Mike Blamires

Link: http://www.thechristmascountdown.com

*** blatent off top self promotion post ***

After some beer, a few of us decided a better Christmas no1 was needed, so we came up with this idea, try and get as many people as possible to download the anthemic Europe classic "The final countdown" to get it to Christmas no 1. I won't say anymore but do visit: http://www.thechristmascountdown.com for more info ... go one ... you know you want too.

Link: http://www.msmm.org.uk/

No geekery in this article but I did want a link for Midsummer Music Madness & Hunsley Acoustic music on here sooooo http://www.msmm.org.uk.

Some pictures of the last excellent event can be found here http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/MikeBlamires/MidsummerMusicMadness.

Enjoy!

I am sure I have posted (and lost) on this topic before, but I can highly recommend the following for getting a Mustek scanner up quickly http://ascending.wordpress.com/2007/03/03/howto-scan-with-mustek-600-cp-in-ubuntu-linux/. I managed to get some OK results using OCR with kooka and ocrad (sudo apt-get install ocrad kooka).
As a not I would recommend using xsane.

I hate the phrase Web 2.0, its screams to me "dot com" and implies that somehow the web as we knew/know it was somehow flawed, none the less Javascript has become the lingua franca of the web, and throw mash up a few other technologies and as quoted on the Coding Horror article "Basically, what "Ajax" means is "Javascript now works.""

These days I spend more time developing code users don't see or interact with directly (at least within the UI) and, because of that, I have not really touched any Javascript or browser level technologies for a while. I of course keet up with whats happening I just haven't put finger to keyboard and got my hands dirty since before AJAX emerged and I spent much of my time trying to do what AJAX does with internal frames and painful Javascript. Looking back all I wanted was AJAX and the ability to query remote services I probably just didn't know it.

Recently I have had cause to implement some AJAX technology (delving into SOAP, DHTML & even CSS), Javascript really appears to have grown up and with it the support. Web development at the presentation layer has for me always been frustrating, due to lack of standards, feedback, useful output and no really great way to see what is happening.

This clearly has had to change and I am very pleased to say it has (and bear with me I am behind on this!), firebug really is the cream of the crop for AJAX development. Hell, even if you are not doing any AJAX and just developing a site, it has all you need. Debugging within the browser is a messy affair usually involving alerts, custom error boxes, spurious screen dumps of variables and general vodoo. With firebug for Firefox you can clearly see your HTTP traffic, including all the headers and all the responses & debug your Javascript, watch variables, manage breakpoints, step through code, full DOM explorer etc.

If you are developing Javascript and you are not using it, get it from http://www.getfirebug.com/. If you are using IE7 and still wrestling with the Script Debugger then Microsoft do supply similar tools for IE7 but they are not as complete as firebug.

Now you have installed your newly supported Java stack you may well wonder what you can do with it ... well I'll be installing Subsonic. Sure this isn't really going to stretch your system or really use all the capabilities of the stack BUT it is a damn good way to listen to your music collection over your network.

First you need to have installed Glassfish as per this post, and then you need a copy of Subsonic which you can get from sourceforge here.
To finish off also install ant.

sudo apt-get install ant

To carry out the task very quickly you can do it through the command line as such:

asadmin deploy ~/Subsonic.war

Of course replacing the last parameter with the fill path to the subsonic file you downloaded earlier.

The second method is to use the administrators interface at http://localhost:4848/ as such:

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