Blogs

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...

October 2007 Public Training was held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Here are some pictures from that training.

October 2007 Public Training was held in North Sydney, Australia. Here's some pictures of the building the training was held in.     Here are some of the attendees.

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. Push mail Sync'd Calendars Sync'd Todos Sync'd Mail Sync'd Contacts I love that when somebody sends me an email, Exchange 2003 pushes said mail right to my phone.. no waiting! I love that when said email contains a calendar invite I can accept it and not only does it add the appointment to my phone, I see it in...

So last night as I sat in my hotel room in Ohio I was reading a thread about Android, Google's open handset OS. I decided to download the SDK and give it a crack. The first things I noticed were the steller documentation and the ease of constructing a basic app... I had created a simple hello world app in about 15 minutes, 13 of those being reading the doc. It made me realize a few...

Hey All,   Gonna start my first post with a big thanks to everyone who worked on getting Liferay Blogging to a very usable point. Then, I have a question for everyone out there... Snippet or Full Content? By this I mean in the RSS feed of our blogs. Does the world prefer a simple snippet of the content as part of the RSS item? OR does it prefer the Full Content of...

Last week Google announced OpenSocial with an impressive set of partners including Orkut (as expected), MySpace, iLike, Flixter, Oracle, .... There were companies that had their own social network, others that offered applications through the Internet and even companies that provide services and infrastructures. There's been a lot of blogging about whether this is Google's checkmate to...

If you are running Liferay with Tomcat, you have most likely come across this annoying message upon startup: INFO: The Apache Tomcat Native library which allows optimal performance... This is Apache's subtle hint that you can speed up Tomcat.  I decided to see how much of a boost it would give you.  Without the JNI library installed, I get this on startup of a vanilla...

So we've been operational for a little over two months now and this is how we do it over here at the Liferay Dalian Office.   First we work hard:   Then we play hard:   Want to join us?...

So, in an attempt to add some stuff to my blog that I think people might enjoy, I am going to write an entry every Friday, called the Friday Funkfest. What is the Friday Funkfest, exactly? Well, one of the things I absolutely love to do is customize my Windows box with different programs, wallpapers, extensions, etc, and I love visiting really great looking sites, I thought I'd spread...

One of the most controversial things we've done for version 4.3 was to switch all of the icons to using PNG icons. This wouldn't be so bad, as IE can render PNGs with index transparency just fine. The problem comes in when you use PNGs with alpha transparency. What's the difference? There are two types of transparency when it comes to images. Index and alpha. File formats with...

A couple of days ago I was humming along working happily when suddenly, doink! The power went out. It was a beautiful bright sunny day, and so I might not have noticed right away except that my new printer (see a couple of posts down) clicked and when I looked over at it, I saw that the little blue power light was out. When I looked back at my machine, my screen had dimmed. I was on...