Every web site needs to keep improving, and your obd't servant is no different. I started almost exactly a year ago by replacing the old blog software with Pebble. Then I got busy with real work, and had to put aside site maintenance. Around the beginning of this year I was able to modernize both the home page of darwinsys.com (making it new and graphical) and the layout of the rest of the main site. This week, I re-did the Java Web Frameworks site, which has gone from coyote-ugly to fairly modern looking, after being re-implemented using the Seam framework. So, I am now running Seam ("war deployment" option) on Tomcat in production.

At the same time, I had to upgrade the Tomcat web server from 5.5 to 6.0, which went fairly smoothly, although there may be a few little bits that need a boost.

I just created a Java application that is needed on several platforms, one of which, alas, is the ubituitous and ill-designed Microsoft Windows XP.  In the project there are some classes that are auxilliary to the main program. Naturally enough I created a package for these called "aux". In Java a package name is also used as a directory name when the files are stored outside of archives, as they are during development. Hmmm. "aux".  I know that Apple Computer long ago had a UNIX version called A/UX, but I didn't know anybody else had dibs on the name. But it seems Bill Gates was after Apple even back when MS-DOS was being cloned from CP/M-86. For it turns out that "aux" is a reserved filename, not just in MS-DOS, but even today in Windows XP (for all I know and don't care so please don't tell me, Vista too). It's because "aux:" is a device name, and the system is too scatterbrained to tell whether you mean that, or a file, if you just type "aux". The result is that WinZip was unable to restore all the files in this package; so I had to waste about half an hour adapting to this (including copying these files again, changing their package name, changing all the files that refer to them, making sure the changes made it back to my real OS (no extra points if you can guess which one it is) and get committed into my source repo so that I don't have to put up with this "hideous botch" ever again. Until next time we meet some screw loose in the M$ universe, that is.

CNN quotes former US Veep Dick Cheney defending the unimaginable trillion-dollar deficit left behind by his administration - much of which was spent on the unwinnable war in Iraq - by saying ""All of these things required us to spend money that we had not originally planned to spend, or weren't originally part of the budget, ... Stuff happens. And the administration has to be able to respond to that, and we did." Stuff happens? You lie and cheat and break laws to get your country entrapped in a thousand-billion-dollar foreign war and all you can say is "Stuff happens?" Just gimme a break - if you can't admit you got caught breaking the law and lying on a far, far greater scale than Watergate - then just be quiet. Don't say anything. Put a lit on it. Or go hunting by yourself.

Read more...