Been a while since my last post. Finished an assignment on tapestry (Jakarta, not weaving). There is a report on generating a sample app if anyone is interested. If there is anyone else out there learning tapestry, let me know, its hard to find resources.

Started implementing security into timeshare, its an uphill task, so many things to be redone/fixed to work with the new changes. Hopefully a chance to fix old bugs, but probably an opportunity to generate new ones.

Bought a cheap KVM switch box (finally), and as a result have started using my Linux box much more (I don't have to crawl around to swap cables any more). Have moved my php editing environment across, and moved GAIM across. Not game to move my mail (thunderbird) across yet, think I'll set up a dedicated hard drive for my home directory first.

Few interesting finds recently. PostSecret is a rather interesting project. Also Katrina has started a new comic.
Have started using GIM (Googles new Instance Messaging service). Installed the client and had a quick (30 sec) look, but have been otherwise running it under GAIM (username: trevor_peacock at you-know-where).

Next few days: gotta get over this cold, knock over the last few assignments for this term, and make arrangements for the holidays. Fun fun...

Eh hell, I'll throw up a new entry for the sake of it (well before the owner of this server cracks a monkey over me not using the blogging thingy or something...)

lets start on about the newly acquired toy of mine... a 1984 model Toyota Corolla, Rust bucket w00t w00t!

I've been doing research on where how and the cost of getting it re-registered, when I went to Pat Heverns, the lady said it was "thirty three thirty" I thought it was $3330! but a little research on the Roads and Traffic Authority site and I found out its approximately $30 to $40 to get its Blue slipped ( but for the full cost, it would be about $500 to $600 to get it fully on the road)
now all I need to do is get my licence, that will be a bit of a challenge without my berth certificate (yay for a peace of paper saying that I was born and a living bean on this earth), one I find that I will finally get my Ls (for another $33), but I need something to drive to get the 50 hours required to go up to the red Ps, and I cant do that whit my car unless I get it fixed and rego'ed, so I'm really stuffed there.

On to personal matters....

Read the last posting, it will give you an idea...

Have finished building the test webapp, solved the component problem. The missing piece in the puzzle was provided by this site. My first disappointment in tapestry, component parameters it seems have to be read manually

IBinding binding = (IBinding)getBinding("heading");

but I think that is fixed in Tapestry 4.

Now to get on and do up the reports and articles

Battle of the bands comp tonight at the crow bar, the standard much higher than previous years. Completely blown away by the second band, "Jennifer Will Drown", mostly by the guitarist who effortlessly played complex and beautiful melodies. Hadrien was most impressed by the drummer, who he saw perform with another band recently. The guitarist (band comprised of guitar, bass, drums, vocals) used a standard effects pedal, as well as a MIDI pickup, which he used masterfully. I've seen them before, but have only really been a novelty, but this guy made it fit in and work. His frequent transitions between effects were flawless.
Satyricon (I think) was the 3rd band, who have performed the last 3 years, definitely deserved to win the first year I saw them, but last year they replaced they're drummer and have since lost co-ordination between members. They also haven't really progressed in any way since the first time I saw them, pretty much the same old routine. A nice surprise was the female vocals provided by the keyboardist.

Just about ready to tie up my ITC382 assignment, want to get the bulk of that out of the way tomorrow. Also have to investigate where to find ear plugs for the next concert I go to, and try and get a copy of JWDs CD.

Very happy with progress. Have taken as an example problem to re-implement lists.peacocktech.com using tapestry. So far I have the main page up, with the additional feature of listing public lists, the page to view all posts in a list, and the view of a single message. Yet do be done are emailing of messages, and I would also like to (now that I have some idea how after coding mailfile.peacocktech.com) have the system read in the multi-part mime sections, and present them in the correct format (image/text/html/downloadable file), but this is not required for the purposes of ITC382. I would like to explore before I wrap up this assignment is splitting the email message view off into a separate component, so it can be embedded into future applications, such as the webmail project I would like to complete.

Have been relying mostly on the object reference. Have learnt today a feature of Java5 that I knew existed, but haven't used yet, "for each" loops for iterable objects and arrays, fun fun fun in Java.

