James Carr

Sorry eclipse, but it was bound to happen. I installed eclipse on my laptop awhile back and had been suffering somewhat harsh just trying to prevent it from running out of PermGen space (yep, read all the docs, and verified that I was giving it more memory through the about section… it saw my changes). It’s always been a fight just making the bloody thing work right (it’s fine on my desktop though) and have been basically forced to restart glassfish before each redeployment.. argh!!!!

So, I suffered again trying to make eclipse work right on my laptop and spent a good two hours in eclipse irc channels… although I received lots of help and pointers, sadly nothing resolved my issue. Finally, I decided to give netbeans a try and, thank God, I don’t have any issues yet… I’ve done my 300th deployment now and no memory warnings, no bumps. And even better, redeployments seem to go pretty smoothly and take a couple seconds to do.

And gotta love HTTP monitor.

Lately (thanks to Spring) I’ve been toying with dynamic languages a little bit running on top of java. I haven’t delved into JRuby on Rails yet, but I have been using them as scripted beans injected into java classes, largely in a way that exposes an application API to either a scripted environment, or to take advantage of their dynamic features. I have always loved Groovy, Ruby, and Javascript for two things: closures and the ability to add methods to a class at runtime. Something strikes me as great being able to to code something like:

tomorrow = 1.day.from.now;

Being able to write code that is so expressive like that is somewhat satisfactory, and I like being able to quickly prototype ideas with out the painful build process JEE development always entails. Let’s face it… JEE development is sometimes overly complex. Maybe we overcomplicate things by making or programs too abstract. Maybe we just need better “killer frameworks” to minimize the “plumbing work” (this is why I like Spring). Although the Ruby zealots will brag about what a breeze development is, imho they miss the point that the reason it’s such a breeze is because Ruby on Rails takes away all the boring work. Recently I almost felt like JEE is getting close while doing a Stuts 2 + Spring 2 + JPA + AJAX tutorial. Maybe we need Spring on Rails.

I don’t know… maybe I’m rambling, maybe Dave Thomas, Bob Martin and all are right saying “Java is the new COBOL.” Maybe JEE just needs to adapt to keep up with high paced development.

One thing is for sure… each time I use scripted beans with JRuby and Groovy to quickly prototype ideas I can’t help but think to myself, “Why not just write applications like that?”

Been suffering a complete lack of inspiration lately trying to come up with a new layout for my blog. Everytime I sit down and start coding or applying a theme, I just plain out lose interest or don’t come up with something that grand.

Anyhow, I’ve been scavaging the the net for some layout inspiration, and thought I’d post some of my favorite CSS sites, both from what I knew of before and what I recently came across:

• Nice Stylesheet
• CSS Vault
• CSS Beauty

And of course let’s not forget my old favorite, CSS Zengarden!

Hopefully I’ll get past this CSS “Writers Block” sometime soon.

There’s one thing that has always made me disgruntled about online video… the unavailability of captions for the hearing impaired. What astounds me is that, as long as streaming video has been available, content providers either still haven’t found out a way to provide closed captions or just have a complete lack of interest in providing them.

My recent upset over this issue probably stems the recent availability of some of my favorite shows online, which at first made me happy to be able to catch up on episodes I missed this season. Unfortunately, I was largely let down. NBC.com does provide captions, but only for a few shows and the quality of the captions are crappy in general. For reasons that confound me, the captions are displayed off screen and to the side, which makes it pretty difficult to read them without taking your eyes off the screen. And like I said, only a very few shows get them… the show I tuned in for, The Office, gets no captions at all. I suppose hearing impaired people aren’t supposed to be interested in comedy shows?

NBC’s attempts are noble, and better than other online content providers (which from my experience provide no captions at all), but leaves a lot to be desired. With online video expanding more and more (with webisodes, reruns, etc) one can only hope that content providers seek to provide access to those with disabilities rather than bar them from enjoying the same content like everyone else.

This may come as a result of no federal regulations in regards to online video content and closed captions, but hopefully this is a loophole that can be closed pretty soon… there really is no excuse why big television networks cannot provide the same closed captions that they provide in the original on the air broadcasts.

Edit:
From a blog on deafdc.com Shane Feldman writes about Project ReadOn, an online service that offers to caption any videos for you free of charge. Bravo!