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I am reading the Oreilly book Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML, by Elisabeth Freeman & Eric Freeman, and have come to the realization that sans-serif IS easier to read than serif. Thus if you visited the site at all before you may notice that ALL the pages are slightly easier to read. That's why you keep reading, so you can keep learning and applying what you've learned, right?

I am reading the Oreilly book Head Rush Ajax, by Brett McLaughlin, and after several inexplicable reboots related to how Eclipse 64 bit handles the Tomcat server and some serious goofing around (as well as a little help from my brother) I have the tiniest of examples working on the Articles page. It's hardly anything at all since I haven't really thought of an appropriate use for it in my current content BUT if you mouse over the one item in the list that is NOT a link to an article you will see the page change ever so slightly.

Well while I was playing around removing old versions of Java and installing new ones I decided to go ahead and upgrade my other server runtimes. I am now running Tomcat 6.0 on JDK 5 patch 9 vice Tomcat 5.5_17 on JDK 5 patch 8. The new tomcat allows me to use Servlet 2.5 and JSP 2.1 vice Servlet 2.4 and JSP 2.0. Of course, Tomcat 6.0 is still alpha but early adoption is often good for development in that it helps find bugs that would otherwise go unnoticed until a widespread deployment occurs. Additionally, I am now editting the site in Eclipse 3.2.1 x64 using the x64 version of java. The only issue I have run across so far is that the Tomcat 6.0 service that actually runs the site is still stuck in a 32 bit world and cannot launch Tomcat in a 64 bit environment. The other downside is that Eclipse does not yet recognize Tomcat 6.0 as a valid runtime environment. So I have to develop the page using JDK 1.5.0_09 x64 on Tomcat 5.5.20 then deploy it to Tomcat 6.0.0 running on JDK 1.5.0_09 32 bit. :( UHHHGGGG!!!

Oh well, hopefully time will move everything to 64 bit and I will again be in a synchronized environment.

Added a few new links to the Links pages. One under Shopping and the others under Information.

Well, not much new today just updated the server to WAMP5 1.6.5 this morning and updated the "powered by" string at the bottom of the page(s). Please, visit the Software page under Links for the link to the WAMP5 website. And again if you have any suggestions for links to add to the page please don't hesitate to let me know via email.

My brother indicated that the scrollbar was not working in Vista. Now I like MS and Vista is cool but the current IE 7 version in Vista is a REAL pain in the rear when it comes to iframes. Nothing I did allowed me to dynamically size it to the window. My work around forced me to change NUMEROUS pieces of code I should never have had to. In the end if the browser is IE 7 on NT 6.0 I simply set a static size on the iframe. Percentage does not work and the clientHeight expression that works fine in XP x64 IE7 does not work in the Vista build. Otherwise, IE 7 allows me to use standard CSS without all the stinking usual IE workarounds BUT man is the iframe a painful element to make work. That is, there is a lot to like about the closer standards compliance in IE 7 but the few new workarounds you need really suck.

As usual I am messing around with the site instead of doing other things I should be doing. This time I was messing around with some site optimization and decided that the home page was just getting too long. To rectify this, at least minimally, I moved some of the older content to archive pages based on year, the years are listed at the top of each page. The default home page will always contain the most recent entry but the older entries will be archived each year when I make my first entry. I also combined 2 of the css files together to reduce the complexity and dependencies just a little more. I INTEND to add some compression down the road as well, just in case someone that is still using a dial-up modem should "come a visitin".
If anyone is curious, the maintenance data at the bottom and the menu at the top of each Home page are jsp includes NOT tiles or html applied multiple times. This allows me to only maintain one simple page and keep all four up to date at the same time. While it admittedly adds yet another file to maintain, one more file is much better than trying to maintain four separate pages (and growing).
Have you ever noticed how many open source sites built with open source tools, like Apache and Eclipse proudly display their standards compliance [(X)HTML, CSS, Section 508] and how few ASP and .NET sites display ANY kind of standards compliance. I like .NET but does using ASP/.NET necessarily mean that you give up standards compliance? Or is it that the community of developers is so arrogant as to believe they don't need to be compliant? Or is it that they feel it just doesn't matter? Just some food for thought.

