(hey I haven't posted in forever, but since I actually had something to share...)

I was looking for any information about getting BlazeDS running locally on my Mac to take a stab at learning Flex remoting, and I found this nice tutorial over at Coding Cowboys, but got disappointed when I realized that while the author was working on Leopard, he was actually setting up BlazeDS on a linux server.

But in my normal "oh this should be pretty easy" fashion which has on other occasions brought down the boot sectors of powerful hard drives, I decided that following the instructions on the page would just work on a mac too.

And it did!

It should be pretty clear why I'm just not sending you on to the aforementioned post if you go look at it - he's also setting up Amazon EC2 webservices, which I'm not as interested in at the moment. Also, I'd like to just play with Flex remoting for a minute at home, so I don't need to get a server involved. Especially since I have this handy unix workstation right here on my desk.

Ok, no more silly patter. Here's how to set up BlazeDS on your intel-based mac running Leopard. I should also mention that I have the developer tools installed, but I don't know that that makes a difference.

Getting BlazeDS running on Leopard

1. Download the turn-key package
2. unzip it to a directory -- /blaze is good. You now have a folder at the Root lavel of Macintosh HD called blaze.

   If that "unzip it to a directory" direction is alienating to you, just double click on the zip, let Mac OS unzip it for you, and rename the directory to blaze and move it to the top of the Macintosh HD. Pretty much the same thing.

3. In terminal, go to that dir - ls /blaze (just for fun maybe - I'm terrible at doing commands like sudo ./blaze/tomcat/bin/startup.sh ... I usually just cd to the directory and do ./startup.sh)
4. You need to issue two commands in terminal:

   ./blaze/tomcat/bin/startup.sh

   and

   ./blaze/sampledb/startdb.sh

   Note - when executing these commands either from the root (/) which is the command above, or from the directory they're in, you still need the leading ./ -- so if you're in the /blaze/tomcat/bin directory, the command to start tomcat is ./startup.sh, not startup.sh which will give you an error.

   Note #2 - You can close the terminal window. It says "hey, closing this will end processes running blah blah blah" but BlazeDS still works after you close the window. If you're just playing around, it might be worth leaving it open since it tells you in the console output how to shut the server down.

5. open http://127.0.0.1:8400/ in a web browser.
6. Play with the pretty flex remoting demos.
7. Learn everything else. =)

Oman3D:

In this tutorial you will learn how to create a reusable flash that can be configured through the HTML of the page displaying the SWF file. Using the technique you will be able to use one single SWF file for all your buttons in a single page.

Anyway, it's cool to see it work. Now I need to figure out how to force justify the single word in the button, and actually get the text how I want.

I was looking for some information on how to style lists and blockquotes (I'm getting a little annoyed with them -- I can't figure out how to change their default indentations, and browsers give them way to much vertical space.

I found this nice site (or 5 sites) by maxdesign that look pretty helpful. At least they should help me figure out my list problems, if nothing else. And the Floatutorial: Step by step CSS float tutorial looks like required reading since I just got a headache from trying to figure out how to clear the floats in the new layout I'm working on.

Nice CSS tutorial, aimed at designers. Mostly nice because it gives tips on how to translate page layout concepts to CSS.

CSS From the Ground Up

Can you tell I'm working on a website?

Pete Freitag posted this awesome list forever ago:

1. Rounded Corners
2. Rounded Corners without images
3. Creating a Netflix style star ratings
4. Tableless forms
5. Styling Lists with CSS
6. 2 Column Layout Technique
7. 3 Column Layout with CSS
8. 3 Column Fixed width centered layout
9. Printing with CSS
10. Adding a CSS stylesheet to an RSS feed
11. Footer Stick
12. CSS Element Hover Effect
13. Styling Horizontal Rules
14. Clearing Floats
15. CSS Popups
16. Box Punch
17. CSS Badge
18. Orange RSS Buttons with pure CSS
19. 10 CSS Tricks you may not know
20. 10 More CSS Tricks you may not know

Thanks Pete!

