Good Bye, Custom Blog…Hello WordPress

Posted by Trav

I’ve been debating on whether or not to switch to WordPress for about a year now.  Part of the reason I held off is because I like to write my own software. My custom-written PHP blog setup was tweaked over a period of 6 years. It served as a proof-of-concept for a lot of things I learned how to do in PHP. For being the active testbed, I thank my old blog.

That being said, I just couldn’t resist WordPress any longer.  A lot of really smart coders that I admire use WordPress to manage their blogs and sites. If it is good enough for the best, then it is good enough for me.  I think this will really help me get more ideas out there. I have always enjoyed posting fixes and whatnot that I figure out, but my custom blog was nowhere near this slick. And, I must say, migrating my old blog to WordPress is the most fun coding that I have had in a long time.

Solution to Deployment issue using Netbeans 6.5.1 and Tomcat 6.0.22 on OX 10.5.7

Posted by Trav

Somehow I always find myself in the middle of a very strange computer problem. This particular issue is a result of my wanting to learn to write JSP applications using Netbeans 6.5.1 with Tomcat 6.0.20. I don’t have time to do a full writeup, so here’s a nutshell version of the problem and my solution:

Problem

When I tried to use the Deploy option to push my Netbeans project to my Tomcat webapps folder, the deployment would fail. I could manually copy the .war file into my Tomcat webapps folder and everything would work fine. But, I thought, “Why should I have to do this if Netbeans is supposed to do it for me?”

Solution

Since I’m running OS X 10.5.7, I opened the Netbeans configuration file at

/Applications/NetBeans/NetBeans6.5.1.app/
Contents/Resources/NetBeans/etc/Netbeans.conf

and added the following to the netbeans_default_options line:

-J-Djava.io.tmpdir=/tmp

Note: This must be added within the double quotes. Also, I didn’t distrub anything that was on the line already but merely added that tidbit of code.

Explaination

I found this piece of advice buried deep in a forum. Apparently, Netbeans puts the deployed files into a temporary folder before deploying them. The temporary folder it tries to use on OS X isn’t accessible (a permissions problem I guess). Adding that snippet of code tells Netbeans to use the OS X default temporary folder tmp for its intermediate work.

Enjoy!

What to do if Cygwin Does Not Work Properly in Vista

Posted by Trav

So, I tried to install Cygwin on my Windows Vista Business machine today.  The install, via the setup.exe that downloads what you want to install, launched and completed as it always had in WIndows XP. I was pleasantly surprised considering how Vista has refused to install things normally before. Just when I was about to be happy, I clicked on the Cygwin Bash Shell shortcut, the prompt came up, but no commands worked.  Not ls, not dir, not anything! I let out my usual sigh of annoyance and cursed Vista (for the millonth time).

I then proceeded to Google to find a solution.  Nothing. The forum posts pleading for help were responded to with the usual worthless suggestions (such as “Don’t use Vista“) and RTFM talk. I don’t really want to use Vista, but it has been forced upon me and I have little recourse but to use it.  Anyway, after trying a few things that didn’t work, I finally figured out what to do: Set your system path environment to the Cygwin bin directory and everything works fine!

To do that, all you gotta do is follow these simple steps:

  1. Install Cygwin normally with the setup.exe program, selecting what you want to install.  For the purposes of this walkthrough, I’m going to assume you installed Cygwin in the default C:\cygwin location.
  2. Click on the Start Menu (or Windows Orb, for those of you Vista fanboys).
  3. Right Click on Computer, and choose Properties.
  4. Click Advanced system settings in the left-hand context sidebar (and accept the UAC prompt to go proceed as an Administrator).
  5. Click the Advanced tab
  6. Click the Environmental Variables button at the bottom of the dialog.
  7. In the Environment Variables list box, find the variable Path and double click on it
  8. In the resulting Variable Value box, move your cursor to the end of the line of paths already there and add ;C:\cygwin\bin Do not forget the semicolon before the path!

That’s it! Remember, if you installed Cygwin somewhere other that C:\Cygwin, you’ll have to change your path to be different from my example. I’m hoping that if you did a non-standard install that you can figure out how to adjust the path!  I hope this helps somebody!

Using MS Server 2003 Admin Tools with Vista

Posted by Trav

Today I tried running the Windows Server 2003 Admin tools with Vista Business and was a little surprised when I got the error message:

MMC could not create the snap-in.

I guess the only reason I was shocked was that I got no errors whatsoever. The install went just fine. Normally, when you attempt to install an older Microsoft tool that isn’t compatible, Vista will freak out and let you proceed no further.

After a some Googling (and several leads that did not work), I found a fix on the Microsoft Knowledge Base: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/930056

The fix was actually quite easy: Finding the fix was another story!

To WP or Not to WP…

Posted by Trav

So, I have installed WordPress 2.7 on my long-forgotten TravisSmith.us domain. I have been considering migrating JerryTravis.com to WordPress, so for now, this is a testbed to see if I really like the platform enough to do so.

Grinding Along

Posted by Trav

This semester has been very hectic. Teaching is going well enough. For the most part, I have really good students, which is nice. It’s our Program Assessment year, which is a big part of our school’s accreditation, so that’s made things a little more hectic than I’d like, but that will be over in less than two weeks. The most challenging part of the semester has been my college classes. Global Information Systems has kept me and my group very, very busy. I’m still here, though. It’ll all be over on December 6, at which point I’ll let loose a huge sigh of relief.

East Kentucky Post

Posted by Trav

A colleague of mine has just opened a new trading post site at EastKYPost.com. It allows you show the world items that you currently have for sale as well as request items that you are interested in buying. The best thing about it is that the postings are targeted for the people of Eastern Kentucky.

New Calendar

Posted by Trav

If you check out the homepage of Jerrytravis.com, you’ll notice that there is now a nifty new calendar on the right-hand side of the page that shows the posts from the last active month of the site. I wrote the entire thing myself, which is something I’ve been wanting to write from scratch for a very long time. The calendar itself is very modular and allows the same calendar engine to be used for a myriad of purposes. I’m going to clean up code and document it, then I’ll probably post the code on the site for all to see and use!