(hey I haven’t posted in forever, but since I actually had something to share…)

I was looking for any information about getting BlazeDS running locally on my Mac to take a stab at learning Flex remoting, and I found this nice tutorial over at Coding Cowboys, but got disappointed when I realized that while the author was working on Leopard, he was actually setting up BlazeDS on a linux server.

But in my normal “oh this should be pretty easy” fashion which has on other occasions brought down the boot sectors of powerful hard drives, I decided that following the instructions on the page would just work on a mac too.

And it did!

It should be pretty clear why I’m just not sending you on to the aforementioned post if you go look at it - he’s also setting up Amazon EC2 webservices, which I’m not as interested in at the moment. Also, I’d like to just play with Flex remoting for a minute at home, so I don’t need to get a server involved. Especially since I have this handy unix workstation right here on my desk.

Ok, no more silly patter. Here’s how to set up BlazeDS on your intel-based mac running Leopard. I should also mention that I have the developer tools installed, but I don’t know that that makes a difference.

Getting BlazeDS running on Leopard

1. Download the turn-key package
2. unzip it to a directory — /blaze is good. You now have a folder at the Root lavel of Macintosh HD called blaze.

   If that “unzip it to a directory” direction is alienating to you, just double click on the zip, let Mac OS unzip it for you, and rename the directory to blaze and move it to the top of the Macintosh HD. Pretty much the same thing.

3. In terminal, go to that dir - ls /blaze (just for fun maybe - I’m terrible at doing commands like sudo ./blaze/tomcat/bin/startup.sh … I usually just cd to the directory and do ./startup.sh)
4. You need to issue two commands in terminal:

   ./blaze/tomcat/bin/startup.sh

   and

   ./blaze/sampledb/startdb.sh

   Note - when executing these commands either from the root (/) which is the command above, or from the directory they’re in, you still need the leading ./ — so if you’re in the /blaze/tomcat/bin directory, the command to start tomcat is ./startup.sh, not startup.sh which will give you an error.

   Note #2 - You can close the terminal window. It says “hey, closing this will end processes running blah blah blah” but BlazeDS still works after you close the window. If you’re just playing around, it might be worth leaving it open since it tells you in the console output how to shut the server down.

5. open http://127.0.0.1:8400/ in a web browser.
6. Play with the pretty flex remoting demos.
7. Learn everything else. =)

I’ve been getting a lot more into — I don’t know how to put it — doing things? So I’ve started spending more time learning stuff, making things — mostly web pages and crap. But it’s toward building more interesting web applications, and I’m looking at and working through a lot of different stuff — CSS, javascript & DOM, ruby/rails, java & jsp (that’s for work, really) and even some computational graphics type stuff.

So to sort of glaze over my experiences, I spend a lot of time reading words written by people who are totally in the mix, right? I mean I basically at this point am the creepy paparazzi skulking in the alley out side of Web 2.0, Inc. picking up every little scrap those fat-cat bastards throw away.

So it’s kind of funny to eavesdrop on another group’s conversation and hear something that is so outside of the above referenced mix that the people having the conversation seem to be well, mentally impaired.
(more…)

It had never occurred to me to look on YouTube for el-p videos, but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. This is a nice clip of J and Aesop Rock doing a live bit in a record store.

And — I guess no surprise — the comments are the usual battle of racism vs reality with mediocrity holding sway.

This is also nice: Deep Space 9mm (live)

YouTube - David Bowie ~ Ashes To Ashes 80s RETRO

Test Post

DreamHost Flash Tools
What I really care a bit about I think is…

Flash Image Rotator
The Flash Image Rotator enables you to show several photos in sequence with fluid transitions between them. It supports rotation of an RSS/XSPF playlist with JPG/GIF/PNG images, a wide range of flashvars (settings) for tweaking both behavior and appearance and an extensive, documented javascript/actionscript API.

You’ll need to create a XML playlist (here’s the one for our slideshow above) for any images that you wish to use, but it’s really not that hard and the comprehensive documentation in our wiki will have you up and running in no time!

NASA - NASA Images Suggest Water Still Flows in Brief Spurts on Mars

NASA photographs have revealed bright new deposits seen in two gullies on Mars that suggest water carried sediment through them sometime during the past seven years.”These observations give the strongest evidence to date that water still flows occasionally on the surface of Mars,” said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, Washington.

Is all you need to know. For example, if you need to refresh on how position: whatever works, just go to http://cssdocs.org/position.
cssdocs.org — thanks and a tip of the hat to Pete Freitag.

PERL One Liners

Just enough PERL to do almost anything. Except help me debug this script:

I thought I understood this to be opening the file of image urls, and then [int rand(@LINES)] picked one line to print out as a Location http header. Well, I found this page while I was googling my problem, and thought it looked like it was worth saving, since PERL is an eternal mystery to me.

