Technical Details

I’m very happy to announce I finally have a working version with no loss of features in the port. Album art support was looking pretty iffy for a while, until I made a break through this morning and some very dirty image hacking to strip off the .itc header of PNG and JPEG images, very frustrating.

The app is supposed to be in Rosetta (universal) binaries, but please let me know if it works on intel macs, since I only have an old G4 which is running 10.3.9 and is very slow.

Download your rTunes app

I have a working port of rTunes for OS X, all I need to do is clean up the distribution, and make sure it will run on intel macs since I’m using a very old and slow G4.

My plan is to release on Monday.

I’m trying to watch Larry Ellison’s keynote from last year, and I get to see 30 seconds and the real media starts this annoying “communicating …” shtick, which goes on for 10’s of minutes at a time. No wonder they are almost forgotten in 2007, to those of you who think real media is the way to go for your streaming media concerns, get a clue and switch to you tube, you’ll have much happier customers, and no annoying install ware. At the current rate it’s going to take me 3 or 4 hours to watch his keynote in 30 second chunks, fun wow.

I’m not sure why this isn’t a default but c’est la vie, and this is certainly something that has irked me from time to time, so I was quite pleased when I stumbled upon this in the seam forum  which is the little bit of magic to ignore comments in facelets/JSF.

Add the following to your web.xml file:

    <context-param>
        <param-name>facelets.SKIP_COMMENTS</param-name>
        <param-value>true</param-value>
    </context-param>

I’m happy to get half of this monkey off my back, the Windows version is available, after I discovered that iTunes version 7 broke rTunes version 0.8 badly. This release has only been tested with version 7.2.0.34 of iTunes, let me know if you run into any issues. I’ve included a new application rTunesRemote which you can hookup to a RF based USB remote control unit like ATI’s Remote Wonder and then control your iTunes from anywhere in the house (or your RF range of the remote.)

I had quite a few issues packaging this since iTunes changed the windows com interface in version 7.

The Mac version is near completion, but I have to go back and test against version 7 of iTunes, also it may seem odd, but the Windows com access is superior than native Mac access where python is concerned. Once the testing is done, I have to figure out the packaging of the application and various minor platform issues like power pc vs. intel.

Get your update here:  http://agwego.com/rtunes

I’ve mostly had a big hate on for Safari, since we had to ensure our software worked with it just like all the other browsers, our client is very Mac centric. Needless to say, the hoops, that had to be jumped through to get a rather simple application to work, which I might add was working great under FireFox and IE were too many to mention and the real pain was that the code came out looking like a piece of shit with browser detection logic and all kinds of stupid html tricks in the forms. I wasn’t a happy camper.

At WWDC 2003 I had a colourful conversation with the head of Safari development (I don’t recall his name) and at that time I said why don’t you port safari to Windows, after all in those days it was IE or Netscape (at least I was using NS, but I don’t think too many other people were by then and Firefox wasn’t a household name yet) I’m glad to see they finally listened to me.

So far, Safari 3 seems pretty fast, I always liked how they incorporated the progress bar into the url field, that’s smart thinking and nice design. Safari 3 is compatible with our old Safari 2 version forms (a small yeah.) Finally I probably don’t have to run a virtual machine to boot linux so I can use Konqueror for browser testing anymore, very nice. (Safari is built on the festering bones of Konqueror)

We may have a new browser war, back to the future…

In the last couple of years I’ve been pretty down on Java and web based applications, sure you can do it but it was torture and honestly who thinks JSP is a good idea, hopefully nobody. There was JSF but it seemed fairly disconnected from the server, and although J2EE was an improvement over its predecessor, it was heavy, verbose and not very orthogonal, plus there was lots of plumbing to do with respect to your DB. Finally, lets not forget those damned XML files and no matter how good your development tools were you still needed to keep a bunch of crap floating around in your head to do basic day to day development, it was easy to spend as much time on J2EE infrastructure than it was to actually worry about your app and its business logic. I’ve never spent any time with Spring or Struts so please forgive me for not going off on them as well.

So, enter Java EE and Seam, my interest has been rekindled in Java and Java based web applications. The simplicity and power of Seem vaguely reminds me of ObjectSpace’s Voyager, a truly revolutionary product for its time. With the introduction of annotations much of the configuration has migrated from the XML files to the source, all in one place, very nice. So far my productivity has been pretty good and enjoy writing Seam apps so much more than J2EE apps, suddenly Java enterprise programming is fun again. To say Seam is deep is an understatement, every new project I work on and I’m on my 3rd, pushes ome into new territory and Seam has a solution where many other frameworks force you to use a single approach, Seam often gives you several methods to do the same thing (sometimes too many, but that’s a different story.)  The learning curve can be rather steep at times, but in general it’s fairly easy to get something put together and working it’s the polish that usually requires the real work. As more people use Seam the knowledge base will grow and we’ll see more books and articles written.

I’m slowly on my way to becoming a Seam evangelist, I’ve already given 3 one hour presentations on Seam and its power. If Seam isn’t on your radar, check it out, because I’m confident you’ll be hearing a lot more about Seam in the coming year.

Seam has the notion of passing a Request Parameter to a class, but there’s a catch, depending on how things are being done (and there’s nothing to say I’m doing it right) @RequestParameter isn’t quite as flexible as I think it should be.

First you can’t set the parameter programmatically since the Request Parameter declared will always be set when hitting the page, whether it is passed or not. As an example, if you set the parameter via a setter method, the parameter will be reset to null if no parameter is passed via the URI overwriting the previous change. Not the use case I’m use to, it would be nice to have an option for RequestParameter to ignore the setter when no parameter is present. Something like:

@RequestParameter( ignoreifnull=true )

This is a good review of “19 Deadly Sins of Software Security“, too bad it’s not free on Amazon.

There are also some good links to other security resources in the post.

This is nice PyUnit add on for using annotations with your unit tests.

You can now annotate a method with @Test which frees one from being forced to use the naming convention ‘test’ in the method name like: def testSomething(self)

The other annotation that is really nice is @expected_exception(SomeException) which you normally have to set up a test harness to explicitly catch the exception and test for it, very nice.

Get the recipe here