shwango! blog

The Train Expo was this past weekend at the Cincinnati Convention Center. Pretty cool stuff! I just started getting back into trains and model railroading over the Christmas holiday after Jen took me down to Holiday Junction at the Museum Center – they also have an amazing model of Cincinnati in the 40s as well as the re-opened Tower A which overlooks the Queensgate yard. (Webcam of the model.)

Some pictures and movies of the train expo: day 1, day 2, and a few movies.

Jen’s been pretty understanding of my new hobby! Actually she doesn’t mind it at all – just how much time I’m spending on it!

I also did a little “railfanning” a few weeks ago.

Here are some pictures over looking the yard on the Hopple St. viaduct and a few pictures from the Longworth Hall parking lot.

I think I’ve mentioned before that over the past two years or so I’ve really been getting into Java and J2EE development. I’ve got a cool app running on JBoss using EJBs, Quartz for scheduling and MySQL for the database. Pretty stable too in the year or so it’s been in production. Most of the “good” stuff in our TF platform is running on JBoss now too – not really using the J2EE features yet since there’s so much old code still there, but making progress. Anyway…

I just started playing around with JBoss’ EJB3 stuff and I’m lovin’ it! I didn’t mind EJB 2.1 since I have MyEclipse and XDoclet to easy the amount of code I had to write, but this is much better! I’ve only just done a few small demo apps, but so far it’s really great.

Want to listen to a great podcast with Gavin King (of hibernate fame) discussing EJB3 and JBoss’ new Seam product, check out the Java Posse’s interview with him!

I highly recommend the PDF book Getting Real by the 37signals guys. I’m not a Ruby or Rails user, but I really like what these guys are doing – I use my Basecamp almost daily. Great ideas abound! The book has some “common sense” stuff – but reiterating that never hurts since many people don’t use common sense! And I just really like their style. The book is a short 170 pages or so and a very quick read.

Also, if you didn’t listen to the Venture Voice podcast with Jason Fried of 37signals, check it out! 37signals’ James Buck was on Audible Ajax recently.

This comment I got is hilarious! Those of you who suffered through the v.com fiasco would get the inside joke! Whoever posted that, thanks – I busted out laughing when I read that! Aaron, was that you?

The new Intel based Macs look so sweet. Not sure if I could decide between a 20″ iMac or a MacBook Pro. Both would be nice…

Geez… I can’t believe it’s February already! And I didn’t even have one post in January, even though I should have! Besides wishing everyone a Happy New Year, January 15th was Jen’s birthday! So, happy belated blog birthday to Jen! I won’t promise to write more often, but I will try – as Joel says “The more you write, the more you’ll be able to write.” And I want to be able to write.

I know I haven’t posted in a while, but just wanted to post a Merry Chistmas and Happy Holidays message to my one and a half readers out there!

Jen’s been working really hard to get her disertation work done as well as apply for internships, so I just wanted to publicly give her a pat on the back! Last night we overnighted the first application since it was due earlier than the others. Way to go Jen! (And maybe now she won’t always post a comment saying I’m a tool since I’ve only been posting techy stuff!)

For the most part, I love my development environment. I really like the J2EE platform and using MyEclipse/Eclipse/Subclipse/JBoss/Subversion is a great combination and works really well most of the time.

Today I had one of those user errors that is a pain to track down. I redeployed a custom J2EE app to our production JBoss server that I just updated and suddenly JDom breaks. Worked fine on my local box. Scratch head…

So I start by “cleaning” my local projects… Now my JSPs are coming up saying “bad class file” when referring to my classes included from my other project. Scratch head…

Tried a bunch of different things… Bang head against wall…

Finally after hours of searching the web and recreating the projects, etc… I come across a post that mentions that the JSPs use javac from the path…

Crap! I had put the old 1.4 jdk/bin directory in my path to make it easy to run javac before I was using Eclipse. So now that I’m using 1.5 (aka Java 5) the JSPs were still being compiled with the 1.4 javac causing my problem.

Once I removed the 1.4 reference in my XP environment vars the JSPs compiled fine.

Of course I’m still getting the originally JDom error on production, so I still have to track down what’s causing that! Doh!

References: Bad class file, Error running javac

My JDom error is this:

org.jdom.Element.addContent(Lorg/jdom/Content;)Lorg/jdom/Element;; nested exception is: java.lang.NoSuchMethodError: org.jdom.Element.addContent(Lorg/jdom/Content;)Lorg/jdom/Element;

I’m including JDom 1.0 jar in the EAR file and I don’t see any other jdom.jar files in the classpath. Ideas? Oh, production is using JBoss 4.0.1RC2 and my laptop is using 4.0.3. I found this post, but I’m pretty sure I’m using JDom 1.0 for compiling and running!

UPDATE: After upgrading our production box to JBoss 4.0.3 and JDK 1.5.0 (update 5) the JDom errors went away.

I really dig the Azureus BitTorrent client. It’s an awesome little Java application that’s got a ton of great features – including plugins. Now I haven’t played around with too many of the plugins, but the Swing Web Interface (aka WebUI) has to be about the greatest!

With this plugin I’m able to upload .torrent files to my Azureus client at home from anywhere – well, anywhere with Internet access that is. If I’m at the office and something happens to catch my eye, I can quickly start downloading from my client at home! (Don’t want to use up the office bandwidth now, do I?) Or just post a URL to a torrent and off you go! Oh yeah, it supports SSL and basic authentication for security and UPnP for port forwarding if your router supports it – I just have port forwards configured on the router. Also you can run at as a stand alone app too! Sweet!