I’ve been thinking for a while that I should get a cheap car audio system that includes an aux-in jack so that I could use my iPod to play music in my car (FM transmitters are just too unreliable for city driving and I don’t have a tape deck, only a CD player). Reading this article though makes me wonder if I can just get a car audio system that’s specifically designed for the iPod.

I think I’ve reached the point in my programming career where I’m about as lazy as you can get. Fortunately I’ve also started heavily leveraging the power of ant recently as a cross-platform, heavily Java oriented, shell scripting tool.  Shell scripting isn’t really the right word for it though because it’s really the declarative nature of ant files that makes it work so much better than shell scripts, python, ruby etc.  I don’t think about how to do things I just say what I want done and it happens.

Dear lazyweb,

I’m writing a J2EE (well technically JSP/Servlets but no EJBs) webapp which has two goals:

1. Secure authentication is required.  Unauthorized users shouldn’t be able to access anything except a login page.
2. Easy access for authenticated users.  ie: Don’t prompt users for their password every time they open a new browser instance and don’t time out logins.  Prompting the first time they access the system using a particular browser/computer is okay though.  Even prompting once per day would be okay though not ideal.

I realize that these goals tend to conflict to a degree – ie: it’s far more secure to log users out every so often so that if someone gets access to a machine they logged in from they don’t get access automatically. We’ll have to live with that risk and so lets just assume that the systems users are accessing the system from are secure or users are smart enough to always click logout when they’re finished.

On Friday night while strolling along the riverside at Southbank just like on our first date, I proposed to the beautiful Janet and she accepted.  The wedding bells aren’t expected to actually start ringing until Janet finishes uni in a couple of years but we’re very excited to be about telling everyone how happy we are together.

I pulled the big red lever on CVS this morning and converted over to Subversion at work.  It’s gone pretty smoothly though one of the engineers is complaining that Eclipse is now freezing up a lot.  Not sure if that’s related to the Subversion change of if something else is going on but it’s something I’ll have to investigate some more.

It’s sad but I get a buzz out of being able to move things around in the repository right from within Eclipse and knowing that the history is being preserved.

It’s interesting to watch our press release about the release of EditLive! for Java 5.0 flowing around the various news agencies via a Feedster search.  I really should circle back with the guy pushing out the notifications to see which ones he actively submitted and which ones it flowed around to by itself. It’s pretty amazing what you can track these days.

Okay, lets get this clear, driver signing has nothing to do with security.  It might help stability, but security – nope, totally unrelated.  So when you see Windows developers posting under the title When people ask for security holes as features: Silent install of uncertified drivers, and then talk exclusively about system stability without mentioning security once you really have to wonder.

The security of the system has been breached long before the unsigned driver warning pops up – security is breached the minute the installer starts to run or possibly even by the time the installer downloads.

You’d think it would be obvious given the number of people looking for ways to clean up Word’s so called HTML output to make it look something like HTML, but apparently Google failed to google it.  Good work guys.

So the new Blogger Word plugin is going to result in a whole ton of really, really, really bad HTML being published to the internet (in addition to the current volumes of it).  Sigh, and we had been making progress….

Everyone’s been busy arguing about what the appropriate name for those things that NetNewsWire and FeedDeamon download, parse and display (eg: Scoble, Steve Gilmor, Scoble, Dave Winer, Scoble, Scoble and of course Scoble – not that Scoble posts a lot or anything….)  Anyway, no one really cares, the vast majority of people haven’t heard of any of those terms and will have to learn what they mean so whatever the majority of people wind up learning is what will stick and everyone will have to live with it.  I’m betting the easiest thing to say will win – most likely “feed”.

For the past few weeks I’ve been investigating and planning a move from CVS (CVSNT actually) to Subversion at work. Hopefully this week I’ll be able to do the actual conversion and see what mess it makes.

The main thing that’s missing from Subversion is an exact equivalent for CVS’s meta-modules. Subversion’s externals are good but need to support relative URLs so that branching is simple. Even so, it’s not that hard to go back and re-edit the externals property after branching and it can probably be automated with a small script.  It might actually be a good opportunity to automate adding new branches to our automatic build setup as well so whenever we create a new branch the build machine (affectionately known as Bob) automatically starts building it.

Ken Coar starts each post with a one-line comment/quip/remark which may or may not be related to the topic of the post.  Apparently Leo Simmons reads them:

Hi, Leo!

This isn’t the only not-so-hidden message to Leo hidden in Ken’s summary and I’m beginning to suspect their up to something.  If only I could crack the devious code their using…

Maybe I need a monacle…  BTW Ken, do you always wear that or is it just to make you look uber cool on your blog (which it does btw)?

I’ve previously griped about the lack of a good IDE for Ruby on Rails and despite trying out TextMate for a month I just wasn’t happy enough with it – I’m still spending far too much time navigating files and not enough time coding.  There’s a lot of talk about just using VIM and being happy with that (example) but that VIM just doesn’t have a good enough interface for selecting which file to edit and navigating the file system, let alone for quickly scanning files to find the section I want.