LoLoCoJr

Mplayer does not seem to detect the aspect ratio of connected monitors. You have to specify the monitoraspect parameter. If you have one of those 16:10 laptop widescreen monitors this might greatly increase your viewing experience (put monitoraspect=16:10 in your .mplayer/config file). The Xine player autodetects this just fine btw.

The default Typo layout is really slow and IMHO not very readable on high res screens. Luckily the Wordpress inspired theme was CSS’d well enough that it took about 10 minutes to refit the blog with a new layout. In the process I also created a couple of partials for the Google stuff. Rails really rocks! And if you still haven’t learned Ruby why’s (poignant) guide to ruby is a must read! Hilarious!

When you find this..

...picture on the Sun homepage it should be a reminder that putting all (any?) eggs in the Java/Sun basket is a really bad idea or Project Harmony might be here at exactly the right time!

Went to J-Spring this week. It was the first time I attended this annual NLJUG event. It was very well organized. The opening talk by Duncan Mills was nice. Amongst other things he demo’ed some JSF interface abstractions where the same application was shown running on a desktop PC with Firefox, a PDA and a telnet interface. The keynote by Raghavan ‘rags’ Srinivas, Sun evangelist was quite entertaining. He discussed the ‘Open *’ (Open Everything) concept. Of all the sessions I attented the Spring Framework one by Rod Johnson and Alef Arendsen was the most insightful. I’ll definitely be doing some more Spring stuff. Overall, a very enjoyable experience. Will definitely be at J-Fall.

Today I switched to the Typo blogging system. I was quite happy with Roller but Typo gives me a very good excuse to do some more stuff with Ruby on Rails since Typo is Rails based. It’s not as polished as Roller e.g. lots of tweaks must be done on the filesystem level but it’s progressing very nicely. I hope to follow the latest CVS (erh SVN) releases as closely as possible. For now it’s back to business. Incidentally, this is the first post with BloGTK, a GTK based blogging client. It has rough some rough edges but I like it so far! As for exporting/importing the posts from Roller to Typo.. since there were only 10 or so posts I did this manually as writing a custom script would have taken a lot longer than the 5 minute cut ‘n paste job.

Configuring your Trails web application is really simple. By default Trails (0.6) comes configured for the built-in HSQL database. Start by modifying the context/WEB-INF/hibernate.properties file like:

hibernate.dialect=org.hibernate.dialect.MySQLDialect
hibernate.show_sql=true
hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto=update
hibernate.connection.driver_class=org.gjt.mm.mysql.Driver
hibernate.connection.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost/<dbname>
hibernate.connection.username=<dbusername>
hibernate.connection.password=<dbpassword>

replacing <db*> entries with the appropiate values for your MySQL database. Hmm, that’s it! Don’t forget to redeploy your Trails app after these changes. Also make sure the MySQL driver jar is in your TOMCAT_HOME/commons/lib directory (of course also assuming you’re using Tomcat).