Del's blog

In 4 days I'm heading out of the country for the next two months to the USA. It's partly holidays, part mini career break, part time to think things through and reassess "Life, the Universe and Everything".

It's not all as mellow as it sounds though. In fact I'm sure it's going to be an awesome, exciting adventure but 12+ months of pottering and thinking means it's about time I take stock of things.

Other than the pottering and pondering, getting real excited about going back to the USA. I was there back in 2008, almost around the same time and it was an awesome adventure of deserts, driving and Disney. And sticking to the trusted, there is lots of desert driving and more Disney this time round.

Flying into Vegas which is where the road trip will begin. After a couple of days to sort out supplies, sleep patterns etc, it's off into canyon country in Southern Utah. Really looking forward to visiting Utah again as I loved Zion National Park last time, and I'm sure the ones we're going to visit this time round will be just as awesome. Plus how can a National Park with a section called Island in the Sky not be awesome just by name?

Then it's up into Salt Lake City for some rest before some more epic drives up into the wilds of Wyoming/Montana to visit Grand Teton and Yellowstone. Hoping I get to see some wildlife like bears and wolves etc, but hopefully there will be no pic-a-nic[ing] from Yogi Bear's relatives...

Then it's onwards to Chicago and Niagara where I'll cross over into Canada for a few days, then back down to New York City. Not sure what to do in NYC this time round... will see.

Then it's on to Florida where it's theme parks, theme parks and the happiest place on earth. Watch out kids, I'm gonna ride Dumbo this time round :-D Some time in Seattle, then back to Sin City for half a week or so before it's back home to Oz.

All in all, epic American adventure. I'll hopefully be keeping this blog updated as I go so check in frequently. Also there's my twitter which I plan on updating too.

Don't think I'll blog again before I leave, so next time I write it'll probably be from the RV Park at Bryce Canyon (no free internet in Las Veas)...

For want of a better word, I guess I could be termed a flashpacker. Cutting costs here and there is awesome, but a few nice things along the way be it a more comfy bed or hot water is always nice. That and the fact I seem to always cart off with me what seems an enormous amount of cables and gadgets.

This trip happening in a week and a bit isn't that much different to the last few in terms of gadgets I'm taking, but I am throwing a few more into the mix. The Eee PC and Skype has saved me in the past and this time round I'll be relying on it plus a bunch of other gadgets to get me through the trip and help me keep in touch, pay bills, navigate roads, backup photos etc.

So in a nutshell... I think the gadget count is going to be something like as follows:

• Eee PC - surf the net, skype, email, blog etc
• Panasonic Lumix FZ35 - not quite an SLR but awesome zoom... and rather large!
• Canon IXUS - smaller point and click for when I don't want to lug the Lumix around
• iPod - music, also a backup for my photos and any trip notes
• iPhone - mainly for keeping in touch via SMS
• Garmin eTrex - don't want to get lost on a trail, maybe some geocaching too?
• Kodak PlaySport - take some video of the car drives and places visited so I can show my mum

Between now and next weekend I'm also going to try and sort out my user accounts for various things so I can keep pics and hopefully videos coming through to the site whilst away...

So I thought it's about time I dedicate a blog to travel planning with cost consciousness in mind. About to set of on my second trip to the USA - this time for a significantly longer period of time - there are a couple of tips and tricks one can use to help keep the costs down.

Flights
Keep and eye on cheap fares. One can save hundreds of dollars buying fares when they're on sale. Also I find that often with the international flights it's cheaper buying them months in advance. For my upcoming trip and my trip to SE Asia last year I saved hundreds of dollars having my flights booked approx 6 months in advance.

For point to point tickets use an aggregator site to get a high level overview of the cheapest flights and times, then go to the individual airline sites to confirm the price and book. Booking direct via the airline, you often can avoid any extra charges the aggregator may apply. If time isn't a factor, sometimes choosing that flight 1 hour earlier (or later) can make a difference, particularly if your trip consists of lots of point to point flights as it all adds up.

Accommodation
This is always a killer in travel costs, as it puts quite a bump into the budget. There's obviously a wide range in price, quality and style of accommodation so one needs to make a decision on what they are happy with, what they are willing to pay and go out and do some hunting. Research will help in getting your best value for money here. There's often lots of discounts from codes to early reservation discounts. Also don't discount cheaper alternatives, sometimes they are just as awesome as the more expensive choice but perfectly fine. Make sure to do you research though, as sometimes things are cheap for a reason.

Discounts
Use them when and where you can. There are stacks of websites on the net offering deals and codes for all kinds of things from Broadway shows, hotel bookings to dining. It does require you to check the sites periodically, but this is a easy way to save heaps of money.

It might sound all a bit extreme, but the savings you make do add up to be quite a bit. Especially when travelling through places such as the USA and Europe. Of course one could do all the above even cheaper by backpacking but sometimes you want to just mix things up and have a bit of everything. In which case eventually add up.

So I've had the opportunity of late to dabble with Spring 3. From what I had seen before I wasn't totally sold on the move to annotated controllers but after having used it for a few months I think I'm pretty much a convert to the new approach.

