It is available at http://www.widgetweb.com.

Released Oct 14th

Changelist:

• Change - Merge Site, Space, Theme, Page actions into single action menu.
• Change - (Important to Developers) Moved hidden attribute from Space model to Space object.
• Enhancement - Add creation listeners. These are commands that can be executed immediately after a widget is created.
• Enhancement - Extensive redesign of themes/layouts. Introduce concept of themes to ease customization of sites. For an overview of how to change themes, see Themes Layouts.
• Bug Fix - Encoding issues resolved. Will now support any language as input to Widgets.
• Bug Fix - Numerous bug fixes including improvements to the user interface and continued improvement of handing in Internet Explorer.

http://cube.ign.com/articles/651/651275p2.html

I GET IT! And I love it! This controller is incredible. I can only hope that Nintendo can rally the FPS hoard from the PC world. I can only hope that game developers get it too.

One of the coding conventions followed by our development team is to check for null arguments (as a precondition) and to throw an IllegalArgumentException if this is violated.

For example: if (null == startDate) throw new IllegalArgumentException("Null: startDate");

This example illustrates a few conventions:

• The use of IllegalArgumentException instead of assert (Java 1.4 assertion). We believe these checks are not conditional, i.e. testing vs. production.
• IllegalArgumentException is used instead of NullPointerException since it more accurately describes the violation.
• The check for null is highlighted by placing null first.
• The check is all on one line allowing grouping of similar checks.
• The message is simply Null: <variable name>. This is quick to type, but still helpful during debugging. Itis fine to be terse since these types of checks are never expected to escape to the user.

Okay, so I'll play prognosticator for a minute. My prediction: In 3 years, we will look back on Google Talk as being the biggest driver of business and technical change for 2005.

Here's what I mean. Google is the first(1) large, high profile company to embrace XMPP(2), an open source chat protocol. Additionally, they've publicly stated that they plan to get all other major chat protocols to become interoperable with XMPP.

My prediction (in detail): They are going to be successful in winning large numbers of new users to chat as well as winning a large number of current chat users (from AIM, MSN, Yahoo) to XMPP a.k.a. Google Talk. Additionally, they're going to get AIM and Yahoo users to be able to chat easily to Google Talk users (and the rest of the open source XMPP community).

As a consequence of this interoperability, we will finally have an open source, extensible chat protocol upon which to build our applications. Quickly we will see several smart applications of this protocol, much of it invisible to us. For example, presence built into web applications and desktop applications, server to server communication using XMPP, etc.

Additionally, businesses will realize they can run their own servers to secure communication. This will mean that many businesses will adopt XMPP as their choice for chat. Hopefully, the enlightened companies won?t create islands, but will successfully secure intranet communication while allow extranet communication.

So, what is the Holy Grail? Ubiquity. Chat interoperability between mobile devices, applications, Internet sites, etc. Presence technologies will be mundane, but everywhere.

Sidebar:

1. Apple has XMPP(Jabber) support. But they haven't created the buzz I'm expecting Google to create.
2. XMPP is an open source, XML based communication protocol. Jabber is kind of an open source umbrella for products and services using XMPP. Jabber created XMPP, then spun it off as a separate technology.

I found this article on text sizing useful. It links to over 250 browser shots of text under various conditions.

It would be nice to have a library that allowed html requests to be served by a workstation that is behind NAT. http://www.me.lv/jp/manual.html looks like it's the right idea, but there is not code to download. It doesn't really look legit...

Anyone know of a library that does this? If so, please email me (see the email on the left).

WidgetWeb Beta 7 has been released to the general public. It is available at http://www.widgetweb.com.

I've had the pleasure to use Dean Edward's CSS Query lately and am very impressed. It is one of those rare libraries that marries a simple concept with good/perfect implementation. CSS Query allows you to query the DOM using css selectors. As a developer, this allows me to leverage (and grow) my knowledge of CSS while reducing my dependency on custom code to query the DOM. Thank you Dean Edwards!

WidgetWeb Beta 6 has been released to the general public. It is available at http://www.widgetweb.com.

My second child, a 7lb 13oz baby boy was born today, May 25, 2005. He is 21" long. Mother and baby are doing great!

The Code Fragment mode in IDEA is awesome. I recently had a collection that I was sorting, and wanted to print out the collection both before and after. To accomplish this:

• I evaluated the collection,
• switched to code fragment mode,
• wrote a fragment of code that iterated over the collection
• and printed the results to System.out.

Nice!

WidgetWeb Beta 5 has been released to the general public. It is available at http://www.widgetweb.com.

