When I was a child I heard some advices that were written by one Brit to his son( I don’t know who exactly, I’m even not sure that he was Brit, but I believe he was… doesn’t metter ). I heard it on the radio and found them rather intelligent,  wise, rather laconic and easy to undestand so somehow I keep them in my mind, at least some of them.

Time flows. Now I’m a father and feel like giving the list of this advices to my son. It was a bit difficult to find them but here they are:

• Sing in the shower
• Treat everyone the way you want them to treat you
• Plant flowers in the spring
• Leave everything a little better than it was before you
• Never gave up home-made pastries
• Strive for excellence, not perfect
• Look people in the eye
• Do not wait, that life will be fair
• Learn the three decent jokes
• Return debts on time
• Make a compliment at least three people every day
• Ask a supplement if you feel that you deserve it
• Encourage others to even the smallest improvement
• Never underestimate the power of love
• Smile
• Think about the big and enjoy small
• Do not be afraid to say “I made a mistake”
• Do not forget old friends
• Be very optimistic and enthusiastic of all the people you know
• Have some champagne just so, without reason
• The first to say hello when meeting
• Be where you need
• Stop blaming others
• Always shook the outstretched hand
• Farewell to themselves and others
• Often say “Thank you”
• Often say “Please”
• Wear shoes peeled
• Never missed an opportunity to tell someone that you love him
• Remember the birthdays of other people
• Live as an exclamation, not as a justification
• Keep Secrets
• Take responsibility for every day of my life
• Be committed to continuous improvement
• Sing a chorus
• Plant a tree in her Birthday
• Head of a dog
• To marry only for love
• Happy Hour at least twice a year
• Remember the happiest moments in my life
• Call mom

To my son with love

For some reasons the same in russian:

- Пой в душе
- Обращайся с каждым так, как хочешь, чтобы обращались с тобой
- Посади цветы весной
- Оставляй все немного лучше, чем было до тебя
- Никогда не отказывайся от домашнего печенья
- Стремись к отличному, а не к совершенному
- Смотри людям в глаза
- Не жди, что жизнь будет справедливой
- Выучи три приличных анекдота
- Вовремя возвращай долги
- Делай комплименты минимум трем людям каждый день
- Проси прибавки, если чувствуешь, что заслужил ее
- Поощряй в других даже самые маленькие улучшения
- Никогда не недооценивай силу любви
- Улыбайся
- Думай о большом и наслаждайся малым
- Не бойся сказать “Я сделал ошибку”
- Не забывай старых друзей
- Будь самым большим оптимистом и энтузиастом из всех, кого ты знаешь
- Выпей шампанского просто так, без повода
- Первым скажи привет при встрече
- Будь там, где ты нужен
- Перестань обвинять других
- Всегда пожимай протянутую руку
- Прощай себя и других
- Чаще говори “Спасибо”
- Чаще говори “Пожалуйста”
- Носи чищенную обувь
- Не упускай возможности сказать кому-то, что ты его любишь
- Помни дни рождения других людей
- Живи как восклицание, а не как оправдание
- Храни секреты
- Возьми ответственность за каждый день своей жизни
- Будь привержен постоянному совершенствованию
- Пой хором
- Посади дерево в свой День рождения
- Заведи собаку
- Вступай в брак только по любви
- Встречай рассвет хотя бы два раза в год
- Помни самые счастливые моменты в своей жизни
- Звони маме

But here are the Good news -> Google brings power of upcoming HTML5 to Microsoft IE and boosts IE’s JavaScript performance ->

IE8 runs 10 times faster with Google plug-in
Chrome Frame instantly boosts Microsoft browser’s JavaScript performance

here is a developers guide how to force IE using Google Chrome Frame on your sites.

SunSpider benchmark results show IE8 with the Chrome Frame plug-in is nearly 10 times faster at rendering JavaScript than IE8 alone.

>$ruby script/console

>Loading development environment (Rails 2.3.2)

>/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.3.2/lib/active_record/i18n_interpolation_deprecation.rb:23:NoMethodError: undefined method `alias_method_chain’ for I18n::Backend::Simple:Class

Googleing shows that many people gets in the same trouble  - nonworking fresh install of rails on FreeBSD ( probably this problem belongs to other BSD or Linux). (http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk/browse_thread/thread/342f99c546440fff/559e5fa694476b0c?lnk=raot)

So if you see this error when trying to execute `rails` command:

>$rails helloappl

>undefined method camelize for app:String

Don’t panic. Everyting ok and  solution is pretty simple. In fact its not a trouble with rails, but  there is a missed unmentioned dependency

all you need to do:

>$cd /usr/ports/converters/ruby-iconv

>$make install clean

Hope this post will help somebody to don’t waste time on sort out the problem.

First of all I thought How I do that. It looked quite hard to code all non-transparent logic and data with different formulas that was already done  in xls file that I’ve got from my custumer. But what if just open xls(odf) file change some cells value (input  params )  and read the the result of calculations from others. This thought had crossed my mind. There sould be tools that could work with .xls or .odf files and I need a crossplatform one.  And I start looking up….

So Google proposed me : 

1. http://www.andykhan.com/jexcelapi/
2. JOpenDocument http://www.jopendocument.org/documentation.html
3. JExcel http://teamdev.com/jexcel/
4. Apache POI http://poi.apache.org/spreadsheet/

First two are nice, crossplatform and easy to use  but… but they don’t recalculate value of cells with formulas (their API  return value of cell with formula but that value isn’t right if any dependent cell changed). That’s not what I want.

JExcel as I know is very powerfull but it has a strong dependency on Microsoft Office. That isn’t for me.

And Last one Apache POI is crossplatform, powerfull  and has “Formula Evaluation” support (http://poi.apache.org/spreadsheet/eval.html ).  This is exactly what I need.

