Having used Eclipse almost exclusively in my Java work, I was interested in trying it out and went to download the .dmg file. I unpacked everything and tried to run the poorly named Maia-IC-90.94.app

Nothing came up. Lame.

I dug into the package and executed idea.sh which prompted me that I need to set the environment variable IDEA_SDK or JDK_HOME.

Ah ha!

In my .bash_profile, I set

export JAVA_HOME=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/CurrentJDK/Home
export IDEA_JDK=$JAVA_HOME

And ran idea.sh again and IntelliJ came up.

Running Maia-IC.90.94.app still doesn’t run the app but at least now I can play around with IntelliJ.

The API leverages Apache HTTP Client and JSON.org Java libraries and is built using Maven.

The project source code can be found here.

If anyone runs into any problems with using it, please feel free to ping me!

Update: Linode was nice enough to update their API page with a reference to my project.

Trippy.

Open-source with a business model company, Terracotta, acquired Ehcache, the very popular caching library.

The creator and maintainer of Ehcache, Greg Luck, had these things to say about the acquisition:

What this means for Ehcache Users

• Ehcache remains under the Apache 2 license
• New feature development is accelerated with the addition of a team of engineers working full-time on Ehcache
• I am full-time on Ehcache. I have not had the time I would have liked to devote to Ehcache (I have been doing a miserly 10-15 hours per week for the past 6 years) but now I do. Look out!
• Ehcache extends its standards support. There are multiple emerging standards in this area and I plan to work with the community to lead further standardisation efforts. A lack of time has been my biggest obstacle in doing more on this to date.
• Ehcache gets new hosting at ehcache.org with state-of-the-art forums, source control and bug reporting. The changes will happen slowly and carefully.
• File release at sourceforge.net is retained
• Maven deployment to oss.sonatype.org and Maven Central is retained.
• Distributed caching via Terracotta is seamless. Ehcache users can have full confidence that they can start single node and scale as high as they need to with Enterprise features.
• Enterprise support, training and professional services for Ehcache. I have provided these for a few years now, but now we will have the full Terracotta organisation behind them with the usual SLAs.

What this means for Terracotta Users

• Ehcache APIs will replace Terracotta distributed cache APIs as a single caching interface / standard for Terracotta distributed caching
• a single-node version of Terracotta ala Ehcache will be available for the first time
• Full freedom to run on the latest version of Ehcache at all times, knowing it will work with Terracotta
• Single vendor support structure for caching interfaces / libraries as well as their scalability / reliability runtime.
• the investment protection of standards

It’s pretty cool to see open source companies like SpringSource (recently acquired by VMWare) and Terracotta making big moves. I look forward to seeing what’s next for these guys.

I stumbled upon Crockford’s talk on the JSON Saga, where he tells the story of how JSON came about. He is a really smart guy and a talented speaker. Check out the video:

Cutting to the chase: On June 20th, 2009 I married the lady of my dreams, Patcharee Phongsvirajati.

The wedding ceremonies took place at our houses and the reception was held at Foxchase Manor.

Check out some photos taken by a few of the many photographers:

Photography by Mac Pham, my cousin:

Photography by the Pros:

Photography by Cau Duc, my uncle:

After a bit of toying around, here are my findings.

The Eclipse plugin is pretty slick. Deploying and build is simple.

The dev server that you spin up locally looks to be jetty under the hood.

Objects intended for storage are JDO annotated and after compiling, you run the .class files through the DataNucleus Enhancer which adds additional metadata so Google can map it to BigTable. The Eclipse plugin automatically performs this step for you after compiling. The examples provide a bunch of ant macros to help facilitate building/deploying.

One issue that I had was that the project was building with Java 1.6 and I would get an error after compiling:

Caused by: java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: Bad version number in .class file

Even though they say they support Java 1.5 and 1.6, I guess this doesn’t work on the Java 1.6 for the Mac. Switching the build to 1.5 allows the DataNucleus Enhancer to run successfully.

Even though they are using JPA, some features have not yet been implemented or supported ( see http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/java/datastore/usingjpa.html#Unsupported_Features_of_JPA)

Overall, I like what I see so far and think this would be great for quick prototypes of web apps/services.

Going through the tutorial, my awesome Guestbook application has been created and deployed.

