slaggle dot com

This week keeps getting more and more interesting. I can’t talk about a lot of it yet, but hopefully soon some shiny new things will be happening in the odd life of Tim Gourley.

We confirmed our travel plans for late October: Lori and I will be travelling to the southern parts of Texas to help Lisa and Eric move out of their condo and into their newly-built house on October 21st. We plan on driving to Oklahoma on the 20th and staying with my mother that night. We’ll get up early the next morning and drive to Rockport (near Corpus Christi). That’s a 12 hour drive so it should prove interesting. Once we get there we’ll stay a couple days and be put to work. Oh, the things I do for family. It will be a fun trip.

Last weekend Lori and I went to see “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow”. It’s a pretty good movie and I recommend it. The visuals were really cool and the fact that the entire movie was filmed in front of a blue screen gave it a nice, consistent look. The plotline was very entertaining but I felt that I’ve seen too many anime shows that did the exact same thing. Sky Captain isn’t the best movie in the world but it is pretty darn entertaining if you look past the over-used plot and a few minor continuity flubs. I thought the acting was well-done and the fact that there’s no nudity or bad language was a big plus. Anymore a movie like Sky Captain is a rare thing indeed.

I probably won’t be posting much for the next several days. I picked up a copy of Stephen King’s “Dark Tower 7: The Dark Tower” on Tuesday and I’m fervently reading in anticipation of the end. Reading big-big. So far I’ve avoided reading spoilers online and I refuse to read the last page until all the others are read first. I’ve been entrenched in the world of sai King’s Dark Tower for 14 years now when I picked up the first two books in paperback, and ever since I’ve waited patiently for the series to be completed. Now, the final tome has been released and I can’t wait to finish!! It’s a big moment for this geek, if it do ya fine.

Unti later then my ka-mais, long days and pleasant nights!

Firefox 1.0PR includes an excellent new feature called Live Bookmarks. What that means is that any web site that has an RSS feed can be bookmarked and the links will be kept up-to-date. This is really cool for getting the latest headlines from your favorite websites such as CNN or Slashdot.

I wanted to take this a step further. I surf the web from at least four different machines, and on each one I have to maintain a seperate list of bookmarks on Firefox. It’s getting hard to maintain since I visit a large variety of sites on a daily basis. This new RSS feature gives us an easy way to keep those bookmarks in a central place so you don’t have to type in all those URL’s a million times.

So what is RSS? It stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and was created as a means for sites to share links to specific articles, weblog posts, etc. For example you might see someone take the headlines and links from Slashdot and post them on their own site. I won’t get into it too much, but a basic history of RSS is available on XML.com.

Firefox takes the RSS feeds from a website, and stores them so that the latest headlines show up as bookmarks, making it super easy to keep updated on the latest stories. So why not create an RSS feed of all your bookmarks and store them for you?

In order to do that, you need to know the basics of the RSS standard. An RSS 2.0 file will look something like this:


<rss version=”2.0″ xmlns:dc=”http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/”>
  <channel>
    <title>Main Bookmarks</title>
    <link>http://www.slaggle.com</link>
    <description>Main Bookmarks</description>
    <language>en-us</language>
    <item>
      <title>Google</title>
      <link>http://www.google.com</link>
      <description>The Best Search Engine Out there</description>
      <dc:creator>Google</dc:creator>
      <dc:date>2004-09-17</dc:date>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Google Groups</title>
      <link>http://www.google.com/grphp?hl=en&amp;tab=wg&amp;q=</link>
      <description>The Best Search Engine Out there</description>
      <dc:creator>Google</dc:creator>
      <dc:date>2004-09-17</dc:date>
    </item>
  </channel>
</rss>


I saved this file on my webserver in a “bookmarks” directory as bookmarks.rss and created an “index.html” file in the same directory that references it with a special link tag:


<link rel="alternate" title="Main Bookmarks"
href="//slaggle.com/bookmarks/bookmarks.rss" type="application/rss+xml" />


You can see the results of it by visiting my bookmarks page. Go to View -> Page Source to view the source code. You can see that I set up five different categories of links. Main bookmarks, My Sites, Weblogs, Web Comics, and Forums.

