Shay’s Blog

I went through the article. The Ajax Toolkit Framework (ATF) is nice. It supports dojo, rico, and zimbra. The code snippets are a nice feature. I built the tree view example which uses dojo in the example. I am going to try it ATF more.

The installation was a bit tedious. I installed using these steps, but ensure you have the eclipse and web project toolkit (WTP) plug-in installed. If you do not you can download it here.

• Download and extract XULRunner into its own directory.
• Open dos window
• Change to the directory you put XULRunner in
• Run xulrunner –register-global
• Run xulrunner –register-user
• Download and extract Tomcat 5.5 into its own directory
• Download Sysdeo 3.2 beta 3 plug-in
• Extract it to the your eclipse plug-in directory
• Start eclipse
• Then open window, preferences, tomcat
• Select tomcat 5.5
• Put the tomcat directory in the tomcat home field
• Hit apply and okay
• Download ATF
• In eclipse Select Help, Software Updates, Find and Install…
• Select Search for new features to install
• Select Next
• Select New Archived Site
• Select the directory that you downloaded ATF into
• Select Finish
• Ensure all ATF features are selected
• Follow the remaining prompts to install ATF
• Stop eclipse
• Then follow the final steps here
• Start eclipse using the –clean option

Congrats you are now good to go using ATF.

The 30 days of no restaurant is ending tonight.  I am glad we did it.  It has caused me to be much more cognizant of what I am eating.  Plus I have been cooking a whole lot more.  I plan on continuing this trend.  Though some good Indian food is sounding really good right about now.  I need to weight myself tomorrow morning.  I am afraid the weight loss I initially had were wiped by Thanksgiving.  I am still hopeful though.

I recently started watching The Charlie Rose show. He has some very good guests and is a great interviewer. I was watching today’s show, and the first segment’s guest was Amory Lovins. I have never heard of him, but what he was saying caused me to take notice. He is a physicist and an environmentalist. He proposes a switch in energy that is both clean, but creates a positive cash flow over current energy costs. His solutions are based on more efficient use of energy and different energy sources. The main energy savings in (more…)

Since I moved the directory that my blog was in, the caching plugin was not working. I finally spent some time troubleshooting it. The problem was the symbolic link that it needed to work. I got that working and reenabled the caching. I am happy to report it is working now. The pages should load a lot faster now.
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I finished reading Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.  It is an interesting read.  There is a chapter on drug dealers.  It is fascinating analysis about how the drug dealing organization is structured a lot like corporate America.  There is a lot of money being earned at the high levels, but the lower levels operators live a very meager existence.  There is another chapter about how legalized abortion caused the crime rate to decline.  I am not sure how much I but into this theory, but it is thought provoking nevertheless.  It is well written and definitely worth a read.

This is a very funny video that makes you feel bad for the kid. I doubt he wanted it shown to the world.

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It has been a while since I have posted.  Alicia and I went drove down to San Antonio to have Thanksgiving with her family.  I met one of her sisters that I have not met before.  We watch the horns play dreadfully against A&M.  Wow, did the offense look bad.  We came back to Dallas on Friday after watching the game.  We were in Bulverde so we drove up 281 to Lampasses.  Wow, I had forgotten how pretty the Hill Country is.  We hung at home the rest weekend.

We did some serious cooking on Sunday.  We made chicken-fried steak.  I make it the breading with half flour and half garlic power which gives it a great taste.  We also roasted brussel sprouts, stir-fried cabbage, and made gravy.  I had never successfully made scratch cream gravy before.  I was successful with some coaching from Alicia.  I also had never made a pie before so on Saturday I made a coconut-crème pie.  Then on Sunday I made a chocolate meringue pie.  They turned out really good.  They were easier than I thought.  I made a butter pastry crust for them.

I just saw this notice. Robert Altman has died at the age of 81. He was one of my favorite directors. His film credits include: The Player, MASH, and Prairie Home Companion. He is tied for the lead in most Best Director Oscar nominations without winning one with five nominations. You can read more about it here:  http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/obit_altman

I cannot believe that longhorns managed to lose to KSU on Saturday. The score was 42-45. If you score 42 points then you should win the game. Your defense if you are a top-five ranked team should be able to keep your opponent from scoring 42 points. The longhorn defense got smoked is the only way to describe the game. The secondary has been suspect against Baylor and Texas Tech. They looked very good last weekend against Oklahoma State so I was very hopeful that they had turned the corner. Aaron Ross who I have given some great praises to got burned on several occasions. Colt McCoy who was on track to break the NCAA passing touchdown record got knocked in the first quarter with a shoulder stinger. He still needs two more touchdown passes to tie the record. The defense has plenty of time to heal some and regroup against A&M.

I stepped up last week and redid a task that was not mine at work.  Somehow I managed to inherent another problem that could not be reproduced on my development machine. I decided to not fight with the piece that I think was causing the issue and work around it by leveraging the DWR piece I wrote to handle another part of the solution. I feel good, but I am sleepy since I woke up this morning at 5 and could not get back to sleep. It is going to be a long day since I have my Dale Carnegie call from 5:30 to 9:00.