The three minor hurdles to configuring Jetty 7 and Maven are making sure port 80 is not already taken, getting the right connector implementation configured, and running Maven as sudo so that Jetty has permission to run on Port 80. In OS X, you can see if anything is already running on port 80 by running the following command from Terminal:

If you're on OS X and see something running on Port 80 yet you didn't install a webserver, chances are it's Sharing. Go to System Preferences > Sharing and disable it. Otherwise, figure out what process is running on port 80 and make it go away.

Now to configure the Jetty Maven plug-in, here is what my configuration looks like which you should replicate in your pom.xml under the plugins section (and adjust to your particular directory structure and desired context):

One of the difficulties I encountered was getting the connector working correctly. Since Maven has moved to be an Eclipse project, the package structure for the connector has changed and thus the reason most of the existing documentation on getting custom connectors to work did not work for me.

The last remaining hurdle to overcome is that running a standard “mvn jetty:run” doesn't work on OS X (and likely Linux as well). You'll see the error message “Embedded error: Permission denied”. If you run Maven with error stacktraces enabled, you'll see an exception that looks like this:

This is because you need elevated permissions to run applications on lower ports on *nix based systems. Simply run it as sudo, “sudo mvn jetty:run” and you'll be good to go.

Not a terribly tough problem to overcome on your own, but I thought I'd try and try to save someone some time if they run across the same issues.

Luckily this is easy to install, just not terribly intuitive or easy to find as it's not a package known as dig:

That's pretty much it-- you should now be able to use dig!

Easy solution:

In the address bar of Firefox, type:

Search or scroll down to the section called "network.http.sendRefererHeader" and change this value to 1.

For some reason, this was set to 2 on my machine.

Annoying solution:

Something is probably corrupt in your Firefox profile. Given that you're the type of person who shops at newegg, AND uses firefox, you can probably figure out how to create a new profile on your own.

Anyhow, give those a try and see if they work. It's nice to be able to shop on Newegg again with Firefox!

... you've came to the right place.

There are many ways to setup your package structure under Maven2 to build EAR's, but essentially what I do is create a root level project which packages a given application into an EAR, and nothing more. Once you have the maven-ear-plugin setup for the most part, all that you need to do is to tell the Maven EAR Plugin to treat the various Axis2 pieces of shit packages like JAR's:

This is just one of many gotcha's I learned about while working on an aforementioned project. In fact it's really pretty hard to find any comprehensive documentation on getting EJB3, Spring, and Hibernate working together on JBoss with a typical Java web application, especially while using Maven. I have a sample project I used to work through some of the integration issues with this, and will hopefully be able to wrap it up and add it to Google Code in the next few weeks to provide an example of getting all of these technologies to play together.

What is MadKast? I guess I would describe it as the FeedBurner of social bookmarking & discovery-- it gives your blog readers a way to share your posts, and also supposedly gives you a way to see other sites that your readers are viewing, analytics behind what your readers are sharing with other people, etc. I haven't yet received any sort of confirmation e-mail about a way to login and view this information, but maybe that happens automagically once they have some data to work with. Until then I don't have a good idea about the latter parts, but the concept seems cool at least.

Just thinking about how functionality similar to this usually works, I fully expected to have to go download a WordPress plug-in, unzip it and SCP to my server, then enable it in WordPress and have to edit my post templates, etc. I never really looked into it because I just assumed I'd have to go through all of that work and I honestly just don't have the time or interest currently for that. I'm just spending an hour today to try and get caught-up on personal e-mail and decided to give it a whirl. When I saw that I just needed to include a link to their script, I was still a bit skeptical thinking I would still need to edit my post template to get it to work. Not so-- it literally took just a few seconds to get up and running on my blog, so color me impressed.

I'm interested to see what sort of information I can gleam from the analytics portion of MadKast, and hopefully I can start blogging somewhat more frequently soon to make that sort of thing more valuable to me. I do feel like my site is starting to get a bit widget heavy, but it still seems to load quickly for now.

Have you tried MadKast? What do you think about it? Have you seen the analytics portion of it?

Although the above instructions aren't terribly explicit, you can find the various Eclipse font settings under Eclipse > Preferences > General > Apperance > Colors and Fonts once you've installed the font and made the appropriate changes to your System Preferences.

1. Adblock Plus

Ever been to a Sys-Con site unprotected by this add-on? Bad idea. Personally I do white list some of the ad networks like Google Ads because I don't mind them, but this add-on does help a lot with the really annoying and hijacking type ads.

2. Adblock Filterset.G Updater

Keeps Adblock Plus up to date with fresh blocked URL's.

3. Add Bookmark Here

Makes bookmarking in folders and sub-folders much easier.

4. Allow Right Click

Not sure how effective this is, but what the heck.

5. BugMeNot

Fills in pre-registered account information at "registration required" sites.

6. ColorZilla

Allows you to get the RGB and Hex value of any color via a eye dropper.

