Custom argument matching with Mockito

I wrote up a wiki entry on my continuing adventures with Mockito.   This time, I'm trying to perform state verification of the inputs to the test double dependency.  And again, Mockito does not disappoint with its awesome Matchers and ArgumentMatcher support.  I'm really enjoying the use of Mockito.  Very much recommended.

 

Updated my Mockito example

I updated my Mockito example on my wiki.  The example now uses Mockito's annotation support.  Cleans up the setup considerably.

http://sites.google.com/a/pintailconsultingllc.com/java/mockito-examples

Using Rhino Mocks wiki entry

http://sites.google.com/a/pintailconsultingllc.com/net/using-rhino-mocks

My first foray into unit testing with a mocking framework in .NET.  Rhino Mocks has a very similar feel to EasyMock in the Java world.

Copy Source as HTML Visual Studio 2008 Addin

If you ever have a need to document source code in a wiki or a blog, this addin is very handy. 

Using Rhino Mocks with MS Test

This post helped me out tonight. If you get some silly message that Rhino.Mocks.dll is not in a trusted location, the resolution of the problem is fairly straightforward.

Implementing object identity when using Hibernate

A good article on how to effectively implement object and database identity with Hibernate-mapped domain objects. Probably not specific to Hibernate, but for any domain object mapped by an ORM framework. Good read.

http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2006/09/13/dont-let-hibernate-steal-your-identity.html

jMock example is now up

http://sites.google.com/a/pintailconsultingllc.com/java/jmock-examples

Of the three mocking frameworks that I've now briefly looked at, I'm most impressed with jMock. I just like the simplicity and feel of it. Very easy to use and I really like it's expectations implementation. I've started building out a sample Spring MVC web app which I will drive with TDD and mock object usage, utilizing jMock for object mocking. So far so good. I'll post more when I get the chance.

Custom JSP 2.0 tags example is now up

http://sites.google.com/a/pintailconsultingllc.com/java/custom-jsp-tag-libraries

I had a need to create a view helper for a web view that I was building, so I did a small spike solution on JSP 2.0 tags. They seem much easier to write than they were previously (I haven't written one in many years). I thought I'd put it up on the wiki for others to use. Hopefully it proves useful. This example is done using Spring MVC as the web framework. Nothing special needed to integrate the JSP 2.0 tag into the Spring MVC web app.

Mockito example is now up

http://sites.google.com/a/pintailconsultingllc.com/java/mockito-examples

Same set of classes as the EasyMock demo. Not much difference between EasyMock and Mockito, at least not yet. Mockito probably is a bit easy to use (no replay method to be invoked before testing).

EasyMock example

We're starting to look at mock object frameworks at my current consulting gig, so I thought I'd put together a small example of how to use EasyMock.


http://sites.google.com/a/pintailconsultingllc.com/java/easymock-examples

Pretty simple but gets the point across on how to get started with EasyMock. Mockito examples are forthcoming.

Teaching programming with Python

Using Python to teach my daughters about programming. Thought it would be fun and get them to apply some of things they've learned in school. So far so good. We did a Hello World python script tonight.

JavaScript apps with SproutCore

Installed the SproutCore Ruby gem this evening and I'm starting to play around with SproutCore. More information about SproutCore can be found at http://www.sproutcore.com. SproutCore uses Ruby and some other Ruby gems (Mongrel, Merb, and others) to help you build and test JavaScript apps. Apple is using this for their Mobile Me service. Looks really interesting and so far the examples are pretty cool.

Valuing simplicity

I've been reading Douglas Crockford's JavaScript: The Good Parts. A good read, especially if you've done JavaScript in the past and didn't think much of it at the time (like myself). It's been an eye opening read. One of his lines in the book, "We value simplicity, ..." struck a chord with me. A very simple statement, but it sums up something that I hold very dear to my heart these days.

I value simplicity. A lot. That's why I think I like my Mac so well, after working with Windows and Linux. I like Windows because it's familiar, but there are so many options, and the options seem to change in every Windows release. The reliability of Windows also is a concern. Linux just isn't simple...it's not designed to be simple nor do it want to be. That's good for some situations, but terrible if you want to appeal to the masses. The Mac and other Apple products appeal to the masses due to simple by stylish designs.

I'm not finding all this AJAX, JavaScript, and DOM manipulation simple in design. It's quite the opposite. It's seems very messy and chaotic using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for building web applications. And the interfaces that are being built still pale in comparison to rich applications. Hopefully things get better over time with the RiA technologies (Flex/Flash, Silverlight, etc.).

Extra-lazy collection fetching in Hibernate

I came across some new functionality in Hibernate recently, extra-lazy collection fetching. This functionality, which seems oddly named, basically allows you to initialize individual list or map items, if you have everything configured in Hibernate just right. The details of my spike solutions are written up on my wiki:

http://sites.google.com/a/pintailconsultingllc.com/java/hibernate-extra-lazy-collection-fetching

For small lists, I would recommend not using this functionality, as every item is a SQL call to the database. For a large list or child objects which are expensive to create, this might be just what you're looking for. It took me a while to get the list semantics to work properly. The @IndexedCollection is very important. I have not played with a map collection yet, but in theory that collection should work similarly.

Hall monitor tests

Hall monitor tests are tests included in your unit and integration test suites that ensure that coding conventions are followed. They codify and automate the tribal wisdom of the development group. I used them very effectively on a .NET project about a year ago. Kudos to Joe Muraski, Brad Hill, and Bob Schultz for their efforts with "hall monitor" tests.

kuler - Adobe's fabulous color picker/theme organizer tool

If you ever need to do any styling and need a set of colors for a theme, check out Adobe kuler tool. A Flash-based web tool that is simply amazing. Free for use; just log in with your Adobe ID and you're off and running.

http://kuler.adobe.com/

A rabbit killed my Internet connection

First off, kudos to the Comcast technical support person that came out to my home and quickly diagnosed the issue with our cable connection. It seems that rabbits around our parts have a taste for coaxial cable insulation (the black plastic covering of the cable). Our Internet service went on the fritz about a week ago. All my attempts to get it back online proved futile. Coinciding with this outage was the recent irrigation system work on Thursday. So I was all ready to place blame on the irrigation installers.

The Comcast technical support person stopped out a couple of days ago and inspected everything. He said he'd like blame it on the irrigation guys too because then they can bill the irrigation guys for the work and materials to fix it. Nope, the insulation on the coaxial cable was nibbled away very close to the house, two sections, each of about 2 inches in length. The Internet connection has been restored and the Comcast guy put some electrical conduit around the cable where it comes out of the ground and into the house to deter the rabbits from doing this again.

