This is a very cool web app that measures your “bandwidth speed”:http://www.speedtest.net/. Granted, there are far too many of these already on the net so why do we need one more, but give this one a try. First, it has servers all over the globe, well, the US, Europe and Australia at least, and it has a very cool interface that makes if fun to watch. The interface is actually the best part.
I am not sure where I got the link for this, but it has become my new favorite website–”The Daily WTF”:http://thedailywtf.com/default.aspx. It showcases the absurd things that happen in the world of IT, you have got to check it out. Below is just a sample of one of the stories:
The consulting company recommended a local company to do the installation and, a few weeks later, the manufacturing company had a completely non-functioning system installed. Because that didn’t meet the “marginally functioning” requirement, the consulting company was called to help.
“Oh, no, no, no, no,” the tech rep said, “our software will not work on a Hewlett Packard server! It *must* be installed on a Dell PowerEdge 4208 Server and the clients *must* be all Dell Optiplex GX150’s.”
I have been using jEdit for the past several years for all kinds of things. One of its coolest features is the plugin system. Basically, anything you need the app to do there is probably already a plugin that can do it. If you want to do Ruby programming in jEdit, there is now a plugin for that as well–the “jEdit Ruby Editor Plugin”:http://rubyjedit.org/.
Features include:
* Method completion and integrated Ruby docs
* Syntax error highlighting
* Auto indent and insert end
* File structure popup
* Structure browser window
* Navigation shortcuts
The plugin does not represent a full IDE, but does provide enough functionality that for single scripts or small programs it should be all that a developer would need.
As far as I can tell, the move has been a success. The site was down for a few hours, but no real harm. Actually, moving a WordPress 2.0.x site was a lot easier than I thought it would be. I simply moved all the files from the old host to the new one and then uploaded the SQL file and the site just started to work. Very cool! However, if anyone notices any problem, please contact me so I can correct them.
I am moving my website from its current host, HostGator, to “DreamHost”:http://www.dreamhost.com. I am also trying to move my domain away from Network Solutions to DreamHost as well. The former move is not because of any problems I have been having with HostGator, but because I have had, for the past year, acounts with both hosting companies and am simply trying to reduce some of the overhead. So, for the next little while, site availability may be a little sporadic as I do the move and figure everything out.
*Update:* My initial attempts to move my domain name away from Network Solutions to DreamHost have failed. So now it is up to me to contact Network Solutions and persuade them to release my domain. Ugh 
I found a new project management web app called Unfuddled. It is similar to Tracs except that it is a hosted solution like Basecamp. And like Basecamp, it has a pricing scale starting at free and going up to $99 per month. I have not tried it yet, but the website does look promising. My only complaint against it is that you can’t link a project to an external Subversion repository. This means that if you are moving an existing project, you may loose all the history attached to your source code.
Well, the filter/interceptor solution that I found for solving the “lazy loading problem in TeamDocs”:http://www.fuzzylizard.com/archives/2006/07/29/753/ didn’t work, so I had to remove all lazy loading from the app. This took a little bit of work to get all the lazy="false" statements put in the right spots. However, it now works. This is probably not the best solution, but it is good enough for now. Once I pick a web framework I will have to revisit this.
On the other hand, The entire object graph is connected so I am not sure what the best solution is. It may simply be to load all the objects on startup and cache them in memory somewhere. Then when objects are needed, they are simply retrieved from the cache and only persisted via Hibernate when they change or objects are added. I am not sure.
As for my stupid mistake, I was trying to create directories on the file system and nothing was working. I kept getting a false result when calling dir.mkdir(). Moral of this story, always make sure you call the mkdirs() to ensure that all parent directories are created as well. I gotta read the Javadocs more often instead of just picking the first method and going with it.
As far as TeamDocs is concerned, I can once again log in, see the explorer view (the view that shows a level of directories and documents) and create a new directory. Cool, now on to uploading documents.
BTW, for anyone for whom the previous paragraphs did not make sense, TeamDocs is a document management application that I am creating. More information can be found at the “project website”:http://teamdocs.fuzzylizard.com, which is woefully un-updated and slightly out of date.