I just nuked my comics blog.
I haven’t updated it in ages, so no point in keeping it around.
Sorry for any broken links you may encounter.
I am currently working on some front-end items for our Liferay portal. I have chosen to give Liferay’s AlloyUI javascript framework, which is built on top of Yahoo’s YUI framework, a shot.
For some unnecessary reason, I wanted to find out what version of Alloy I was using. I say unnecessary because the Alloy framework hasn’t been updated since 2010! See? This is a disturbing trend I’ve noticed with Liferay’s components. Like, why are its web services written for Axis 1.4?! It was released in 2006, that is positively ancient! One of those “if its not broken, don’t fix it”-type deals, I suppose. …going down a rabbit hole here.
…getting back to the topic at hand. Ever since I watched a screencast on, the now dead, encosia.com, I have been using firebug (and now Chrome’s Developer Tools) to tweak my CSS and javascript on the fly. It also introduced me to using the browser console to actually interact with and modify a web page. The console is also useful for retrieving javascript variables, such as a framework’s version number.
I tried the obvious first:
> AUI.version
“3.4.0”
It worked, but that’s the version of YUI that Liferay 6.1.0 comes with. Not the version of AlloyUI. It took a little bit of exploring, but I managed to figure it out.
> AUI.Env.versions
Which, inside Chrome’s console, gave me:
Alloy v 1.5.0
Not perfect, but its clear to see the YUI version of 3.4.0 and the AUI version of 1.0.1.
And now you know a perfectly useless fact about AlloyUI!
As a vegan and a programmer, this article I recently read, horrifies me on a few levels. In my line of work, its so easy to just think about the bugs in my code as harmless, annoyances for customers, or, at worst, maybe some giant company loses some money. Never really thought about how anything I could write could actually lead to the death of anything…
At the OpenUpstate meeting I attended recently, as well as during my recent engagement to my girlfriend, I became painfully aware of the fact that the business cards I have do not contain any of my personal information on them. As a result of this, I decided to make some personal business cards for myself. In doing so, I decided to finally bite the bullet and purchase a vanity domain so that I’d have a respectable email address for people to contact me at. I am a programmer after all, I should be as elitist as possible, right?
bencarson.com is being cyber-squatted, so I bought bencarson.net. There’s nothing there yet since I mainly did this for the email address. However, I may be moving some content there in the future. I’ve never really fallen in love with jinjerbeard. Using a domain after my own dorky name may just be easier and certainly more permanent.
So I’m coding a Liferay portlet that will display one of two forms on it, depending on the type of customer that is viewing the page. In order to implement this, I decided to that the JSTL ‘choose’ tag would be perfect for what I need.
<c:choose>
<c:when test='<%= displayForm.equals("Form1") %>'>
...code for form 1...
</c:when>
<c:when test='<%= displayForm.equals("Form2") %>'>
...code for form 2...
</c:when>
</c:choose>
But when I deploy and run my code, I get this error:
According to TLD or attribute directive in tag file, attribute test does not accept any expressions
After about 30 minutes of searching I found the solution on this page.
I had to change
<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jstl/core" prefix="c" %>
to
<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jstl/core_rt" prefix="c" %>
After that simple tweak, my forms display correctly.
No idea what this does or why I had to do it. But it worked, so I’m happy.
Attended a cool meeting of coders last week.
A group called OpenUpstate.
Looking forward to more meetings.
Still climbing the very steep learning curve of being a web application developer and admin.
I have dropped CodeIgniter, in favor of CakePHP. A friend of mine recommended this PHP framework, so I’m going forward with it.
I have completed the first tutorial and have a page that will spit out the user data for my app. That’s it. Still a long way to go. But, with the help of this page, I did manage to centralize my CakePHP core. So now I can just point my apps to this one spot for the base Cake code. This will make upgrading the framework easier. I’m sure I will be testing this feature out shortly as the release of CakePHP 2.2 is imminent.