Understanding Flash window modes for embedding HTML rendering in Flex app

An excellent write up about Flash window modes. I'm attempting to use an IFrame in my Flex application to punch a hole into the Flash movie and allow HTML rendering in my Flex application. When doing this, one needs to understand window modes. I'll probably have more to say about the IFrame solution in Flex, but for the meantime, here are some very relevant links:

http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=e5141

http://ccgi.arutherford.plus.com/blog/wordpress/?page_id=171

http://ccgi.arutherford.plus.com/blog/wordpress/?p=173

http://ccgi.arutherford.plus.com/blog/wordpress/?p=133

http://www.deitte.com/archives/2007/09/html_in_flex_wi.htm

Getting Hibernate to format generated SQL

Use the configuration property hibernate.format_sql to have Hibernate format generated SQL. This feature needs to be used in conjunction with the hibernate.show_sql configuration property. Both need to be set to true to get nicely formatted SQL. Very handy for understanding what Hibernate is doing.

flexcover: A code coverage tool for Adobe Flex

Found this interesting tool for Flex development. I've been using dbUInt Flex testing framework to do TDD with Flex. Having a code coverage tool will be very helpful for my TDD efforts.

Understanding Flex transport protocols

I've been doing some investigation of Adobe Flex remoting and messaging protocols. I've used the HttpService before and was somewhat underwhelmed by its performance. Recently, I've looked at BlazeDS and the AMF3 binary protocol. AMF3 seems much faster than transporting XML over HTTP. Well, James Ward has an excellent Flex application that quantitatively demonstrates this performance difference.

http://www.jamesward.org/census/ (Source code here)


Very well done and quite informative.

First Flex app up and running with BlazeDS

Well it took me a while and a lot of browsing the web for the proper incantations, but I finally got a Flex app up and running with BlazeDS 3.x. Their reference documentation is not very clear about the Flex compiler arguments that you need to specify to reference the services-config.xml and to specify the servlet context root. I have a document of the steps that I went through, with screenshots, so others might have an easier time with this. BlazeDS remoting seems very quick and performant. For my application, I built a new Java web app up from scratch and did not use any of the turnkey stuff. In hindsight, it seems that magic revolves around the Flex compiler arguments. This Flex app also uses Cairngorm microarchitecture framework, which seems pretty straightforward to use. Next up is to hook in Spring and Hibernate on the Java server side.

Silverlight 2.0 does have unit testing

Seems that Silverlight 2.0 does have some unit testing potential.

http://www.jeff.wilcox.name/2008/03/31/silverlight2-unit-testing/

Excellent tutorial on Cairngorm framework

If you do anything of any substance in Adobe Flex, you'll undoubtedly come across the Adobe Consulting Cairngorm framework. It can be a rather daunting framework to grasp at first, but David Tucker has an excellent multi-part tutorial to guide you on your way. Very much recommended.

http://www.davidtucker.net/category/cairngorm/

MSTest tools don't seem to work with Silverlight 2.0 projects

I've been playing around with Silverlight 2 beta in Visual Studio 2008. I tried to create a Test project in my Silverlight solution and add a Silverlight project as a reference to the Test project. No go! Complains about Silverlight assemblies can only be referenced by other Silverlight assemblies. This sucks...I wanted to drive a lot of my design of non-visual classes in the Silverlight project using tests. I assume that NUnit testing won't work either. Could be very interesting developing for the CoreCLR.

Sonos ZoneBridge now installed

Added the ZoneBridge to my Sonos music network tonight. Very easy to install--it's pretty much plug and play. My ZonePlayer is now connecting wirelessly to my ZoneBridge and the ZoneBridge is connected to my Airport Extreme access point in my living room. Not bad for about 20 minutes of configuration and software installation and setup. I have a pair of Definitive Technology ProMonitor 1000 speakers connected to the ZonePlayer ZP100. Sounds great.

Sonos Music System up and running

Received our Sonos music system today. For more information, go to http://www.sonos.com. I bought the Controller 100 and ZP100 Zone Player combo for $699. Set up the computer software on my Macbook. Installation on the Mac is effortless and I literally had it playing music from my NAS device in 5 minutes. Looks like it uses Windows Networking (aka SMB or CIFS) to access music libraries. I have a 1 TB Western Digital MyBook World NAS device connected to the network where I've been burning my WMA files to. Haven't tried Ogg Vorbis or iTunes collections yet. I absolutely love this music solution. Great out of box experience. Kudos Sonos!

BTW, I also purchased a Zone Bridge from Sonos, but have not connected that to the network yet. I post more when I get that online.

New Airport Extreme

Man, these Apple products are like crack! Now that I have the MacBook, I wanted to upgrade the living room wireless access point. Went out to the Apple Store and ordered an Airport Extreme. Super easy to setup, very small and stylish, and it seems to run great. I'm using it in bridged mode and 802.11n only (radio set at 5 GHz). Hopefully I'll be able to use wireless outside in the backyard pool area. Highly recommended!

New MacBook!

Just bought my first Mac...a black MacBook. I bought it with 1 GB of RAM, but immediately went to Newegg.com and purchased 4 GB of RAM to replace the original 1 GB that came with the system. So far so good. My Dell XPS went on the fritz late last week. It looks like the nVidia video card went to hell and now none of the operating systems will boot up on it. And the Dell is off warranty, so it's going to cost me some money to get the thing fixed. Oh well. So I'm rolling with the MacBook. For Windows, I'm going with VMware Fusion on the MacBook.

Continuous testing using Fireworks

This past weekend I installed the Fireworks plugin for IntelliJ IDEA. Fireworks will periodically check your source directories and if anything changed, will run all the tests (after recompilation) without you, the developer, having to initiate the test runner. There are some things that I'd like to see different in the plugin (e.g. the ability to exclude integration tests from continuous build), but overall, it's a worthwhile tool for the arsenal. One other gripe is that Fireworks pops up the compilation dialog. I think I can actually get this to work in the background by tweaking an IntelliJ preference. You can still use the test runner within IntelliJ; Fireworks just ensures that you're running tests more often. Thumbs up!

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Fireworks IntelliJ IDEA plugin for continuously running unit tests

Just installed the Fireworks plugin for automating the running of unit tests. Very cool. The plugin installs a tab that changes its icon depending on whether the test suite running successfully or not. Very similar to autotest in Ruby's ZenTest gem. Very nice complementary tool for TDD. Definitely a good find.

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Compiz Fusion on Kubuntu 7.10

sudo apt-get install compiz compiz-kde compizconfig-settings-manager emerald

Alt-F2 to run compiz -replace
Alt-F2 to run emerald -replace

Configure Compiz and Emerald from KDE Menu, Settings.

Very, very cool. Much better than Vista and Mac OS X.

