What's it all about, Alfie?

I was going through a Snow Leopard compatibility list this morning and noticed that Shimo 2.1.1/389 - the nice front-end to Cisco VPN is not Snow Leopard ready. So I fired it up to check the version. When I did, I saw that they have an update: v. 2.2.1 which is compatible with Snow Leopard.

Whew! That was close. I want to upgrade to Snow Leopard, but there are some things I can't live without. I'm going to make a list and check them off as we go. It's getting close - today's the day.

Once again, a round of security and stability fixes for a browser - in this case, it's Camino 1.6.9. The release notes state that in the update:

Camino gets a Mozilla Gecko 1.8.1.23 update, which includes critical security and
stability fixes and also improves Flash and ad blocking features.

so there's really more than a simple round of security fixes. That's nice.

Again another update on the eve of the release of Snow Leopard, OmniGraphSketcher v1.0.1 is out with Snow Leopard compatibility, among it's list of notable changes:

• Fully compatible with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.
• You can now import data that has text labels specified for only some of the rows.
• Axis title styles are now saved separately in Save Current Styles as Default.
• Added a "Select All Fills" menu item.
• Fixed a bug where dragging a single point from a grouped data series could cause the point to get stuck to nearby points.
• Fixed several bugs where Undo had to be invoked more than once to revert a change.
• Fixed a bug where pasting data with the first column all zeroes sometimes caused a crash.
• Smaller fixes and improvements.

and while the big news this week is indeed the sale of Snow Leopard, it's nice to see the updates for Snow Leopard trickle in so that the upgrade is as seamless as possible.

Everyone has them - those days when you really don't get excited about a lot, but you have to get up, get ready, go to work, do your best, etc. It's just a day, and today was one of those days for me.

Sure, I learned that I really needed to be careful about the centering of divs in the page - more application of the CSS margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; style, and I also fixed up a co-worker's code who was out of the office today, but that was just a simple thing.

I added a nice database-driven configuration variable to an app that originally had manual configuration. Nothing amazing, but the data was in the database, and the SQL query wasn't that hard to find all futures within a group that had no options on them, and then I'll never have to hassle with the manual configuration again. Nice, but not amazing.

I did the work. Nothing fancy. Just one of those days.

I know it's a good thing to do, but there are times, like today, that I just find it so hard to sit down and write design docs for something I've already written before. OK, sure... I haven't written it here before, and that's the same as not really ever having written it, but when you're writing the design docs from memory, it really doesn't have the same effect as those design docs that you really need to think about.

Still... it's something that has to be done. I just have to push through it and get it done.

I was once again trying to center a div on a page and I ran into the same problem I'd had before - centering that div. So when I looked this guy up this time, I decided to make a note of the solution so I could always find the solution no matter what.

This is that note.

The solution should be:

  div {
    align: center;
  }

but for some reason, the internet powers that be decided that this was not nearly as obvious and clear as the real solution:

  div {
    margin-left: auto;
    margin-right: auto;
  }

Don't get me wrong, the margin-left and margin-right attributes are nice, and they have a lot of use in a lot of cases, but to use them to center a div over the more obvious align attribute is a little... well... let's just call it non-obvious.

So there we have it. I'll probably never forget this again. Figures.

This morning another of the updates for Snow Leopard (10.6) compatibility is out in Fission 1.6.5, the lossless audio editor from Rogue Amoeba. I was just using Fission yesterday to convert some sound files to iPhone ringtones, and it's simply amazing how simple it is. You simply tell Fission to "Save as Ringtone" and you look and it's there in iTunes, waiting to be synced to your iPhone. Wild.

I'm sure this isn't the last of the updates, but it's good to see that this one is ready to go for Friday.

Well, it's started. Updates are trickling out for the much anticipated release of Snow Leopard this friday, and today it was MarsEdit's turn. The 2.3.3 release notes indicated:

• Fix a performance problem that caused slow typing for some users
• Fix a rare crashing bug that became more common in 10.6 Snow Leopard
• Fix a bug that caused occasional distortion of text in the post editor
• Fix a bug that caused double-clicking a table header to open selected post
• Fix a crashing bug when adding categories to a blog with no existing categories

but I'm not sure if he's fixed the bug about the refreshing of the CSS file for preview. I'm hoping it does, but we'll have to see.

UPDATE: No, it's still got that bug where it's not properly rendering the table's CSS the way I want. Too bad. Maybe next update. Thankfully, WordPress at HostMonster works just fine in that regard.

I ran into a very interesting problem today with NullPointerExceptions and log4j. Specifically, it seemed that I was getting NullPointerExceptions on calls to log4j. I couldn't believe it at first, and I did several things to "clear up" the error, but the NullPointerException persisted on the statement:

  log.info("Time to clear the daily data.");

and in theory, that shouldn't happen when we defined at the top of the class the value for log:

  protected static Log  log = LogFactory.getLog("my.package.ClassName");

It should just always be there. Very odd.

So I hit Google and got a really good hint from one of the answers there

...when using Tomcat, it will unload the ClassLoader that held the webapp, and if you 'un-deploy' the webapp, and maintain the thread, it'll keep going. However, it's lost it's static variables in the unloading and now you're going to get a NullPointerException.

Since there is no way to close out the class that's loaded and instantiated for an H2 trigger, I had been just shutting down the chat interface of the alerts. But what I needed to do was to kill the alert thread(s), and then stop them for good, and clear all references so that they could be cleaned up.

So I did just that. I'm thinking that this is going to make a big difference in the overnight roll-over, as we'll have shut everything down and if the class loader had been dropped, there's no chance of it making a call and getting a NullPointerException.

I haven't been using GraphicConverter a lot lately - I just haven't had the need. But today when I heard about the update to 6.5.1, I got it - like I typically do. I then started looking at it a bit - playing, really, and then I noticed something I hadn't seen before - GPS functionality. It's not tied into GPS hardware that I can see, but with the geotagging feature of the iPhone's camera, and other's, it makes sense to be able to edit/update/add this kind of data to the images. Amazingly neat!

This means I can transfer the GPS data from one picture to another, and even add GPS data to pictures shot with previous cameras that don't have that feature. Slick! Glad I saw this, it's liable to come in quite useful.