Take a little, give a little. I’ve been working on a Java/JBOSS project for the past 6 months and part of that includes working with the Java Native Interface.  One of the things I have to do, practically at gunpoint, is to make sure our Java clients run on Windows […]

Java / JNI

I finally got some time to put up galleries of the Dept56 dioramas we built this year.  Each year gets a bit more involved.  This year I spent extra effort building home made lighting out of parts from Radio Shack.  I’ve got galleries of the Dickens Village and the North […]

2006 Dept56 galleries online

There is a lot of information on the net about using WordPress as a CMS (content management system), in other words using WP as the foundation for a regular (non-blog) website.  But that information is kind of spread out and not completely clear on the process required. Fortunately, it’s very […]

Using WordPress as a CMS: making e-Commerce Lite work on ...

I just got word that my book is now planned for a March 30th post to the printer.  I don’t know if that constitutes “publication” date, but it’s close enough for me.  I guess I’ll be opening the book’s companion site the first of March then, unless I find out […]

GIMP Book: publication date set for 3/30

USTA investing millions in The Tennis Channel Well, this just sucks.  My family is big into playing and watching tennis.  My daughter is a state high school champ.  We love watching the US Open, the French Open, the Australian Open and Wimbledon, along with any other tournaments we’re lucky enough […]

USTA investing millions in The Tennis Channel

I finally finished the production edits for my next book, The Artist’s Guide to GIMP Effects.  Now the book is in copy edit.  I’ve received a sample chapter in final layout form.  Woohoo!  Although this is close, the book still has an April publication date.  I don’t know squat about […]

Status of my next GIMP book

There are a lot of examples of writing a simple JNI library for calling from a Java class.  Unfortunately, few of them explain how to push your JNI class/loadable library into a package of it’s own.  I ran into this problem today while trying to integrate a JNI library I’d […]

Working with JNI

The project I’m working on has a Java client that communicates with a JBOSS server. The client launches applications on the local host, communicates with them using XML and sends data from the applications back to the JBOSS server using JAX-RPC (via Axis, at the moment).  In order to manage […]

Learning to hate Java

I’m working on a Java project at work that has a TCP-based server component that accepts XML messages from clients. I implemented an XML handler that I pass to the SAXParser class that takes the XML as an input stream. The client sends the XML message and then waits for […]

Discovery of the TCP Half-Close

Just thought I’d give a plug to this very cool Firefox plugin. It provides browser side blog editing and automated submission. What it does is provide an editing area (with minimal highlighting and formatting, but sufficient for quick posts, plus HTML editing mode) in your browser without having to log […]

WordPress plugin: Performancing

Let's face it:  the old GIMP Gallery was the ugliest hack of PHP knonw to mankind.  Hey, I was fiddling.  I couldn't find a good gallery product so I wrote my own.  Well, I finally found one that works under WordPress .  It's called PhotoShow.   Very slick and easy […]

GIMP Gallery moved inside of the blog.