7. del.icio.us "Classic"

I use del.icio.us as a huge but filtered bookmark repository, and this helps me with that.

8. DownloadThemAll!

Used to download files without having to click on each link.

9. FasterFox

Moar faster == moar bettar.

10. ForecastFox

A look at what's going on outside.

11. GMail Manager

Makes it easy to manage multiple GMail accounts, and also forces all GMail activity to happen over https.

12. Greasemonkey

Magic custom scripty goodness.

13. IE Tab

Allows you to load pages using IE within a Firefox Tab. Only works on Windows?

14. Image Zoom

A fun hack that allows you to enlarge and shrink images on the fly.

15. me.dium

- What I spend a large amount of time working on, and interesting way to connect with others and discover new sites on the interwebs to boot.

16. MeasureIt

Get pixel measurements of things on screen.

17. PDF Download

Ever click on a PDF and had your computer explode? This helps fix that.

18. TargetAlert

Displays a tiny icon representing content type for non-HTML links.

19. TwitterFox

I'm not completely sold on this plug-in yet because I've had issues with it, but Twitter hasn't been the most stable either.

20. VideoDownloader

Allows you to download videos from several popular sites including YouTube.

21. View formatted source

Good for web types.

22. View Source Chart

See above.

23. Web Developer

I'm sure you've already heard of this one too.

I think that's pretty much it. Let me know if you have any other Firefox add-ons I should look at or substitute. This will be a living list, so don't be let down if it changes over time.

The first day or two I felt like a bull in a China shop on the MacBook. The process for installing software didn't make any sense to me, I kept using the control key for common shortcuts, and in general I was trying to figure-out how to setup the full software stack I'm now working on without really having a good understanding of the OS I was using on my workstation. I'm sure I've looked retarded to my new co-workers for the most part so far, but I feel like making the switch is really starting to pay dividends.

For starters, there is just no comparison between the fit and feel of a MacBook Pro to a Dell laptop. My Dell seems like a total piece of crap now, and it annoys me to have to use it. It's big, heavy, clumsy, and shodily assembled compared to the MacBook. I look at some of my co-workers Dell laptops and am very glad that I picked the Mac, though some of them have some 12" Lenovo's which are pretty sweet.

Since I'm only a couple of weeks in, I hesitate to list all of the various software and so forth that I've found useful, but I'll get around to posting that in a couple of weeks once I feel like that list is more finalized. Instead, I thought it might be useful to post some of the pros and cons I've noticed coming from using Windows and Linux:

Pros:

• Unix with a very nice GUI. That's really enough to sell someone right there. I'm a command line junkie and it's nice to have Bash and all of the assorted Unix facilities and software available
• The hardware is really good-- it has great fit and finish. I can even use the MacBook Pro on my lap without getting scalded. There are just so many little things that you notice over time about the MacBook which are ingenious (like the light sensitive keyboard backlighting for instance)
• Everything just works. Had I attempted to set the same environment up on Windows I would have had to bludgeon myself with Cygwin. I haven't had to deal with any of the annoying dependency problems that Linux has.
• I actually like the hardware lock-in. It makes it much easier to find accessories for your given hardware, and you can easily compare specs and application performance with other users, etc. I'm sure this also helps make the OS a lot better as well since they don't have to support every chipset and piece of hardware under the sun.

Cons:

• Some of the software seems like it's dumbed down too much. I understand it's a design philosophy of the Mac, but with some software I find myself looking for the "Advanced" mode. I'm not sure what you would call the file browsing software, but it was my primary complaint until I found Path Finder
• The concept of Free Software seems to be beyond a lot of people in the Mac community. Every little add-on that makes software suck less is likely to cost you $12-$15.
• There aren't really any Mac specific ergonomic keyboards. I'm currently using an MS Natural keyboard when I dock at work, but I find it hard to get used to shortcuts because I'm still using a keyboard with a Windows layout

All that I can say is that from the perspective of a big Unix fan who does Java development, I feel like the Mac offers a great platform for both software development as well as an everyday workstation OS. I'll get around to posting a list of software that I've found to be useful in a couple of weeks once I feel like I've got most of what I need.

Using a branch is always more involved than using the trunk, so the trunk should be used by the majority, and the branch should belong to the minority. Subversion is easier than other source control systems in this regard, but the rule still holds: when trying to decide what goes on the trunk and what goes on the branch, put the code that most developers want on the trunk, and put the minority on the branch.

I think one not-immediately-obvious thing to think about when branching is that none of your incremental changes to the branch will show-up in the trunk revision once you've merged the branch back into trunk. Instead, you only get the revision where the changes were merged back into trunk. Being that we link revisions with tickets and tasks, it presented a difficult problem to track down changes because people were using branches way too often. For the most part, we now follow the basic rule that you should only create new branches while doing some major changes to existing implementations, or interface changes, while most everything else such as maintenance, new features, and bug-fix type items belong in trunk.