Der Wunsch: Offline… Leider

While working on a mini improvement request for Wish (more on that later), I found out that Der Wunsch is now ‘almost’ offline. Here’s the Babel Fish translation of the message on Der Wunsch home page:

Off-line… Unfortunately
The web page is unfortunately for indefinite time off-line, since I must worry about other projects.

That’s about a year and a half since Der Wunsch came to life. Thanks for the effort, Claus.

Now, back to the mini improvement. I’ve received several feedbacks and was finally able to complete the first request from Machi.

i really like this website. i think it would be better if u could search the wishes by number, rather then just keywords. just a thought

I’ve made the change to reflect this request. So now when someone searches for a number, the wish with an ID of that number will be presented first before any other wishes with the number as part of their description text.

Other improvements from the rest of the feedbacks, comin’ right up!

Sydney Trip 2007

Having lived in Melbourne, Australia, for almost 9 years, I finally travelled to Sydney for the first time ever last week.

Planning the trip was easy and quick with Bezurk (a Ruby on Rails application, made in Singapore, I’ve lost faith in travel agents since a long time ago), Wotif (a JEE application, Australian made, works like a charm but they really need a design makeover), and Google Maps (I want my goddamn placemarks on the print result).

I must admit that I like Sydney CBD better than Melbourne’s. My favourite hangout in Sydney was a little cafe in QVB (great ambiance), totally loved the chocolate croissant accompanied by a glass of latte. Another favourite spot was Royal Botanic Gardens, it was totally relaxing, lying on the grass just looking at the blue sky. Last but not least, I think Makoto serves the best sushi.

As for the touristy activity, I took a 2-hour train ride to Katoomba followed by a bus ride to Blue Mountains. And yes, I did all the Scenic World’s Skyway, Flyway, Railway, and Walkway. I also did the bushwalk thingy to Echo Point’s The Three Sisters.

Some pictures from Sydney:

Darling Harbour

Sydney Harbour Bridge

Sydney Opera House

Royal Botanic Gardens

Blojsom IM Notification Messages

Here’s a screenshot of Blojsom notification messages on Pandion.

You’ll be notified for new entry, comment, trackback, and pingback. I’m currently working on XMPP Plugin for Blojsom, though nothing is stopping this from becoming IMNotification Plugin. I guess there are plenty of AIM and MSN users out there.

SCodePlugin v0.5

SCodePlugin v0.5 has been released, expect the jar and source downloads to be available from SourceForge mirrors in the next few days. As usual, if you want it earlier, just email me and I’ll send it to you.

Changelog:

• Introduced KaptchaImageEngine using Kaptcha (was Simple Captcha) library, with 3 new flavours from KinkImageEngine, FishEyeImageEngine, and ShadowImageEngine.
• Replaced image engine class loading in image factory with constructor injection. SCodePlugin passes the image factory to SCodeServlet, instead of passing the image engines.
• Set ImageIO caching off during SCodeServlet initialisation. This improves performance and prevents any temporary disk-based image creation.

Upgrade instruction:

• In WEB-INF/lib directory, replace scodeplugin-0.4.jar with scodeplugin-0.5.jar, and add kaptcha-1.1.jar .
• On /WEB-INF/classes/blojsom-plugins.xml file, replace the scode bean declaration you have for SCodePlugin v0.4:

  <bean id="scode" class="com.mbledug.blojsom.plugin.scode.SCodePlugin" init-method="init" destroy-method="destroy">
      <constructor-arg>
          <map>
              <entry key="simple" value="com.mbledug.blojsom.plugin.scode.engine.SimpleImageEngine"/>
              <entry key="gradient" value="com.mbledug.blojsom.plugin.scode.engine.GradientImageEngine"/>
              <entry key="funky" value="com.mbledug.blojsom.plugin.scode.engine.FunkyImageEngine"/>
          </map>
      </constructor-arg>
  </bean>

  with this for SCodePlugin v0.5:

  <bean id="scodeSimpleImageEngine" class="com.mbledug.blojsom.plugin.scode.engine.SimpleImageEngine"/>
  <bean id="scodeGradientImageEngine" class="com.mbledug.blojsom.plugin.scode.engine.GradientImageEngine"/>
  <bean id="scodeFunkyImageEngine" class="com.mbledug.blojsom.plugin.scode.engine.FunkyImageEngine"/>
  <bean id="scodeKinkImageEngine" class="com.mbledug.blojsom.plugin.scode.engine.KinkImageEngine"/>
  <bean id="scodeFishEyeImageEngine" class="com.mbledug.blojsom.plugin.scode.engine.FishEyeImageEngine"/>
  <bean id="scodeShadowImageEngine" class="com.mbledug.blojsom.plugin.scode.engine.ShadowImageEngine"/>
  <bean id="scodeImageFactory" class="com.mbledug.blojsom.plugin.scode.ImageFactory">
      <constructor-arg>
          <map>
              <entry key="simple" value-ref="scodeSimpleImageEngine"/>
              <entry key="gradient" value-ref="scodeGradientImageEngine"/>
              <entry key="funky" value-ref="scodeFunkyImageEngine"/>
              <entry key="kink" value-ref="scodeKinkImageEngine"/>
              <entry key="fisheye" value-ref="scodeFishEyeImageEngine"/>
              <entry key="shadow" value-ref="scodeShadowImageEngine"/>
          </map>
      </constructor-arg>
  </bean>
  <bean id="scode" class="com.mbledug.blojsom.plugin.scode.SCodePlugin" init-method="init" destroy-method="destroy">
      <constructor-arg>
          <ref bean="scodeImageFactory"/>
      </constructor-arg>
  </bean>