Since I live in South Africa and jPod is not available here, my friend Bit Torrent lent me the series. I had a bit of history w/ the jPod concept since I loved Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs and enjoyed the follow-up book jPod. I’m also a programmer so I appreciate the culture behind jPod, even though compromises have been made to suit TV. That’s OK with me. I hope the community that has sprung up around the apparent loss of this TV show portends a new direction for entertainment companies - perhaps a way for them to make a profit and for us to get some enjoyable entertainment - and perhaps even some interaction.

CBC: Embrace the power of the Long Tail and listen to this community. Please renew jPod! Everyone else: Sign the petition!

• Download HAT from http://hat.dev.java.net/.
• Open the Tomcat Monitor app, click configure, Java tab, and add the following line to Java Options: -Xrunhprof:file=dump.hprof,format=b,heap=all
• You may need to add more memory to Tomcat as well (Maximum memory pool).
• To launch it on the command-line:
  java -jar hat.jar -port 7002 “C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Tomcat 5.5\dump.hprof”
• If you run into memory problems w/ hat, give it more:
  java -XX:PermSize=128m -XX:MaxPermSize=128M -Xms700M -Xmx700M -jar hat.jar -port 7002 “C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Tomcat 5.5\dump.hprof”
• View the Hat webapp at http://localhost:7002/
• The docs included w/ the HAT download outline the capabilities of the HAT app pretty well.

• Add the tiles-related files from the struts distro.
• Replace < %@ taglib uri='/WEB-INF/struts-template.tld' prefix='template' %> with
  < %@ taglib uri='/WEB-INF/struts-tiles.tld' prefix='template' %>
• Add direct=’true’ to all of my template:put lines. - this solves a NullPointerException issue.
• If one of the items you’ve named in your template is not in it’s referred jsp file, struts will throw the following error:
  The requested resource (/zeprs/WEB-INF/templates/whatever) is not available
  Try the following:
  • Add ignore=”true” to the template:get tag
  • If this does not solve the problem, add an empty tag to your jsp page:
    template:put name='header' direct='true'

So far it’s been a pretty smooth transition. Yeah!

I’m not using Spring for this project but I simply added spring.jar to my classpath, and Bob’s yer uncle. Works fine!

On a related manner, logging was not working - I was getting a FileNotFoundException. Here’s my log4j.properties entry for the logfile:

log4j.appender.R.File=${catalina.home}/logs/my.log

${catalina.home} was not getting initialized, so I simply set the path manually:

log4j.appender.R.File=/tomcat/logs/my.log

When I get a chance, I’ll figure out how to declare that variable manually so I don’t have to change my log4j when I deploy.

I hope that Jason manages to keep the love flowing - managing his community of supporters. There’s so much competing for my attention. How do independent developers stay on our radar? I’m OK with an occasional update via e-mail, in case I’ve lost his site in the long list of rss feeds to which I subscribe. Some sort of community like Linked In would be fine as well. Perhaps something like plazes, which features a geographically-dispersed community? It will be interesting to see how Jason maintains his network of supporters.

I wish Jason all the best!

Ajax incorporates:

• standards-based presentation using XHTML and CSS;
• dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model;
• data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT;
• asynchronous data retrieval using XMLHttpRequest;
• and JavaScript binding everything together.

I’m currently implementing Ajax functionality in my projects, thanks to dwr (direct web remoting). dwr is pretty easy to implement - kudos to the fellas working on it. Right now I’m simply using dwr to help check if the user has entered an id that already exists the the database; however, I’m planning to use dwr to make long, complex forms alot easier (and fault-tolerant). This is a really nice item to add to a web developer’s toolkit!

After seeing the announcement of XForms beta in Firefox, I decided to test it out. First I picked up a zip for the latest firefox nightly, unzipped it in my Program Files dir, and launched firefox.exe.Then I installed the XForms extension, , xforms.xpi. Unfortunately, there are not many pointers to samples or working examples, so here is my current list:

• XForms 1.0 Test Suite - Not very useful - the Firefox implementation may not be up to the spec yet.
• XForms - The Next Generation of Web Forms - alotta links to form demos and XForms-related news, courtesy of the W3C.
• XForms calculator demo - Works!
• XForms tax form example - Works!
• XForms Samples - these require formsPlayer; however, I bet they can be modified to work w/ Firefox. Some useful javascript examples.

We can secede emotionally, however, by turning our backs on the heartland. We can focus on our issues, our urban issues, and promote our shared urban values. We can create a new identity politics, one that transcends class, race, sexual orientation, and religion, one that unites people living in cities with each other and with other urbanites in other cities. The Republicans have the federal government–for now. But we’ve got Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Diego, New York City (Bloomberg is a Republican in name only), and every college town in the country. We’re everywhere any sane person wants to be. Let them have the shitholes, the Oklahomas, Wyomings, and Alabamas. We’ll take Manhattan.

Update: 11/14/2004 - The Economist has an article that digs a little deeper into the statistical analysis behind the Lancet study.