FileInputStream fis = new FileInputStream(“c:/temp/test.xls”);

Workbook wb = new HSSFWorkbook(fis); //or new XSSFWorkbook("c:/temp/test.xls")
Sheet sheet = wb.getSheetAt(0);
FormulaEvaluator evaluator = wb.getCreationHelper().createFormulaEvaluator();

// suppose your formula is in B3
CellReference cellReference = new CellReference("B3");
Row row = sheet.getRow(cellReference.getRow());
Cell cell = row.getCell(cellReference.getCol()); 

CellValue cellValue = evaluator.evaluate(cell);

switch (cellValue.getCellType()) {
    case Cell.CELL_TYPE_BOOLEAN:
        System.out.println(cellValue.getBooleanValue());
        break;
    case Cell.CELL_TYPE_NUMERIC:
        System.out.println(cellValue.getNumberValue());
        break;
    case Cell.CELL_TYPE_STRING:
        System.out.println(cellValue.getStringValue());
        break;
    case Cell.CELL_TYPE_BLANK:
        break;
    case Cell.CELL_TYPE_ERROR:
        break;

    // CELL_TYPE_FORMULA will never happen
    case Cell.CELL_TYPE_FORMULA:
        break;
}

Finnally, I’ve created a SOAP-service that gets some input params, makes calculations using Apache POI from nessesary xls file, and returns calculated data. That’s all.

First of all about tools. Currently, the most powerful debuggers are the Firebug extension in Firefox and the Opera Dragonfly debugger in Opera.
Firebug is well-known, userfriendly, and its more than enough in most situation. But from my own expierence, sometimes Dragonfly can help to debug code that has been “packed” and needs to be unpacked using eval(), when Firebug can’t. I was faced with such situation about half a year ago when I need to fix an application based on Dojo.

Now about techniques. Here is an particular interesting technique that I found from the article “Advanced debugging with JavaScript” :

…Debuggers for many other programming languages have a “watch” concept that can break into the debugger when a variable changes. Neither Dragonfly nor Firebug currently support “watch” but it’s easy to get the same effect by adding the following line of debugging code at the top of the source of the script you’re troubleshooting:
__defineSetter__('prop', function() { debugger; });
Using getters and setters can emulate “watch” functionality and help you set “smart” breakpoints.

These three are very important as for me:

1) jQuery now supports “live events” – events that can be bound to all current – and future – elements. Using event delegation, and a seamless jQuery-style API, the result is both easy to use and very fast:

Previously I use liveQuery plugin for this purpose.  Now, for examle I can simply use 
 $("p").live("click", function(){
  // doing something
 });

to bind a handler to an event (click) for all current – and future – element <p>.

.live – don’t fully replace functionality of liveQuery plugin, for examle .live doesn’t support the no-event style callback that liveQuery provides. Only event handlers can be bound with .live. But in many chanses  it’s all you need.

2) jQuery 1.3 has a brand new CSS selector engine – nicknamed ‘Sizzle‘.  So now jQuery performance for most selectors  coming in about 49% faster than its previous engine. This is especially surprising considering that the engine in 1.2.6 was already pretty fast.

3) HTML Injection was rewrited. All of the code related to injecting HTML into a document (such as the append, prepend, before, and after methods) has been overhauled.  The functionality provided is identical to what was in previous releases of jQuery but with the added benefit of being much, much faster (about 6x faster overall).

So now jQuery is  being much, much faster in many ways. (It is realy importnat cause many users still are using IE6 that is realy slow and dull browser ).

Additionally, Google has provided us with a copy of jQuery hosted on their servers. This copy of jQuery is automatically minified and gzipped – and served from Google’s fast edge cache servers. 

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3/jquery.min.js”></script>

You can feel free to include the above html-code directly into your site and you will get the full performance benefits of a quickly-loading jQuery.

Bottom line is the fact that we have enough reasons to upgrade our sites jQuery engine.

So here is my expierence. It was based on this articles Building GlassFish on FreeBSD and Compile Glassfish on FreeBSD (JDK 1.5)  (which are primary the same) and some others.

First of all:

1) Don’t try to build it using maven2 . Just use maven (/usr/ports/devel/maven)

2) It ‘s important to specify which BRANCH to checkout cause if you don’t you ‘ll get the newest sources that won’t be compiled.  To Checkout sources of Glassfish v2 use:

 $cvs -d :pserver:YOUR_ACCOUNT_LOGIN@cvs.dev.java.net:/cvs co -r SJSAS91_UR2_BRANCH glassfish/bootstrap

3) Don’t try to build it using jdk1.6 cause you get build errors on step 4 ‘Build the checked out source code. ‘

That’s all. Step by step tutorial you find in  Building GlassFish on FreeBSD just remember my remarks.

#tar -xzf rfunc-2.1.3.1-RC1-unix.tar.g 
#cd sources

3)change config file ‘makefile.freebsd’: here is my config makefile
4) run make :

#make -f makefile.freebsd rfunc

5)copy ‘rfunc’ to ‘/usr/local/libexec/firebird/udf/rfunc.so’

#cp rfunc /usr/local/libexec/firebird/udf/rfunc.so

(found some useful information on this forum post )

Long long time ago, when I was child and trees were big. My father bought me Raymond Smullyan‘s book named «What is the name of this book? » :)  By the way, it was a great book, and there was a nice question «What is the difference between something and nothing?». In russian it sounds more amazing:

- В чем разница между ничто и нечто? 

and prety logically strict answer:

- Ничто не существует, существует нечто. Nothing does’nt exist, Something exist.

It is a good clear and complete answer (by logic).

Now, I often think about is there other question is there any difference between two philosophic substance All and Nothing?

Probably, these are just the two different sides of the same coin…