In my case, I had a form where there was a database column named “num_guests”, representing the number of guests. When the field fails to pass validation, the error messages is something like

Num guests is not a number

Not quite the text that we want. It would be better if it said

Number of guests is not a number

After doing a little bit of digging, I found the human_attribute_name method. You can override this method in your model class to provide alternative names for fields. To change our error message, I did the following

class Reservation < ActiveRecord::Base
  ...
  validates_presence_of :num_guests
  ...
  HUMAN_ATTRIBUTES = {
      :num_guests    => "Number of guests"
  }

  def self.human_attribute_name(attr)
      HUMAN_ATTRIBUTES[attr.to_sym] || super
  end
end

Since Rails 2.2, this method is used to support internationalization (i18n). Looking at it, it reminds me of Java’s Resource Bundles and Spring MVC’s error messages. Messages are defined based off a key and there’s a chain of look ups that get applied to resolve an error’s message.

Although, I don’t see myself doing any i18n work in the near-term, it is cool that we have that option now in Rails.

Do you think you would be able to recognize extraordinary talent when it is staring you in the face?

Video for viewing pleasure:

Specifically, checkboxes have always been a pain to deal with. The gotcha with checkboxes are if a checkbox isn’t checked, the request doesn’t send the parameter so it requires some additional checks to detect that the user deselected something that was there to update the field accordingly. I’ve been playing around with the Stripes framework and ran into this issue.

With Stripes, you can render a checkbox using their JSP tag:

<stripes:checkbox checked="true" name="property1" value="yes"/>
<stripes:checkbox checked="true" name="property2" value="no"/>

When the “checked” value is equal to “value” value, Stripes will render the checkbox as checked. So with the code shown, two checkboxes will be shown with the first checked and the second unchecked.

If a user reverses this by unchecking the first, checking the second, and submit the form, the HTTP request will only see that property2=no. Before the form was submitted, “property1″ had a value of “yes”. Now, “property1″ won’t even appear in the request parameters, so we have to do special handling to check for the absent of the parameter to update “property1″ to whatever value it should be when it is not checked.

In Spring MVC with form binding, checkboxes are dealt with a little differently. Using Spring MVC’s form JSP tag, you can do:

  <form:checkbox path="property1" value="yes"/>
  <form:checkbox path="property2" value="no"/>

Assuming your command bean is named “person”, this will generate the following HTML:

        <input name="person.property1" type="checkbox" value="yes"/>
        <input type="hidden" value="1" name="_person.property1"/>
        <input name="person.property2" type="checkbox" value="no"/>
        <input type="hidden" value="1" name="_person.property2"/>

As noted by the docs,

What you might not expect to see is the additional hidden field after each checkbox. When a checkbox in an HTML page is not checked, its value will not be sent to the server as part of the HTTP request parameters once the form is submitted, so we need a workaround for this quirk in HTML in order for Spring form data binding to work. The checkbox tag follows the existing Spring convention of including a hidden parameter prefixed by an underscore (“_”) for each checkbox. By doing this, you are effectively telling Spring that “the checkbox was visible in the form and I want my object to which the form data will be bound to reflect the state of the checkbox no matter what”.

Spring MVC also provides a “checkboxes” tag which allows you to render a list of checkbox boxes without having to wrap the “checkbox” tag around a JSTL forEach.

Hopefully, that gives you some insight into how to work with checkboxes in Stripes and Spring MVC.

All valid concerns. However, if IBM can maintain the developer community relationship that Sun and MySQL have built I think developers may have a lot to look forward to. Especially, government contractors.

First thing that popped into my mind when I read this was

Sweet! No more heavy-weight Oracle development. The government will allow devs to use MySQL now!

After all, it’s backed by Big Blue.

And nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM.

Right?

Installing Oracle on a laptop still gives me nightmares. *shudders*

I was presented with the following message:

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
system32hal.dll.
Please re-install a copy of the above file.

Uh, what?

Must be a fluke! So, let’s try this again.

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
system32ntoskrnl.dll.
Please re-install a copy of the above file.

Uh-oh. This doesn’t look good.

After googling a bit, it turns out Parallels does some pretty bad things like modify essential Windows boot up files to get Boot Camp to work with Parallels. They even modify boot.ini! So, I think what happened to me was that Parallels crashed at some point and corrupted/deleted these essential Windows files rendering my Windows partition unbootable.

This is what you call a deal breaker. If your software’s purpose is to allow other operating systems to run, rendering said operating system unusable is a big no no.

So, I’ve been using Fusion for a day or two now, feature for feature pretty much has everything Parallels had. Even the user interface is fairly similar, they just call things a little different. For example, what Parallels calls Coherence, Fusion calls Unity. Performance is about the same but I don’t really play games or anything other than startup Internet Explorer when running Windows. Best of all, Fusion doesn’t seem to do terrible things like modify Windows boot up files. Fusion beats Parallels hands down.

