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A friend sent this great video link on watershed hydrology from the 1950s.

I’ve been working on a website for the program I work for at The University of Arizona. The website is a searchable document catalog of the Santa Rita Experimental Range. I am using Google Maps, jQuery, PHP/CodeIgniter, and MySQL to build this website. CodeIgniter is a great framework for building web apps. I like how simple it is to use and learn. The CodeIgniter website has lots of great documentation and examples.

I run Windows Vista Home Ultimate on my home PC. At best Vista is OK. It really is a hardware resource hog, which is a shame. One of the things about Vista I like the least is how slow Windows File Explorer is when it comes to copying and especially deleting files. Someboday didn’t think things through in designing the “Calculating Time Remaining” part of the explorer functionality. It is incredibly slow and I have not found a way to disable it. So, I am now working with a utility called Total Commander. File copies and deletes are much, much more faster. The interface takes some getting used to but so far I like all of the features offered. The interface has a similar look to the old Norton Commander interface. I am going to try it for a couple more days and if it keeps working this will I’ll probably buy a copy.

Technorati : windows vista total commander

I’ve been using maven jetty plugin to build and test a web application. I’ve been meaning to try the Ant equivalent of this and decided to try the installation instructions found on the jetty website. As per the Jetty site’s instructions I downloaded the source code for the latest version of Jetty (6.1.9) and tried running the “mvn install” process. The install failed due to a missing plugin, which seemed to something related to the Apache Release Plugins. So, to solve the problem I edited the pom.xml file in the Jetty source folder and added the following repository:

<repository>
<id>org.apache.maven.plugins</id>
<name>Maven Release Plugins</name>
<url>http://repo1.maven.org/maven2</url>
</repository>

I wasn’t sure what the id nor the name should be so I just made a logical guess. I re-ran the “mvn install” process and this seemed to work. I followed the remaining installation steps and got the ant plugin jars to build. I hope this helps anyone who has the same problem.

Sometimes it is necessary to access a JSF backing bean in a ArcGIS WebServer app. The easiest way I’ve found to do this is with the following two lines of code:

FacesContext fc = com.esri.adf.web.util.WebUtil.getFacesContext();
UserBean bean = (UserBean) fc.getCurrentInstance().getExternalContext().getSessionMap().get();

The example assumes there is a faces-config.xml defined managed bean.