The OS X equivalent to rt.jar is called classes.jar and it is located in /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/CurrentJDK/Classes.  Assuming that $JAVA_HOME will be mapped to /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/CurrentJDK, you can then point any application looking for /jre/lib/rt.jar to the classes.jar by executing the following commands in Terminal:

1. cd /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/CurrentJDK

2. sudo ln -s ./Home jre

3. cd jre/lib

4. sudo ln -s ../../Classes/classes.jar rt.jar

Refreshing Glasses of Water on a Hot Summer Day in Bermuda

The few of you who have followed this blog with any regularity know that it goes through periods of activity followed by long stretches of inactivity.  You may consider this a period (albeit brief, so far) of activity.

The updated design of AaronBaecker.com has been in the works since summer of 2010.  On the surface, it’s a re-imagining of the site’s look-and-feel.  Under the covers, it takes advantage of some of WordPress 3′s new functionality, as well as implements the site in HTML5.  There’s not really any CSS3 gimmickry here, yet, but it’s on my radar.

HTML5 won’t be a big deal to those of you who don’t know much of anything about the way web sites are created, but it’s an intriguing bit of data to those who may dabble in the web space.  This isn’t just HTML5 in terms of those tags that will be recognized by all browsers – it’s HTML5 through-and-through with some bits of magic applied to make it work in legacy browsers (yes, even IE 6 delivers a fair representation of the site, I think).  You’ll notice the site doesn’t actually validate to HTML5, but I’ll blame that on a combination of WordPress auto-generated markup and embeds.  I think that realistically accounts for all of the validation errors.

I’ll take you on a brief tour of the new site:

Web Fonts: I decided to use web fonts on the site, primarily just to try out some “hot, new technology”, but also because my lack of design skill means that any added bit of visual interest can’t hurt, right?  You’ll see three web fonts included as stylesheets, if you care to browse the source.  The fonts I chose are from Google’s Web Fonts, here: http://www.google.com/webfonts

Header Background: The header background image at the time of this writing was taken by me during afternoon tea at the Fairmont Hamilton Princess in Hamilton, Bermuda.  Try the rum Bloody Mary, it’s awesome.

Advertising: I’m sticking with Google AdWords, but created two new ad sizes and themed them to match the site’s color palette.  That was quick and easy to accomplish.

WordPress 3: I’ve been very happy with the ease of administration in WordPress 3 – particularly as someone who doesn’t post all that frequently.  The biggest upgrade, by far, has been the automated upgrade process that makes patching WordPress simple.  Version 2 of WordPress was a pain to upgrade and led to countless sites getting hacked because they were out-of-date on patches.   Now, if your site is out-of-date, you have no one to blame but yourself.  Log in and click the upgrade button once in a while!

I have an overall love/hate relationship with WordPress.  As a publisher, the tool is simple and straightforward to use.  As a developer, I tend to think it’s poorly documented and more complex than it needs to be – particularly the whole “loop” concept and the sheer volume of functions in the API.  I work with a lot of Web Content Management systems and feel like some of the enterprise systems that are extremely feature-rich are easier to develop with than WordPress.  Drupal is also easier, if you’re looking for another open source alternative.

Development Tools: I use Coda & TextMate for Mac, FogBugz for Issue Tracking, Kiln for Source Control.  The latter two are definitely overkill, but I use them for other projects so I might as well keep things consistent!

It has probably been 4 years, or so, since the last visual update to my site and I think it’s long past due.  I hope you find the new site more appealing, as I do!

The Suspect and The Tea Party, Sarah Palin, etc.

A great deal has been made about the radical views of the suspect, Jared Lee Loughner and trying to connect those views with those of the Tea Party and its most high-profile spokesperson, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.  I don’t believe the case for that linkage has been made.   That’s not to say that Mr. Loughner didn’t follow Ms. Palin or the Tea Party, but I haven’t seen any sort of proof offered that the actions of the Tea Party or Ms. Palin led to this incident, yet the news is nearly reported as such.  In listening to and reading news reports, it appears to me that the suspect’s views were far to the right of even where Ms. Palin stands, so it is quite possible that the suspect would have nothing to do with the Tea Party.