>> apachectl -V
Server version: Apache/2.2.9 (Unix)
Server built:   Sep 19 2008 10:58:54
Server's Module Magic Number: 20051115:15
Server loaded:  APR 1.2.7, APR-Util 1.2.7
Compiled using: APR 1.2.7, APR-Util 1.2.7
Architecture:   64-bit
Server MPM:     Prefork
  threaded:     no
    forked:     yes (variable process count)
Server compiled with....
 -D APACHE_MPM_DIR="server/mpm/prefork"
 -D APR_HAS_SENDFILE
 -D APR_HAS_MMAP
 -D APR_HAVE_IPV6 (IPv4-mapped addresses enabled)
 -D APR_USE_FLOCK_SERIALIZE
 -D APR_USE_PTHREAD_SERIALIZE
 -D SINGLE_LISTEN_UNSERIALIZED_ACCEPT
 -D APR_HAS_OTHER_CHILD
 -D AP_HAVE_RELIABLE_PIPED_LOGS
 -D DYNAMIC_MODULE_LIMIT=128
 -D HTTPD_ROOT="/usr"
 -D SUEXEC_BIN="/usr/bin/suexec"
 -D DEFAULT_PIDLOG="/private/var/run/httpd.pid"
 -D DEFAULT_SCOREBOARD="logs/apache_runtime_status"
 -D DEFAULT_LOCKFILE="/private/var/run/accept.lock"
 -D DEFAULT_ERRORLOG="logs/error_log"
 -D AP_TYPES_CONFIG_FILE="/private/etc/apache2/mime.types"
 -D SERVER_CONFIG_FILE="/private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf"

To start up apache, you can do it a couple of ways.

Type sudo apachectl -k start

or

1. Go to System Preferences
2. Click on Sharing
3. Check the box that says Web Sharing

You can go to http://localhost or the URL provided in the Web Sharing screen to confirm apache is running and is able to serve up requests.

There is also a ~/Sites directory in your home folder. Apache is already setup to serve up files from this directory under http://localhost/~[username] where [username] is your user account name. Any files here will be render for example ~/Sites/index.html is accessible from the browser via http://localhost/~[username]/index.html.

One note to get this to work. Out of the box, all requests to /Sites result in a Forbidden 403 error. To resolve this issue, modify the conf file specified above as SERVER_CONFIG_FILE (/private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf in my case) from

<Directory />
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride None
    Order deny,allow
    Deny from all
</Directory>

to

<Directory />
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride None
    Order deny,allow
    Allow from all
</Directory>

Restart apache (sudo apachectl -k restart) and try going to http://localhost/~[username] again.

May your pockets be filled with little red envelopes.

I decided that I want all photos to be in one place and if I was going to use iPhoto, I’m going to import by copying the originals to the iPhoto Library. Before I could get all of this to happen, I had to backup all of existing photos that were not in the iPhoto Library to an external hard drive. Planning on importing these photos over again from the external hard drive, I then deleted all of these photos through Finder. Going back into iPhoto, I still saw the thumbnails for the photos I just deleted. If I attempt to open any of them though, it complained it couldn’t find the original. What a mess. There doesn’t seem to be a way to refresh your iPhoto Library and it would remove photos it doesn’t have references to any more.

I figure the easiest way to get my iPhoto Library setup the way I want it is to start from scratch. So I went under my Pictures directory and renamed iPhoto Library to iPhoto Library.original. Opening up iPhoto again, you get prompted to search for your Library or create a new one. I choose create a new iPhoto Library and now I can begin importing my photos.

After making sure I have the option to copy items to iPhoto Library when importing, I can now import photos from my external hard drive.

Great! Now I have all of my scattered photos in iPhoto Library. But what about the photos I had imported to the original iPhoto Library ( the ones under iPhoto Library.original)? Well, there didn’t seem to be an easy way to import non-broken originals form one iPhoto Library to another from the GUI so I went to the command line.

All of the original photos that are imported to an iPhoto Library are under a folder called Originals. However, due to the way iPhoto manages the photos, this also includes the broken files that reference the photos I had deleted. Basically I wanted to get rid of all of these broken references before importing all of the photos from my original iPhoto Library to the new one I am creating. Here’s how I did it.

1. Open up Terminal
2. Change directory to the original iPhoto Library’s Originals directory (~/Pictures/iPhoto Library.original/Originals)
3. The broken references aren’t actually symbolic links. They seem to be using extended file attributes to denote where the original file actually is (see xattr).  Since we deleted the actual photos, to identify these files type:

   find . -size 0
   

   to get a list of all of the 0 byte files.