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Issues when attempting to build native Ruby extensions on (K)Ubuntu Linux

Just a friendly reminder that anyone attempting to install Ruby gems for Mongrel, ruby-debug-ide, or anything else that needs to build native extensions will need to install build-essential and ruby1.8-dev Ubuntu packages into their (K)Ubuntu Linux system prior to installing the gems. Seems like an easy thing to remember, but I didn't, and ended up wasting a lot of time dorking around with it.


$ sudo apt-get install build-essential ruby1.8-dev


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NetBeans 6.0 is an awesome Ruby on Rails dev environment

I've been doing some Ruby on Rails stuff lately. Nothing serious, just playing with the platform right now. I've been using Aptana Studio 1.0.2 on my Kubuntu box here at home and it's worked really well. Today, I thought I'd try out NetBeans 6.0 and see how it's Ruby on Rails support is. One word--AWESOME!! It's much nicer than Aptana (which is really quite good in its own right) and for newbies like me trying to get their feet wet with Ruby on Rails, it's done very nicely. NetBeans is quite quick on my dev machine here at home. I really like the integration with Ruby and Rails that Sun has built here. Kudos to the NetBeans group for providing a top notch Ruby on Rails dev environment. BTW, I'm using Ruby 1.8 and Rails 1.2.4. I may try JRuby at some point, but right now I'm fine working with stock Ruby and Rails.

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dpuint for real Adobe Flex unit/integration testing

I've been really underwhelmed by flexunit and its inability to properly unit test Flex UIComponent implementations. Well, it looks like I'm not the only one. Digital Primates have a new unit and integration testing toolkit for Flex that is quite nice and really supports testing of Flex UIs. I've been using it for a few days and it's much better than flexunit.

http://code.google.com/p/dpuint/

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Flex Builder for Linux Alpha 2 out!

Seems to bundle the new Flex 3 SDK Beta 3.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flex/flexbuilder_linux/

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Integrating DbUnit and Grails together

I've been struggling within the Grails world for a while. It's pretty cool stuff, but the story around testing seems a less than desirable for my tastes. For integration tests, I like to have a database loaded with some data, and I don't want to have to load that data via object construction. In the Java world, I would use the excellent DbUnit framework to bulk load/unload data to/from the database. Why should Grails be any different? After some playing around with DbUnit 2.2 and Grails, it isn't any different. Works like a charm for integration testing. I'll still use metaprogramming and mocking techniques for unit testing, but DbUnit allows me to build up simple datasets of the database tables that I can easily load and unload through my Grails integration tests.

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IntelliJ IDEA Android Support plugin out in the wild!

Well, it didn't take too long before an Android plugin became available for IntelliJ IDEA. It's available through the Plugin Manager as Android Support. Works really well for a new release. I've been able to build some simple examples and run them through the Android emulator. I'm really enjoying playing with this Android SDK. It's done very well and it seems that they made the tools easily integrable into existing IDEs (for now Eclipse and IntelliJ).

http://code.google.com/p/idea-android/

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Google's Android SDK rocks!!

Just got my first taste of the Android programming environment. Very, very cool. I have it set up on Linux and I'm using the Android Eclipse plugin with Eclipse 3.3.1. It's really freakin' cool. Much better programming environment than Microsoft's Windows Mobile stuff on .NET (formerly .NET Compact Framework). I've done some things in that world and it seemed OK, but this stuff that Google released is absolutely beautiful. Debugger works pretty well and I've heard that JUnit is included in the Android runtime on the emulator be default. That was always a hang up with Microsoft's stuff--you couldn't write test cases for anything. I really like where this thing is going. This is going to be fun!!

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Brian Goetz's Java Concurrency in Practice

Started reading this book tonight and working through the code examples from his book's website. If the first two chapters are any indication, this is going to be very good book. Very approachable discussion on concurrency, which never seems to be approachable.

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nvidia-settings, the Nvidia configuration UI

If you're using Nvidia's restricted drivers, use nvidia-settings to access their GUI for tweaking everything under the sun on your Nvidia board.

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Pheasant hunting in northeastern South Dakota

Got back from an excellent pheasant hunt yesterday. I shot 7 pheasants over 3 days of hunting (limit is 9 for 3 days of hunting). Two friends (Pete and Kevin) came out from the Twin Cities to partake in the festivities. Very fun, especially on Sunday when it was just the three of us and Kevin's German shorthair pointer and a farm dog helping out for the hunt. We shot our limit of birds in about 2 hours. Weather was pretty good until Monday--Monday was extremely windy and really difficult to hit anything. The birds would fly real high and let the wind get behind them, so there wasn't much time to get a shot off. I'm still having problems ejecting spent shells from my Benelli Nova pump and get a new round into the chamber.

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Finishing up the pergola in the backyard

My neighbor is just finishing up the pergola for our pool area in our backyard.

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The pool is done!

We're finished building the pool. Pergola is still being worked on.

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New Quad Core Linux workstation on the cheap

Built a nice new development Linux box (Kubuntu 7.10) for dirt cheap. I already had the mouse, keyboard, speakers, and LCD monitor. Everything was purchased from NewEgg. Not bad for under $1,000. I probably could have stepped up in the processor, but it's still quite quick at 2.4GHz.

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Kentsfield 2.4GHz 2 x 4MB L2 Cache LGA 775 Processor	$280
GIGABYTE GA-965P-DS3 LGA 775 Intel P965 Express ATX Intel Motherboard	$100
XFX PVT84JUDD3 GeForce 8600GT 256MB 128-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 SLI Supported Video Card	$130
Thermaltake Purepower W0100RU ATX 12V 2.0 500W Power Supply	$50
NZXT HUSH Black SECC Steel/ Aluminum/ Plastic ATX Mid Tower Computer Case	$90
G.SKILL 4GB(2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Memory	$170
SAMSUNG Black 20X DVD+R 8X DVD+RW CD-ROM 2MB Cache SATA DVD Burner	$30
Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD5000AAKS 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive	$110
TOTAL	$960

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Flex Builder Linux installs new Flash Player

Seems I have a new version of Flash Player 9 after installing Flex Builder Linux on my Ubuntu system. Adobe's Flash Player site reports the following:

9,0,60,235 installed

Hmmmm....interesting. Wonder what's changed?

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Flex Builder for Linux alpha posted

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flex/flexbuilder_linux/

Looks like Adobe's getting very serious about Flex development. Very good to see. I've been using Flex Builder on the Mac and it's OK, but Linux has Java 6. This alpha works with Eclipse 3.3 (Europa).

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Using autotest and RedGreen

http://errtheblog.com/post/15

Nice blog entry about using autotest and RedGreen together for Rails testing. Works like a charm. Thanks Ted for this "gem".

