I have been using the Struts 2.0.11.1 framework to develop a new web application with on a Oracle OC4J 10.1.3.1 application server. Things have been working great for me during my initial development using JDeveloper Studio 10.1.3.3, which has a embedded OC4J 10.1.3.3 server in it.

What I found was that when I deployed the application to our test server, the application would not parse any of my url parameters. This obviously caused the application to not work. I now started to do some extensive research on what might be going wrong. I spent hours in Google doing search after search, and not finding much information on why the issue is happening.

I figured that the issue was something to do with OC4J, since the issue was not occurring in version 10.1.3.3 but did occur in version 10.1.3.1. I confirmed my assumption when I finally came across the following thread .

It appears that OC4J has a bug in version 10.1.3.0 through 10.1.3.2 with parsing url parameters when not being passed to or from a servlet. Since Struts 2.x uses filters as the only way to invoke a action, the url parameters were being stripped off. To fix this issue they suggest you download this patch.

http://updates.oracle.com/ARULink/PatchDetails/process_form?patch_num=5608209

Since this patch is only important to me, and my application, I doubt I can get the server group to install it for me. There are lots of applications on the server, and who knows what the patch will affect and so on.

So if you are having the same issue I am, you will be stuck using WebWork for a while, until you can get the application server upgraded. Webwork works just fine, but you have to make sure you use the web.xml 2.1 compatibility setup. I wish that Struts 2.x would include the 2.1 compatibility from Webwork in its release.

Bill Clinton was in Hillsborough, NC on April 23, 2008 to do a support rally for his wife Hillary. I figured this might be a once in a lifetime opertunity for me to see a former President of the United States in person, so off I went to see the one and only Bill Clinton.

The rally was a lot of fun, and I had a great time. Bill Clinton is a excellent speaker, and has so many great point’s it is amazing. He really makes me believe in the Clinton campaign, Hillary, and himself. He is a man of the people, that is for sure. I just wish I could have met him in person. This is one man I bet is a ton of fun to hang out with and drink a beer.

Here are some pictures that Amber Jennings took of the event. They can be viewed in full detail here .

I have been using quartz to do some batch scheduling on a project. I found that most of the Spring Quartz classes do not really work that well with the 1.6 version of Quartz.

I did find a easy way to start the Quartz scheduler using a simple spring call.

I created a ~SimpleSchedule class in java that will create a simple scheduler.

public class SimpleSchedule
{
  private static Log log = LogFactory.getLog(SimpleSchedule.class);
  
  public SimpleSchedule()
  {
    try
    {
      Scheduler scheduler = this.createScheduler();
      
      // Start the Scheduler running
      scheduler.start();
      
      log.info( "Scheduler start at " + new Date());
    } catch (SchedulerException ex)
    {
      log.error(ex);
    }
  }

  public Scheduler createScheduler() throws SchedulerException
  {
    return StdSchedulerFactory.getDefaultScheduler();
  }
}

To get this scheduler to start at load, all I have to do is initialize the bean in spring, and the scheduler is created and loads the default quartz_jobs.xml.

<bean class="edu.unc.its.as.affiliate.quartz.SimpleSchedule"/>

My wife, Amber Jennings, just got some photo’s she took published on the Moe.org website. I am so proud of her. The shots are great, and I am sure that she will get many more great ones when we go to Moe Down.

Well this project was definitely not as easy as I would have thought. I bricked my Linkstation Live like 5 times. The box would only boot up to the Emergency Mode. Thank god for the Buffalo NAS wiki because they provided me with all the information I needed to get the box up and running again.

Using the instructions I found out how to install a Debian os on my system, boot up the system into EM mode, and recover the box with the default os. Listed below is a list of links from the wiki that I found most helpful with hacking the Linkstation Live v2 box.

• FreeLink Firmware / Debian OS

• Revive your Linkstation Live from scratch

• Install Webadmin for Freelink

I did figure out a neat little tick on how to get a bigger root partition on the box. I will have to wright up how to do that later.