Spring In-Depth, In Context

Here is another great contribution to Open Source and especially for the Spring community. My good friend David Winterfeldt ( creator and operator of http://www.springbyexample.org ) and published his book, which is a work in progress, to his site ( http://www.springindepth.com/). The first couple of chapters are done, and have some great reference stuff in there. The following chapters are still in progress, but already contain some really good stuff. He's got examples of AOP, WebFlow among some of the more advanced topics.

If you are interested in Spring, or just in open source in general, take a look.

Joomla!

Lately I've been looking into Joomla. My uncle currently has a website that somebody else built using Joomla. He has asked me to take over the site for him, since the guy who built it, isn't doing a very good job maintaining it. enough of the intro.

To gets things clear, this is my first attempt at using a CMS tool. I've read about them, seen what they can do, but never have i used one. I've heard about Drupal, Joomla, Lenya to name a few. But i have no comparison for anything, so my opinions are purely from a newbie's perspective.

First, Joomla seems pretty good. Installation is mostly point and click. You can configure some stuff once it's installed, but from what i have found, documentaion isn't spectacular. I've found articles about how to do certain things, that go into pretty good detail, but from what i have found the major thing lacking is a beginner's how-to....."Like ok I've installed Joomla, what do i do now?"

I've also come across the phenomon of every has rolled their own feature.....i'm looking for a Picture Gallery, but there doesn't seem to be anything simple, there appears to be tons.

anyways, i'll post more as i learn.

Dealing with biodegradeable material

This week-end I've been trimming down, cutting down cording off the cutup wood.

The city i live in comes by to pickup branches to pass through a wood chipper for a few weeks each year, unfortunately those weeks are at the beginning of the summer ( April - May ) before most people have a chance to do any of their yard work.

You can take your stuff ( branches, leaves, etc ) to the city dump for free...but the problem is how do you get them there. I have about 6 bundles of branches and 1 full pine tree. how am i supposed to manage to take them to the city.... i could rent a truck and trailer, but that would cost more than i am willing to spend on "ecological" disposal of this stuff. I'm in luck to have a buddy that has a pickup that will give me a hand, but I'm thinking most people would just through this stuff out to the trash.

My question is, is it really that cost prohibitive to continue the "pick-up" service once a month throughout the whole summer?

Netbeans vs Eclipse

This is more a technical post, so you non-technical people reading this, just skip over and ignore.

Now onto the post.

I've been an Eclipse user for quite some time, well that and IntelliJ IDEA from JetBrains. Recently ( after listening to a few podcasts, and reading some decent articles ) i have switched to Netbeans for my personal development. I still use Eclipse at work, since that is the standard, but have been realizing that i really like some of the stuff from netbeans. Sure i could still use Eclipse, but i have aways been a little bit of an IDE whore and tend to switch to what best fits my needs.

There are still a few things that i find myself looking for, but i had that feeling even with eclipse or IntelliJ.

I guess i just haven't found what i am looking for.