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Ruby on Rails screencasts from PeepCode

PeepCode screencasts for Ruby on Rails developers

Very cool way to learn Ruby on Rails. I bought a 10-pack of credits. Very well done screencasts. Highly recommended.

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Aptana as a Ruby on Rails IDE

I'm using Aptana as my IDE for learning Ruby on Rails. So far, so good. Has a lot of good Rails support and works well with Rails on both Windows and Linux. Not bad for free, open source software.

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Building Mongrel on Ubuntu Linux

Had some problems installing the mongrel gem on Ubuntu. This link quickly solved my issues. Full steam ahead on this Ruby on Rails endeavor.

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More on IntelliJ IDEA 7.0 M2 EAP and JetGroovy

Just tried out the test runner and the debugger for a Grails application. Both work awesome without any setup or configuration. My integration tests ran within the typical IntelliJ IDEA test runner and the debugger worked too. I'm just stoked about Groovy and Grails development now!!

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First impressions of JetGroovy in IntelliJ IDEA 7.0 M2

Holy crap!! JetBrains really knocked the ball out of the park on this one. The newly released IntelliJ IDEA 7.0 M2 EAP supports a new Groovy/Grails plugin, JetGroovy, also created by JetBrains. I've been working with Grails 0.56 in Eclipse using the Grails Eclipse plugin. The plugin is not great and has some serious performance issues. BTW, I'm running all of this on Mac OS X 10.4. I tried out the new IntelliJ EAP with JetGroovy tonight. It absolutely rocks!! It found my Grails and Groovy distributions without intervention (they were setup in the environment on the OSX). Creating new domain objects, controllers, views, etc. is all done through the New... menu item. What's really cool is the quick view of the domain object, its controller, view, controller test, and domain test classes. Links to each are at the top of the editor window, and selecting a link changes the editor window contents to that file. Very, very cool. This plugin will singlehandedly get people playing with Grails and Groovy. Looks like a winner. Can't wait to see where this goes over the rest of 2007. IntelliJ IDEA 7.0 is set to be released in early 2008.

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HTTP Scoop utility for HTTP sniffing

If you're on a Mac and doing web development, HTTP Scoop is a nice little tool for sniffing HTTP traffic. My friend Ted hooked me on to this tool. Very nice and super easy to use.

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Got a MacBook from my consulting client...

and I'm loving it!! This is really the first time I've ever done anything substantial on the Mac OS X platform. Wow! What a difference it is over Windows. I'm really enjoying myself on this thing. We're doing Adobe Flex and Groovy/Grails programming at my client and the Mac platform is great for this type of development. I just came from a .NET 3.0 programming gig using WPF and WCF and the Windows environment was really flaky, even with its own development tools. For Flex programming, I'm using Eclipse 3.2.2 and the Flex Builder 2 plugin for Eclipse. Works without a hitch. I've been pleasantly surprised by the plugin when running Eclipse on Mac OS X. It's very quick and responsive and development is a breeze. I'm really enjoying the Flex programming (two weeks in so far). I pretty sure my next laptop is going to be a MacBook Pro with the high resolution (1920x1200) display. The MacBook that I'm using now is great, but we're hooking up external LCD monitors for primary display. The 13" display on the MacBook isn't enough for development.

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Adobe Flex 2 XML Schema for MXML markup

If your interested in using some other tool besides Flex Builder 2 for building Flex applications, you'll probably end up looking for an XML Schema (.xsd file) for MXML markup. I found one here.

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Installing Dreamweaver CS3 on Windows Vista

It seems that the Dreamweaver CS3 installer will not work with Windows Vista x86 directly out of the box. I tried it a couple of times and every time it complained with an internal error 2739. Here's what needs to happen to make it go smoothly:

1. Open up a command prompt as Administrator by right clicking the command prompt icon and selecting Run as Administrator.
   


2. Navigate to \Windows\system32 directory.


3. Run the following command from the Command Prompt: regsvr32 jscript.dll

That seems to solve the issue.

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Good article on why agile adoptions fail

Jean Tabaka lists 11 reasons why agile development method adoptions fail. Good article.

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User Account Control (UAC) on Vista

I've been fascinated by the amount of User Account Control or UAC dialog prompts I've been getting in Vista. Think of UAC as a graphical sudo. Basically you don't run as Administrator in Vista--you are prompted to allow administrative authority when a process needs it. It's actually pretty annoying, given that most Windows .NET development software needs administrative privileges. My Visual Studio development experience is vastly different on Vista than it is on XP. Not sure what to think of UAC. It certainly clues you into heightened access by programs, but it never prompts for an administrative password (for example in Linux when the adept notifier is opened, it will prompt you for a sudoer's password).

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Getting Ruby on Rails up and running on Ubuntu Linux

1. Install RubyGems: sudo apt-get install rubygems


2. Install Rails: sudo gem install rails --include-dependencies


3. Download and unzip Eclipse.


4. Get Ruby Development Tools via Software Update: http://updatesite.rubypeople.org/release


5. Get RadRails via Softwware Update: http://radrails.sourceforge.net/update


An in-depth tutorial on the use of these tools (using Ruby on Windows) can be found at http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/6998.

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Flex Builder 2.0.1 - Terrible first impression

I downloaded Adobe's Flex Builder 2.0.1 for trial drive. I'm interested in rich client development and Flex and Flash seem to be where the action is at. I'm currently doing WPF in the .NET world, but that necessitates installing .NET 3.0 on the client machine and XBAP deployment is still a bit shaky these days (partial vs. full trust issues come to mind). Anyways, I thought I'd try out Flex Builder 2 for 30 days. Well, it only took me a few minutes to see that this tool probably won't be very productive for me. The thing is terribly slow in source code mode, to the point that it becomes unusable. The design mode seems to work OK, but switching to source mode just brings the tool to its knees. It is built on Eclipse 3.1.2 and I've been lukewarm on Eclipse these days too. Not sure if its the Flex Builder stuff or Eclipse causing the issue, but it ain't good either way. Now looking for other tooling to help with Flex development. Luckily, it does look like I could just use a text editor and use Ant and the Flex build tasks to build stuff up. Stay tuned.

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When pair programming rocks

I recently spent about 2.5 days pair programming with another developer at a client gig. We camped out in a small conference room for the entire time and set up a laptop with a nice 20" widescreen LCD monitor so both programmers could easy see what was happening. Wow!! What an awesome experience and when the time was up, we had refactored some nasty eventing code into a thoughtful design that has a nice set of unit tests around it (where as the previous code had no unit tests). An awesome agile development experience. Probably one of the only times I've truly felt super-productive on this project. Looking for more opportunities like this at this current client engagement. Kudos Mike!

