I've griped a lot about servlet development, mostly in person to people around work, but also a bit on here. In particular, I'm writing stuff that uses a lot of forms, and it's really hard to debug, as I'm being kept outside of the 'black box' that I'm developing, and need to infer what's happening from the results (in other words, no debuggers, no printf (that go to a sensible place anyhow), and a lot of other stuff that's just not good for development). However, I've developed two methods to deal. The first is that, as most of our form submission happens through a http POST, the user gets redirected after the jsp that catches the POST finishes. So, I typically comment out the forward URL, and instead serialize whatever printing I want to happen through that. No spaces or underscores, and it sucks for handling a lot of printing, but it works. I might have code sprinkled through my jsps and servlets saying things like forwardurl += "value_of_parameter=..." It's ugly, but it's easy to set up. At some point, I'll look into better ways to do this. The second thing I've found, which I actually grabbed for home programming stuff 2 days ago, is a tool called LiveHTTPHeaders. It's *REALLY* good for figuring out what's going on with your CGIs and forms. I was just debugging something for about 15 minutes, trying to find why a listbox's values were landing in the POST form as a null, when I remembered the tool, grabbed it, and found that I was capitalizing the form value in the submit, and the POST was looking for it in lower case. So, yeah, it's a really great Mozilla plug-in.

While I'm boosting, let me say that google is a really cool company. I've blocked microsoft's bots from my site (no, IE users, I'm not blocking you, I'm blocking the crawlers that populate Microsoft's search engine). I've made a few more tweaks, and google is now crawling my site, including my entire blog. Huzzah. There's a few things I could do to make it easier yet for google to find the whole thing -- currently to go to an arbitrary page in the archives, which is what I really want indexed, google has to go to the initial index and step forward, something that their bot is reluctant to do to any depth. A page that directly links to each archive index will fix that, and would be pretty simple to write.

On the downside, when I returned from shopping yesterday, a blackout+surge had visited my apartment, resetting all the clocks and turning off all my computers. Alas, although everyone else booted back up without damage, kryten's hard disk is now toast. Without the system that acted as the gateway to the internet, I'm without access at home.. almost. I can still get internet access from one of the neighbors' wireless APs, for my laptop, but that's outgoing only. I'll probably start checking the spare IDE hard disks I have to see if any of them are good and could have the latest OpenBSD installed onto them.. although if I do that, I'll probably wait for the coming release. Either that, or perhaps I'll put Redhat Severn onto it.. hmm.. If I had the money, this would be a good time to cancel my verizon DSL and switch to telerama, but I don't want to drop the money for the DSLmodem right now.

Sweden voted nay on joining the EU. Phooey. The Israeli cabinet is talking of forcibly relocating Arafat, and one guy, Ehud Olmert, wants him assassinated. Just like Zeevi, it would be a good thing if Olmert got his just desserts, and were to be killed himself.

Sometimes I wonder what Wally does all day when I'm not around.