I’ve had a quick go at upgrading ClockingIT to Ruby On Rails 2.1 and the most difficult snag I ran into was a has_and_belongs_to_many relation with a symbol as the join_table parameter which suddenly lacked the downcase method, and had to be changed to a string.
Whups.
I’ve been using QProcess from QT to spawn some SSH processes in glTail, and then just using exit(1) to quit while testing.
And on thursday evening, by server ran out of memory due to ~4000 SSH processes running. Guess I should find out how to properly quit a QT application instead of just exiting. 
I’ve had a bit of fun the last week or so, and done two implementations of the same program. One in Ruby, and one in C++. The goal was to try and make a ‘pretty’ and entertaining view of the relationship between your web-pages, and where your traffic is coming from.
The Ruby version ended up dropping below 30 FPS when handling the relationships between ~90 urls, while the C++ version is at about ~800. Even though C++ is a pain to develop in compared to Ruby, I’m going to have to drop Ruby this one time due to speed.
Sun CEO sets open source Java time frame - Yahoo! News
> San Francisco (InfoWorld) - SAN FRANCISCO – Demonstrating a perhaps more aggressive path than anticipated, Sun Microsystems is set to announce the open-sourcing of the core Java platform within 30 to 60 days, Sun President and CEO Jonathan Schwartz said at the Oracle OpenWorld conference on Wednesday morning.
This means around chrismas. Will be interesting to see what comes of this.
Ajax for Java developers: Exploring the Google Web Toolkit
> The recently released Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is a comprehensive set of APIs and tools that lets you create dynamic Web applications almost entirely in Javaâ„¢ code. Philip McCarthy returns to his popular Ajax for Java developers series to show you what GWT can do and help you decide whether it’s right for you.
Still can’t decide if GWT is for you? Read this article for a good overview of the strengths and weaknesses of the framework, and you might be in a better position to make up your mind. Personally, I find it’s a bit too much like developing GUI applications, and I don’t feel too comfortable with the vendor lock-in.
Sun Denies Open Source Java Imminent
> Sun was quick to deny published reports today that it plans to open source Java in the next few months. The company is working on the project, but any transition to open source is closer to a year away.
Bugger, but I guess this will give GNU Classpath more time to play catchup, and possibly become a viable alternative to the sun stack.
While reworking my HTML in ClockingIT to support TaskList reordering with Drag and Drop, I ended up with some strange padding around empty LI’s used to make sure a tasklist never ends up empty (to work around a dropOnEmpty problem with Prototype/Scriptaculous). After several hours of trying just about everything, it seems IE decides that and empy LI needs to have some content after all, and that empty content makes IE refuse to set an height on the LI lower than the font-size inherited by the LI. Forcing
style="font-size: 1px; and line-height: 0px;"
on the empty LIs fixed the problem.
We’ve been hard at work lately and we’ve implemented a new design which we’re both very happy with. I’ve also ripped out domTT and created my own tooltips implementation, as domTT was way overkill and created all kinds of problems with stuck tooltips. I’ve also changed the ajax working indicator into something I think gives better and more natural feedback.
We’re not quite ready to make a full announcement and bring in loads of people, but if you want to take it for a spin, it’s available at ClockingIT along with more screen-shots and information.
Seems there’s an assumption in Sun Java 1.5 about window managers which causes it to bug out with Compiz & Xgl.
A temporary workaround is:
export AWT_TOOLKIT=MToolkit
or grab Compiz CVS and apply the following patches:
— dix/window.c 2006/05/29 18:12:27 1.1
+++ dix/window.c 2006/05/29 18:15:15
@ -1265,8 +1265,12 @
result = EventSelectForWindow(pWin, client, (Mask )*pVlist);
if (result)
{
- error = result;
- goto PatchUp;
+ if (vmask = SubstructureRedirectMask)
+ {
+ error = result;
+ goto PatchUp;
+ }
}
pVlist++;
break;
— src/window.c 6 Jun 2006 05:12:07 -0000 1.55
+++ src/window.c 6 Jun 2006 06:22:39 -0000
@ -2268,6 +2322,9 @
}
XConfigureWindow (w->screen->display->display, w->id, xwcm, xwc);
+
+ if (w->resName && strncmp (w->resName, “sun-awt-X11″, 11) 0)
+ sendConfigureNotify (w);
}
void
@@ -2283,6 +2340,9 @@
XMoveWindow (w->screen->display->display, w->frame,
w->attrib.x - w->input.left,
w->attrib.y - w->input.top);
+
+ if (w->resName && strncmp (w->resName, “sun-awt-X11″, 11) 0)
+ sendConfigureNotify (w);
}
}