Human Factors Issue

Okay this is going to be a much condensed version over what I just wrote and lost. My background is Industrial Engineering and I am currently working as an IT consultant. Recently our group was moved to a new building and floor. This was a much needed improvement. After several months of enjoying the new diggs I realized that my energy, concentration, and motivation had taken a dive. There are many things that can lead to this and in my case I know of a few. However, what I learned recently was that I was suffering from excessive eye strain because of the 400-600w worth of lighting directly above my head. I have since moved my workstation around and have experienced increased productivity, concentration, and overall comfort throughout the day. My watering eyes have almost ceased.

JQuery and IE 6.0 troubles

I am working on a website where I need to submit a form using the ajax() call inside of the JQuery library. I was happily developing along and testing using the Chrome browser. However, since the group I am working for only supports IE I decided I better test this with IE. Of course submitting the form in IE didn’t work. I spent a good portion of the morning working on the problem and generated a lot of frustration for myself. I finally decided to remove all the fields in the form and try to submit and empty form. That worked! I then slowly added the fields back in until it no longer would work. I came to the conclusion that the form was failing to submit because two of the fields were named with the common property names of length and width.

Example:

The ajax code looked something like:

$(“#formId”).ajax(

type: “POST”,
url: “some.url”,
data: $(“formId”).serialize(),
success: function(msg){
alert( “Data Saved: ” + msg );
}

)

This would fail by only submitting a couple parameters and not the entire form.

UTF Storing in Text File

UTF String stored into file

String password = “foo”;
byte[] pbytes = password.getBytes(“UTF-16l”);

try{

String valueToStore = Base64.encode( pbytes );

}catch(Exception e ){

}

IE Troubles

This is the first time that I have used TextMate to publish to my blog. Very cool!! Now back to the subject of what was so frustrating today. I am going to have serious ulcers thinks to some of the crappy software from Microsoft.

This code shows how to add and remove items from a list and is compatible with IE, FireFox, and Chrome.

<code>

function handleChange(){
var owner = document.getElementById(“ownderId”)
var subject = document.getElementById(“subjectId”)

var opt1
var opt2

for( var i=0; i < subject.length; i++ ){
var option = subject.options[i]
if( option.value ==”opt1″){ opt1 = option }
if( option.value ==”opt2″){ opt2 = option }
}

if( owner.value == “FOO” ){
if( !opt2 && opt1 ){

opt2 = document.createElement(“option”)
opt2.value = “opt2″
opt2.text = “label for opt2″

try{
subject.add( opt2, opt1 )
}catch(err){
subject.add( opt2, opt1.index ) // IE Fix
}

}
}

}

</code>

Changing the Default JDK for Netbeans 6.5 on the Mac OS X platform

I need to jot this down before I lose it.  So here it goes.

1. From a terminal window go to  ”/Applications/Netbeans/Netbeans 6.5.ap/Contents/Resources/NetBeans/etc/”
2. open up the netbeans.conf file and edit the following line to look like  ”netbeans_jdkhome=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/CurrentJDK/Home”

Thats it!! 
I hope that helps you. Restart Netbeans if you haven’t already.

Relaxin this weekend

Pics from the Victor Wooten Concert Saturday Night.

It was great night. I drove down with a couple friends (one which happens to be my old bass instructor). I also ran into an old friend down at the show. Good times!

The next step

It’s been two months since I have taken the time to write anything on my blog. But the work is still going on. Friday we met to discuss the next steps in the development of whatever it is we are developing. I decided that the next step for me would be to get a server up and running to make it feel more tangable. Since I already had plans for Saturday that involved setting up a Fedora 5 server, I decided that would be the day. So after getting done with the Fedora setup in the morning I drove off to go to the local computer store. After messing around with the Sata drive for several hours I finally gave up and went to bed. With a clear head the next morning I install a simple 10 Gig IDE that I already had laying around. Everything else runs smooth and we now have our server ready to go.

I love Linux!

Saturday morining 8:00 am I wake up roll out of bed, try and make myself presentable as quickly as possible and jump in the car to drive 30 miles south of my house. Today is the day we finish setting up our first Linux Fedora 5 server. On the agenda today is getting Apache 2.2.2 to talk with Tomcat 5.5.something Subversion up and running with our source code imported, Subversion working with Apache 2.2.2 and finally if we have time get Maven 2 loaded and the CruiseControl application installed. Since some of this stuff I have only done one time prior it was a full schedule to say the least.

9:00 am
Luckily Tom has already set up the server minus the XWindows libraries but including Tomcat 5, Subversion, and Apache 2.2.

Now we need to get the Apache server to communicate with the Tomcat server. This is not as easy as it sounds since the documentation on the Tomcat site has seemingly been abanden long ago. We copied down the .so file that we suppose would work for the Intel based x86 architecture and go about setting up the httpd.conf file to include the new shared library, add a workers.properties file to the httpd/conf directory and modify the server.xml file under the Tomcat installation to enable AJP13. Once completed we get repeated errors from the http server (Apache) exclaiming that the mod_jk.so file is bad. We go through several girations of this before, including investigating moving to another server Jetty or Resin.

For the Impatient (What works):
1.) Get Fedora 5 installled minus xWindows.
2.) Type “service httpd status” to get the status of Apache.
3.) If apache is not installed then install it using “yum install httpd”
4.) Try starting Tomcat “service tomcat5 start”
5.) If Tomcat is missing then type “yum install tomcat5”
6.) Test the installation “telnet localhost 80”

Now to get Tomcat working with Apache use the Proxy approach
1.) finish…. later. collecting our details.

The First Open Enterprise Server

I know, I know, I know… I have already been hassled for choosing the Sempron chip. I am not a hardware guy and the goal for this stage of the game is to get a server in the sky for less then $500. It turns out that this one will cost me less then $390 by the time I take the 200Gg. Sata drive back that I don’t need. 10 Gigs. will work for now.

The server:
Case: Antec NSK1300
Processor: AMD Sempron Processor 3000+
Motherboard: MSI – K9VGM – V
RAM: 1 GB DDR2
Harddrive: 10 GB IDE hardrive

The First Official Meeting

We have decided on the name Open-Enterprise since we feel that this describes what we are doing. The meeting yesterday morning went very well with Marc and myself slating out the first bit of work to be done. The list falls roughly into Marc working on the HR interface while  I am working on the core data access, service layer, and util classes.  We hope to build very light weight modules that can be modified and maintened easily. Part of or discussion centered on whether or not the service layer would be required since what we see happening mostly in the module is CRUD database activity. We decided on a mixed approach using the ServiceLocator pattern attaching our DAO’s to the ServiceLocator. If we need a further seperation between view and data access layer we can simply place a service in between the two layers and redirect the calls from view layer, using the ServiceLocator, to a newly created Service component.

Another part of the dicussion centered around how SOA, Mule, BPEL, and the OE modules in general would remain generic but yet be able to leverage the information from other modules without braking with our highly decoupled model.  It is my opinion that WS Interface specifications will need to be generated for each module in the OE suite.  The combination of these specifications will form what I term the Eco system that will sit on top a generic service bus (Mule).

While researching Mule last night I ran into a couple of terms that I had heard used but was unfamiliar with their meanings.

The Terms: Staged Event-Driven Architecture SEDA and Representational State Transfer REST or REST(ful) systems.

These links helped me to understand the terms a little better. 

 http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~mdw/proj/seda/

http://www.xfront.com/REST-Web-Services.html

We hope to have some architectual drawings a general road map and some sample code soon.