One of the major advantages to this new style is that it makes it dead easy to create RESTful web services. You basically define your controller class and annotate your methods the methods you wish to expose as a REST call with the @RequestMapping annotation. With this annotation you can supply some additional attributes such as the URI pattern you wish to match and what HTTP method applies to the service,

Combined with added support for JSON such as MappingJacksonJsonView and the Jackson JSON libraries one can very quickly whip up a fairly robust REST service.

As a good starting resource the SpringSource blog has a good rundown: http://blog.springsource.com/2009/03/08/rest-in-spring-3-mvc/

With the upcoming USA2010 adventures 6 or so weeks away there's no time like the present to get the travel blog in action. So in hope of more frequent blogging in the coming months, here's a post for July...

So following up on the last post, have started getting into the trip research phase. Which for the time I'm away for equates to an awful lot of googling and wikitravel research. The long short list of places being visited is as follows though:

• Las Vegas
• Utah (mainly Canyon Country)
• Wyoming/Montana
• Chicago
• Niagara Falls
• New York City
• Orlando
• Seattle

Having visited some of the national parks in the Arizona/Utah region before and being very in awe/impressed, is no surprise that a fair part of USA2010 is road tripping it from Vegas out through Utah and up into Wyoming/Montana visiting the National Parks along the way (see Google map on previous post).

Parks that are on the list for visiting are: Bryce Canyon, Arches, Canyonlands, Grand Teton and Yellowstone. And apart from my slight fear of animals (monkeys in Asia, bears and bison in North America...) it hopefully will be pretty awesome with lots of cool geological features/formations and wildlife spotting. That said, gotta get my feet back into a hiking mode in the next 6 weeks.. seeing I have to hike to see Delicate Arch amongst other things.

Other highlights I'm looking forward too is Orlando where I'm going to live like a kid for a week or so and hit up Disney World and Universal. Can't wait...

So between now and when I leave it's time to finalise accomo and sort out trip things... as for post my mini career break (aka mid twenties/career crisis... lol) we'll see what pans out...

Off on a 2 month [mini career?] break in just under 3 months to the USA. As part of the trip more road adventures checking out the national parks of Utah and Wyoming.

View USA2010 in a larger map

So in the last year or so I've picked up bits and pieces on how to use automated software build tools. I've mainly been using Maven and for the things I've had to do so far I'm pretty happy (apart from when the m2eclipse plugin chucks a spaz!).

One cool way in which you can use Maven and the YUI Compressor plugin is to minify and aggregate (if required) your javascript and CSS files at build time.

This will help improve your site/application by minimising round trip times and the number of resource requests that need to be queued due to browser limitations on the number of active concurrent connections.

You utilise the plugin by including the plugin into your pom.xml then defining the configuration that you want applied (e.g. files to include/exclude, aggregation rule etc). The YUI Compresspr plugin site has a couple of examples so refer to it for more info.

One thing I came across though was that if you are using overlays and have resources in the overlay that need to be included in the compression/aggregation you will need to ensure the war is exploded at the start (e.g. process-resources). This is required so that the files are available for running the YUI Compressor plugin on prior to the building of the final war. If you don't do this step first the overlay is only unpacked during the package phase which is too late as YUI Compressor has already run.

Anyways that's the tech blog for tonight. Time for sleep...

With the end of IE6 support by Google I've decided now is a good time to post about fun with developing web apps that work on IE6. Whilst Firefox is a much superior browser to IE, IE for the most part is okay. Except if you're developing front end apps that need to operate properly on IE6 as well.

Life then becomes endless fun of trying to work out why things only happen in IE6 but not elsewhere. CSS gone wild, box model fun, random behavior. Caching issues (though that applies to IE5+).

The interesting thing is that IE6 usage is probably actually declining as many small-mid size sites/companies are actually no longer supporting the browser and equally users are using newer versions. But the problem then lies with large corporations who have SOE builds most often which have IE6 installed. If you then think about that, then that's still quite a lot of people using IE6 who may hit your site during their lunch break.

Food for thought, but it's slowly getting there...

So a few days ago Firefox on my Mac starting giving me "The connection was reset" everytime I tried to access my website. The odd part was, if I accessed it in Safari it loaded up perfectly fine. After which if I retried in Firefox it started working.

So tonight whilst I'm up late (on-call this week, so have some work to do tonight), I went on a mission to rid myself of the "The connection was reset" error. Disabling/enabling of plugins and resetting of Firefox preferences later it appears the problem is solved. And in the end it looks like all I had to do was clear my cookies.

And now I'm back in Firefox land :-)

Next post will be on IE woes... the bain of every developer... especially when the dreaded 3 characters of IE6 is mentioned...

Headed over to Freshwater this afternoon with two of my friends for an afternoon at the beach. Nice sunny Sydney summer weather that wasn't too hot made for a great day. And my first trip to the beach this summer - I didn't count swimming in Asia as that's not quite the same as a Sydney summer.

There's something about Sydney I reckon... everytime I come back from holidays I'm glad to be home. I'm not really sure why that is exactly. I love the climate - not too hot/cold (except maybe those crazy 40 degree days!), water is pretty much within easy reach - makes for a nice sunset view coming over the bridges on the way home, parks to cycle through and enjoy and the lifestyle.

I haven't really live in another country for an extended period of time, but I reckon Sydney is somewhere I'll always enjoy returning too.