Made it to brunch today, for the first time in a long time. Spent most of the day looking at tapestry. Also got TeamTalk working between here and home. Remains to be seen how well it will work. Runs quite quickly, there is only one hop copared to two when i talk to Alan, so it runs a little smoother. As long as i'm not using the modem for anything else on this end, it could almost replace the phone.

Figured out some actual java coding in tapestry today, linking templates to classes. Reading the tapestry philosophy in wondered how much of the "plumbing" tapestry would handle, and thus far it has exceeded my expectations. Unlike servlets/jsp, it seems you dont need to worry about creating session objects, you just use "this", tapestry will keep track of the changes made and restore them when the same user accesses the page. It also handles link actions and form processing with very little effort. (Direct)Links and forms are linked via an ognl expression, to a java method. Form fields are set automatically via similar methods (standard getters and setters). Java classes look almost as if they had nothing to do with a web-app.

References are still a problem. Have been working mainly by looking at examples from a chapter from a tutorial published by Sandcast Software, as well as sample code from the HLS/KCD tutorial and the official component reference.

Been (very) busy the last few days, although I don't have a lot to show for it. Installed MediaWiki on my Apache server (about my only success). Tried to get WikiPDF working. Its obviously designed to run on Linux. After a bit of tweaking I got it to generate latex, but it failed to convert that to PDF. Tried to get PHP working atop Tomcat. This seemed the most promising lead, and it did work on Tomcat 5.5, but not 4.1, and MySQL didn't work. Perhaps I should learn how to set up PHP normally, might explain how to get MySQL to work.
Also started a few days ago upgrading tomcat 4.1 to 5.5, all going fairly well, except getting manager and admin modules to work. The Admin module now has to be installed manually, but it doesn't work on a virtual host, it must be running in the default app.

Continuing to work back through Dream Theaters discography, I'm quite impressed by their 1997 album "Falling Into Infinity". Quite a relaxing mix of songs, plenty of different styles, every song is unique.

After scouring the net for examples of the config files (*.page, *.jwc, *.application) I finally managed to get a working app with a page and a component. No dynamic content yet, I need to add a few methods to a Java class first, as soon as I find out the naming scheme.

Found a new plugin today. Palette provides a tree of components that can be dropped into a page from various librarys, saving the time needed to manually type the component specifications. It seems quite powerful looking at the demo.

Been reading through some tutorials. None of them have been a great help, but I've been looking more for references, and haven't taken the time to read the articles top to bottom. Some of them come with demo code. That might be the best way to progress, I learn well by dissecting example code.

Spent the last few days reading the tapestry tutorial (originally by Howard Lewis Ship, revised by Kevin C. Dorff), written for Tapestry-3.0-beta-3, as well as the user guide and developer guide. Setting up Tapestry-3.0.3 wasn't quite as easy. Because of licensing issues, some of the components tapestry uses can not be distributed with tapestry, so the developers have written an ant script to download and install the extra components. Had to install Apache-ANT (I had previously only used the implementation built into eclipse) to run the script, which failed when trying to download javassist. Had to update common.properties with the correct URL to get it to work.
I have an Eclipse 3.1 environment running Spindle 3.2.0, with an ant script to compile and install a war file into Apache-tomcat-4.1.30. (I can see myself using ant for all sorts of things now, quite a powerful scripting language) I hope to upgrade to tomcat 5 or 5.5 soon (depending on if I decide to try Sysdeo, will have to determine which versions it is compatible with).

Last few days have been pretty quiet. Class still uninteresting, 555 is still a disappointment, did pick up one useful thing though, did some reading after one class and figured out how to use the Linux route command. managed to set up my firewall to route local traffic locally, rather than just shoving everything down the modem link. It worked until the modem re-dialled, and I haven't been able to get it to work since, haven't tried much though.

The text book for operating systems arrived (surprisingly), so I can now make a start on that.

Working back through Dream Theatres albums, I found a very nice piece in Train of Thoughts called Vacant. It starts with a familiar piece of music, which I haven't yet been able to identify. I think John Williams may have played it somewhere, or it could be a classical piece from somewhere else. I don't know my composers well enough to narrow it down any. Vacant introduces a well worked vocal melody over the original piece. The 2:57 piece is followed by the instrumental Stream of Consciousness (11:16) which presents variations on the original melody, I've been playing the two most of the day on repeat, and starting to work out some of the pieces on piano/flute.

