The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.

The LookupDispatchAction is a useful feature of the Struts framework that allows you to handle multiple submit buttons on the same form. Unfortunately, there’s not a whole lot of information online on using this with XDoclet. While it’s not difficult to do, it’s not clearly spelled out anywhere either:

@struts.action path="/test" name="MyForm"
input="/test.jsp" parameter="method"

The parameter attribute sets everything into motion.

Google now has personalization. I’m constantly impressed by their JavaScript magic to do all sorts of neat user-interface tricks. This time it’s drag and drop to move logic divisions around.

I had a particularly unique situation at work this morning, being a Java developer, and having to debug Perl SOAP Lite code on Fedora Core 3 to connect to an ASP.NET WSDL Service for the PlanetJam Media Group and their StickyFish client. This is my first time touching the SOAP protocol layer directly, but it was similar enough to XML-RPC to pick up rather quickly. And the SOAP Lite interface for Perl is not that much different from the PEAR SOAP package for PHP, which I do have experience with.

But in the process of installing the required Perl library dependencies, I realized just how inadequate the official Red Hat repository is as far as package availability. I finally took the plunge and tried the DAG Apt/Yum RPM Repository. It’s a little nostalgic running apt on a Red Hat work box now, especially after running Debian on my home system all these years. But it just goes to show that all these Linux distributions collaborate and share the best of each other’s open soruce technologies to make a better operating system for everyone.

Last weekend I was down in Mobile, Alabama to visit the family for Mother’s Day. I brought back with me two Pentium workstations, one of which has already turned into a dedicated Windows XP box. A D-Link four port KVM is currently being used to switch between my Linux and Windows machines, and it’s nice to be able to offload some of my VMWare tasks to another machine. Productivity has doubled.

Though I’m winning the battle, I feel as though I’m losing the war. My idea for a Vonage Thunderbird Click2Call extension has already been implemented. The Linux Journal recently published an article on writing a compiler front-end for GCC, and thus rejected my article proposal on a very similar topic. And I’m still waiting to hear from Dr. Dobbs Journal on a cornerstone article submission on digital signal processing. To top it all off, a very involved publication for IBM DeveloperWorks hangs in the balance. It’s the one I’m most worried about, and the deadline is fast approaching.

Boycotting Cinco de Mayo, the Atlanta bloggers all got together at Manuel’s Tavern. This group just keeps getting bigger and bigger, and I can’t even keep track of everyone anymore. On the plus side, Mark did finally make an appearance, as well as the seemingly random Jessica, who turned out to be not so random after all. They do have nachos, and the food is actually affordable for my skimpy college budget. And as traditions go, the sharpie marker and napkin has once again returned, with all the details, including favorite Simpsons quotes. Lori, Lady Crumpet and Hollis MB have much more informative posts. Will add all the names to my blogroll sometime early next week when I get back to Atlanta.

If I had to write an entire entry for every interesting article or site that I encountered during my daily research, I’d never find any time to actually do the research itself. Still, I’d like to be able to provide my readers with a glimpse into the type of work that I do on a regular basis.

More importantly, I’d like to have some sort of searchable resource reference and reading queue. I literally visit hundreds of sites in a single day with the intention of reading them later, only to completely forget what I was even doing the next morning. Essentially, what I need is an advanced version of Firefox’s tabbed browsing. And that’s the motivation for the anti-social bookmark system.

Inspired by del.icio.us, and its open source clone, Rubric, I recently added social bookmarking functionality to the website. The framework is based on the open source Scuttle package, using PHP decorators on top of the original code to enable tight integration with the site.

While I do lose most of social bookmarking aspects with Scuttle, it does have some clear advantages, namely, the ability to avoid storing your bookmarks in a third-party, proprietary system. Though del.icio.us is an excellent system, my unfortunate experiences in the past few years have shown that free services have one of three endings: they either transition into a pay service, become advertising heavy, or just simply go backrupt after reaching critical exposure.

Thanks to Marcus for designing the initial Scuttle software. Building and customizing from open source components, even if in alpha status, is much, much simpler than writing solutions from scratch. Let’s see how this experiment works out.