Daniel E. Markle's Blog

I have been trying out a configuration management package for a recent project, JFig.  First I built a wrapper class as I want to have a defined set of configuration values and cross platform handling of configuration file locations.  Then I built the functionality I needed into the rest of the application, fired things up, and everything seems to be working well.  But then I noticed, that's strange, the configuration file isn't getting updated.  Isn't JFig supposed to handle that for me?

The short version is no, not only does it not handle it for me, it doesn't provide any way to save configuration changes at all!

I got a chance to taste the results of this recipe tonight, and I can vouch that when properly made, this is a great way to make a tasty snack using bags of inexpensive pretzels.  Now I don't have to just sit there and listen to Cliff consuming these tasty things over the microphone while playing World of Warcraft.

If you do web design or web application development check out the Web Developer Extension for Firefox.  An incredibly handy toolbar addition to Firefox, It includes handy utilities like the  ability to edit CSS in real time, on any site you are browsing.  You can even edit the HTML source of web pages directly and see real-time updates.  That's not all however, it includes more options to do everything from visualize page elements, resize the browser window to test content, validate page code with a click, autopopulate form fields when building web applications, and more.

I am a big advocate of open source software, but every once in a while commercial software does something that illustrates to me why it will never be completely replaced by open source.  I came across this IEBlog entry at Microsoft recently.  For years printing from web browsers has been terrible; you almost never get anything like what the page looks like; elements fall off page borders, content doesn't resize to page width in a sane way, frames aren't rendered correctly if at all, etc.