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Goodbye, ankhsvn!

Well, I and a couple other developers at my current gig stopped using ankhsvn within VS 2005. Cool tool and it works great if your solution doesn't get too big. But our stuff is getting huge and it just became a drain on resources. It needs some serious perf tuning, but I'm hoping that it does improve to the point that I can one day use it. Just not ready for prime time at my client. Now I'll have to manually maintain the svn adds from TortoiseSVN. Not real excited about that, but I can't take the hit on performance that ankhsvn subjects me to.

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SharpDevelop's SVN support

Seems SharpDevelop is using the excellent TortoiseSVN component to handle Subversion integration in the IDE.  I'm really impressed at how far SharpDevelop has come in the past few years.  It's a very capable IDE and much faster than VS 2005. 

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New Dell 2407WFP monitor

Just received a new 24" Dell widescreen flat panel LCD monitor. It's quite nice! I have it hooked up to my Dell XPS M170 laptop and its a dream. I had a Dell 20" widescreen flat panel LCD monitor previously connected to this laptop, but the 24" will run at the Dell XPS native resolution of 1920x1200. Sweet! I paid $569 (no including tax); there was a email coupon offer that I used to get the monitor at that price. If you have the money and a video card that will drive a monitor of this resolution, it's well worth the cost.

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Adam Nathan's Windows Presentation Foundation Unleashed

Beautiful book, at least from the aspect of color. The whole book is published in rich, glossy, colorful pages. Code examples are syntax highlighted, just like they would be in VS 2005. The content of the book looks excellent. I have Sells and Griffiths Programming Windows Presentation Foundation, which actually seems quite out of date. That book seems to be based on early Avalon releases and has many errors now that WPF has been released. I think there is some value to the book. but not being up-to-date hurts it greatly. I also have Moroney's Foundations of WPF. This book is scant on hardcore WPF information. It tries to use the Expression Interactive Designer tool to demonstrate designing UIs. I much prefer Nathan's book, which really goes into the deep internals of WPF. Looks like a winner.

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Using SharpDevelop for WPF programming

It can be done! It seems that SharpDevelop 2.1 Final (which I just downloaded and installed) can be used to develop WPF apps. There's no XAML-aware editor; you get the XML editor and you have to come up with everything by yourself. But the tool understands the binding between the XAML file and the code-behind partial class file. Very cool. I tried to use C# Express Edition 2005 with the WPF and WCF extensions installed and that didn't work out so well. I wonder how difficult it would be to develop a XAML addin for SharpDevelop. Heck, one could use Kaxaml to prototype the XAML and then move to SharpDevelop after the XAML is complete. Anything to avoid purchasing a license of VS 2005.

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Concepts in Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)

Found a PDF of Adam Nathan's third chapter from his WPF Unleashed book. This chapter goes over dependency properties, routed events, and commands, all important core concepts which are heavily used in WPF. Might be worthwhile to the WPF developers out there. I ordered a copy of his book, though it hasn't arrived yet.

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KNetworkManager, part 2

Just dropped into a local Dunn Brothers Coffee shop here in Shakopee and effortlessly connected to their WiFi with Ubuntu 7.04 (development snapshot). Why is this a big deal you say? Because it was so easy to do with new KNetworkManager applet on the panel. 10 seconds after logging in, I was able to auto-discover the network and connect to it with two clicks of the mouse (one to open the applet popup menu/configuration and the other to select the Dunn Bros. network to connect to. Much, much easier than in previous version of Ubuntu. I really dig where 7.04 is going.

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Test-driven development is hard!

I'm on a consulting gig at the moment and the team is collectively trying very hard to embrace test-driven development (TDD). We have an agile process lead or meanie as he likes to be referred to and this meanie does a great job of keeping us focused on having a good test suite and a thriving, evolving code base. However, we're under a tight deadline for the first release of our product and I keep wondering when the ax will fail from the business. When will they tell us that we either make the deadline with all the features or we're looking for new gigs this summer. I absolutely believe in test driven development and the benefits that TDD affords to software projects. Unfortunately, businesses typically don't understand or cannot evaluate the importance of TDD. Come hell or high water, we're going to hit this date. Our project team is already behind in the amount of features that we should have implemented by now and I really feel like our development velocity has been all over the board and has not settled out into a semi-predictable range. Time will tell how this goes off, but I have learned the importance of driving development with tests. I've done testing before, but this time we're really focusing on pulling development forward with tests. It takes an enormous amount of discipline, at least for me.

On a related note around TDD, one beef I have with Visual Studio 2005 is that it's not geared for incremental compilation and testing cycles. It's always compile and packaging bytecode into DLLs and EXEs. That really starts to hurt when your solution has lots of projects and the projects start to get a lot of source files in them. Java is much nicer in this regard. You compile to .class files and run your tests. No packaging required. Heck, if you're using an incremental compiler like the Eclipse compiler, the compilation step is almost negligible. I am becoming a big fan of NUnit and attributed tests and test fixtures.

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Eye candy in Feisty Fawn, part 2

I've been playing around the development snapshot of Feisty Fawn and the new transparency stuff baked into KDE seems to be working well. I didn't have much luck with any of this stuff before Feisty, so this is a welcomed change. I don't believe any of these effects are provided by Compiz or Beryl, as much as I can tell. I've played with Beryl about 3 months ago and the effects provided by Beryl were trippy and fun...but alas it was quite unstable at that point. I would assume that Beryl would be stabilizing in the near future and that we could expect some of its graphical goodness in a future version of Ubuntu/Kubuntu. I think Suse already uses Compiz or Beryl in some fashion in their desktop product offering.

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Man, I've been away from Java for a while...

I've been working in the .NET world for my day job for the past 6 months. Wow, when I work on my home Java project in IntelliJ running on Linux, I'm continually amazed at the speed that I can work at. Much, MUCH faster than our .NET development environments. Some of it is the corporate laptops that we're given to work on, but I will say that Java 5 and 6 are blazingly quick on Linux when compared to the .NET stuff I've been doing. I really miss IntelliJ--ReSharper helps, but it's not IntelliJ. I've been doing some Swing programming lately and enjoying some of the new effects coming out from various Swing gurus at Sun. Romain Guy and Chet Haase have a new Swing book coming out that looks very interesting.

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Eye candy in Feisty Fawn

There does seem to be more eye candy in Feisty Fawn. Immediately noticed the expanding ghosting effect when click on app launchers on the panel. Seems to be more transparency and fade in/out effects also. For the most part, the effects and animations are working and you can tweak them to your liking (which I did not see in Vista when I was using it). Feisty seems very fast compared to Edgy. Apps pop open and things seem quite spry in the new Ubuntu development snapshots I'm working with.