Read the first few chapters of the text book today, while thinking of possible topics. This is what I came up with:

Java "school" - mensioned in a post on my blog
Email ID - I would like to write a servlet based webmail application to replace thunderbird. I have often wondered how such applications identify unique emails (when using features that leave messages on the server). I could research the topic, to find if there is a standard method, or if headers are simply analysed to determine the email is "unique enough" (for e.g., time and subject)
JSP Tags - find out exactly what jsp tag (libraries) are, and how to write, and extend them.
Java-MySQL - learn how to interface Java-MySQL eventually for use in the above mentioned webmail app.
Tapestry - research and learn how to implement the Tapestry framework.

I'm looking for something that could be used for part A and B. Email ID is possible very simple, the practical side may be limited, I already have code for receiving/processing mail. JSP tags are possibly made obsolete if I start using tapestry. Java-MySQL probably relies on a few method calls, I have already learned PHP-MySQL, its something I would still like to learn, but probably wont take too long on my own.
So, at the moment it looks like Tapestry is my topic.
I did look at tapestry once before, when I first started running Tomcat, had problems getting it running, probably due to my lack of understanding of Tomcat. Also Spindle was somewhat premature at that stage. Both tapestry and spindle have matured a lot over the last 2 years, so the time is right to re-investigate their use.

Nice day, after yesterdays hellish events. Caught up on sleep, and played some guitar. Figured out a few Bread (alt) songs (their more up-beat electric guitar tracks).

Got a very quick response from my query on the forum, probably enough to infer the answers to my major queries, I'm a lot more confident about starting the assignment now.

TV Production screenings are on tonight, always good to watch. I don't know anyone else who is planning to see them tonight, probably be some of the ButlerC proddies from first year there.

A coding session has been planned for tomorrow in JCCC working on out 307 project. Will be good to get the ball rolling again in session, I don't think any work has been done on it the last 2 weeks.

Been listening to Dream Theaters (wiki) new album Octavarium (wiki). As much as I have read about Dream Theatre, this is the first I've heard, and I'm impressed, very well balanced, and plenty of progressive elements. Listening to it I can hear a lot of Jeff Wayne, Pink Floyd, Andrew Lloyd Webber and a little Korn, System of a Down, and even U2. I was going to start playing some (more seriously than just picking out bits by ear), but powertabs.net is temporarily off-line, so will have to wait till another day.

Sat down and properly read through the assignment 1 for 382. Didn't help :| Its confusing and sometimes contradictory, or lacking explanation. I'm also confused as to the bounds of what the blog (Learning journal and Research journal) is meant to achieve. I will have to sit down today, and try and summarise the assignment, post it to the forums and see if I'm making the same conclusions everyone else is, and perhaps get some input from the lecturer.

Alan and I set up software for voice communication. It works quite nicely. We are using Team Talk 3. We used it last year (older version) to communicate during network games, as we were having problems with the in-game voice chat in UT2k4. Running on the 10Mb network there was a noticeable delay, but it was quite usable, and we could run it at high quality, however with a dialup(me)-adsl(server)-adsl(Alan) setup there is a 1-2 second lag, but it is still useful. I set up my server with a new domain and software as a permanent hub for us to use.

Well, lets start a blog off eh shall we?; Aright, good....
A long long time ago in a galaxy... eh hell...
Let me put my frustrations and thoughts out on this...
OK, one of the girls at the salvo's I've gotten to know over the time and had become an inspiration when I was doing my Solder-ship classes at the salvo's. Her just being there has convinced me to do this. She was a "Junior Solder" for a while there, and showed me that there is still a place for kids to grow as Saints and be good in there life, not party animals, smokers, drinkers and junkys at just the mere age of 12...
But now I find out she doesn't like church anymore and wants to quit anything to do with the Salvo's, and that just blew a hole right into my heart. To see her as a roll model for the kids, and now she what's to quit, and I don't what to see that! The reason I when into uniform is to help kids in facing hardship, and make them grow into saints, and this girl convinces me in a indirect way. I don't feel I've been helping Grow saints in the salvo's through the Kids, her inclued! (even though se was one, but she has fallen away) I'm contemplating on whether I should stay in uniform now...

