Monthly Archives: April 2006

Normal Ringtones

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I’m in the minority here, but I like my celly to ring like a phone, not like MTV played through a tin can. I still think there’s a market for “phone” ringtones, but nobody’s biting. In the mean time, here are a couple links that contain a pretty decent collection of actual rings.

http://www.dence.net/oldphone/
http://www.davidenglish.com/ringtones.html

I’m using “Old Italian Phone” from the first link and it sounds pretty decent on my Nokia 6682. It’s got that old phone sound with a little electronic-ness in there which takes the edge off, and it’s unique enough so I know it’s my phone.

Spring MVC gets Form Tags

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Most seasoned Struts developers I know (myself included) are masters of the html:* tags, using and extending them liberally in just about every web application they design. Spring MVC has been on the forefront of challengers to Struts, and with its sensible design, endless flexibility and excellent documentation, it isn’t difficult to see why. But Spring’s MVC left the building of HTML form controls up to the developer and his own devices. This was a big issue for me and the one that has kept me from rapidly adopting the system for use in my own apps.

In their 2.0 release the Spring team has given the community its wish, and provided a JSP form tag library. It’s been added to the manual, but here’s a key term that might pique your interest: convention over configuration.

The Spring crew has taken lessons learned from the wildfire of support for Ruby on Rails and employed them in their J2EE kit. Bravo. Time (and other ‘me-too’ projects) will tell if this is really what J2EE needs to stay on return to the cutting edge.

My First Autocross

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I finally got off my lazy ass and gook the GTI out for a romp in the cones. It was every but as fun as I imagined, and I suck every bit as much as I imagined! With the exception of my last run which involved mauling the entire row of cones on the last tight turn, I improved my time incrementally each lap.

I’ll definitely be doing this again in the future, and I owe a big thanks to Equipe Rapide (autox.carlc.com) for hosting such a great event!

Welcome to the New Site

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This is the very moment all you millions of blogsumers have been waiting for — the new breddy.net site! Thank you, thank you — settle down.

The new site is a WordPress blog with a customized version of Ian Main’s Green Marinee theme. I humbly extend my gratitude to Ian for making this excellent code available for public use.

Courting SpringMVC

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As a Struts user since 1.x, I finally decided to come out of my Jarkarta shell and test the Spring waters. I’ve been using Spring in the middle tier for a year or so now and could not be happier. I’ve had only a small taste so far, but here are my initial thoughts:

Good

  • Designed from the ground up using good OO principles – Rod & crew really have this part mastered
  • Amazingly flexible – many concrete classes are provided for each bit of functionality so that you never get more than you need
  • Transparently woven-in with Spring – less glue code

Bad

  • Lack of rich HTML component library – just doesn’t cut it when you’re used to having forms and select boxes built for you. Apparently this is addressed in 2.0M3 which makes a new Form tag library available, but I didn’t see any reference to this in the docs.

More to come as I work with it.

Spoiled

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It’s times like this that I realized how lucky and spoiled we are. The air conditioning in our house went south again for the 4th time in about a year. Luckily it isn’t super hot yet, but 85 degrees and at least as much humidity is no picnic to sleep in when you’re used to a nice dry 72 :)

WordPress is the new Movable Type

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Well let’s see how this goes. I like the themes created by the WP community, and the fact that you can manage other “static” pages like a Wiki. So I’m dumping cgi-based MT in favor of PHP-based WordPress. More to come…