De choses et d'autres...

Superman vision... "Kaya Special Optics, Inc., having specialized in manufacturing special optical devices for the past 30 years, would like to take this opportunity to introduce a newly developed product called the "Infrared See-Through Filter PF". The PF is a special optical device that helps to visually penetrate an object's surface in order to view whatever lies below..." See for yourself
The most interesting part may be that they provide an explanation of how it works (I've not yet read it in full)

More about Tomcat on Mac OS X When I ran my google search re: the tomcat install, I also found this excellent series of articles about running and using Tomcat on Mac OS X. Today thanks from a pointer from Brent's excellent mac.scripting.com I read the second installment of the series and decided that I should point to the series myself. "In this series, we will look at how to use Mac OS X as a killer server-side development environment, or even as a deployment environment, for those who are so inclined. We'll start by helping you to set up Tomcat, and from there we'll go on to cover other server-side technologies and how they integrate with OS X. " The first article of deals with installing and running Tomcat 4.01. In the second installment, the author looks "at how to set up OS X to launch Tomcat automatically on startup and how to run it more securely, by running it with the permissions of an unprivileged user". In the third part, Ian McFarland, the author will show "how to set up Apache and Tomcat to work together. This, also, is very easy to do. And in the last installment in this series, we'll see how to get set up with Project Builder, Apple's free industrial-strength IDE, to build Web apps" I found to minor problems with the articles though. In the first one, is that in the first article the author does not mention that one needs to set the JAVA_HOME environment variable. Second, in the second article recommend using the /System/Library/StartupItems folder. IMHO this is not a could idea everything in /System is off-limit and any Mac OS X user should avoid making modification there. One would rather use /Library/StartupItems instead. Nevertheless, the series is highly recommended.

While searching for Mac OS X "Open With..." contextual menu on Google, I found the following helpful list of Tools and Utilities for Mac OS X on macfixit.com.

Installing Tomcat on Mac OS X continued... OK. Back to the actual Tomcat install... I ran the following search on Google "installing tomcat on mac os x". It yielded several interesting pages. The first one turned out to be the most useful (read correct) It's published in the Apple Developper Connection Internet Developer Web site (great resource btw). It's titled Mac OS X: Java and Tomcat Part I. It gives the correct value (/usr) for the JAVA_HOME environment variable needed by Tomcat (it's setting the environment variable which I wanted to do in the ~/Library/init/tcsh/environment.mine file, that got me side-tracked in the first place). Other Web pages suggested using /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework as the value for the JAVA_HOME variable, but it yielded an error message OMM. Following the instructions in the ADC article, the actual Installing and running Tomcat took less 2 minutes.

Installing Tomcat on Mac OS X Decided that it was about time that I install Tomcat OMM. MLW has been pressuring me to finish her Web site and truth be told, I've been holding back on doing it for way too long. Since I need to implement some CMS features, I decided that the right route would be some Servlet/JSP based solution (now that WebObjects version 5.1 is out which supports Servlet and JSP). In the process, indeed, I got side-tracked into finally understanding and fixing my tcsh config files (@ ~/Library/init/tcsh) problems. For some unknow reasons, my *.mine files there didn't seem to get executed. Trying to execute them manually generated error messages which made no sense to me. Today, after spending the whole afternoon on the problem, I eventually found the causes of the problems. As it would turn out it's unbelievably stupid. 1. My shell files were edited using BBEdit which defaulted to saving them using Mac OS 9.x line-ending!!! 2. I learned that it would seem that a shell script MUST end with an empty line to be properly recognized and executed. 3. The shell error messages are not always that helpful in understanding what the problem is (in my case I got "command not found" messages re: the line-ending problem). 4. When a file is source'd and an error occurs, you don't necessarily get an error message. In the process I also found an error in O'Reilly UNIX in a Nutshell p.3-5: the correct syntax for variable assignment is "set var = value". The syntax in the book is "set var value" what this does is set 2 variables with null values.

Let's blog. On Friday, I downloaded MacJournal to log the process of installing new stuff OMM. The idea was to keep some notes that might prove helpfull at a later time. I also wanted to have some hard facts on how I spend my time while using computers. At first, I thought that I'd used a desktop app even though I knew that at some later time, I would switch to publishing a weblog like anybody else. After using MacJournal for the week-end I decided that I might as well directly keep a blog using Radio. The funny thing is that I've been a web developper for 7 years now. And for various reassons, I've never published any kind of personnal Web site although I've wanted to do so for quite a long time (er like 7 years). One of the primary reasons why I haven't published a Web site yet has probably to do with the fact that being somewhat of a perfectionnist, I didn't want to start any kind half-backed Web site experiment. I wanted to be sure that I could and would sustain the effort and build exactly the kind of Web site I had been envisioning for years. Another important reason is that I'm not too sure wether I want to or even can keep a public blog... Now with Mac OS X and Radio, the problem is that it's sooo easy (Thank a million bbum!) to publish and maintain a weblog that it seems that I will, at long last, start doing it anyway. Even though this first experiment is not exactly what I had in mind for my first personnal Web site. I just purchased one license and I'll try to use Radio from now on and see how it goes.