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KNetworkManager

There's a new KDE app out that seems to be a major step up for wireless network configuration in Linux--KNetworkManager. It came down with the upgrade to the development snapshot of Feisty Fawn and it's been a dream to work with. Discovers broadcasting wireless networks and seems to make switching wireless network effortless. A much improved user interface for networking in Linux. Lots of information is displayed about current network connections also. Very cool. Kudos to both the Ubuntu community for including it and the OpenSuse.org community for bringing this tool to life. Thanks.

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OpenOffice.org updated to 2.2 in Feisty Fawn

Looks like OpenOffice.org is getting an update in Feisty Fawn. I just upgraded to the Kubuntu 7.04 development snapshot and opened up OOo Writer, and lo and behold, the splash screen states it's version 2.2. I can't tell any other difference than the new splash screen. It does look like the issue with greyed text in OOo has been fixed. Save dialog is different than the one in 2.0.

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kdesvn upgraded in Ubuntu 7.04 development snapshot

I upgraded my development laptop (Dell XPS M170) to Kubuntu 7.04 development snapshot and was pleasantly surprised that kdesvn was duly upgraded to version 0.11.0. It now seems to handle Subversion 1.4 formatted directories. IntelliJ 6.0 is using an updated version of the Java Subversion library which upgraded the folder metadata in Java projects to the new format. Now Subversion works again from Konqueror. Happy days!

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wajig

The Debian Package of the Day for March 18th is wajig. It's a command line tool that unifying several package management interfaces commonly used on Debian and Ubuntu. I did an apt-get install and was up and running. Seems to work well and has a ton of options. I like the use of this facade over a number of disparate tool interfaces.

Apple has a ton of cash these days

BusinessWeek has a good story on Apple's current financial situation, which is outstanding these days. Something like $12 billion in cash and no debt. It wasn't too long ago that Microsoft spotted Apple several million dollars to stay afloat and ease the monopoly concerns. I wonder if this is what Microsoft had in mind when it gave Steve Jobs that infusion of money. Kind of interesting.

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Getting Java 6 Runtime from apt-get

Looks like you can get the Sun JRE 1.6.0 from an apt-get repository. I still used my update-alternatives to configure the default Java Runtime Environment to version 1.6 and configure the default Firefox Java Plugin. Looks like Ubuntu is staying up-to-date with Java.

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Getting Java 6 to be default JVM on Ubuntu Linux

After installing Java 6 using the Sun shell script installer, I wanted to set the default Java installation to the new Java 6 installation that I just installed. This is how you do it:





sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/javac javac /usr/lib/jvm/jdk1.6.0/bin/javac 30

sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/javac java /usr/lib/jvm/jdk1.6.0/bin/java 30

sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/libjavaplugin.so firefox-javaplugin.so /usr/lib/jvm/jdk1.6.0/jre/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so 30



sudo update-alternatives --config javac #then choose javac6

sudo update-alternatives --config java #choose java6

sudo update-alternatives --config firefox-javaplugin.so #choose java6 firefox-javaplugin.so





Found this ditty here.

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JBoss and Exadel teaming up

http://labs.jboss.com/portal/rhdevstudio



http://labs.jboss.com/portal/jbossrichfaces



http://labs.jboss.com/portal/jbossajax4jsf



Looks pretty interesting. RedHat/JBoss seems to be getting very aggressive on the Java EE 5.0 front. Should be interesting to see how all of this plays out, but certainly RedHat/JBoss seem to have the strongest offering in the Java EE space. I've used Exadel Studio Pro in the past (mainly for its Hibernate tooling) and it was very good back then. I'm not a big fan of Eclipse (prefer IntelliJ IDEA), but this should be viewed in a positive light within the Java community.



I've been working in the .NET space for the past 6 months and I long for tools like Eclipse and IntelliJ. Yeah, we use ReSharper 2.5.1 with VS 2005 and it's a huge improvement over stock VS 2005. However, VS 2005 is just a pig with memory and performance on our development laptops. .NET has a lot of growing up to do to catch up with the likes of the Java development crowd.

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Initial thoughts on Vista Business, part 1

Here's some of my quick thoughts on Vista Business before I go to bed. I tried to upgrade my Windows XP Professional installation on my Dell XPS M170 laptop, but the Norton SystemWorks uninstaller rendered that installation totally useless. Hence, I had to reinstall Windows XP Pro and then perform the Vista Business upgrade. Painful, but I got Vista up and running.

• The UI is pretty, but I'm already finding that I don't like the window titles and the goofy shading that they display on the window decorations. The animation is pretty cool.
• Windows Defender sucks! If you've seen the Apple commercial you know what I'm talking about. Good God it's annoying! If this is Microsoft's answer to better security, yikes!
• I don't care for the new Explorer windows. I can't figure out how to apply global folder options to all Explorer windows and bookmarking folders seems to be hidden somewhere. I think they fixed some performance issues with Explorer windows (they seem spry and don't lock up when opening directories or deleting a directory tree of content).
  
  
• SQL Server 2005 doesn't seem to install correctly. Seems like a service pack is coming out soon to fix this.
• No ActiveSync...Vista uses Mobile Device Center or some tool like that. Could not get MDC to connect or sync to my Verizon XV6700 Pocket PC smartphone. My wife's Windows XP system with ActiveSync 4.5 connects and syncs without issue.
• Stand By works really well. No issues there. System seems spry going into and out of Stand By mode.
• I'm using MS Live OneCare. Seems to do an admirable job of keeping my system up and running. Does anti-virus, backup, defrag of hard drive and Windows Update, among other things. Much better integration and performance than Norton's offering.

All that said, I took my Vista hard drive out of the laptop and went back to Ubuntu Linux 6.10 running KDE. I guess I'm just hooked on Linux these days, though I am thinking about buying a Mac laptop later this year.

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Putting parents on Linux

Well, it looks like my parents are going to make the jump to high speed broadband Internet connectivity. They're scheduled to have Charter install a cable modem at the ol' homestead this coming Monday. I thought my father would never move to this. Now he's inquiring about a cable modem router and how one would go about sharing the connection between two or more computers. And he's inquiring about alternatives to Windows. Why? He's completely fed up with all the malware, adware, viruses, anti-virus product offerings, forced annual upgrades for anti-virus software, incompatibilities of sharing documents saved in Microsoft Office formats, blah, blah, blah... People will not continue to use Windows if it continues to degrade in performance and reliability. There are viable alternatives in Mac OS X and Linux these days and people are starting to figure that out. Perhaps some of this is due to the iPod phenomenon--people buy an iPod and then start to contemplate buying a Mac (perhaps a Mac Mini or iMac) for the integration with iTunes. Whatever the reason, Microsoft is on a slippery slope here (I'll blog about my initial thoughts of using Vista Business here at home later tonight).