I finally found out how to center divs on a page. I feel so stupid for not finding it earlier:

Max Design - CSS Centering - fun for all!

Theoretically, you should be able to apply auto margins to the left and right of the containing block and it should center on the page.


The W3C Visual formatting model states: "If both 'margin-left' and 'margin-right' are 'auto', their used values are equal. This horizontally centers the element with respect to the edges of the containing block."


So, a containing block should be able to be centered using the following rules:


div#container
{
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
width: 50em;
}

BibliOdyssey: Pantagruel I

Pantagruel is a great collection of crazy creatures. Just looking a it I thought it beat the clap-trap in most of the Fantasy RPGs I've played. Some game company should give this stuff serious attention.

I knew if I googled this enough times I'd eventually find the rigth answer. This is totally the right answer.

Fixing the MT bookmarklet for Safari :: The Daily Journey :: JayAllen.org

Change:

t=d.selection?d.selection.
createRange().text:d.getSelection();

To:

t=getSelection();

Dofus Arena looks to be Final Fantasy Tactics remade as a multiplayer internet game.

Uh-oh. I hear my productivity dropping through the floor now.

Some cool games in flash:

Final Fantasy in Flash

Xiao Xiao Shooter

Not a game, but I love this animation: Door Steps by Lodger.

An article reviewing the majority of current mac backup software reaches an uncomfortable conclusion: (Most)Mac Backup Software [is] Harmful

The surprising conclusion is that almost all Macintosh backup or cloning programs do not fulfill their primary purpose, i.e., they are not able to restore files with all associated metadata. This is despite the fact that many of the tools are advertised as “safe”, “accurate”, “bug-free”, etc. The tools that fail are harmful because they generate a false sense of security. Even more exasperating is that many of these tools cost (significant amounts of) money. The only laudable exception is the great SuperDuper application, which performs flawlessly.

I had some problems with tcsh on my Mac, and I got sick of it. I read Using the shell Terminal in Mac OS X by A.P. Lawrence, and switched my shell to be /bin/bash. And now all that ruby and rails stuff works, and I don't even have to ~/.bash_login first!

I bet you were terribly worried.

OGLE: OpenGLExtractor by Eyebeam R&D is a cool 3d capture app "that allows for the capture and re-use of 3D geometry data from 3D graphics applications running on Microsoft Windows."

Basically, that means you can run this software while running say a video game, and it will capture the 3d models that are displayed.

Weird! (some cleanup required, apparently).

There's a nice collection of ruby on rails resources over at eDevil's blog. Path: eDevil%u2019s weblog » Blog Archive » Ruby on Rails resources

Oh, ruby!

Flashier Flash (I know, I know) is a webite that has tutorials on making tile based games, which I need to figure out for my final project.

Steve's Tutes has actionscript 2.0 game programming info.

Hmm, I should remember that sometimes the official site for a technology often has the beginners guide that everyone else will assume you read. I just found StartAtTheBeginning in Ruby on Rails at the official Ruby on Rails Wiki.

Have you noticed a general upward curve regarding the total number of occurrences of the phrase "ruby on rails" around here? I sure have, and I wish I could explain it.

For a language that is 10 times easier (or was it faster?) than other web app development frameworks, Ruby on Rails is a real pain to install on OS X.... and it doesn't seem like it's much better on other platforms.

But as my 3 dear readers know (hello Scott, Damian and Chris) I am not above any command line geekery!

If you need to get "rolling" with "ruby on rails" (what is it about this language and all the cutesy phrases?), check out these articles:

Hivelogic: Articles: Building Ruby, Rails, LightTPD, and MySQL on Tiger -- This is the same as the one I blogged on the 27th...I found this pretty easy to follow, except that when I was done I had no idea how to get started, which in my mind is a fairly large hole in a tutorial. A big problem with the Ruby crowd seems to be that they often think you already have a rails app, or know what you're doing.