When I am old I will be Santa Klaus.

I just wanted to test this new plug-in I got called Flickr Photo Album, actually.

It seems to work, yay.

Feeling your way around grids : Articles : Mark Boulton

From Atheism, not religion, is the real force behind the mass murders of history:

These figures are tragic, and of course population levels were much lower at the time. But even so, they are minuscule compared with the death tolls produced by the atheist despotisms of the 20th century. In the name of creating their version of a religion-free utopia, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong produced the kind of mass slaughter that no Inquisitor could possibly match. Collectively these atheist tyrants murdered more than 100 million people.

Although D’Souza has a relatively good counter to the anti-religion arguments that Dawkins et. al. are advancing, I think he’s missing a larger picture. Dawkins in particular is advocating for atheism over religion certainly, but more that that he is looking for a world where rational analysis and a population guided by their own internal reason are liberated from the constraints placed on them by irrational and subjective dogmas.

Although axis of evil revision 1.5 (revised at the end of the 20th Century to be Hitler-Stalin-Mao, with Mussolini and Hirohito and others removed by a combination of absolution and amnesia) is on the surface a trifecta of religious eradication, the goal of each regime is better understood as attempting to abruptly replace their own culture’s traditional religions with a secular state religion.

It is unfair from this point of view then, to characterize these modern despots as atheist in the operative sense of the word. While they may have sought to eradicate belief in God, they also wished to infuse the state with a mystical quality and god-like properties - Hitler’s Vaterland, and the Marxist Candy Apple Mountains of Communism as practiced in the USSR and China.

Moreover, many of the conflicts that are counted as “religious wars” were not fought over religion. They were mainly fought over rival claims to territory and power….The same is true today. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not, at its core, a religious one. It arises out of a dispute over self-determination and land. Hamas and the extreme orthodox parties in Israel may advance theological claims - “God gave us this land” and so forth - but the conflict would remain essentially the same even without these religious motives. Ethnic rivalry, not religion, is the source of the tension in Northern Ireland and the Balkans.

Here I think D’Souza is right on target, and I wish this meme would get more play in mainstream news analysis. Most of the conflicts that get play as religious conflicts are most definitely economic, historical and cultural rather than religious per se, but the common wisdom is that the conflicts are religious in nature.To tie this back to my first point, framing the conflicts as religious in nature essentially paints them as irrational, and thus suggests from the outset that resolution is close to impossible, because how can we ever reconcile the beliefs of two different religions?

But in reality, most of these conflicts are resolvable in the long term as long as the actual underlying problems are addressed. Unfortunately the hardest things to resolve are historical — when talking to stakeholders in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I’m often dumbfounded by how historical (and thus divergent) the grievances of the various factions are. And if you can’t even get agreement on what the wrongs to be righted are, then there’s a real problem.

But the first step to solving a problem is to analyze it rationally, break it down into it’s components and attempt to find the best strategy to reach a solution. If I may submit, in most cases, an irrational or emotional player will be able to subvert any attempt to find a solution to a social problem, and although the conflicts being discussed are not religious at their core it is the presence of religion and associated emotional pressures that can keep a conflict from being resolved.

Which I believe in a roundabout is the type of argument Mr. Dawkins is advancing in his book.

OS X Daily » Ten OS X Command Line Utilities you might not know about

8. screencapture
screencapture offers a more advanced way (over command-shift-3) to take screen captures. To use it, open up your Terminal.app and try typing screencapture -iW ~/Desktop/screen.jpg. It will bring up a camera icon that is waiting to be clicked on a window. Once clicked, a file on your desktop called “screen.jpg” will be created that will contain a snapshot of whatever window you clicked on. You can of course, also take a snapshot of your entire screen by typing screencapture -S ~/Desktop/screen.jpg.

Boing Boing called her PJ Harvey + Freddy Mercury. I told Kathy that and she said “you mean like Kate Bush?” And we listened and Kathy said: “interesting. I guess PJ Harvey + Freddy Mercury = Kate Bush.”

But does Kate Bush - Freddy Mercury = Sophe Lux?

TemplateWorld has a page of free website wemplates that are very nice, and have “Valid XHTML And CSS.” I put that in scare quotes since I haven’t really checked myself, but the templates do seem pretty well made. It’s a teaser to get you to buy a subscription to their premium template downloading service but in all honesty, at US$50 for six-months of access, it’s actually not such a bad deal since they have literally tons of templates in their members only area.

Web Page Layout Grid | Smiley Cat Web Design

Nice Grid for doing css design.