4. To remove them:

   find . -name "*.jpg" -size 0 -exec rm {}  \;
   

   or if you want to just move them elsewhere:

   find . -name "*.jpg" -size 0 -exec mv {} $dest \;
   

   where $dest is the path to where you want to move the files

5. To delete all of the empty directories (that represent your events) for clean up purposes:

   find . -depth -type d -empty -exec rmdir {} \;

Now your original iPhoto Library should only contain photos that were imported by copying the originals to the iPhoto Library.

To finish importing everything, open iPhoto, choosing your new iPhoto Library and import the Originals directory from the original iPhoto Library (~/Pictures/iPhoto Library.originals/Originals). You might have to copy this folder someplace else since the Import menu doesn’t allow you to specify going into the iPhoto Library.originals package.

After about 5 hours of battling with iPhoto, I think I finally have all of my photos reimported to a fresh iPhoto Library with no duplicates and broken file references. Having to do all of this really makes me think to just switch to something else. How do you guys feel about iPhoto? What are some good alternatives? Picasa anyone?

This allowed requests to blog.notedpath.com/* and theodorenguyen-cao/* respond with the same content. I thought I was done. I discovered this wasn’t the case when I saw blog.notedpath.com as a direct traffic source in my google analytics for theodorenguyen-cao.com. To fix the screwed up analytics, I needed to make it so that all requests that go to blog.notedpath.com are permanently redirected (301) to theodorenguyen-cao.com.

To do this I had to apply an Apache mod_alias redirect directive as such:

<VirtualHost *:80>
        VirtualDocumentRoot /var/www/blog
        ServerName blog.notedpath.com
        Redirect permanent / http://www.theodorenguyen-cao.com/
        ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/wp-error.log
        TransferLog /var/log/apache2/wp-access.log
</VirtualHost>

The virtual host for theodorenguyen-cao.com looks like:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    VirtualDocumentRoot /var/www/blog
    ServerName www.theodorenguyen-cao.com
    ServerAlias theodorenguyen-cao.com
    CustomLog /var/log/apache2/theodorenguyen-cao.com_access.log Combined
    ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/theodorenguyen-cao_error.log
</VirtualHost>

At first I thought this would only fix the simple case of blog.notedpath.com redirecting to theodorenguyen-cao.com, but blog.notepath.com/foobar not being translated to theodorenguyen-cao.com/foobar. However, this does exactly what I want. All blog.notedpath.com URLs will be replaced with theodorenguyen-cao.com URLs. Old bookmarks will simply redirect to a theodorenguyen-cao.com URL and not 404.

Success!

I’m still waiting to see if Google will update the search result links that point to blog.notedpath.com to be theodorenguyen-cao.com URLs.

Digging into it, it turns out the way  for validates_presence_of relies on Object#blank which of course when sent

false.blank? # returns true

Reading up on the documentation, it is suggested to use validates_inclusion_of when dealing with booleans.

The one line change solved the problem:

validates_inclusion_of :accepted, :in => [true, false]

For the web galleries, I really liked Picasa’s layout over Flickr’s. The web site is a lot more simplistic and easy to navigate. Maybe it’s becase I’m so familiar with other Google services. Flickr’s slideshow is so awesome though. Viewing your photostream through Cooliris is such beautiful eye candy.

I started with the free accounts. Google gives you a gig of space for the free account and you can create as many albums as you want. Flickr’s free account gives you 100 mb of upload per month and limits you to three sets.

For me, it really came down to pricing. In order to get more disk space for Picasa, you have to purchase more storage. Starting purchase goes for $20/yr for 10gigs up to $500/yr for 400GB. This storage is actually not specific to Picasa but is shared by all other Google services that need to use extra space. Flickr offers a Pro account, which gives you unlimited storage space for your videos and photos and allows you to create any number of sets and collections, for $24.95.

Given the number of photos I want to upload and my budget, I went with Flickr. Today, storage is so cheap. For $25 bucks, I should be able to get unlimited storage for a service like photo sharing. I’ve started to upload some photos I’ve had for awhile and never really shared them with those who would most enjoy them. It’s been really fun going through old pictures. My photostream can be found here.

Don’t use a big word where a diminutive one will suffice.

So after finding out the domain was available, diminutiveurl.com was born. Yes, it’s poking a little fun at the idea of a tiny url but it was fun to hack on. It’s very minimilistic at this point but I hope to add some interesting features.

For no other reason than to build something, I hope you enjoy it! I am glad to present diminitiveurl.com! Please let me know what you think.

I’m sure there are some kinks to iron out but please check out theoandpat.com and let us know what you think. Oh, yeah also, RSVP for the wedding. If you’re reading my blog, chances are I know you and you’re invited.

-Theo