My Tech Hell

Update: 6:20 EST, Friday, January 15 2010

So far as I know, if you text donations to any carrier other than AT&T, the service provider will waive the normal text charges. I guess the (twisted, greedy) spirit of Ma Bell still lives within AT&T. Way to go guys! For all other carriers – WAY TO GO GUYS! :)

You can help

This is just a quick post from special circumstances. I’m sure you’ve heard of what’s going on with Haiti right now, and the images coming out of there from the news networks would make you cry your eyes out. There’s a technology spin on this, though.

I have Verizon for my cell phone service, and I just donated $10 to the Red Cross using it. It was quick, easy, painless, and the right thing to do. If you’ve got a cell phone, most likely you could donate another $10 in about two minutes to one of eight different charities, and I’m pretty sure it works for just about any service provider.

Look here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/14/red-cross-raises-4-millio_n_423910.html

… and pick your charity. As far as using your cell phone goes, it’s a four step process.

1. Text whatever number corresponds to you choice of donation. For me, it was 90999 and the text was “HAITI”
2. You get an immediate text back asking to confirm your donation. For me, it asked that I just text “YES” back.
3. You get another instantaneous response asking if you want to continue getting text updates from your chosen charity. This may only be a Red Cross thing, but you can just text whatever they ask to them to not spam you. In my case, I just texted back “STOP”.
4. One more text comes back confirming your donation and your preference to not receive any more messages.

That’s all there is to it. Your next service bill gets a small bump, and $10 goes to helping a country that not only helped give us the Louisiana Purchase which doubled the size of our nation 200 years ago, but which most probably just lost a full one percent of it’s entire population. That’s 100,000 people. Think about it. $10 will get you maybe two lattes at Starbucks in the USA. $10 in Haiti might buy enough antibiotics to save a few people’s lives. Take a few minutes out of your day, go to the Huffington Post page, pick your charity, and give, tech-style. It’s good for the soul.

Not Again…

JSF, that steaming pile of undocumented, developer-hating obfuscation has yet again soaked up about 16 hours of my time to do something that should have been a three second configuration. Just to reiterate, much like Randall Munroe’s hatred of velociraptors spurs him to evaluate houses based on their ability to repulse dinosauriod attacks, I find myself now evaluating jobs by how close the project requirements are to actually using the JSF framework.

That said, when you’re a contractor, you use the tools selected for you by the almighty architects. In my case, it’s JSF or my paycheck. Being the Alpha Geek that I am, I gratefully welcomed the paycheck an opportunity to learn more about JSF.
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JavaServer Faces – Aw, crap…

I hate JavaServer Faces. I think JSF is a bloated abstraction-fest and just about any other framework makes it easier to write MVC applications – even Struts. That being said, I’ve had to recently work with the beast, and in doing so I had to figure out how to do some things that wouldn’t even be an issue in Spring MVC, but required a workaround in JSF. One of those things is abstracting out actions from the JSF tags, and what follows is how to do it.
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A Small Utility For A Big Annoyance

You’re working on some files – say some dlls or .class files if you are a geek, or Word and Excel files if you’re mortal, and you need to move them.  No problem since you’ve moved files before – heck, anyone can move a file!  You right-click on the file to get the context menu, left-click on “cut”, right-click in the destination file, left-click on “paste”…

(Play music clip to get full experience of horror and rage)

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I haz a problem!

I had a problem, as I often do with the frameworks I work on. I wanted to set properties in my spring context configuration file with externalized strings à la i18n. It seemed like a reasonable request at the time – and then I had several hours sucked out of my life by internet searches with terms like “propertyplaceholderconfigurer i18n”, “propertyplaceholderconfigurer externalized strings”, and near the end when my brain cells started committing seppuku out of loathing of whining forum posters and rage at bofh post answerers, “job openings mcdonalds”.
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