That’s not to say that I’m about to give either the Tea Party or Governor Palin a pass here.  News reporting after the event has been very quick to point out that the Governor’s Political Action Committee posted an image depicting gun sights over some of the Democratic lawmakers who voted for President Obama’s health care bill this past year.  The graphic was intended to depict lawmakers’ seats that should be “targeted” in the next election because of their support for the bill.

I have long thought that Sarah Palin was absolutely the wrong person to serve as a spokesperson for either the Republican Party or the Tea Party.  It is ads like this – along with a whole host of other reasons – that lead me to the conclusion that she is too irresponsible and too polarizing to be an effective national political figure.

The Tea Party, MoveOn.org, and both the Democratic and Republican parties themselves need to learn some lessons from yesterday’s shooting and its aftermath.  Politics in this country has passed the point where reasonable people can participate in the process.  The kind of “Let’s take a stand” or “Let’s take back America” rhetoric coming out of political groups, pundits, and politicians these days is wrong, because it seeks to turn the direction of our country into a very black-and-white decision (“You’re either with us or against us!”) when things aren’t nearly that easy.

Completely missed in the thinking that any one party can “Take Back America” is that once that process has been completed, you still have to live with the other party – they don’t just disappear!  I have yet to hear anyone explain how being so overtly partisan and dramatic leads to the creation of a country that works for more than 54% or 55% of its citizens, as neither party seems to have the support of more than that percentage of people in any one election.  Perhaps that’s why the only thing so many people in America can agree on is that they dislike the direction of Congress today.

I think the legislative process in this country was meant to be a collaborative process between all parties to turn out legislation that’s good for the majority of the American people.  You take ideas from everyone and weave them into a cohesive piece of legislation.  It may not be (and likely won’t be) perfect, but it gets the job done and doesn’t leave anyone feeling completely dissatisfied.  What it has turned into instead, is a process whereby one party (the party in power) gets almost exactly what they want to the complete exclusion of the other party.  This was true under the Bush administration, as well, so I don’t mean to point fingers at any one party here.

Even more troublesome to me is that the politics of “taking a stand” and “taking back America” has de-humanized the people serving us in Congress.  Our legislators are defined solely by the issues they support, instead of who they are as people.  The thought that “I can disagree with this person, but still respect and like them as a person” has been completely removed from all discussion – particularly if you’re watching partisan pundits on any of the major news channels (MSNBC, Fox, CNN, etc.).  I believe the loss of this distinction is what leads to events such as yesterday’s shooting.  Unless you’re completely insane, it’s a whole lot harder to shoot someone you know as a person, rather than someone who you only know by a set of talking points.  The blame for this problem lies not only on the aforementioned media, but also on the legislators themselves – many of whom will not stray from their talking points in any sort of public forum, which means the audience never sees them as real people.

Yesterday’s shooting was a tragic event that is, sadly, played out across our country many times each year, often without anywhere near the same amount of media coverage.  I do believe, however, that we can use these events to open a broader discussion of the direction of politics in America because, as Americans, we have more in common with one another – regardless of our views – than today’s partisans and politicians would want us to believe.

Here’s a search query that will get you a nice list of his past appearances.

Even better, though, is this clip from In Living Color with Jim Carrey playing Telly:

So here’s to Telly and Jim Carrey for a great trip down memory lane – and thanks Tony.

Field Notes + HTML5 For Web Designers

I have had an addiction to Field Notes – the awesome pocket-sized notebooks – for about a year now.  Couple that with Jeremy Keith’s “HTML5 For Web Designers,” which is available from A Book Apart, and you have a lovely composition.  All of this is to say that with the advent of WordPress 3, it’s time for a refresh of my WordPress theme (because it’s awful more than anything else).  So I’ll be putting these items to good use over the coming weeks.

This'll make your heart skip a beat!

