Daniel E. Markle's Blog

I have had it rather easy so far in life in that not many people well known to me have passed from among us.  I was shocked to learn mid last month that Zeynep Barnes was suddenly no longer with us.  I knew her as Chuck's fiance, and had taken a road trip with them to Jake's wedding.

This picture shows the two of them as I remember, enjoying life and their time together.  Visit the Zeynep Barnes Memorial Website for more pictures and information about Zeynep's life.

To the surprise of no one there has been yet another truck flip at the Clark's Ferry deathtrap.

I strongly recommend everyone backup their computer; portable hard drives are relatively cheap nowadays.  I've been especially strong with my advice to laptop users.  The nature of these portable drives, pushing the limits of technology and more recently the amount of heat these things produce tends to make them fail much more often than normal.

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.

I have been asking for Cable Ties for Christmas for a few years now, but have never received them. This Christmas my prayers were answered; I received a veritable flood of ties in all shapes and sizes. Small, large, removable, colors; I now have a wonderful collection of ties for all my needs.

I am finding an increasing amount of 'open source' products where the source code is under the GPL and the project is indeed technically open source, but the structure of their project denies both them and their clients any real benefit from this distribution model. This type of pseudo-open source project takes four forms, often in combination: No open user documentation, no open bug tracking system, inadequate or expensive developer documentation with a highly complicated codebase, and no access to the development work in progress. Each of these methods act to further destroy or prevent the development of a user community behind the product.

There has been much talk recently about the most recent Microsoft-funded anti-Linux study. Most recently, an analysis of the study shows critical flaws in the methodology used. Basically they installed over 150 superfluous packages which inflated the number of "security problems." Most interesting to me however is the clear lack of understanding of proper administration by those who ran the study.

I noticed this rather interesting pair of billboards while eating yesterday evening. They must mean one of three things.

• This is an advertisement for something other than a hospital, otherwise if they are in this area they are contradicting themselves. What are they, a midwife service?
• The advertised hospital isn't in this area, which begs the question why are they advertising here.
• They left out the word "other" as in "any other hospital," in which case this is a rather embarassing grammar mistake to have on such public display.

Whenever using struts html:text tags, be careful with the 'disabled' flag. It may appear that it just disables the field for input, and indeed it shows the value in the form in the grayed-out field. In reality though, it is going to send a null value when you submit the form regardless of what seems to be the case.

Use the 'readonly' flag instead if you want a non-null value to be submitted.

Earlier this week my new dual-core PowerMac G5 arrived. I have been waiting for the dual core versions because noise and power consumption are a factor for me so I did not want one of the multi-processor systems. I have not been disappointed; this machine is very quiet and fast.

In the course of working on more J2EE web applications, I am starting to run into things that annoy me about Java. One of the biggest annoyances I run into when developing web applications in Java is the lack of support for String in case constructs. Apparently I am not alone.

While wandering around the Harrisburg area I came across this sign. I am not sure what an "Adult Salad Bar" is, but I don't think it is something I would expect at a family restaurant.  A "Hot" roast beef sandwich does indeed seem like an appropriate side.