Rolling with Ruby on Rails on Mac OS X Tiger (for beginners) -- This one's a bit better for the newb, because it walks you through creating a blank ruby app. And then stops. But at least by following it from the part where he modifies /etc/httpd/httpd.conf it gets you able to open said blank ruby app via http://localhost/app. So you've got that going for you there.

MySQL Bindings for Ruby under Mac OS X Tiger picks up where the former left off, but is basically just some help on installing/configuring MySQL & the ruby bindings. If you worked through the first article up top, this is already done.

ONLamp.com -- Rolling with Ruby on Rails walks you through making a cookbook, although it assumes you're on a Windows box. So you sort of have to play along, like you are.

I've been enjoying reading Why%u2019s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby, which is the most bizarre thing about a programming language I've ever read. But it's a good read, and I think it lays out the case for why Ruby is interesting in a non-Web2.0alicious and non-CompSci manner.

It's more like talking to a guy on mushrooms, but at least he's basically coherent.

Apparently RoR ships all broookk3n on Mac OS X. Huh.

Hivelogic: Articles: Building Ruby, Rails, LightTPD, and MySQL on Tiger

Well, there. That's fixed now.

Gramophone records, magnetic tapes, vinyl records, digital samplers and computers have already liberated the samples long ago. But still - to infringe copyrights - one has to decide which sample one actually wants to steal. One has to arduously load audio files into sample editors or sequencers. One has to cut, copy, paste and arrange. All that takes precious creative energy and a lot of time.

Enough of that!

Copyright infringements have never been easier than with sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ!

Like I'll ever figure this one out: Oregano Multiuser Server

The Odeo Blog: Podcast Amongst Yourselves: Odeo moves towards democratizing podcasting with DIY toolkit.

Once you create a recording, you can share it with your Odeo contacts or by email. Peeps are your Odeo contacts that you can add, delete, and otherwise manage. Or you can share your audio with the world by placing it in a channel.

This probably isn't revolutionary, but it should help people who need a little help doing stuff like this, for example professors that I help at work.

BrickQuest: Fantasy Boardgaming in an ABS Universe by Peter Guenther. What's the feeling you get when someone beats you to the punch? I have that feeling now...

I had an idea for a Warhammer style table top game years ago when I worked at a hobby store. I never really developed it... my main concept was that you'd make vehicles and there would be rules concerning points cost determined by the number of "dots" it took to make each vehicle.

Which if you think about it for more than a minute is a terrible mechanic. But I was 18.

(via Boing Boing)

You are a GRAMMAR GOD!


Congratulations! If your mission in life
is not already to preserve the English tongue,
it should be. You can smell a grammatical
inaccuracy from fifty yards. Your speech is
revered by the underlings, though some may
blaspheme and call you a snob. They're just
jealous. Go out there and change the world.


How grammatically correct are you? (Revised with answer key)
brought to you by Quizilla

Apple released Java 1.5/5.0 (whatever) a while ago, but curiously if you install it you'll find that java & javac are still the 1.4.2 versions.

huh. It turns out that you need to read the Java 5.0 - The Missing Installation Instructions over at the JavaRanch Big Moose Saloon.

Silly Apple!

DVD to PSP Conversion Guide

Might want to do this some time, hint hint, if someone that loved me very much wanted to get me a, hint hint, PSP for x-mas or my birthday sometime, hint hint.

Blackboard has a blog: Bblog: The Blackboard Weblog

It's funny the things you find out when you actually look through a vendor's website(s).

I was told that I should Get Started with Hibernate instead of doing JDBC connections in the java.

Fair enough I suppose.

Chris Coyne created a small language for design grammars. These grammars are sets of non-deterministic rules to produce images. The images are surprisingly beautiful, often from very simple grammars. Chris' program was a command line program for unix-like systems. We couldn't wait to play with creating our own images, but we wanted a full graphical environment for exploring them. Hence, Context Free, an environment for editing and rendering CFDG design grammars.