Once I got all that set up, I created a new bookmark folder in Firefox called “Live Bookmarks” and then clicked on the RSS icon on the lower right-hand corner of the screen. It gave me a screen like this:

I clicked on each one individually and added them to the Live Bookmarks folder. Click here for see the final result.

Now whenever I want to add a new bookmark, I just add an “item” entry to one of the RSS files and I’ll be able to access the bookmark on any machine I work from. It’s very convenient if not a little awkward to set up (unless you’re a web/xml fiend like I am).

If you don’t want to go through the pain of setting this up yourself, you can sign up for services such as http://del.icio.us/ which will manage your bookmarks and set up the RSS feeds for you. All you have to do is subscribe through Firefox. It’s that easy!

I think if this gets too unmanageable for me I’ll create a PHP interface for managing the feeds automatically, but for now I’m pretty happy editing the RSS files directly especially since they don’t change that often.

This is a pretty geeky entry, so if the thought of reading about programming languages and technology bores you, you might want to skip this post and read something more entertaining.

That said, onto the post. Lori and I were both on call this weekend and spent most of the weekend trying to quiet beeping pagers. Sadly, flushing them down the toilet wasn’t an option and Lori spent a lot of time on the phone with various managers and people trying to get stuff sorted out. Oddly enough my pager was silent. Very odd considering that mine usually goes off non-stop and hers is usually the quiet one.

Anyway, while she did that I spent a lot of time programming. As I mentioned before, I’m trying to learn how to effectively use Jakarta Struts to build web applications in Java. Armed with the awesome IDE Eclipse, an excellent Struts plugin, and my handy Struts in Action book, I set off to build the skeleton for what will eventually be the manager for the new price guide.

I have to say I absorbed a LOT of information this weekend, and even managed to learn how to effectively use a system called Hibernate, which is an Object/Relational Mapper, abbreviated ORM. Basically it allows you to map your database tables onto useable Java classes via an XML mapping, JavaBeans, and some utility Java classes. So instead of accessing JDBC directly and writing SQL queries, I can do the following:


List users = UsersService.getInstance().getUsersList(1);
String firstName = (Users)users.get(0).getFirstName();


That queries the database for the row with the user_id=1, and populates the string firstName with the first_name from the database. It’s pretty neat, if you ask me. The UsersService class is a class you have to create that has all the basic CRUD elements (Create, Read, Update, Delete) so all you do is call the methods contained within. It’s uber-geeky and I dig it.

So I’ve been able to create the basic framework for priceguide admins to login. Now that I know how to use the tools, the rest will be pretty easy to code. I can’t wait!!

Now that Labor Day is past us, we can look forward to college football season in full swing, the temperatures cooling off as the descent into autumn begins, and shorter days. It’s the time of year where things begin to wind down and settle into the coziness of a warm fire on a cold winter day.

This Labor Day weekend we didn’t do much of anything, which was a welcome change. Lori didn’t have to work late, neither of us had our duty pagers, and we had absolutely no obligations. So we stayed at home all weekend and enjoyed the rest. I did some yardwork, which was my major thing. The rain kept me from mowing the lawn last week so it was getting kind of high and unsightly. Now it looks nice and trim again.

I spent a lot of time learning how to use Jakarta Struts, which is a framework for building web applications with Java. I got a book called Struts in Action that helps a lot. Lori’s learning how to use Flash MX so she can program some nifty games and stuff.

This weekend we also watched a lot of television. Flame of Recca is a manga series we’ve been reading for a while (it’s up to volume 7 right now) and I recently found a subtitled release of the anime so we’ve been watching that. Hopefully someone will pick it up and officially release it in the USA.

That’s really about it. Things have been pretty normal. Hopefully I’ll have some fun stuff for a future update. If I get the chance I want to do some more geocaching this week. The last time we did some caching was when Heathe came to visit a few weeks ago.