Too few hours in the day //Jafoca.com

During my collegiate experience at Hope College I took a class in Databases under Dr. McFall.  During that class we were tasked with utilizing MSSQL and MYSQL along with Java for the more practical portions.

The class wrapped up with a major project in which we were supposed to implement an inventory management system for a make-believe video store.  My group chose to use JSP for this because of an ingrained dislike for the Swing layout system utilized by normal java.

One of the major problems I saw with doing this project with JSP was that php or asp web apps were much more common, and jsp had special server requirements that made hosting cost more than double standard linux hosting. ($18+/month compared to 7$/month) That has changed.

Anyhow that project ended in disaster (but hey!  I graduated!) and at this point I am not keen on touching java ever again, but I did just run across this information that might be interesting to somebody.

Mochahost provides a really decent hosting package for JSP in the range of $6-$10 per month.  That is quite a low number compared to those I have seen before.  Note - you do need to select one of their higher level plans, the basic SOHO will not do.

A Note: Anybody coding JSP or anything databasey in java should give up and switch to Ruby on Rails.  You will see why right away.

I have just been listening to the google Chrome press event live as it has been happening, and I have to say that I am indeed impressed.  The new browser looks pretty amazing, and while I personally do not do much web app development, I am really looking forwards to trying it out for its increased stability and speed.

One funny thing…. at the end of the presentation the google gears download site went live and i found quite the google glitch.  This screencap shows their broken download link =(

This may be the biggest software news this week!  oh wait….

//edit//

The download is now working.  Get it here

So what happens when Internet services are combined with a search engine and a command prompt?  Mash up goodness.

Ubiquity is a new FireFox mashup engine of sorts that allows users to on the fly generate mashups of Internet services that operate with XML RPC calls.  Basically it allows data to be pulled together from different sources to create what is called a mash up.  My favorite mashup example is Whrr.  Whrrl is a mashup of google maps and a database of points of interest, allowing for the bookmarking and logging of reviews for places such as restaurants and businesses.  Once combined with an iphone client application, you can also track your current location and make that info free to your friends to use.  So mashups are pretty cool.

But how does Ubiquity play into this?  Ubiquity is a firefox plugin that allows on the fly generation of mashups from a command line like utility.  Now, mashups are not specifically easy to generate even for a somewhat skilled programmer.  They require knowledge of the API interfaces of the services you would like to mash up, which can be a challenge.  Ubiquity eliminates some of these challenges by doing the mashing up part for you.  The demos of Ubiquity that I have seen can take a snippet from a website and email it to a contact in gmail with the simple command “mail to ‘contact’”.  Essentially it is supposed to know what you want to do, which is the remarkable part.

It supposedly can do just about anything from posting to a blog to inserting maps and restaurant reviews into email.  But the versatility of mashups come at a price - usability is still nowhere even close to what the common Internet user can handle.  It is a good step, but in time it will need to be better.

So yesterday we discovered a bug in the Blue Sky Sessions website.  I think that I probably introduced it when I was fiddling with getting our contact form looking pretty last week, although I have no idea how as the contact form is not presented with the portfolio where the bug occurred.  The bug consisted of the entire layout being shifted to the left hand side of the screen from its normal centered position, quite embarrassing.  It only happened in IE, and was only on one of our pages.

Anyhow - I took to looking at the code and found that structurally the template was exactly the same as the other pages, so it should have been centered.  I really could not find this bug!  Getting frustrated, I asked Barry (my boss / coworker) to have a look at it.  After deleting most of the page he noticed that I was missing an HTML DOCTYPE declaration.  Yuck.

He put this in and of course (silly me, I should have thought of that…) it worked.  The doctype tells the browser how to parse the HTML code, I did not realize that it had actual importance to interpretation so I was not too attentive to it in the past.

An example doctype declaration is:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”>

So anyway, if you are having goofy HTML bugs then be sure to check out your doctype.  An excellent reference for anything HTML is w3schools.