I saw some strange behaviour in an EL expression used JSP tag. As it was nothing ATG specific, I decided to try it out in plain old Tomcat rather than full ATG application. So I located the instance of Tomcat 5.5 (I always have couple of Tomcats lying around) and being lazy, I decided to inject the change into out-of the box jsp-examples Web application that comes with it.

I picked a victim JSP to be modified (jsp2/el/basic-comparison.jsp), made my change, reloaded page – nothing. I must have forgotten to save the file, did it again – nothing. Weird. Maybe browser caching. Cmd-Shift-R – nothing. Tried different browser – it showed unchanged file as before. Definitely not a browser issue.

The most logical explanation would be that I am editing different file than reloading: so I verified that the JSP file I edited is indeed under WebApps, that correct version of Tomcat was started. It was. There was no context redirection in place but to be sure, I unzipped pristine copy of apache-tomcat-5.5.31.zip (I have couple of those around as well), copied the JSP there, started it – same thing.

Really weird.

Few more experiments showed that no change to any JSP page under jsp-examples was visible. Removing JSP page caused 404 error as expected, but as soon as the page was there, it reappeared in original pristine version.

At this point, I started to suspect there is something fishy with the jsp-examples application itself. And it was. Brief check of the web.xml showed that it is quite long (24K) and that it contains declaration:

<servlet>
  <servlet-name>org.apache.jsp.jsp2.el.basic_002dcomparisons_jsp</servlet-name>
  <servlet-class>org.apache.jsp.jsp2.el.basic_002dcomparisons_jsp</servlet-class>
</servlet>

....

<servlet-mapping>
  <servlet-name>org.apache.jsp.jsp2.el.basic_002dcomparisons_jsp</servlet-name>
  <url-pattern>/jsp2/el/basic-comparisons.jsp</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

and suddenly it all made sense.

As long as the JSP file was present (Tomcat checks), it’s content was completely ignored and the request for /jsp2/el/basic-comparisons.jsp was served by COMPILED class /webapps/jsp-examples/WEB-INF/classes/org/apache/jsp/jsp2/el/basic_002dcomparisons_jsp.class – which of course did not contain any of the JSP file changes. When I removed file, Tomcat reported 404 a- the check for file existence comes before check for URL mapping apparently.

Moral of the story: being lazy causes one has to do more work but often learns something new. Had I created fresh new WebApp, none of these mappings were present and I would never realized what is Tomcat 5 doing behind the scenes.

Btw, in Tomcat 6 the mappings are gone and everything behaves as expected.

Although this is not technically a bug – but a feature – it is unfortunate that this optimization is used exactly in one application that can be used by newbie developer learning JSP for experimentation and not seeing it’s change can confuse the hell out of them. Especially when googling the issue will very likely sending him/her in completely wrong direction – suggesting reconfiguring Jasper, playing with valves and internals of Tomcat configuration.

The biggest difference is that in G+ there is no peer relation – “friendship” that needs to be confirmed by both parties. Both ends are disconnected in Google+ – set of people whose updates you see in your stream and set of people that see your updates is not the same and can be in extreme case disjunct.

In G+, like in Twitter, everybody chooses set of people whose updates you want to see – you “follow” people. This following does not require any approval on their end. Unlike Twitter, you can easily organize the people you follow into groups (circles) and with single click limit the news stream only to members of this group (where one person can be in many groups). It is like having multiple Twitter accounts, each with different set of people followed and switching identities.

On broadcasting side, you can select the target audience for each post by addressing the message to be visible publicly (Twitter default), by any member of your circles, your extended circles (kind of “friends of friends”), one or several named circles, or even named set of people from your circles. Whether your message will actually appear in their message stream depends on whether the addressee did add you into their circles. Twitter does allow you only public updates. (Yes, ok, there are “protected tweets” by who uses them ?). Facebook allows you updates only for all your friends or single FB group.

For example, I have group named Following with members like Andy Ihnatko, Leo Laporte, Leo Babauta and other internet celebrities. Clicking on the circle will show me all public updates from these people, but it would contain none of the posts made e.g. by Andy for his circles – of which I am not member of. Similarly, should I post an update for the “Following” circle, Andy would never see it in his news stream (despite of that I do have him in my circles) as I am not member of his circles. This way Google created incredibly flexible framework that can deliver any mode of communication available from Twitter and Facebook:

1) Twitter following: see above
2) Facebook friends: both parties add the other to circles
3) Facebook groups: named circle (plus possibility of multiple groups and administration that does not suck)
4) Friends of friends: extended circles
5) direct message to person (in your circles): update with single person recipient

What G+ does not have (yet) are applications/games and public developer API. I am pretty sure that promised availability of the later will cause the explosion in the first. It will be very interesting to see the impact of this new, much more flexible “trust model” on the kinds of applications available.