A compact photo-gallery css hack, pretty cool.

Ambient Design Ltd. gives away a free natural media painting type synthesis program called Art Rage.

The title Art Rage seems a bit silly without a few !!!! trailing it. Check out the gallery to get an idea of what the app does, if natural media painting synthesizer doesn't do it for you.

SHELL EXTENSION CITY, millions of free Windows power tools, explorer enhancements, windows add-ons, tweaks, system utilities, freeware, ie5

Yeah, it's geeky websurfing day, apparently. I just don't have the time to follow this stuff up right now.

ThunderMain believes in helping the wider community by sharing both knowledge and code. This page contains links to articles written by our CTO and sample code for other developers to use.

The windows IE extension allows you to view the source that's actually being displayed (as opposed to downloaded), which is helpful for seeing what's going on with pages that use a lot of document.write tricks, &c.

PHP Designer 2005 is some sort of free PHP editor that's also good for HTML.

Windows only.

A faculty member at work tipped me off to baseportal, a free service (yes, they also charge money for premium services.

It's pretty cool. You can set up a database and use it. I'm not sure how easy it is to integrate into another webpage though.

UPDATE: Oh, and I broke my database pretty easily. And I don't know how to get it back. Hmmm.

S5: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System is a weird thing. It's like Powerpoint for your browser, but it looks like you need to be a .css hacker to really be able to put the thing to good use.

Still, it's a nice alternative to simply putting a.ppt file up, but perhaps it doesn't win against saving your powerpoint/keynote file as a PDF.

Not sure. I'd say that I would play with it, but I'm not sure I will. I like nice smooth fade transitions, cause I'm st00pid like that.

So as I've mentioned previously, I've been trying to teach myself style sheets. I'm still having trouble, but it's beginning to take shape in my head.

If you know me, perhaps you've seen my hidden (ha ha) blog: ill o' dreams : a catalog of dreams; from fatigue, fever or other maladies. If you have, check it again and tell me what you think of the new stylesheet.

It's not perfect, but I like it lots better than the default MT template I was using before.

I've been using Squared 5's MPEG Streamclip for Mac OS X for a while now, and it truly rocks. It has allowed me to do all kinds of things for Temple Faculty that were heretofore a real pain in the ass, mostly capturing clips from DVDs.

I'm not sure if it works with store-bought DVDs (like movies) because we've only used it for ripping DVDs people have made with iMovie/iDVD or similar products.

Here's the description:

MPEG Streamclip is an application that converts MPEG files (including transport streams) into muxed, demuxed, QuickTime or DV files with more than professional quality, so you can easily import them in Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro and Toast 6. The most important conversions require the Apple MPEG-2 Playback Component (you can buy it online from Apple, but you already have it if you use either Final Cut Pro 4/HD or DVD Studio Pro); this component is used for high-quality decoding of MPEG-2 video. MPEG Streamclip also includes a player to set In and Out points, cut unwanted parts and perform a partial conversion.

I haven't checked which searches have led people to my site recently, so I guess I'm out of the zeitgeist for the second, since the answer is not many:

 #reqs: search term
-----: -----------
    2: samurai and shiba inu
    2: foxy
    2: shiba inu
    2: homelandsecurity/videos of hostages
    1: jesus: wrong for america
    1: red hot girls com
    1: oidhche shamhna 2004
->  1: scott sendra
    1: funny logs
    1: san jo shiba inu
    1: info dr rusty shackleford
    1: ann coulter pics
    1: pics of shibas
    1: dancer buff bot macro
    1: squeak blog
    1: illovich.com
    1: shiba inu puppy pictures
    1: apple soundtrack loop utility
    1: kristoff lib con

The interesting question is... who's looking for Scott Sendra? I know where he is, but I'm not telling.

rentzsch.com: fs_usage Intro

$ sudo fs_usage -e -f filesystem|grep -v CACHE_HIT|grep -v grep|grep open

Got it?

