Stehno.com

I am firing up my EclipseFrills set of Eclipse plug-ins again… trying to get them out the door for a 1.0 release and making sure they still work on 3.5.

SourceForge has really had a facelift and a wealth of new project management tools… it really is pretty awesome for something that is free… though currently their Trac implementation does not work in Mylyn, oh well.

Check out the project Trac Wiki and let me know if you are someone who actually uses these.

I decided to play around a little with Jackrabbit the other day… here are some of my notes…

I am running on Ubuntu with Tomcat 6 and all I had to do to get started was download the Jackrabbit war distribution and install it in the webapps directory, then add the jcr-1.0.jar (downloaded from Sun) to the TOMCAT/lib directory. Once you start up the server and go into the context you get a nice welcome screen:

I created a content repo in my home directory:

In working on the multi-file upload support in Spring (see First Negative Thing I Have Said About Spring), I had to code up a simple example of how it works now. It took me a little searching to figure out how to use multipart support with the new controller annotation configurations, though it turns out to be really easy. I figured I’d post a quick summary of how it’s done.

With your standard file upload form:

<form action="upload.do" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data">
    <div>File 1: <input type="file" name="file" /></div>

No, not decorating with pretty colors, decorating with additional functionality… specifically click-tracking and confirmation. With a little bit of JavaScript and a little help from Prototype you can add functionality to link clicks.

If you have the following links

<p><a href="http://dzone.com" class="track">DZone</a></p>
<p><a href="http://cnn.com">CNN</a></p>
<p><a href="http://thinkgeek.com" class="confirm track">Geek Porn</a></p>

A useful trick I started doing for property-backed configuration files is to provide something a little more rich than a simple Properties object as a provider. Use a Properties instance as a delegate to pull out the properties, but provide a more useful interface for the values themselves.

Say you have a properties file such as:

path.storage = /some/path

You could simply access these via a Properties instance, and use it directly as in:

String path = props.getProperty("path.storage");
File file = new File(path,"archive.zip");

My wife and I have a ton of VHS tapes full of content we have gathered over the years. For a while now I have been investigating means of converting these to a digital format before they become so obsolete that they are no longer even playable… which probably wont be too long since nobody makes the VHS tapes any more. Most of the solutions I came across were either prohibitively expensive or low quality. But I finally had one of those, “well duh” moments in my local Fry’s Electronics store looking at computer TV cards. The card I was looking at had a cable input…

I have started using a different music player on Linux. The Listen music player has a simple, clean interface that appeals to me much more than the new (and somewhat buggy) Amarok version. I just want to play music with some interfaces to outside resources, like last.fm or podcasting sites, and that’s what Listen does. It also honors the media keys of my Logitech keyboard, something I could not get Amarok to do.

It’s worth a look… or a listen, as the case may be.

I will start out by saying that I do not have a Kindle, nor have I had the opportunity to play with one. These thoughts are based on what I have seen/read about it and some general thoughts on the subject of ebooks.

When the Kindle came out I was very excited. Think of an ebook reader with support by the company where I buy most of my books anyway… not a bad idea. It looks pretty cool and the reviews seem generally good, but as I have thought about it over the year or so since it came out, I have found some sore spots.

I am digging into the RESTful controller support in Springframework 3.0 (see related Spring Blog Posting, which is still in development. I am both unimpressed and confused with what I have seen so far and I am not sure if I am missing something.

I love the URI templating; it really adds a richer, more solid feel to the controller support and being able to embed parameters in the url is an awesome feature.