Well I added another link to the Software page for a new application I learned about over the weekend called Fiddler. If you are interested in seeing how many bytes of traffic each page generates INCLUDING images then this is a great tool. It is also good for seeing what one of the benefits of webservices is. That is it can show you what a dramatic decrease in traffic can be had by using dynamic content within a single page vice doing multiple post backs. Microsoft calls their version of this technique ATLAS but any AJAX engine will accomplish the same task. It might take a little more work on the programmers part but it can be done.

So I was playing around with getting Sun Application Server PE9 running concurrently with Tomcat 5.5, on which the majority of this site is running, so that the transition is seemless[using Apache mod_jk]. And I found a great blog on it here. The problem was, he says in step 3 to add the entry when what he meant was "run the option from the command line". A simple error for someone for whom English is not their first language but an important one none-the-less. It took me several hours to figure it out but then again maybe I am just slow.

There is a little more here and here but they aren't quite as insightful. And the first one by Amy Roh actually duplicates most of Jean-Francois Arcand's blog.

I have also decided the background image is too intrusive and makes reading too dificult therefore I have removed it.

So I was looking at a site I look at relatively often, hMailServer (it is on the Links page under Software) and it ocurred to me that the site is exceptionally well designed. It has a consistent easy to follow interface, it is not cluttered with eye catching [distracting] advertising, it describes things distinctly and clearly, has an excellent feedback and interaction system in it's forum in which you actually communicate with THE developer, he clearly states on the home page what the most recent stable version of his software is, and it is, in my opinion, a visually appealing page. My only complaint is that he doesn't indicate the date the latest stable build was declared stable. From a design perspective it is a nearly perfect page. Those of you interested in web/UI design might take a look at it.

My brother felt that the site did not contain enough "eye candy" so I thought I'd "jazz it up" by adding a simple background image. I found the image with white lettering on black background then, using The GIMP, I inverted the image, scaled it up, cropped it slightly, and changed the image background color to "eeeeee" which happens to be the same color as the background for every page on the site. I am not sure I like it as it does make it a little harder to read but it does also add a little more visual appeal to the site without being too overpowering. I was going for subtle. As always feel free to e-mail me and tell me what you think of it.

Seven days and many java classes later I have made still more behind the scenes improvements to the site. The site, as mentioned previously, takes advantage of Tiles in conjunction with Struts BUT neither Tiles nor Struts lets you set variables for use in your JSP's without first going through an action class or rewriting/extending the controller. Neither option seemed like a viable alternative to me to accomplish what I wanted so I wrote a singleton class to read configuration data in from a file, a ContextListener to initially load the file into memory, a RequestFilter to put the configuration file's variables into the appropriate J2EE scoped objects [request|session|application/context] based on the action invoked, and some beans to hold all the data. It seems to be working better than I had hoped when I conceived the idea and the site you are reading this on is taking advantage of it.


Unfortunately, I did introduce a dependency on JDOM, but the use of the Java XPath and DOM models is excruciatingly painful, to say the least, JDOM is MUCH easier to work with. That is not to say that I won't attempt at some point to remove the dependency but for now it is accomplishing the task quite nicely.

Well it's definitely been a while since my last post but I have made a MAJOR change in the site. I have gone from a static driven site with a smattering of PHP to a full Java Web Container site. I have also completely eliminated the use of frames on my site (for the majority of it at any rate). The idea is that I can now make changes to certain pages and maintain the consistency of the layout (using Tiles). I can ALSO maintain better browser compatibility and XHTML/CSS standards compliance. The exceptions will, by necessity, be the PHP and possibly ASP.NET driven page(s) that may be incorporated into the site at a later time. The current PHP page is the Neighborhood page which is rendered in an iframe within the Tiles context. This allows the current functionality/layout to be kept while still allowing me to experiment with other languages and concepts and incorporate them into my site. One of the advantages I see in the new site is that I can test my changes locally without taking the current server offline and without making the development changes visible (intentionally or otherwise).