So, I'm going to give him one of my old computers with Ubuntu Linux on it. I'll probably wait until Feisty Fawn (7.04) comes out in April, but yeah, I think he'll be better off with this Linux box. My father does his email through GMail and really just surfs the Web and downloads pictures from his digital camera. So Linux should work well for him there. I'll make sure that Java and Adobe Flash 9 Player are installed. It should be interesting to watch him learn and use Linux.

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Curse you wmiprvse.exe process

This process has been a pain in my arse lately. I'm working at a client site that seems to make copious use of this process within their internal network. First of all, what is this process used for...



http://www.neuber.com/taskmanager/process/wmiprvse.exe.html



Yep, it's part of the Windows operating system. Makes sense why a company might want to use this tool for collecting and setting information on client desktop systems. What doesn't make sense is how the process renders my development laptop totally useless when it is activated. I'm assuming the process always runs, but stays silent until activated by some WMI remote calls. At that point, the process sucks 80-100% of the CPU for a long durations of time (minutes). Particularly irritating when attempting to build a large Visual Studio solution or testing our WPF application. If you kill the process from task manager, it just comes right back. I probably kill this process 5-10 times per day. ARGGGGHHHH...it's damn frustrating!! One more reason why not to use Windows for a development environment. I really like a lot of .NET and C#, but hooking it up to the Windows XP operating system cripples the .NET platform. I'm going to have to investigate Mono one of these days. My Ubuntu Linux boxen don't exhibit this type of behavior ;-)

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F3, Sun's new declarative scripting language for the JVM

F3 a new scripting language from Sun, looks pretty interesting and seems to be a direct statement to Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). I've been using WPF professionally (getting paid for programming in it) for about 3 months now. It's pretty cool stuff.



I think Sun could have something here if they made Swing programming easier and then built up infrastructure around animations, transitions, graphics operations, transparencies, reflectiveness, etc. that WPF does so well. If all of that can be deployed to the web via applets and Java WebStart and works reliably, then Sun would have a real winner on its hands. As I've previously stated, I'm not a raving fan of the AJAX programming model, but no one until recently has come up with anything better for richer clients on the web. Now all of sudden, Adobe's opening up Flex and bringing on Apollo, Microsoft's pushing WPF, and now Sun is sweetening the pot with easier Swing programming with F3. I've been very impressed with Swing performance in both Java 5 and Java 6 on Windows and Linux platforms. Hopefully Java 7 will continue this trend.



http://ajaxian.com/archives/f3-suns-new-declarative-java-scripting-language



http://blogs.sun.com/chrisoliver/category/F3



http://blogs.sun.com/chrisoliver/resource/f3.html

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C#/.NETAnnoyances, part 2

Compiling and building in .NET results in DLLs, not loose bytecode or IL. When your project gets large, it can take a significant amount of time to build all the dependencies. You really see this when doing a lot of NUnit testing. I like to go back and forth between code and NUnit (using test-first programming), and it becomes a real pain when you have pauses all the time for building DLLs because of one change. Our .NET solution is composed of 16 projects, so a change to the domain layer project can cause the building of many other DLLs. I now appreciate the incrementalness of Java with loose .class files or with Smalltalk with the image file. Yeah, the C# compiler is blazingly fast, but it does take time to build DLLs. .NET programming yields a much different development experience when compared to Java.

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C# Annoyances, part 1

• Namespaces don't restrict where source file resides in folder structure on filesystem: Source files can live anywhere and have any namespace. Nothing in the language restricts where source files reside based on namespace. Refactoring becomes a real headache, with lots of manual changes to maintain some semblance of organization.
  
  
• Interfaces cannot have constants: No way to static import constants into source files.
  
  

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Flithy rich clients, WPF XBAP and Java applets/Java WebStart

For the past two months I've been immersed in the world of .NET, C#, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). This immersion resulted from a failed attempt to build an AJAXified web application using ASP.NET AJAX tools (all the previously codenamed Atlas stuff). So far, the WPF XBAP experience has been far superior to the AJAX web experience, both on the development team and the customer. Initial conclusions from this 4.5 month gig: AJAX web applications are fine for simple applications, but it's not suitable for something as complex as a clinical care management application. Our domain model is huge and thus there's a lot of information and screens that need to built. The WPF XBAP deployment model has been boon to our productivity and the customer really likes the user experience and performance of the XBAP.



This situation has gotten me thinking that Java has most if not all of this stuff in the form of applets and Java WebStart. The Java Runtime works on nearly every platform imaginable and both Swing and SWT are more than performant in their current incarnations (Java 5 and 6). I wonder if applets and Java WebStart won't be considered more often in the coming months and years for deploying complex rich clients to the web. I've had excellent success with both applets and Java WebStart on my Ubuntu Linux and Windows XP systems. Java 6 added support for OpenGL in Swing, so some of the neat animation and effects features found in WPF may be doable in a cross-platform manner in Java.



Whether its WPF XBAP or Java applets or Java WebStart, I don't look forward to working AJAX anytime soon. I'm feeling underwhelmed by the mishmash of technologies and web framework involved in that sort of solution (CSS, JavaScript, HTML). GWT is about the only thing that gets me excited to do web development these days, mainly because it hides all the crufty JavaScript, HTML, DHTML, CSS crap from me and allows me to work in Java all the time.

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Initial thoughts on .NET 3.0 and WPF

Well, it's been about a month of using .NET 3.0 and WPF. WPF is cool, though it does seem to have some rough edges. A DatePicker seems to be omitted from the WPF component palette. I would have thought that would have been a given. I'm using WPF at work and we've had many issues with XBAP deployment and executing under partial trust. Code signing and deploying the signed application seems to be an area that was neglected by MS. Very painful at the moment. The Java Plugin and Java Web Start do the certificate and code signing much better. On the plus side, animation and effects are very cool and easy to use. The jury's still out on XAML. I see why they went to XML declaration of the UI, but damn, make sure that Visual Studio 2005 understands the XAML consistently. It seems to have issues with XAML, and I'm using the WPF/WCF CTP for Visual Studio 2005. All in all I give it a thumbs up. Hopefully MS will improve and tweak it aggressively over the coming months.

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Using Performancing Firefox add-in for blog entries

Just trying out the Performancing Firefox add-in. Seems straightforward to use and works on Firefox on Linux.

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Upgraded to Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft)

Well, I upgraded one of my main workstations here at home to the Edgy Eft. Upgrade is easy:

gksu “update-manager -c”

After a few hours of slow downloads and some dialog confirmations, your Dapper Drake installation will be upgraded. Firefox 2.0 is one of the major app updates. Lots of little tweaks. Amarok looks like it's been heavily upgraded. VMWare Workstation 5.5.2 no longer works in Edgy Eft, but it looks like VMWare is working on resolving that issue. So far so good. Man I love Ubuntu!

