Days of …

Use Ant!


<delete includeemptydirs=”true” >
<fileset dir=”${checkout.dir}” defaultexcludes=”false” >
<include name=”**/.svn/” />
</fileset>
</delete>


There is all so common situation when you have to go to once a week to a website, and you have to login to it and your browsers is not asking you about remembering that password. So you have to remember that password and its getting out of your head and you have to spend some time trying to get it into your head again.

If you are using Firefox you are lucky. There is a way to let your browser to remember the password and even reveal what you have typed correct password.

Here are the steps for a freedom:

1. You will need to install Greasemonkey extension for Firefox from here. This extension allows you to use special JavaScript programs, which change the behaviour and/or look of the web sites. Don’t worry if you don’t know JavaScript, that knowledge is not required unless you want to write something completely new.
   

   Perhaps you want to bookmark this page before the required Firefox restart, so you could easily return to this small guide. Press Ctrl-D to do that.

2. After Greasemonkey is installed and you restarted the Firefox you will need to install Force Autocomplete script, which will enable password saving feature on all pages.
   

   You don’t have to restart Firefox, to get Greasemonkey scripts working. If the script is not working - just refresh the page (Press F5).

3. Next step is to install password revealing script: Passwords on MouseOver

Now you all set. Your form data will be remembered and you could verify that you are typing correct password.

You could get many more additional scripts here: http://userscripts.org/

Excellent article on branching in Subversion. One thing missing is the branch timeline chart. Something like this:

Where horisontal line is the trunk timeline and angled lines are releases. Based on my experience, that chart often helps developers to understand when branches are created and how to deal with them.

I was reading a lot of Ruby on Rails books in order to start my own project. I found the thing, which really disturbes me: though Ruby is a proper OO language, none of OO desugn features are presented in Rails books.

Proper Object Oriented Design should simplify software development by introducing abstraction from unneccessary logic constraints.

Take, for example, books dealing with making simple online store. They all say that there is no way to add products into shopping cart because products can be in many shopping carts. Because of that you have to add LineItems, which will point to a product description.

This is true when we speak about database design, but completely untrue when we speak about software design. From OO point of view there is no such thing as LiteItem. It has no value to a business logic and it must be dropped from model.

This model look much cleaner and causes no confusion. Additional work must be done on model layer, but this is just to avoid database limitations.

Just made a configuration change on my hosting account: disabled Java in order to get Ruby-On-Rails

For a website I want to build, I have to choose the platform and the programming language. At work I use Java and Websphere 6, but can’t use it for my own project. The reason is that I don’t know how popular my service would be it seems quite expensive to put it into Websphere hosting. I have Java capabilities in my hosting plan here, but its only for web applications with no backend server support. In other words - there will be no MVC. Only JSPs and servlets.

And I will not be able to use JDK 5, nor be able to change server to, say, Glassfish, so I will be able to use some latest useful JSF components.

Another choice would be to choose other language, say Ruby. But I don’t have any experience using it, so it would be a major roadblock for a starters.

I’m stuck again!

News from Writer’s blog
The following is a summary of the changes in the Writer 1.0 (Beta) Update:

* Tagging support
* Support for Blogger Beta
* Categories are sorted by name and support scrolling, plus improved support for reading categories from your blog
* Improved startup performance
* Paste is enabled for Title region and TAB/SHIFT+TAB navigation between title and body supported
* Insert hyperlink added to context menu when text is selected
*
* Title attribute in Insert Link dialog
* Custom date support for Community Server
* Improved keyboard shortcuts for switching views
* Change spell-check shortcut key to F7
* Add ‘png’ to insert image dialog file type filter
* More robust image posting to Live Spaces
* Improved style detection for blogs
* Fixed issues with pasting URLs and links
* Remember last window size and position when opening a new post
* Open post dialog retrieves more than 25 old posts

IBM Rational development organizations host a number of early betas to gain the expert contribution and insight from our customers and from those evaluating IBM Rational products. New open betas for IBM Rational Software Architect V7.0 and Rational Functional Tester V7.0 are scheduled to be available soon. Preregister now and we’ll inform you via e-mail when the code is ready for download.

Here is the page with the overview and information on how to register.

The CoComment service, which was debuted this year, has some updates, which make this service actually useful. Before those updates there was no way to check for and be notified about comments posted to somebody’s post. Now it is possible!

For example: you noticed some interesting post, but don’t want to participate in the comments. But you still want to look at other people’s thoughts. The only option would be to bookmark the post and come back later. In many cases you will just forget about returning back and the discussions will be gone.

Now you just instruct CoComment’s crawler to report any comments and it, if you have any luck, will.