I was promoted tonight to 4th Gup in the Soo Bahk Do martial art. Cynthia was promoted to 7th Gup. For perspective, our art has 10 promotions before black belt with each getting progressively harder and with a longer wait in between. 4th Gup means there are 4 more tests until Black Belt.

Wow, looks like I need to get a double-edged safety razor. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6886845/

Saw Sin City last night. Wow! What a fantastic movie! I guess it doesn't topple the first viewing of the Matrix for me, but it comes close. I loved the dark theme, the great actors, and the feeling that this really was a graphic novel on the big screen.

I've wanted Webdav support in WidgetWeb for awhile now. Up to this point, I've been stymied by the complexity of Slide (even the Construction Kit seemed like work - why isn't there a drop-in jar to start with?). I knew about the Tomcat servlet, but WidgetWeb works in both a hosted and standalone environment. Additionally, I wanted the authentication to be integrated with WidgetWeb. This ruled out the standalone servlet. So, hacking begins.

I didn't want to include the full tomcat distribution as a set of jars for WidgetWeb. But, thanks to the permissive Apache license, I was able to take the pieces I wanted. I left the classes in tact (no changes to source including to packages). Through some trial and error I was able to identify all the necessary classes. Hurdle one crossed.

The next issue I ran into was that the location the servlet was looking by default was the "root" of the webapp. The servlet deals with Resources from javax.naming (JNDI). I do not know much about JNDI, but on a hunch I searched for a directory based naming context. Tomcat comes through again with FileDirContext. I copied this over and created a subclass of WebdavServlet. In this subclass, I overrode the getResources() method to return the FileDirContext with a search scope of the Public directory for WidgetWeb. Hurdle two crossed.

Finally, I needed integration with WidgetWeb's authentication. It appears that the webdav protocol has few ways to authenticate. WidgetWeb uses form-based authentication. But, webdav is looking for basic authentication. A quick search of the web produced a Basic Authentication routine from http://www.alemoi.com/dev/httpaccess/. This appears to be in the public domain (please correct me if I'm wrong!). A few quick changes to integrate with WidgetWeb and voila! webdav access.

So, once again, thanks to the combined efforts of open source developers I was able to solve critical issues in a very short period of time.

Beta 5 of WidgetWeb is nearing release. I expect it to be released this weekend or early next week. See the Releases page on WidgetWeb for details about Beta 5.

"In the interest of fairness and equality, all shall be punished." Thoughts on bureaucracy by Ron Lancaster.

My sister had a son today!
Vitals:

• Ethan Daniel Lowell
• 8lbs 1oz
• 20"
• Born 12:36 PM

This site has a 40 question test for determining your ability to use words that are commonly misused. http://www.okcupid.com/tests/take?testid=14457200288064322170

My result (woohoo!):

English Genius You scored 100% Beginner, 93% Intermediate, 93% Advanced, and 88% Expert!

See here for full results and results from my friends. http://www.firelord.net/render/firelord/englishtestresults

Well, last night I competed in my first open tournament. I competed in the 30-39 bracket in both forms and sparring. I did well enough placing 3rd in forms, but I know I could have done better had I managed my time better and had a better understanding of the rules. Next time. =)

Recently learned about the Uberman sleep schedule: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/4/15/103358/720 - Anything to reduce my sleep need! =)

I believe this is the first commercial UML tool designed specifically for IDEA. It looks promising. More information here: http://www.betosoftware.com/teresa/index.html

From the IBM website: HeapAnalyzer allows the finding of a possible JavaTM heap leak area through its heuristic search engine and analysis of the Java heap dump in Java applications.

http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/heapanalyzer?open&S_TACT=104AHW61&S_CMP=GR&ca=dgr-jw26awheapanalyzer

http://www.artima.com/intv/marketect.html

I know this article is old. Marketect is currently being used as an office joke so it seemed appropriate to post a link.

http://freshmeat.net/projects/db4o/?branch_id=1733&release_id=178607

DB4O is now open source under the GPL. Very cool.

Not much to report today, beyond the usual. That woman three down in the line waiting for the bus gave me That Look again. I'm more certain than ever that she is an agent of the Evil One. They are all around me, but sometimes the din of the voices is so loud I can't concentrate and I don't notice them. But I'm SURE of her.

As I walked past the newstand downtown, I could feel all the eyes in the pictures on the magazine covers following me. I really must speak to the proprietor. If only he didn't look so much like a ferret. It unnerves me.

More later, after I've had my tonic and given all the eggs a half-turn.