Martin's Blog

Many moons ago I was a Net(Bloat)Beans user but had found the efficiency and speed I desired with Eclipse. As of the NetBeans 5.5 beta I figured it was time to try again. Since then I’ve kicked the Eclipse habit and not looked back. I’m not saying I’d never go back but now Eclipse seems less integrated and suffering from too many unfocused plug-ins. Where as NetBeans seems to have optimized the developer experience by offering powerful packs oriented to the type of developer (you are). This keeps things tight and focused.

Beyond nice Ant build file creation, integrated Unit testing and all the good IDE coding features, we now have Subversion support. And it really works too. (Now I hope Sun will get rid of the requirement for the native SVN client) This was the tipping point for me. So if you’re considering a second look at NetBeans I’d say it’s ready.

With that said I hit a little snag when first trying Subversion.

The SubVersion add-on creates a config directory that caches your Subversion server settings. In our case we had hit a proxy to reach our SVN repository (which went away). So, long story short. If you’re hitting a “PROPFIND” error while using NetBeans you may need to delete or examine the files file in the ~home\.netbeans\config\svn directory, restart NetBeans and try again.

As a technology realist I like to try stuff out before I say how cool it is (or not). I can say script.aculo.us is cool. Over the weekend I was looking for ways to make my Blog a little cleaner and more dynamic. Please check out my (Search etc) links in the top right corner you’ll see my little widget in action. Pretty cool eh?

To say this was completely simple is an over statement. You definitely need to cut some JavaScript and CSS code. But what intrigues me is that my learning curve was the toolkit and not making this cross browser capable (tested with IE 6, 7, Opera and Firefox). Also, I was able to complete this widget with about 10 lines of code. Very impressive! Lots of good examples out there too a good sign of a well adopted toolkit. One can quickly surmise there is an excellent foundation of AJAX and JavaScript here.

Now the techi stuff… In the process of creating this widget I came to a dilemma where I needed to serialize a series of Effects. Basically I needed to make sure my menu control was done hiding before showing the new menu. (try selecting Search then Subscribe)

Through a little research I deduced two resolutions.

new  Effect.SlideUp('inner-search', { afterFinish: function() { 
Effect.SlideDown(elem); } 
 } ); 

new  Effect.SlideUp('inner-search');
Effect.SlideDown(elem, {queue: 'end' });

There are many ways to skin a cat, right. Here is how I made my choice. Resolution A a) Complex code b) 2 effect limit Resolution B a) Simple code b) Ability to queue up N number of effects

Recommendation: Go with Resolution B. To wrap, I will create more data points for myself but, script.aculo.us is indeed cool!

Being a hockey fan is a great thing! At the end of 06 we at ICSynergy jumped at the opportunity to sponsor a local Dallas hockey team. Through out the season we’ve been following the team. Recently the team had a sensational victory that I thought was worth socializing.

Great summary from Peter:

“Today, we had a game and we won 5-4. It was a close game. It was 4-1 them going into the third period and we scored 4 goals that period. I am having a lot of fun playing and I am glad you have supported our team. I have attached a picture of our team holding our sticks up after winning the game and 1 of me in front of the banner. Thanks again!“

Team victory!

Here is Peter after the game.

Hearing about a great team victory makes it all worth while.

I’ve found it pretty common that I want to rollback my OpenSSO instance to its preconfigured state. For example I’m testing OpenDS integration and it’s not working as desired… In that case I'd like to go back to using the "files" based repository. I’ll post on that shortly. It’s a really quick hit to bring your OpenSSO instance back to the beginning state. ..

1) Stop the web container that is running OpenSSO
2) Goto your home directory. The following image is my home dir on my XP instance. You’ll notice two directories “Access Manager” and “opensso”.
3) Simply delete or rename these directories
4) Start your web container again and you’ll be back in action

NOTE: As depicted in the next image, I’ve found it a best practice to append “opensso” to the default “Configuration Directory” value. As my previous cleanup instructions are based upon this. If you’ve used the default value you’ll still find an “opensso” directory. In addition you’ll need to find the “AMConfig.properties” and “serverconfig.xml” files to delete too.