1) Twitter seems to to become  unavoidable – more and more services assume that one has twitter account. Many cyberevents rules start with “retweet this” or “tweet that” which of course one cannot do without Twitter account

2) Direct messaging via Twitter is one very convenient method how to add information to many service: new todo in Toodledo, Evernote and so on. It is MUCH faster than starting any client on an iPhone.

3) Twitter is after all the best medium for sharing links. Facebook does not cut it  if you want to keep friend count reasonable so there is a gap between Facebook and LinkedIn

Alas, I am back, with my old handle ‘miroadamy’.

Hello – Nael and the gang …

Not any more.

I am definitely giving up on Things and Cultured Code products.

The reason why is sheer frustration from long wait on usable synchronization between Things on Mac, iPad and iPhone. Something that have been discussed, promised, chewed over 2 years and that still does not work.

In theory, you *can* synchronize as long as Mac and iPad / iPhone are in the same wireless network and can see each other. Things on Mac must be running and when Things on iPad/iPhone starts, they find each other and exchange data. It works most of the time, until it stops. With a bit of luck and some tweaking, one may be lucky and get it back to working order. Or not.

It happened to me several times that for no particular reason, iPad started the synchronization but never completed. Sometimes restarting iPad or Mac helped. Sometimes not. Sometimes I managed to fix the problem by unregistering the iPad and adding it back. When this remedy failed, in frustration, I tried to contact CC technical support. Here is the answer

Hi,

Thank you for your inquiry.

We are working on our own cloud sync solution that will allow 
for multi-device-sync (Mac / iPhone / iPad) using whatever network is available (Wifi / Edge / 3G). 
See: http://culturedcode.com/status
That's the most requested feature currently.
At present I can't give you a time frame,
though, when this is going to be ready.

Regards,

Roman.
Things Support
Cultured Code

They have been working on synchronization for well over 2 years now, if I remember correctly, which is about 18 months too long. What kind of project management is that they still do not have a time frame for completion ? This is not perfectionism, this smells like Cultured Code is another product company that was great once but lost its mojo and capability to deliver. Things may be the most beautifully designed GTD application out there – but how long will pleasure from using shiny toy compensate for lack of basic functionality ?

After reviewing the landscape of GTD apps in 2011 I am now settling on combination of Toodledo and Evernote. Toodledo is basically a Web application with several iPad / iPhone clients. There is probably no OS-X desktop client that would come close to elegance of Things. Yet. And the web UI is kinda busy – but boy, it is *very* *very* functional. The synchronization with iPad works like charm, asynchronously.

And I doubt it took the Toodledo team 24 months to solve …

The next vector of distraction to be brought under control is Facebook. This is a tougher nut to crack – because of wide variety of people in my circle of friends, Facebook plays many different roles.

• It is a connection to old friends and colleagues from the old continent and old country.
• It is a family connection.
• It is a connection to people that are not on FB through their friends or relatives that are.
• It is a link to people I worked with and wanted to keep in touch.
• It is a link to people I share common interest with

This variety creates a problem of itself (which is multiplied by English/non English division).  Tool that does too many things, does not do them very well.

Honestly, I do not understand how some people can maintain hundreds of “friends”. The group of this size generates so much noise, so many updates that the news stream becomes close to useless. One can always hide updates from most significant  “link spammers” but that opens up a question: is there any point in providing a view into your life to somebody whose updates you do not read anyway ?

First attempt to solve this is to separate the “private world” and work. In my case, there is no clear boundary as I am fortunate to work with so many of my close personal friends (many of which are on FB) and in my current employment I am lucky to consider many of the people I work with to be much more than just work buddies. Nevertheless, my goal is to get down to two digit number of Facebook friends.

To achieve that, I would like to ask some of my current Facebook friends to reconnect on LinkedIn. I absolutely want to stay in touch,  just using different channel.

My public profile is http://www.linkedin.com/in/miroadamy.