On Color « Digital World

So you’d like to build/design your own website. More often than not, choosing the right color(s) may not be so straight forward. Did you know that there are dozens of websites, softwares and online services that would make your job much much easier. Here are a few of those.

Oman3D:

In this tutorial you will learn how to create a reusable flash that can be configured through the HTML of the page displaying the SWF file. Using the technique you will be able to use one single SWF file for all your buttons in a single page.

This is one of those things that I’ve tried to do a couple times, but it never worked out…and truth be told, after reading the tutorial I’m not sure what I was doing wrong (maybe I wasn’t passing the variable to the swf the right way).

Anyway, it’s cool to see it work. Now I need to figure out how to force justify the single word in the button, and actually get the text how I want.

VisualHub: The Universal Video Converter for Mac.

inkBlots
Google Reader FeedBurner: Create The Ultimate Reading List

Zombie Robot » wp_quotes: Random Quote Plugin

This plugin, I like.

I was having trouble with my two-column fixed layout, until I read How To Clear Floats Without Structural Markup over at position is everything.

I found some helpful advice on how to make a submit button into CSS styled text.

Even though I still don’t feel like I totally get descendant selectors, I appreciated the article at maxdesign all the same.

Let me give a quick shout out to the date entry from the PHP manual.

I’m going to point out that I also really appreciated ma ’s pages Listamatic and Floatuorial.
It was east to get distracted by tangents on the Sitepoint CSS Forum.

I was looking for some information on how to style lists and blockquotes (I’m getting a little annoyed with them — I can’t figure out how to change their default indentations, and browsers give them way to much vertical space.

I found this nice site (or 5 sites) by maxdesign that look pretty helpful. At least they should help me figure out my list problems, if nothing else. And the Floatutorial: Step by step CSS float tutorial looks like required reading since I just got a headache from trying to figure out how to clear the floats in the new layout I’m working on.

Nice CSS tutorial, aimed at designers. Mostly nice because it gives tips on how to translate page layout concepts to CSS.

CSS From the Ground Up

Can you tell I’m working on a website?

From Republicans look to Reagan era for inspiration (Yahoo! News):

But Joe Barton of Texas, also considering joining the House Republican leadership race, doesn’t see the party of Reagan as extreme.”Our party does not suffer the affliction of being a boiling mad collection of fringe interests with notions so cockeyed that they ultimately rub each other rawand make average Americans cringe,” Barton said. “Republicans will never be that.“

That is so awesome I can’t even stand it. Good luck getting your party back together — with your eye on the ball like that, nothing can get in your way.

Pete Freitag posted this awesome list forever ago:

1. Rounded Corners
2. Rounded Corners without images
3. Creating a Netflix style star ratings
4. Tableless forms
5. Styling Lists with CSS
6. 2 Column Layout Technique
7. 3 Column Layout with CSS
8. 3 Column Fixed width centered layout
9. Printing with CSS
10. Adding a CSS stylesheet to an RSS feed
11. Footer Stick
12. CSS Element Hover Effect
13. Styling Horizontal Rules
14. Clearing Floats
15. CSS Popups
16. Box Punch
17. CSS Badge
18. Orange RSS Buttons with pure CSS
19. 10 CSS Tricks you may not know
20. 10 More CSS Tricks you may not know

I just discovered his blog, but now his feed is one of my favorite subscriptions.

Thanks Pete!

I finally found out how to center divs on a page. I feel so stupid for not finding it earlier:

Max Design - CSS Centering - fun for all!

Theoretically, you should be able to apply auto margins to the left and right of the containing block and it should center on the page.

The W3C Visual formatting model states: “If both ‘margin-left’ and ‘margin-right’ are ‘auto’, their used values are equal. This horizontally centers the element with respect to the edges of the containing block.”

So, a containing block should be able to be centered using the following rules:

div#container
{
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
width: 50em;
}

A very funny satirical(?) essay from a recent Harpers: On Simple Human Decency

I hardly mean to imply that George W. Bush is a delusional party hack whose aim is to rob and mislead us for the benefit of his friends. That idea deserves to be stated outright: George W. Bush is a delusional party hack whose aim is to rob and mislead us for the benefit of his friends.

Recommended.

BibliOdyssey: Pantagruel I

Pantagruel is a great collection of crazy creatures. Just looking a it I thought it beat the clap-trap in most of the Fantasy RPGs I’ve played. Some game company should give this stuff serious attention.

I knew if I googled this enough times I’d eventually find the rigth answer. This is totally the right answer.

Fixing the MT bookmarklet for Safari :: The Daily Journey :: JayAllen.org

Change:

t=d.selection?d.selection.
createRange().text:d.getSelection();

To:

t=getSelection();