Apparently Scribus is a decent free Desktop Publishing app for unix distributions, including Mac OS X (Fink required).

This W E B ' S   O F F I C E place is pretty useful, for snippets and stuff.

It's how I like my information: long on fragment, short on context.

Weaving Magic With Regular Expressions sounds so magical, don't it?

I want .mac, but I don't want to pay for it. Dream on you say? Ha ha! Not when I have this handy dandy Homemade (Do It Yourself) .mac using mod_dav and Apache document at my fingertips.

I think the phrase "UNIX on the Game Boy Advance" is enough. Once again, I do not need to elaborate.

I have an upcoming project where I need to Convert DVD Audio to CD Audio, so I thought I should blog this page.

but it's just a freeware open-source text editor, written in Cocoa.

It's Smultron!

Yeah, ok.. the title is stupid. I've been looking at blogs to recommend that Temple to roll out to the community, and unfortunately MT is probably not what we're looking for (because it costs money, sigh).

Drupal looks interesting. I like it because it's not just blogging software. I'll have to check it out more.

Which means installing it somewhere I guess. Groan.

I need to make sure to install iStumbler onto my computer before I leave for Scotland, as I understand there's quite a bit of free wireless internet in Glasgow, where I'll be spending most of my time.

BlueDragon is a free CFML based application server that runs on Mac OS X and uses MySQL for a database server. If I were speaking, I'd repeat that because it's so unbelievable.

There are also payware versions that do the fancier things.

McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Hexadecimal Color Codes in HTML That Look or Sound Dirty, But Are in Fact Merely Colorful

The org chart, she is so complicated.

Definitely above furries, though.

If this were everquest, I could make this.

I mentioned the other day that I had made the new years resolution to learn CSS. Charlotte Lambert made css the page that made me want to learn CSS. The style sheet she made for css zen garden is so beautiful, I just keep going back to it constantly to look at it. I don't know if it's the hand-rendered in drawings or what, but it's just got that YOW that Steven Berkowitz is always talking about.

And btw, css Zen Garden is so cool, it really made me realize that Cascading Style Sheets is cool, is worth doing.

I have a new year's resolution to actually learn style sheets once and for all, and I don't mean just making text different colors, I mean the whole shebang... any way, I found some stuff on Safari (only) support for drop shadows and alpha transparency, and some guy's blog called What Do I Know? which had some nice things in it, especially a story about Winston Churchill's Parrot.

Ok, this is a good example to illustrate why I still don't know css.

I followed a link on die puny humans about how tiny black holes rain on the planet every year, and was disturbed by the final paragraph:

It would also show that the CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva will soon be able to churn out black holes to order. Particle collisions at the Large Hadron Collider, due to start in 2007, would have enough energy to create thousands of black holes every day.

I'm assuming I do not have to spell this argument out in too great detail.

I found a terrible awfully geeky everquest fun website the other day: the EQPixel Army Gnomish Portrait Machine, which allows you to make dollz style toons of your everquest characters.

Yikes.

Kat: "What's that?"

Me: "It's a website that let's you make little cartoons of your EQ characters."

Me: "I can't believe people make things like this"

Kat: "I can't believe you've been playing with it for an hour"

But I was, and I made this ( click to see full size):

disclaimer: Kat informs me that the dialogue is not close to verbatim. She thinks she said something along the lines of "wasting your time with that thing" instead of "playing with with it for an hour," but when hard pressed she admitted that the dialogue e"ssentially captured the spirit" of the conversation (my words).

Yuval Kossovsky is writing a several part review of OS X Server 10.3 aka Panther. He seems to like it, as I 'm sure I will (I'm waiting of a copy to put on the 'ol XServe right now). Read all about it at Panther Server: Is it ready for the enterprise?

Warren Ellis is recommending the work of a band called The Go! Team on his blog.

