At the moment I still get “Insufficient data to generate the preview” from this tool although it seams to be able to parse the data, no idea what it means…

I didn’t have a lot of time to test yet, but my first impression is that it is the chaos of a bulletin board, mixed with the trolls found in blog comments and interspersed with unrelated automated bot comments.

Probably this is because I’m jumping right in, and other developers already had info sessions or got in earlier, so they had some time to get used to everything before the place was overwhelmed.

It’s still a developer preview, so I’ll give it some more time before I decide if I really like it…

The site is a showcase of Grails on Google AppEngine with the Grails AppEngine plugin.

Places are stored in the AppEngine datastore and a taglib is added for rendering the login button and the currently logged in user.

Additionally, an integration with Google AJAX Search API is done when adding a place.

public void testURLEquals() throws MalformedURLException {
  assertEquals(new URL("http://www.kapaza.be"), new URL("http://www.kapaza.nl"));
}

Just so you know when you get strange results when putting URLs in a Set…  It’s even worse, since this means that comparing URLs needs name resolution, which is a slowdown.  More in the Javadocs.

One solution is to use an URI instead of an URL.  This will fail:

public void testURIEquals() throws URISyntaxException {
  assertEquals(new URI("http://www.kapaza.be"), new URI("http://www.kapaza.nl"));

}

The Thrash folder however still shows
No conversations in the Trash. Who needs to delete when you have over 2000 MB of storage?!

7 GB that is, if you use the same metrics hard disk manufacturers use. It’s still not really 7 GB though.

Looks like I still have some space left after 4 years of e-mailing (I didn’t import my old hotmail and student accounts I had before that):
You are currently using 472 MB (6%) of your 7007 MB.

I used a little trick (don’t tell Google!) to import my e-mail from my old server. When you purchase a Premier Edition account, you have better tools to migrate your e-mail. After 15 days (and a successful migration) I downgraded my Premier Edition to a Standard Edition for free (you have 30 days to try it).

$sudo vim /etc/fstab
(add the noatime option)

# /dev/sda3
UUID=8623d9e3... / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro,noatime 0 1

$sudo mount -a
…
$uptime
… load average: 0.24, 0.16, 0.17

So far this completely unscientific proof.

More info about the noatime option.

// This class is package protected to avoid
// external programs messing up.class Brain {

public void handleEvent(MeetNewPersonEvent event) {
...  if (getLocation().equals(Locations.JAPAN)) {
 fireEvent(new BowEvent(event));
}}

public void handleEvent(BowEvent event) {
 // Avoid infinite loop.  The problem is the
// 'esteemed higher' part, the person
// for whom you're bowing may think the same.
 if (event.isPersonEsteemedHigher() && !event.hasBowedTooMuch()) {
 bow();
 } else {
 nod();
 }}

protected void bow() {
 lookSincere();
 smile();
 bendForward();
}

I also needed to reprogram the eating subroutines.

public void handleEvent(FeelingHungryEvent event) {
...  if (getLocation().equals(Locations.JAPAN)) {
 // This was a tricky one to handle,
// the implementation is left
// as an exercise to the reader.
uploadChopsticksRoutine();
}}

The RunForTrainEvent and especially the WaitForTrainEvent could be canceled out since public transportation is much better than the location I originally wrote it for (Belgium).

public void handleEvent(RunForTrainEvent event) {
 if (getLocation().equals(Locations.JAPAN)) {
   stopRunning();
   relax();
   Thread.sleep(5*Timer.MINUTE);
 }
}

Finally, I needed to handle the RunningNoseEvent (extends HasColdEvent) better.

public void handleEvent(RunningNoseEvent event) {
...  if (getLocation().equals(Locations.JAPAN)) {
 // Blowing your nose in public is NOT DONE
// in Japan.  This is considered
// a bit the same as burping.
// Public humiliation is your part when
// this is not checked.
 dipNose();
} else {
 blowNose();
}
}

protected Location getLocation() {
...
if (isCurrentLocationUnknown()) {
 if (bodyTallerThanMostOthers() && friendlyPeople()
       && metroEvery2Minutes()
       && dressCode.equals(Dresscodes.COSTUME)
       && eatingCode.equals(EatingCodes.SHOPSTICKS)) {
  return Locations.JAPAN;
  }
 }
}

} // End class

This is released under an Apache license. Please notify me if these changes are of any use to you.

An interesting solution is posted here (I used the mod_rewrite option). You can test this by changing your user agent in Firefox.

This guy seems to be following bad bots.

I added Java, Nutch, Jakarta, Vagabondo and an empty bot name to the list of bad bots.

First of all, I had a really long week + weekend and I was tired when I wrote the post. I apologize for the rather in-your-face title. I should have chosen a more subtitle wording, especially since I really appreciate all the work that developers donate in their free time to open source projects.

I did’t expect my blog post would end up as the main article on ongwt.com. I use my blog mainly to communicate with colleagues about my work. It probably has something to do with my recent switch to feedburner. Hooray for feedburner!

Like I wrote, I like GWT and its approach. It’s really nice to see how intelligent the development team approached and solved the problem at hand. The image handling (sprites), js compression and http round-trip optimisations are really clever.

I’ll start by describing how my site came to what it is now. The site started as a playground for me. I wanted to try the latest new thing (ajax!) and so I first started with scriptaculous. I didn’t succeed in getting the layout right with pure css (after all, I’m only a Java developer) and I stumbled upon GWT. The mail app demo is really nice and this gave me the idea to start a site that searches on-line marketplaces and lets users treat the classifieds as e-mail: with the possibility to delete, mark items as read/unread and star them. Much like Google Reader.

For this, GWT was the perfect match. Everything went as I expected it to do, sometimes with some cursing about why my onclick events were not fired and why a non-existing background image in css stopped the hosted mode to work, but all-in-all it was very good.

After some (positive) discussion with my other half, I wanted the work I put in it to give me some return-on-investment (money!). It turned out after some basic user testing (she sitting at the keyboard and I shouting “why would you do that?” and “that’s not meant to be used like that”) that the whole idea was too complex for a standard user (no offense to my super-intelligent girlfriend) who stumbles upon my site. So week after week I removed some of the functionality to make the page less overwhelming. Until I finally found myself using GWT only for the autocompleter, which clearly wasn’t the intention of the GWT framework. This, together with the remarks I gave in the previous post (adsense, analytics and seo) made me decide to temporarily stop developing with GWT.

I expect to start again with GWT once the site “gains some momentum”, and then I will re-enable those more complex features which should be easier than with mootools. I’ll probably ask some advice from a usability expert about how to design the page with all this functionality without overwhelming first-time users. And I will check out MyGWT and GWT-Ext more thoroughly.