Posts

I’ve been working quite a bit with the rest plugin for Struts2. The really nice thing about this plugin is the way it cleans up Struts URLs. Makes them more rails-like. I chuckled when depressed programmer suggested that struts2 is “WebWork on drugs.” I hate struts2. I really do. Anyway, I have stripped down an AccountController to show just the POST service. In reality, the create() method is wired to a middle tier service that authenticates username, password pairs then updates session attributes with member id and other bits of persistent session data I need. ...

I reread my Resume Advice post this morning. It occurred to me that the article was incomplete. I gave an example of resume bloat and a few rules for improving it but I didn’t give an example of a resume I liked. I decided to write a resume following the rules and using my own background for the example. Here’s a transcript of my writing flow. RULE 3: The resume shall include a three or four sentence opening paragraph. ...

I’ve been putting off building the software RAID10 on marmaduke. Today, I put it off no longer. The server marmaduke has six storage devices (2 IDE and 4 SATA) $ ls -1 /dev/hd? /dev/hde /dev/hdf $ ls -1 /dev/sd? /dev/sda /dev/sdb /dev/sdc /dev/sdd The CDROM is attached as /dev/hde and a 300GB HDD as /dev/hdf on which I’ve installed CentOS 5.2. The four SATA drives will be used to build a RAID 10. I’ve read through a number of postings on how to build a software RAID. The cleanest, shortest and clearest of them is on tgharold.com. ...

I just finished building a four-drive software RAID10 on marmaduke and wanted to jot down my thoughts on RAID failure. In particular, I read a number of postings on the difference between RAID 01 and RAID 10. None of them satisfactory described the differences and how those differences changed when adding more drives. Marmaduke only has four drives in its array. Most of the web postings dealt with four drives but I also wanted to see the impact on six drives. Here is a hypothetical set of six drives. ...

I have a remote machine that is used to store and process XML files. Recently, I had need to duplicate a directory of XML files (e.g., cp -r a b). It’s not really germane to the subject here, but this particular server has a whack configuration and I gotta rant before I continue. The office server (scrappy) has pretty good specs. [scrappy ~]$ cat /proc/meminfo MemTotal: 3980800 kB [scrappy ~]$ cat /proc/cpuinfo ...

I’ve wanted to build a simple gallery viewer for some time. “But there are thousands of already built viewers,” you may be thinking. Yes there are. But I wanted a simple viewer that was at once trés snappy and minimalist. I dislike the gallery systems that open another window or create a floating panel which must be dismissed. I wanted a simple picture portal with simple thumbnails. I wanted something that didn’t require jacking javascript or event listeners directly into the html. It had to be easy to use with wordpress. ...

This Christmas is good. So much of the year was absolutely lousy. I’m glad it’s ending on the upbeat. There are more than a few painful memories in 2008. A new Harley goes a long way towards easing a painful memory. And my in-laws Julie and Bob have come through with the goods: raffle tickets for a 2009 Harley Dyna Low Rider. ...

When I first read that Rails and Merb were merging, I thought it a hoax. Too good to be true. But true it is. I’m excited but no doubt, “It’s going to be a bumpy ride!”

I needed to look up the various strings Apple uses to name the iTunes Library. First I tried to get name from the iTunes resource bundle echo "this won't work..." echo "so don't even try it" cd /Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj cat Localizable.strings | grep ‘PrimaryPlaylistName’ But I quickly learned that grep doesn’t work on the strings file. Why? Because Apple string files are not UTF-8. They are UTF-16. Usually. But in this case they are. I wanted to iterate over the set of resource strings and extract just the string I wanted. ...

I was looking in my archives for a snickerdoodle recipe. Rummaging through those old sites was nostalgic and horrifying. The very first sites were hosted on Earthlink. I don’t even know the URL any more. The later sites have all been on Hurricane Electric. I pushed the first Red Leopard website out on October 29, 2000 using Microsoft Publisher 98. Yikes! What a dog’s breakfast. Eventually, I migrated to Notepad and by 2002 had a site that I liked. A static site but I liked it. I was horrible at CSS but improved my skills in raw HTML. ...