Ever since I recently upgraded to OS X 10.6.4, I have had problems with the Keychain giving me the error “Access to this item is restricted.” when trying to access passwords stored in various keychains.  I first had this problem after the hard drive in one of my systems crashed and my data had to be restored from backup.  It appeared at that time that the permissions and probably something much deeper on Keychain Access application files were so screwed up as to render Keychain Access’ permission to read items out of a keychain worthless.  I finally fixed that problem by dipping into the original OS X install media to extract the original Keychain Access application files.

This time around, it appears as though the Keychain Access application has again been modified – leaving me with a set of next-to-useless keychains.  You can imagine the drama that played out on my end when I was trying to figure out how I was going to recover all of the passwords that I had so responsibly and securely stored.  I ran Disk Utility, which found and repaired some permissions issues on a few of the Keychain Access files, but that didn’t fix the problem.  So what I finally resorted to – again – was opening a backup and restoring a pre-10.6.4 copy of Keychain Access back to my hard drive (in a different location on disk).  This resolution was successful and allowed me to retrieve all of my keychain items.

Keychain Access Looks to be Updated in 10.6.4

I now need to probably build brand new keychains from them that I can open in the most-recent version of Keychain Access.   I’m also ready to ditch Keychains altogether for everything except the login keychain.  When Apple provides a utility that is supposed to securely store items, it shouldn’t leave me potentially high-and-dry twice in the span of less than a year with the prospect of not being able to recover any of my secure items.

Tales from the Boom & Bust

The Washingtonian had a great feature story this month on the rise and fall of the housing market in the D.C. metro area over the last 10 years, or so.  The story was really more a collection of quotes taken from over 100 interviews that were conducted for the article, but they told a compelling story from every side of the housing industry.

On a personal level, my wife and I experienced the craziness first-hand back in 2005, or so.  We had decided at the time to look into buying our first home.  We contacted a real estate agent who proceeded to warn us before we ever looked at a single home that:

1. We needed a pre-qualification letter from a lender that the seller would consider acceptable (i.e. – a local lender – and preferably the agency’s own in-house mortgage unit (ha!))
2. We needed to be willing to waive inspection or the seller would likely choose another buyer.
3. If we liked any of the homes we saw, we needed to be prepared to write an offer – preferably the same day – because homes weren’t staying on the market for much longer than a few days to a couple weeks.

We ended up looking at several homes in areas that we didn’t really want to live in, with layouts that weren’t very attractive, at prices that made me want to gag.  Luckily for us, we had the willpower to pass on the deals entirely and remain renters.  It’s certainly easy to see how so many others got caught up in the frenzy, however.  There seemed to be such pressure to “act now, or you may miss the bus,” that those who were new to the game may have felt that they had no choice.  I feel I’m better for having gone through that and it’s nice to see how time has made those days seem all the more incredible.

Read an excerpt here:  http://www.washingtonian.com/articles/homegarden/15489.html

Dealmaker Subscription Card

I normally don’t pay much attention to the 62 subscription cards that fall out of each magazine I read, but the subscription card for Dealmaker magazine caught my eye.  It asks the normal questions regarding name, address, etc., but then has a few oddities:

1. There isn’t a price or subscription length mentioned anywhere on the card.  As the old saying goes, I guess “if you have to ask…”
2. They force you to write your Visa, Mastercard, or AMEX number, expiration date, and signature right on the back of the card!  There isn’t an option for “Bill Me Later” that might protect your personal information.
3. In small print under the billing information, they state, “Guarantee: We will never rent or sell your name or personal information.”  Yeah, you may not, but what about my mailman?

I guess one could always send the subscription card in an envelope, but then that kind of defeats the purpose of Business Reply Mail, doesn’t it?

Mike Holmes

I have gotten many hits over the last month or so from people wondering what happened to Holmes on Homes on TLC.  The show mysteriously disappeared from the channel’s line-up in September and has yet to re-surface on any of the Discovery networks.

I queried TLC Viewer Relations and received a response that Holmes on Homes is finished airing “for this season.”  That’s not much information, but it doesn’t seem that they have pulled the plug on the show – at least at this time.  Holmes on Homes continues to air on HGTV and BBC in Canada, so I take that as a good sign that Mike will eventually return to the U.S. TV line-up – even if it is on a Discovery network other than TLC.