Flash Player 9 for Linux out

You can go here and get the Adobe Flash 9 player (both embedded and standalone) for Linux. 32-bit only, but what the hey. Adobe has also release the Flex 2 SDK as a free download.

Some Ubuntu links of interest

I wanted to post some links that I found helpful in my endeavors with Ubuntu Linux so far.

My Ubuntu Installation

Adventures in Linux with Ubuntu :)

Kubuntu - The KDE Desktop

Welcome - Ubuntu Linux

Finished my contract at Thomson West

Well, yesterday was my last day at Thomson West in Eagan. Good 6 month gig. Went in, built some new functionality for a new product that Thomson West is coming out with, and got out. The middle part of the summer was a bit hairy (I worked a couple of 45-52 hour weeks), but for the most part, it was a very straightforward project.

I think the big take away for me on this project was how well Spring Framework worked We had one, I said one, EJB...a message-driven bean. The rest of the system was built using normal Java objects configured in Spring application context files. This allowed us to concentrate on building business logic and not worry about EJB/J2EE issues. We also did all of our testing outside the J2EE container (in this case, the J2EE container was IBM WebSphere Application Server 5.1.2). A nice side effect of all this was that myself and another senior developer could use our Java IDE of choice--JetBrains' most excellent IntelliJ IDEA.

Spring was a big differentiator for that project--it allowed us to build value and deliver value to the client, thus building confidence in the client with regard to our abilities and skill levels. The group that I consulted with are super happy with how well Spring worked on this project and will be integrating Spring into more of their applications and ridding themselves of EJB cruftiness over time. I don't get the sense that they're interested in any of the EJB 3.0 stuff coming out and will stick with Spring and best of breed tools and frameworks in the future. The way it should be. Thoroughly enjoyable!

Next up is UnitedHealth Group's Ovations division. Big change here--.NET Framework, ASP.NET, AJAX. Looking forward to the challenges this new opportunity will present.

Ubuntu Linux "Dapper Drake" rocks!

Well, it's been about a week that I have been working with Ubuntu Linux "Dapper Drake" on one of my desktops here at home. I'm thoroughly impressed. I've used RedHat and Fedora Core distros before and have been satisfied with them. Never super impressed, but satisfied. SuSE seemed slow to me so I really didn't invest much time in it. Tried Dapper Drake on a laptop that had a hosed Windows XP installation on it. Dapper Drake worked well on it, and after I bought a Netgear wireless adapter for it that Dapper Drake instantly recognized, I was off to the races with Dapper Drake.

After messing around with the Drake on this smallish laptop, I decided to install it on development desktop that currently held Windows XP Professional. It was my thought to dual boot this system, but for some reason, the Windows XP Professional installation would die during the boot process. OK, I thought, I wasn't really using Windows here much anyways, and I still have my Dell XPS system for a Windows installation. So I reformatted the Windows partition to a Linux partition and mounted it to the filesystem.

I've gone to installing Kubuntu on both of my Dapper Drake installations. I think I resonate with KDE more than GNOME. I really like the kdesvn integration into Konquerer. Much like TortoiseSVN in Windows. Ripping some albums to Ogg format and amaroK is very cool. I have my Java development tools installed (IntelliJ IDEA, DbVisualizer, Eclipse 3.2+Callisto). I've been using Java 6 Beta 2 on this box and it's working like a dream.

Definitely recommend Dapper Drake to those out there that want a no-nonsense Linux installation that's super simple to upgrade and install packages on.

Google's Browser Sync is eating my bookmarks!

I've now seen this behavior a couple of times on both Windows and Linux versions of Firefox. For some reason, unknown to me, Google's Browser Sync plugin gets a wild hair and deletes almost all of my bookmarks when synchronizing with the central server. This phenomena then proliferates out to the rest of my browsers when I use them. I've become very initimate with exporting my bookmarks frequently just so I have a backup. Kinda of aggravating. I hope they get that issue fixed at some point.

Can't get Callisto to download through Eclipse 3.2 Update Manager

I keep getting exceptions when attempting to download the JAR files, no matter what mirror site I try. Works fine in Windows XP, but on Ubuntu Linux, the Eclipse Update Manager is useless for attempting to install Callisto from the Callisto Discover Site. I'll need to look into this again some time. I still prefer Jetbrains IntelliJ IDEA over Eclipse. And it works great on Ubuntu.

Started using Ubuntu Linux

I installed Ubuntu Linux 6.06 on a old eMachines laptop that Windows XP ceased working on. I had SuSE Linux 10.1 on the laptop initially, but it seemed very slow. So I went with Ubuntu and I've been very pleasantly surprised at the speed and ease of use of this distro. Getting used to sudo very quickly (Fedora Core and SuSE don't sem to make use of sudo much if at all). I have my Java development environment up and running (Java 1.5.0 Update 8, IntelliJ IDEA 5.1.2, DbVisualizer). I added MySQL 5.0.22 to the mix through the use of apt-get. I much prefer apt-get over finding RPMs and installing them through an RPM tool. Overall I'm becoming a big fan of Ubuntu Linux. BTW, I did have to pick up a different wireless networking card, as the built-in Broadcom networking in the laptop failed to connect to my wireless access points. I bought a Netgear WG511T network card, plugged it into the PCMCIA slot of the laptop and was up and running with WEP-encrypted wireless networking in about 30 minutes. It took me a bit to figure out the correct settings for the WEP encryption, but Ubuntu correctly found the new hardware and configured it on the fly. Very impressive.

Early goose season in South Dakota

Well, hunting season has begun, and a bit earlier than usual this year. I bought a non-resident early goose season license for South Dakota and headed out to a field in NE South Dakota to try my luck with some others that take up residence in that fine state. The result...one goose shot, another flew away. We couldn't get anything to come into our decoys except for a lot of ducks. Unfortunately, they're out of season.

More pictures are available at my Picasa Web gallery...

Labor Day Weekend 2006 in South Dakota

Jul 22, 2006 - 31 Photos

IntelliJ IDEA 6.0 to include GWT Studio

Straight from the source...

http://www.jetbrains.net/confluence/display/IDEADEV/GWT+Studio+plugin

JetBrains has a demonstration of this technology on this page. I could only get it to work in IE. Very impressive stuff. Seems like JetBrains has a lot of intentions and infrastructure built up around the GWT Studio to make GWT development easy and fun. Definitely going to have to check this out. The most current EAP, build 5350, has the GWT Studio plugin installed by default.