Blogs

What's this? Two blog posts within five minutes? Yes, well, I thought this would be appropriate as we are about to celebrate Thanksgiving here in the United States. I've had this hanging on my wall for years. I originally got it from a humor mailing list years ago (2000, I think). --- TO BE THANKFUL FOR:The mess to clean after a party because I have been surrounded by friends.The...

Touch typists (like me) don't like to take their hands off the home row of the keyboard if they can at all help it. If I'm in the middle of doing something requiring intense concentration (such as writing or coding), I want distractions kept to a minimum. One of the most annoying things about the PC keyboard layout is that they put the Control key way down underneath the shift key on...

In Eclipse, everything is a plugin, including the IDE itself. So, if there's something which bothers you, all you need to do is replace the plugin with something which works in a way more consistent with your personal preferences, or if the plugin is open source, tweak the existing plugin to suit your needs. In my case, what bothered me was this: I don't have any reason to look at...

A lot of people I run into at trainings and on consulting gigs ask this question:   "How do I access Liferay via Web Services?"   Well, there are 2 basic things you need: 1) A way to get the stubs for Liferay Web Services 2) Some sort of client app to access the portal's services   OK. Honestly, here is the easiest thing you can do to get started:...

All I have to say is wow. Pure, unadulterated WOW. I have been waiting for the iPod of books to reach us, and I truly thought it would be either Sony's Librie, or more likely Apple. But it turns out to come from who now seems to be the most obvious supplier, but the one you would least suspect, and that's Amazon, the book people. This has seriously given me a level of excitement that...

In recent days, some of the engineers at Liferay reported some amazing performance gains with Liferay's Ant build system by using Linux instead of Windows. Well this peaked my curiosity to say the least. I've been working exclusively with Windows XP on my desktop since around 2001, and have only used with Linux on servers -- never for my desktop. Well I'm a former...

November 2007 Public Training was held in Reston, VA.

One of the goals I set for myself with regard to the Liferay documentation was to show people how to set up Liferay for development (either core, extension or plugins) in both of the leading open source IDEs: Eclipse and Netbeans. I have been using Eclipse for many years,and so I know my way around that IDE pretty well. Plus that environment has been pretty much covered in the...

Need a good diff tool outside of something monolithic like your IDE? Ever wanted to compare one project folder to another beyond their respective repositories? Well, look no further than "Meld". Ubuntu install command: $ sudo apt-get install meld Meld is a great diff tool with all the toys and features you could ask for. The main window: Configuring...

My next home project will be to set up Linux Media Center Edition (MCE) which runs on top of Kubuntu. [Also a wiki here.]             I've been reading up on this alternative to Windows Media Center and WOW... It blows me away! I was initially going to set up MythTV on a linux box, but this package makes things 100X...