to your network!

I found an interesting web that has all kinds of great information on website design. A highlighted a couple posts that I thought were very interesting: 10 Unusual Places to Get Design Inspiration and 10 Useful Firebug Extensions. You seriously should click on the design inspiration link, especially if you want to see how creative people can really be; check the beautiful web sites and unforgettable business cards. Truly amazing!

I also did not realize that people were building plug-ins to extend plug-ins! What a concept! I guess that is what makes Firefox such a powerful web browser, tool, platform; there are plug-ins to do about everything. I previously blogged about Firebug and YSlow, but I did not realize that Firebug was also a platform for other developer centric tools, such as HTML validation and code coverage. Someone was nice enough to create a Mozilla Collection for Web Debug Tools, it provides links to all of the referenced plug-ins. 

I recently found a plug-in that I wanted to share as well, called IE Tab. A couple of weeks ago, I was working on a web application and was validating the browser compatibility of our CSS; it was kind of painful switching back and forth between the IE and Firefox, especially since I preferred using Firefox. Fortunately, I discovered IE Tab, which is unfortunately not available on Linux! It simply embeds Internet Explorer in a Firefox tab to render the current page’s content. There will be a little browser icon in the lower right-hand corner of the window; it indicates which browser was used to render the page/tab. Just click on the icon to switch between the two rendering approaches. I think this is much better than having two switch between browsers! Maybe I’m just lazy! There is one small short coming using this approach, it can only use the version of Internet Explorer that you have installed on your computer. I happened to be using IE8 and our testers were using IE6. Needless to say, we had a couple of unexpected issues! Can you believe that IE6 is still being used? I think I would go crazy with out tabbed browsing!

As a developer, I prefer the Ubuntu experience over the Windows experience. However, when I’m updating the checkbook and paying bills, I don’t see many good, non-Windows options. I have been blogging with ScribeFire for quite some time and have been very happy with it . A read a blog on Live Writer some time ago and installed it; for some reason I never used it,

I decided to give it a try this weekend and have to say, it is pretty nice. Functionally they are pretty much the same, both integrating nicely with WordPress. Subtle differences include:

• ScribeFire saves the drafts on the server, where as Live Writer saves them locally on your computer.
• Not that it is a big deal, but Live Writer seems to have better preview support, at least with my current theme.
• Live Writer also integrates nicely with Live’s maps and photo albums. Images are actually easier to integrate with in Live Writer too, more directly editable properties.
• Live Writer also support HTML tables, which you have to create by hand with ScribeFire.
• The spelling checker seems better in Live Writer too. Unfortunately, neither one has an integrated thesaurus.

So, if you are blogging on Windows and want to use a nice little editor, give it a try. I think you will be generally surprised by this Microsoft product.

I thought I would be fancy in my previous post and tried to use a WordPress plug-in to make my code look pretty. I downloaded WP-Syntax and gave it a try. Seemed simple enough <pre lang=”java”>…</pre>. Don’t know what the problem was, but it just toasted my code!  I think it might have to do with remote publishing,  using the XML API. I must have messed with it for about 30 minutes, before I finally gave up and resorted back to simple HTML. I thought I would try one more plug-in tonight; it was called Syntax Hilighter Evolved. The usage is similar to the WP-Syntax, but I finally got this one to work using the built-in WordPress editor.

My next post will be about creating your own Java 1.5 Annotations and adding new behavior to your unit test suite. I thought it was actually a pretty cool exercise… but that is just me!

import java.lang.annotation.ElementType;
import java.lang.annotation.Retention;
import java.lang.annotation.RetentionPolicy;
import java.lang.annotation.Target;

@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
@Target(ElementType.TYPE)
public @interface TestUserAuthorization {

String principal();

String testUserManager();
}

I found a cool little plug-in for Firefox last week called Ghostery. It alerts you about the web bugs, ad networks and widgets on every page that you visit. It is really eye opening, to see how many hidden scripts are embedded in web pages. I am kind of addicted to it now, I feel like I am missing something when switching back to Internet Explorer! The little window to the right is displayed when you visit my blog.

Another amazing observation is how many sites have Google Analytics embedded in them. I have been using WordPress Stats to monitor my blog for the last couple of years. When I switched to Bluehost, I decided to enable Google Analytics for my site, as well as my wifes. If you have not checked out Google Analytics, you should seriously check it out… It is very well done, generates volumes of metrics, and extremely easy to add to your blog or website.

I have already blogged about ScribeFire in the past, I use ScribeFire to do all of my blogging; it is a really nice little tool to create new and edit content on your site. A co-worked hipped me to another interesting plug-in a few weeks ago called YSlow, which is integrated with Firebug.  If you are developing web pages and are concerned about the rendering speed, these two plug-ins look to be the answer. YSlow analyzes web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance. Pretty cool idea! I seem to spend more time on the backend plumbing, but hope to look into these tools more in the the near future.