I have also started using bitbucket as my Git repository of choice. Unlimited private repositories that are free?! Yes, please! No more of the public hosting that Github offers. Not that my hosting of my website would be on anyone’s radar, malicious user or otherwise. But it just makes me feel better until I know what I’m doing.
And speaking of malicious users, it seems my blogs have an audience now. I’ve gotten several moderation requests across this blog and comic for spam comment posts. Still no actual comments yet.
I have begun working with Codeigniter 2.1.0 and am trying to wrap head around what exactly is required for an app to be deployed onto a server.
This required me to move some files and folders around. Unfortunately I set up my XAMPP installation as ‘root’, so I can’t use the lovely file manager-type windows in Mint that I’m used to, to copy files from one directory to another. I keep getting “Permission denied” errors.
I vaguely remember something about chmod from my college days. It has something to do about octal code of a number corresponds to write, read or read/write permissions for different “things”<–what the owner/group/other user permissions were in my head before this experience.
I broke out my linux pocket guide, and found that there are actually three relevant commands, chown, chgroup, and chmod. Since I am working with files that are in my “jooky” directory and are owned by ‘root’, I figured that changing the owner would fix my problem. I looked up the chown command. The pocket guide gave me a start, but not enough detail on the command to tell me how to recursively change the owner of a folder and all subitems in that folder. Quick search with my fav search engine turned up this gem.
Slapped ‘sudo chown jooky:jooky -vR /home/jooky/workspace-web/website’ on the command line and got to watch sweet line-on-line action of all of the files in my Eclipse workspace being reassigned ownership to ‘jooky’.
Now that that’s complete, I am able to move files around my Eclipse environment without a problem.
Everything looks cool so far on my comic site so far. No issues with ComicPress plugin I’m using there. It just looks terrible, as I’m using the out-of-the-box theme. I hope at some point I’ll be able to start looking at learning to theme WordPress sites.
But enough about that!
This past weekend I finally got fed up with the shitty drivers available for the shitty broadcom BC4311 series wireless network adapter that my shitty Dell Inspiron 1521 has.
I have tried a few more Linux distros via LiveCD:
Ubuntu 11.04 64-bit – Something about the color scheme of this distro really turns me off, the reddish-purple just makes me angry. That and the fact that my Broadcom doesn’t work, despite trying the troubleshooting items I find online.
Mint 12 64-bit – I so want version of Linux to work because of its emphasis on aesthetics. Alas, its build on Debian, just like Ubuntu, so my wireless doesn’t work here. I doubt my craptop would support a decent looking UI anyway.
Mandriva 2011 – I know next to nothing about this distro, but I am impressed with the UI and how easily I got my wireless to work.
I almost went with Mandriva, until I remembered each distro can come with different frontend/UI/desktop environment (I don’t know what the graphical part of the OS is technically called). Going back to my fav distro, I found that Mint is available in a LXDE version! Knowing what a POS my ancient laptop is, I opted to take up the ‘L’ part of the LXDE environment. Its supposed to be pretty light, so that would definitely help out my aging Athlon 2800 system. I fired up the live cd and everything looked nice. Much better than the unintuitive, unattractive KDE desktop I had spent the past month or two with.
Still no wireless support until I found this ->http://nfolamp.wordpress.com/2011/10/15/ubuntu-11-10-getting-wireless-bcm4311-working/
After trying the items on this blog, I got wireless working on LiveCD! Bingo!
I promptly clicked the “Install Linux Mint” icon. Everything has been working great since then. A huge improvement over my experience with Fedora 16 and Fedora 16 KDE.
Now, if they’ll only come out with a 64-bit version…
Well I’ve blown away my instance of comicCMS.
Why, you may ask?
Last night I attended my first meetup, and got some exposure to WordPress outside of my current ideas about what WordPress should be used for. I learned that there are tons of plugins for WordPress, and a quick search turned up some webcomic plugins that’ll do the same thing comicCMS was doing. And since its in WordPress, it’ll be furthering my goal of becoming a front-end developer. (Good lord though, I really gotta start learning PHP.)
Hoping to get a decent webcomic plugin installed and then start uploading the “Rescue Mission” comic again.
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