Great Article on CSS-based form design

I just ran across a great article on how to do really good form design in CSS.

Published!

My wife was interviewed for a local magazine on parenting. A picture of my daughter and son was also used as the lead photo. Pretty neat!

Here's the article: (click photo to enlarge)

Contract First Web Services

I must be getting old.

For a while, I resisted the Spring-WS approach of contract first web services. I quickly dismissed it as too much work. I was just more interested in annotating my pojos to get them quickly deployed so that I can get some web services available.

Well, over the last couple of weeks, I've had the opportunity to catch my breath and have an open mind about Spring's case for Contract First Web Services.

Read it here yourself.

Their case is certainly a good one. At the end of the day, the contract really should start with the XML.

Every approach has its pro's and con's, but I think I will be giving much more serious consideration to Contract First Web Services!

Need a password to dump your postgresql database?

I was putting together a quick cron job today to dump a postgresql database, using pg_dump.

If you need to connect to the database with a password (because local trust is turned off), then you need a way to pass the password into pg_dump. pg_dump does not allow a command line password specification (for good reason... you don't necessary want the password showing up in a process listing by someone else on the box).

But it appears that pg_dump will look for an environment variable named PGPASSWORD.

In your script:

export PGPASSWORD=somereallysupersecurepassword
pgdump databasename

voila!

The Year 2009 so far.

So far, I've had a pretty productive 2009 (in terms of some of my personal goals):

• I am really focused at work, possibly doing some of my best all around technical work.
• I am working on some great projects, and generally feel invigorated by my job and my team.
• My side project is going really well. We go into testing in a few weeks!
• My lego house is slowly coming along.
• I started studying economics in my spare time. It is turning out to be a really neat topic to delve into. Next up: some basic accounting!
• Still playing oGame. :-)
  

One of My First Usenet posts.

I was curious what was one of my earliest records of me on the Internet.

According to Google, it's this post by me to a Usenet news group back in summer of 1992:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.msdos.programmer/browse_thread/thread/89c270d2e86ef013/c3be546b21d8fa53?hl=en&q=wmk101#c3be546b21d8fa53

I had been on the internet at Penn State since Fall of 1990, but I seldom used any public Usenet news group until that summer.

Mark: This was the summer was started programming 3D game engines in MS-DOS/Pascal/Assembler! Fun times!