What makes me more upset for her is she is having a troubling time at High school. Her best friends mother has stopped them from seeing each other, and her only 2 good friends are at Leeton High, whilst she is at St. Frances, and has no real friends there, and even though she is in year 7, she is failing... I have been asked to tutor her, but I don't know if I can do it, and I have yet been called up to do it yet... I think I know what this girl has been through, ive been in similar situations at high school, and I went suicidal, that's what worrys me about this girl, or it all could be my paranoia... :-|

OK, Next...
Centerlink, bloody thieving bastards
all I can say for them is Stuff it, I'm getting sick of there Shit! All I get is there crap on Wanting to know my family records, and they will send a letter out about all them odds and ends that they have on record, but they STILL what that same info over and over again! and I was doing job searching whilst I was working in the salvo's, been doing that for about 6-7 months now. But now ive signed up to do the Mutual obligation, I have to fill a record out on my work at the salvo's too now! WHEN WILL I STOP LOOKING FOR WORK! I'M GETTING NOWERE! >.< I think ill have to go back to TAFE and get crap off the teaches again ( "Ooh, tell us how we should Teach you so we can Teach you" ~~ ain't you trained for that? )
what's next on the agenda? meh nothing I can think of ATM, maybe something later

Another 382 lecture, nothing terribly exciting, mostly business centred stuff, not too bad though (not my favourite field).
Had an idea today of what I might be able to focus on in this subject. I haven't re-read the criteria yet to understand it better, so I don't know if this will suit, but... I once had planned to write a webapp to allow Java students to learn and interact together, through a number of forms (wiki philosophy), primarily through the use of problems (questions) that students can attempt, and post their answers online to be "marked" and critiqued by other students. This is not so much conforming to a business model, more a non-profit organisation or community. Again, I don't know if it will fit the criteria, but I'll check over the next few days.
Another thought, as an application of the XML tutorials, I may be able to write an interface in ZOPE on the ISPG server to show this blog, via RSS (or other) from the ZOPE site. Learn about XML, learn about ZOPE, and have a good excuse to play with python (I looooove python, but rarely have time or reason to use it)

Bought text books today, the one for my distance subject (262, Operating systems) is on back-order, and isn't expected for at least a month. Shame, was looking forward to getting my hands dirty in that subject. I'll have to see if the library has a copy, and chase up the recommended resources. There should be plenty of online resources too.

Was supposed to take the bass back today, couldn't find dave tonight, so I'll take it back tomorrow (after another quick play :D ).
Found a page providing a nice definition of "progressive rock". It has a list of progressive metal bands, many of which I'm not familiar with, so I have found myself some research to do. Pain of Salvation and Opeth (who I saw last year in Melbourne) are big favourites, also know tool, but the rest are largely unfamiliar. Its always fun to explore.

Now that i finally have a little time, i'm going to start on this XML workshop.
I have worked with XML before, mostly in Java. Have worked with Dom4J, using XML, DTDs and XPath. I spent some weeks on a project working with these, before i abandoned using XML for a database, as I found it to me far too slow, inefficient and memory consuming once I started working with larger datasets.

I have done a little work in python, but not for a long time, and not with XML. I'd love to get my hands dirty with python again.

Alan and I today looked into CSS. Al wanted to "customise" his blog. Decided to have a look too, as i previously knew nothing about CSS. Tweaked my page, from this to this, by changeing only the CSS (and adding a few jpgs). Clayton reccomended oswd (this in particular) as a source of quality css to learn from. Think i still need to learn more about how CSS fundamentally works first.

Found a useful screen capture program today. Windows XP will do captures to clipboard by pressing print-scn on the keyboard, however i'm not sure if older versions of windows will. CapturePlus saves shots to a file (bmp or jpg), and also allows captures from a single window rather than the entire screen. Personally i'll stick with the old faithful Corel Capture (comes with corel draw suite, i only have the ancient version 7). Its much more flexible, but capture plus is a tiny (90k) but functional free alternative.

Wore out my fingers again today playing Opeth on bass. Only 30 days until their next album. I have it pre-ordered, but not sure what to expect. For a band described as a "classical, jazz, folk, progressive rock, death metal band" (original site no longer available), theyre a bit hard to predict.