Dave Landers

The 3-each-session scheduling at Colorado Software Summit pays off again.

I looked at the schedule, and picked (based on content) the sessions I pretty much want to see this year. I ended up with 18. There are only 20 time blocks.

But because of the way they do the scheduling, I was able to fit in all 18 of my preferences into the 20 time slots. Just try that at other conferences!

Here’s how I do my schedule, in case you care:

Since the iCalendar format schedule is now also available, I subscribed to that (I use Apple’s iCal). Then, I created a new “myCSS” calendar and copied all the sessions I might go to (that’s 18 sessions at 3 times each). Some of the time blocks only had one session I wanted, so I deleted all the other instances of that session. That opened up yet more blocks. Lather, rinse, repeat. In the end I only had about 3 or 4 time slots to manually resolve. It probably took me less than 10 minutes total (not counting reading all the session abstracts to choose the 18 in the first place).

Thanks, Wayne & Peggy!

Technorati Tags: colorado software summit, conference, java, softwaresummit

The full, detailed, daily schedule for Colorado Software Summit has just been posted.

If you are not familiar with the conference, you should take a look. One look at the full schedule and you will see that (like every year), they’ve got some world-class developers talking about some hot topics - REST, JavaScript, JSF, Linux, iPhone and Andriod development, scalability, Spring, and lots more.

In fact, this might just be the first conference to feature iPhone development since Apple has only this week lifted their NDA.

You should also note that, unlike a lot of other conferences, this one features every session three (3) times each. That’s quite a load on the speakers (I speak here from personal experience), but is a boon for attendees (again, personal experience). While there is much more content here than you can hope to take in during the week, the 3-times-each deal makes it pretty certain that you’ll be able to get to your top 10 or 15 sessions.

Some other things that make this conference different and better than the rest:

• When you check in, you will get a CD with every single slide for every single session. So you can plan your schedule based on more than just the abstracts.
• After you get home, you’ll receive a CD containing every single slide (again - since many speakers tweak things at the last minute), plus any example source code used in the sessions.
• Every speaker is presenting two topics, so if you like one session, you might want to attend their other one.
• This conference is a real community. You will (if you so choose) be able to hang out, eat lunch, etc. with the speakers (and many other smart developers). Networking, in-depth conversations, and lots of joking around are an integral part of Software Summit. If you don’t leave having made a couple of new friends, you haven’t done it right.
• The food is absolutely fabulous.
• The venue in the heart of Colorado’s Rocky mountains (at a major ski resort) is spectacular.

Technorati Tags: colorado software summit, conference, iPhone, java, mac, softwaresummit

I just got a new MacBook Pro yesterday. I “needed” a new machine because my old one is a Core Duo (not Core 2 Duo) and wouldn’t run the Java 6 preview. And my son “needed” my old MacBook Pro for college. Yea, that’s it.

Anyway, I turned on the new machine this morning, and selected the Restore from Time Machine option. It chugged away for an hour or whatever, but by about 9:30 AM I was sitting in front of a near replica of the other machine. Pretty cool.

I did have to install XCode and Dashcode again.

And I had to re-acquaint my bluetooth phone with the new Mac. And re-authorize my iTunes music.

And for some reason, I had to reset my USB drive as the Time Machine volume (and it choose a new backup database folder, so it’s going to start over with a full backup).

Technorati Tags: apple, leopard, mac

As I reported earlier, I had a severe problem with Time Machine on my MacBook Pro. As I experimented with it, I realized it was probably related to another problem I have been living with ever since I got the machine.

The previous problem occurred when I was running a build or other long, CPU-intensive operation. Sometimes, the machine would just reboot suddenly. And it was always when I was away. I had no luck with any of the usual fixes suggested by Apple or found on the web. I had figured out that it was probably related to the screen saver coming on, but it was impossible to reproduce this for anyone.

But something about Time Machine allowed me to reproduce this more repeatably: lots of CPU, generating lots of heat, coupled with intense graphics == reboot.

The folks at the FlatIrons Apple Store were really great, especially given the madhouse produced by the holidays. I described both problems and they just decided to replace the logic board. They ordered the part, and I was without my machine for only a day-and-a-half. It seems like this has done the trick. Hurray!

Technorati Tags: apple, mac, reboot

Someone pointed out to me that some of my code sections were unreadable in Internet Explorer. They looked like this:

Hey! where’s the text? The rest of us (at least Firefox and Safari) were seeing something more like this:

Much better, but what’s going on?

I quote code in a <pre class="code">....</pre> block. And my style sheet contained:

.code {
    font-family: courier, monospace;
    margin: 10px 20px;
    padding: 3px 8px;
    border: 1px dashed #999999;
    overflow:auto;
}

It looked to me like IE was robbing space from either the text height or the padding to cram in a scrollbar. And since that made the resulting area for text too small, it also added a (way too small) vertical scrollbar, too. The result is non-functional in any real sense.

A bit of searching and I am drawn to this comment from the CSS 2.1 spec:

In the case of a scrollbar being placed on an edge of the element’s box, it should be inserted between the inner border edge and the outer padding edge. Any space taken up by the scrollbars should be subtracted from the computed width/height, thus preserving the inner border edge.

As I read this, the scrollbar needs to fit inside the element border, and thus subtracts from space that can be used for the content. This does preserve the overall size of the element no matter what type of scrolling might be used (or not). But in my context, it seems wrong. It also means that IE is probably right here (which also goes against my intuition :).

Wrong or not, it is certainly not what I want. So I did more hunting and experimenting, and I found only two solutions that I really thought worked.

First, I could simply increase the padding-bottom to make room for the scrollbar. This solution is nice because it keeps the browser-specific hacks out of the stylesheet. But I don’t like the way this looks when there is not a scrollbar, because there’s extra blank padding at the bottom.

So the only real choice for me was to add some browser-specific thing to the stylesheet. What I ended up with is based mainly on
this post, and looks like this:

.code {
    font-family: courier, monospace;
    margin: 10px 20px;
    padding: 3px 8px;
    border: 1px dashed #999999;
    overflow:auto;
    /* add padding in IE (which supports expressions) to make room for the scroll bar */
    padding-bottom: expression(this.scrollWidth > this.offsetWidth ? "19px" : "3px");
}

This seems to be working reasonably well, as it does not mangle the size of the element when there is no need for a scrollbar, and it bumps up the bottom padding to make way for IE’s scrollbar.

There are some downsides, like the expression is probably being over-evaluated, and it relies on a proprietary IE feature (expressions), so I may reevaluate this in the future. But for now at least my blog is (more) readable for IE users.

Technorati Tags: css, ie, scrollbar