I would also point out that iframes are a pain in the butt. It gave me rendering problems in Opera and Mozilla driven browsers for hours. I finally went with a javascript solution that is reasonably clean and seems to visually fix both browser engines for the issue I was having (Netscape uses the same Mozilla engine Firefox uses). Essentially, I am detecting the height of the viewable window using an expression in CSS or Javascript that is then applied to the height of the iframe. This makes the iframe "appear" to be seemless with the rest of the site, though it DEFINITELY is not.

If you have questions/comments/suggestions please let me know. I have tested the site in IE6, Opera 9, Netscape 8.1, and Firefox 1.5 and 2.0b1. All had a consistent look and layout that I am satified with.

I have some other projects that I may pursue for the site regarding the visual appeal of the site and some changes to functional pages I have removed as part of the site redesign. Plus I may still migrate to a full J2EE capable server (most likely Sun Server 9 or Geronimo since they are both, in my opinion, the most specification compliant servers that are available). I know that JBoss is pretty good too but it has some quirks that I do NOT like. I really like Sun's administration functionality and Geronimo's. Sun's server has some issues with older specification compliant projects but is JEE 5 compliant. Geronimo is close behind as far as the administration interface but is not JEE 5 compliant (yet).

I am currently using Tomcat 5.5 which has some basic authentication/security capabilities but the J2EE/JEE 5 servers give me more options for security/authentication for future upgrades.

Finally, I went through most of the links to ensure they worked with the new site configuration and fixed quite a few broken links but it is VERY possible, that I have missed some things. If you should find any, PLEASE email me and let me know.

[Addendum] While I am still pretty happy with the new site there is one flaw that I am unable to resolve. If you size the windows small enough the scroll bars tend to disappear in IE. In Opera and Firefox the vertical scroll works the way it is supposed to but the horizontal does not. It still appears if you scroll all the way to the bottom but it disappears as you scroll up. IE gets NO horizontal scroll bar at all and the vertical scroll bar disappears if you size the window small enough on windows that contain tables or images. It's not a big deal if you use your browser at a reasonable size most of the time but it is a rather unpleasant side effect of using the CSS for layout rather than a table or a frameset.

An interesting proof
Given correct = right
Implies wrong = left
If (3 x left) = right then (3 x wrong) = right
Thus even though two wrongs don't make a right apparently three wrongs do :)

By request, a tribute to "The Pimp Dog"

A friend of mine was trying to get the <div> tag hiding to work today which normally works simply by changing the style.display attribute for a given id using JavaScript. As it turns out even though it is a relatively simple thing to do for most block text it does not work so well INSIDE a <table> tag; therefore, should you ever encounter a situation where you need to hide two or more rows, <tr>, in a table, your best bet is to enclose them in a <tbody> tag and give the tag an id, then hide and show the tagged content the same way you do a <div> tag. Just thought this might be helpful to someone else.

This is just another little piece of paper I have been keeping around because it was pretty funny and oddly true so I thought I might share it with my one or two regular visitors The Top 100 Things I'd Do If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord

Well, I know I promised not to spout too philosophical about politics or the personal life but I have an article my cousin gave me quite some time ago that I think is important and I just thought I'd share a link to it with you. It is Save America about the confrontation occuring between the Christian/Hindu/Jewish/Buddhist faiths and Islam. Just to be clear, the world is seldom black and white, many Christians do not agree with ALL the teachings of their faith(s) and the same holds true of every other faith including Islam, but the hatred that is espoused by many in the middle east holds quite a bit of sway on the world political stage and thus I feel the warning is appropriate even if many people purporting to be Islamic are not in and of themselves evil people nor do they support the goals of those evil men in power.

By the way I was just pointing out to a coworker the other day how important I think it is that the site not only render well but have a nice view source as well. I think the view source on this page comes out very nicely but feel free to share your opinions on the Forum page or via e-mail. Constructive criticism and complements are always welcome. Criticism for the sake of criticism, ie being a jerk, is most definitely NOT appreciated.