Daniel E. Markle's Blog

Use a Mac and miss Expose when using Firefox tabs? Use a lot of tabs and want an easier way to navigate between them? Try Viamatic foXpose; once installed just tap F8 in Firefox to bring up tiled thumbnail previews of all your current tabs.

Apparently this has been the case since May, but you can call anyone in the US or Canada with a landline or mobile phone for free until at least December 31, 2006 (they will decide at that time whether to continue the program). All you need is broadband internet access and Skype. You also need to be located in these countries, they do a check based on your IP address to verify you are calling from an ISP located here.

Savings in long distance bills alone would more than pay for the broadband connection for many people I know. Even the ~$0.02 rate after the program ends would still be quite beneficial. Hopefully this will be enough to get some of my friends and family started reaping the rewards of the modern communications systems available instead of remaining stuck in the past.

As I have a rather long commute to work every day, I use a lot of gasoline. Fuel prices are rather hit and miss though, sometimes the stations at home are cheaper than in Harrisburg, while at other times fuel is cheaper at home. I recently discovered an awesome Dashboard widget aptly named Gas to keep me updated with the lowest fuel rates in my area. It doesn't cover all the available stations, but it gives me a rather good idea of the price I should be looking for today.

Looking for something to drink in the soda machine at work today, I noticed what I thought was Mellow Yellow (I could only see the back of the bottle) in the Coke machine (we have one of those fancy glass-front machines with the traveling belt that retrieves your soda). It turned out to be Coke's Vault soda.

It seems to be somewhere between Mellow Yellow and Mountain Dew in taste; not as strong as Mountain Dew's syrupy flavor, but not as mellow as Mellow Yellow. It also has a bitter bite to it, no doubt from the high caffeine concentration in this stuff.

Not terrible, but I don't think I will select it by choice if the other two are available.

While taking photographs for the Capitol Centennial Celebration, I noticed on a float in the parade, then on display in front of the Capitol Building a few days later, a Duryea automobile. The Duryea automobile was the first ever commercially manufactured, and it is not widely known that these first combustion powered wagon things were manufactured in Reading, Pennsylvania.

Apparently they had trouble getting investments due to low demand and difficulty convincing investors the crazy idea had a future.

I have been doing a lot of photography over the past few days of the PA Capitol Centennial. I usually stick with outdoor photography, but I could not resist documenting this once in a lifetime opportunity.

There have been a lot of photographers at this event, so I have been able to compare my techniques to those of others. One instance in particular sticks out; when taking staged group shots of people, I tend to adjust the shot on my end as much as possible and minimize re-adjusting the people. This is no doubt due to the vast majority of my experience so far; mountains and animals don't tend to move when you ask them to. It has become quite obvious to me tonight this is not the best way to work with people after seeing first hand the results that are achieved by coaxing the crowd instead.

In the vast majority of photography I do, I continue to much prefer my current 'journalistic' type approach of trying to be hands-off and capturing the feel of the event without changing it, but in staged shots like this which are obviously staged anyway, I really need to be stepping in and molding the image.

With Halloween approaching, many will begin decorating and preparing for the celebration over the next few weeks. If you are considering getting a pumpkin though, you may want to think twice about carving that pumpkin. A life of regret over slaughtering helpless vegetables may not be worth the momentary pleasure.

NeoOffice 2.0 Aqua Beta is now publicly available. This Aqua version of OpenOffice provides a native look and feel, far better than version 1.x ever achieved. I have been using it for a while for all of my document editing needs (I joined the earlier beta program) and recommend it as a replacement for NeoOffice 1.x or any other obsolete non-ODF supporting software you may be using on the Mac.

Upon visiting a friend's house and purchasing a few Playstation 2 games, my interest in gaming is back for a while. One advantage of my on-again off-again gaming binges includes the low prices the games usually are by the time I get back into gaming. Browsing the $19.99 racks, I found Destroy All Humans, a game I had been interested in when I saw it in gaming magazines a year or so ago. This game is every bit as fun as the previews indicated.

Who wouldn't enjoy running around and shocking people with your electric shock gun, sucking their brains out, and then taking off in your flying saucer and using your death ray to level a few cities? You even have psychokinetic powers that allow picking up people, cars, and even tanks and flinging them up and away to come crashing down. The game is very good at adding a comic flair to these absurd but fun activities, with a setting in the 1950s and an outrageous script.

I have been using Ubuntu on various desktops lately; it is one of the most polished Linux distributions I have ever used from a desktop refinement standpoint. However, Ubuntu's desktop refinement appears to only be skin deep.

The Ubuntu developers tend to make major changes right before release time without adequate testing; Hoary's last minute Gnome update, the many issues I've had getting Dapper to work with most video cards (only one machine I've tested on so far works with the LiveCD without using safe mode, two have required the alternative install), and the PowerPC LiveCD installer crashing on yaboot thus making the LiveCD installer quite useless on that platform.

All of these issues were quite obvious, happen either every time or extremely often, and would have been caught with even the most rudimentary of testing. Apparently this lack of testing extends to their updates as well. If I had not noticed their past pattern of not testing before release, I would find it rather amazing that such an update, which kills X11 on their two most major platforms so consistently, slipped through.

At least with the Hibernate/PostgreSQL combination (possibly other databases), you MUST encapsulate all queries, even just SELECT statements in transactions. If you do not, you will get hanging PostgreSQL processes like this:

postgres: <dbname> <dbname> <host> idle in transaction

These will eventually fill up your connection pool / exhaust your RAM / cause your application server to lock when trying to redeploy, etc. Not that I have experienced these personally...

Anyone who uses Netbeans when working with Javascript or CSS would be well advised to try out the Netbeans Javascript Editor. These modules offer both code completion and syntax highlighting for Javascript and CSS. There is one downside, it only works on standalone .js and .css files, not within jsp.

Java has, shall we say, rather interesting date manipulation. If you want a 'sane' date object that accurately tracks dates, you need the 'GregorianCalendar' class.

Most classes, even GregorianCalendar itself, use the Date class extensively. Amusingly this class already contains all the information in Date. As an even more enjoyable kicker, both of these are timestamps with millisecond precision, and not really 'date' classes at all.

It is absolutely critical to use data scrubbing with Linux software RAID. If you fail to do so, when one of the drives fail and the new one is put in place to resync with, the chance of losing all data is very high. When Linux resyncs a RAID array, it steps through each and every block on the disk(s) it is syncing from. If there are any bad blocks on the 'good' drives data scrubbing hasn't found (or data scrubbing isn't being used), that drive will also be marked as unusable. This renders your array useless unless an array is in use that can recover from multiple drive failures at the same time, or you have quite a few days to spend on manual recovery.

See this information on how to do data scrubbing with Linux RAID for another description and instructions on how to do this.

Using fragments combined with jspx (xml compliant jsp) is problematic. Standard jspf pieces stored in WEB-INF/jspfs can't use any elements not allowed in standard jspf or the application server will complain about those elements not being allowed (even when using <jsp:directive.include file="blah" />, which isn't supposed to pre-parse the file). If you set is-xml to true for jspfs in the web.xml, it fixes that error, but of course as it's a fragment and not a real xml file, it errors out saying such.

Workarounds include:

• keeping your fragments to jspf parsable elements


• building fully pre-parsable pieces that output the needed elements and using <jsp:include page="blah" /> (doesn't work if you want to do things like bean or variable declarations to communicate across elements)


• using another parsing engine and forget about fragments, like struts tiles (if using struts) or SiteMesh