See you there

Even after switching to Mac in 2006 – first for home, a year later for everything did not change this, I kept using browser despite better choice. Apple Mail may be decent client but it never felt quite right and otherwise decent Thunderbird had always issues with trading off multi-platform reach for integration and true Mac-ness.

All of this changed today after installing Sparrow. It is all I ever wanted – IMAP based access that really works, with minimalistic but elegant interface, Twitter like simplicity and that special sauce which discriminates great OS-X application from average. For very reasonable price $9.99 available in App Store.

99% of all GMail features are there – the only one I had to sacrifice is multiple signatures for single account. Before, all my work email was redirected and merged into my private GMail account, set up with multiple aliases and GMail was smart enough to pick different signature based on sending address. To do the same, I had to cut the redirect. Luckily, both Sparrow as well as  iPad mail client support multiple accounts so I have access to all accounts inside single client on Macbook or iPad.

Sparrow – http://www.sparrowmailapp.com/, available in App Store.

Highly recommended.

Too much and too little and the same time.

Too much information. Too many interruptions and distractions. Too little time to think.

Too much consumption of information and not enough time to process it and do anything meaningful with it – learn from it or create something new.

The only way how to get out of the self-digged hole is to start cutting.

One of the big sources of distraction and cause of many pointless hours spent on Web is Twitter.

I was using Twitter mostly as filter: by following people with similar interest, trying to curate the content “out there”.

It worked to a certain degree – and I indeed discovered some interesting pieces of information I would miss otherwise.

The real questions I have to ask are: did these discoveries justify the time spent reading through pointless tweets (big portion of twittersphere) ? The answer is no. What would I miss by not finding them ? The answer is – not much, really. What difference did not missing them make in the
long run ? And the final answer is None.

It is very hard to say something that matters in 160 characters. Some people can do it, I am not one of  them.

So after few years of being on Twitter I am deleting my Twitter account today.

Bye bye Twitter. I will try not to miss you. And I am sure you will not miss me.

I listen to a lot of podcasts, about 50 % of them produced by Leo Laporte’s TWIT Network (This Week in Tech, Macbreak, This Week in Google, FLOSS Weekly and occasional Security Now).

What I like about Leo’s network is professionalism of audio production, usually good and interesting panel with topics that are worth listening to. Few other podcasts come even close to the TWIT level of perfection.

Except this one which is much better. Not necessarily from audio or production point of view – although they are both very good. This developers life goes way beyond what Twit does. It is not a dialog of few interesting geeks, it is story. Story nicely designed, well crafted, interwoven with really good music. It changes from dialog to story with commentaries, but keeps you interested. An episode usually
focuses on single theme and contains several stories. Topics are not technology, but the area where technology overlaps with life: motivation, audacity, highs and lows of programming career

Great selection of guests, including cybercelebrities such as John Resig or Miguel de Icaza.

I almost never listen to a podcast episode twice. For this one, I do.

Highly recommended.

http://thisdeveloperslife.com/

Strangely enough, the only advertiser I do not see of trying out is Audible – not because I would not like their product offering, quite the opposite. I simply have have absolutely no time for more content in my life: TWIT plus few additional podcasts, Apple TV and ZIP.ca give me way more that I have time to consume. I have no intention of buying Mustang with Sync – my selection of gadgets purchased as part midlife crisis is strictly limited to shiny objects featuring either Apple logo or an IP address, ideally both. But back to point: I feel I have done my share in keeping TWIT in business and do not really want and have to listen to same adds 3-6 times every week.

Fortunately, the adds are not too annoying to justify drastic measures and additional inconvenience – such editing them out from MP3. I have to give Leo credit for being sensitive in his ad selection – except Mustang, which I find to be least in line with TWIT audience – most products were pretty good.

I found very simple solution that surprised me with completely unexpected side benefit. Whenever Leo goes to an ad (and J.C. Dvorak disappears to baste meat), I turn down the volume to 0 for 2-3 minutes. Just turn the volume off and focus on driving, walking or whatever I am doing. I do not plan, evaluate, program or think about anything, only focus on the current moment and feel whatever is happening right now. I found this being an excellent stress relieve and instead of being annoyed by the ads, I actually started to look forward to them. I do not necessarily subscribe to *all* that New Age hype about being in the present moment, but finding an opportunity few times a day just stop and focus on whatever is happening right now, however simple or mundane that activity is, has its benefits. And there is always something going on: at minimum, you are always breathing.

Therefore, Leo and all Twits – thanks for all the adds. Ignoring them in a creative way is actually very healthy.