garywaddell.com

Using Dynamic Stylesheets for IE

garywaddell — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 14:39:26 +0000

We all know Internet Explorer is a pita when it comes to standardizing CSS. You find you are spending a number of hours testing your website between different IE versions only to find some very cool CSS techniques you used end up looking miserable in IE. I guess it’s what we have to expect from Microsoft at this time, but this trick will help you to still do the very cool layouts you wish but still cater to issues found in Internet Explorer versions. I found myself using this technique:

This technique uses client side conditions whereby the if condition here is checking for Internet Explorer less than or equal to version 7, and when true, including the styles required by IE. You can put this after your main style sheet definition (example: < link > ) where the IE styles will override your other styles that are working in other browsers.

Note however, if you do use the CSS keyword !important, your styles in your IE sheet will end up being ignored as !important forces styles defined in stylesheets later on from being overwridden.

Ant Missing in PDT Eclipse for Mac

garywaddell — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 00:30:23 +0000

So you want to run some build Ant scripts using your PDT Eclipse installation on your new Mac computer, but where is the view? In fact, where is Ant? It appears PDT is not part of the Eclipse PDT bundle, so you need to activate it in the Help | Software Updates section. You’ll find this in the Java Development Tools option. I was (am) using Eclipse Galileo, and I found the option in the Work With drop down, Galileo list item. When I selected this, I was able to expand the nodes in the treeview and locate the Java Development tools. Tada, good luck!!

Customizing the CKEditor Toolbar

garywaddell — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 18:37:19 +0000

If you want to create your own custom CKEditor toolbar, here are the options you can reference when you update the config.js file. Use the ‘-’ to group the icons and the ‘/’ to put icons into a new line. So far, my experience with CKEditor is a good one.

config.toolbar = 'Full';

config.toolbar_Full =
[
    ['Source','-','Save','NewPage','Preview','-','Templates'],
    ['Cut','Copy','Paste','PasteText','PasteFromWord','-','Print', 'SpellChecker', 'Scayt'],
    ['Undo','Redo','-','Find','Replace','-','SelectAll','RemoveFormat'],
    ['Form', 'Checkbox', 'Radio', 'TextField', 'Textarea', 'Select', 'Button', 'ImageButton', 'HiddenField'],
    '/',
    ['Bold','Italic','Underline','Strike','-','Subscript','Superscript'],
    ['NumberedList','BulletedList','-','Outdent','Indent','Blockquote','CreateDiv'],
    ['JustifyLeft','JustifyCenter','JustifyRight','JustifyBlock'],
    ['Link','Unlink','Anchor'],
    ['Image','Flash','Table','HorizontalRule','Smiley','SpecialChar','PageBreak'],
    '/',
    ['Styles','Format','Font','FontSize'],
    ['TextColor','BGColor'],
    ['Maximize', 'ShowBlocks','-','About']
];

EApps Bug – www alias

garywaddell — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 01:32:19 +0000

I use EApps for all of my clients. They are one of the best hosting services as they offer true VPS hosting services at a very affordable rate. The support is very thorough as well, knowledgeable, quick to respond etc. I have been a customer for years now, and continue to be very happy with their incredibly stable service. However, one thing I have noticed that happens when you have multiple domains in a subscription is the www alias can be get messed up when you make changes to some of the settings in your EApps Control Panel. I’ve informed EApps, hopefully they can fix this bug some time…For now, do this if you run into this problem:

The problem is caused by the missing www alias for the .com domain site:

control panel > site tab > select the site > website  settings > configure > check the box for www

If the site is not  setup for www apache will show the site from the first virtual host it finds in  his configuration file.

Button Generator

garywaddell — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 01:27:42 +0000

A great site for creating Web 2.0 Buttons

http://jirox.net/AsButtonGen/

WSWS3227E – java.lang.IllegalArgumentException

garywaddell — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 20:09:08 +0000

So you get your web service client working nicely and deploy your code to Websphere only to find this ugly Websphere Exception:

[6/3/10 21:28:28:081 EDT] 00000035 Connection    E com.ibm.ws.webservices.engine.client.Connection invoke WSWS3227E:  Error: Exception:
java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: argument type mismatch

From what I have read online, this can happen based on the webservices.jar file not being the most current one. I didn’t have that issue though, but what I did find was how Websphere’s classloader can cause this exception. I had setup a SharedLib for my new webservice JAR files but what I should have done was to include the JAR with my WAR file’s WEB-INF/lib and remove the entry from the Shared Lib. This seemed to fix this.

Java Calendar – Calculate Number of Days between two dates

garywaddell — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 17:30:12 +0000

Calendar date1 = Calendar.getInstance();

// You can set date1 to any date
date1.set(Calendar.MONTH,1);
date1.set(Calendar.YEAR,1980);

Calendar now = Calendar.getInstance();
int numberOfDays = (date1.getTime().getTime() - now.getTime().getTime()) / (1000 * 60 * 60 * 24);

Our Education System

garywaddell — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:49:58 +0000

Although this is not a technical article, it certainly opens your mind to our education system today, I certainly hope we can change the way it works because I believe Sir Ken Robinson completely.

http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.htmlI

Logging Soap Messages – Trace.log

garywaddell — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 17:35:04 +0000

If you need to log SOAP information in Websphere, you can turn on trace logging and set the following value in the Change Log Details Level (Logging and Tracing > ServerName > Diagnostic Trace Service > Change Log Detail Levels) :

com.ibm.ws.webservices.engine.*=all

This will log only the SOAP web service messages without seeing all of the other goop that can make the trace log hard to read through.

Make sure you have a valid trace log file defined first (${LOG_ROOT}/trace.log)

Websphere SSL – Keystores and Trust Files

garywaddell — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 22:06:27 +0000

There may be occasions where you need to perform SSL web services through your application into another web service. You need to become a bit familiar with key stores and trust files. I ended up using the default dummy files shipped with WebSphere, you will see this in the IBM article I will refer you to.

First, I assume you have received some kind of cert(s) (*.cer) from the app you will be calling into. You need to add these to your default trust file, which is stored in WebSphere as a repertoire (Security | SSL). Remember the default password for the trust file is WebAS…go figure, that is easy to know and find =)

As long as you can remember the password WebAS (did I say that already), then follow these instructions first. I only followed the instructions for the ikeyman utility, you can disregard the other command line tools (ie keytool) if you do end up using ikeyman.

Now once your app has been installed into WAS, you will need to SSL enable the web services through the Web Services: Client security bindings (Enterprise Applications > YourApp > Web module > YourWARFile > Web services: Client security bindings) Click on the Edit Button beside the web service using SSL and make sure the HTTP SSL Enabled is checked.

Now you can try out your SSL web service from your app.

Enterprise Applications > CEBS70 > Web module > efs70.war