If you're a mac user, you might have some trouble hearing track 4, mainly because the website uses some bizarre combination of javascript, iframes and other obfuscated crap to try to mimic a streaming server.

Which is probably fine on the PC, which is no doubt the only platform they tested it on, but it sucks if you're on a mac, becasue you can't hear the songs. Nothing happens when you click.

Fortunately, a bit of reverse engineering (well, really just reverse concatenating) the javascript that plays the music results in:

Track 1
Track 2
Track 3
Track 4
Track 5

Those links should work if you have WMP installed, which I guess you have to these days.

The songs are pretty good, it was worth the effort anyway. I don't blame the band as I'm sure that the fabulous website budget that they invested was embezzled by an unscrupulous webmonkey, but this stuff does get annoying, and it probably costs them more fans than the cd sales it would ostensibly save.

What is the lesson I'm trying to impart? If you want to protect your music, use a real streaming server (I don't care what kind, as long as the name doesn't include "real" in it). If you don't care to go that distance, don't be cute. Just link to the files like it was a normal thing, and let people hear your music.

I might need to know about using an Xserve for a Small Business LAN in the future, but for now let's keep that on the QT (not QuickTime).

Thanks to Jeff Skrysak, who ported LOGO to Mac OS X. Also of interest is CocoaMySQL, for managing MySQL databases.

move along.

I've been learning about databases, as I might have mentioned earlier. Did I? Not sure, I'll have to look.

Where was I?

Ah: I found this website called ASP Resource Index, or Aspin.

Beyond having some ASP code snippets, applications and coponents, they also have a nice My First Script that has tutorials for JScript, PERL, VB and VBscript. No PHP unfortuanately.

A super-secret project has been getting me more familiar with databases than I ever thought possible... and I kind of like it. It must be an age thing; super-slick glitzy graphics when you're a young man, data driven dynamic documents when you're a bit more mature.

However, alliteration never loses it's gleam.

But I digress. Although I'm working in Cold Fusion and should be paying attention to that, I keep finding references to PHP and MySQL.

Mac OS X versions of both of those are at: Marc Liyanage's page.

I hate blackboard. The company is lame, support sucks, and every patch that fixes one thing breaks two others.

It's all Moodle for me from here on out. Free and Open Source, the way things should be run at a University.

I've been reading Cryptonomicon by Neil Stephenson the last few nights.

It's amazing how reading a book about cryptostuff will increase your paranoia about how transparent your everday life is.

We’re in a strange moment right now where everyone who uses the internet seems to be cognoscente at some level that it has its weaknesses from a security standpoint. So if you sit down and talk to most people who use e-mail they are aware at some level that their e-mail really isn’t private. Everyone hears about crackers breaking into systems all the time. Everyone who uses a cell phone must understand at some level that it’s a radio, a walkie-talkie, and every word they say is being broadcast in a way that anyone with a scanner could pick it up and listen to it.

People know these things but nobody acts on it, which I find kind of interesting. Historically there is not a lot of actual spying on people’s email that goes on. It happens, but it doesn’t seem to be causing serious problems for very many people. The same is kind of true for cell phones.

-NEAL STEPHENSON

My new Superteam is almost complete. Thanks, Lee's (Useless) Super-Hero Generator!!!

The Intangible Millennium Elephants of the Milky Way

The radioactive Sir Boy
Power(s): X-ray vision
Source of powers: Ancient lore

The stupendous Freedom Bee
Power(s): Power mimicry, Prehensile tail, Super speed
Source of powers: Technology

The dewy-eyed Suicyde Krystal
Power(s):Flame generation/control
Source of powers: Genetic engineering

The adjectiveless Ms. Armadillo
Power(s): Enhanced senses, Energy absorption, Psychic
Source of powers: Mystic

The amazing He-squid
Power(s): Mind-numbing beauty/ugliness, Clairvoyance, Shrinking
Source of powers: Psychic