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Thursday, 20 June 2002 |
Eclipse. Hmmm. The help files keep mentioning files that aren't present in the eclipse-SDK install zip. Like example zip files. Hmmm. Must find eclipse's bug trackin system.
Whats possibly more infuriating is there is very little in the way of in of information on how to build stand alone SWT executables. Maybe there is another zip file somewhere? Munge munge.
But, I must say, having an editor that understands refactoring out of the box? Cool as. I was almost pondering ponying up the money for the plugin for netbeans. Much neat'o.
9:30:41 PM 
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I must say one thing of Eclipse. It sure looks a whole bunch nicer than NetBeans. And, according to a mailings list I'm on, it has Emacs bindings somewhere.
This aint so bad y'know.
6:35:24 PM
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(Re-)Released Clickstream, a simple filter that tracks a user's progression through the site. Simple concept, but incredibly powerful. A lot of great ideas have been throw out and I'll start adding them in. Ars Digita has a clickstream component, which I think I'll "borrow" some ideas from. I like the idea of being able to detect time spent on each page, as well as where they go next. This, combined with tools like SiteMesh, would allow for some pretty fancy dynamic interaction with users on your web site. One idea I liked was that of sending messages to users based upon their clickstream history (such as a sales promotion to a guy who spent a lot of time looking at a particular product). Pretty fancy stuff! [PSquad's Corner]
Another toy! Yippee!
6:10:29 PM
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For all who are new to eclipse: a short introduction how to get the files of an Cocoon web application into the eclipse workspace can now be found here. [Martin Dulisch's Radio Weblog]
More new toys.
6:05:02 PM
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IBM unifies Eclipse tools. Open-source environment to ease integration despite patchy industry support [InfoWorld: Top News]
Eclipse seems to be having problems attracting support because it doesn't support Swing. Or at least that's the excuse, there seems to be a strong thread of "if we develop for Eclipse, we're helping IBM and Websphere." The backlash against SWT makes sense, though. It's one thing learning a plugin API, it's another thing to learn an entirely new GUI toolkit along with it. [The Desktop Fishbowl]
Personally, not running Swing looks interesting. Everytime I look at the amount of cpu time and memory that my NetBeans process uses, I get physically ill.
Call me an early adopter. 
6:04:00 PM
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The more I use Mock Objects for testing, the happier I get. I've realised that every single class and method I write can now be tested in complete isolation, and even from inside my IDE. It's great.
[Joe's Jelly]
Mock Objects. Something to catch up on.
5:59:09 PM
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SAPDB Roks!. [Remus]
Hmmm. I wonder what the restrictions are on bundling SAPDB with a commercial product are?
5:58:11 PM
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Column Two: KM & CMS blog. Step Two Designs, the firm in Australia whose whitepapers we have linked to occasionally, has started Column Two a new blog on knowledge management and content management systems. [ia/ - news for information architects]
I get the real feeling there is going to be some serious money in knowledge management in the coming years. Kind of like Data Mining, but wherthe database is the web. Urk.
5:57:05 PM
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Doing a Content Inventory. "I've spoken with enterprises in the Fortune 100 who find themselves sitting on top of 6 years' worth of Web content trapped in static HTML files. They know they need to get this stuff into database and redesign their site into a template-driven system. But their first question is inevitably, "So, uh, where do we start?"" [IA/] [Remus]
Hmmm. An application for some serious AI.
5:54:39 PM
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Entertainment: Coupling: The Next "Friends"?. 17:30 ET - E! [NewsBlip.com]
I suspect this is why I don't watch telly anymore:
Said Alexander, "Nothing much happens in Coupling. It's concentrated on the sort of minutiae of life and relationships, and small details about, you know, when you take your socks off during sex."
4:37:49 PM
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Wells Fargo to process PayPal payments. The banking giant will process credit card payments for the online payment company under a deal the companies are expected to announce on Thursday. [CNET News.com]
It must really suck to have to deal with Visa & Co.
4:27:33 PM
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They mentioned that Java was weaker now than ever.
This sort of one sided view always amazes me - I can't think of a time over the past 4 years where Java as a whole was stronger than it is now. You want an enterprise web solution? You have two choices - J2EE or .NET - and from your Infoworld-article-stats J2EE has a ~60% market share there. Client side (GUI) Java may be weak - but server side Java is on fire.
And for the record - OSX is a the dream Java operating system. Good, fast VM built into the operating system, good L&F (native Aqua widgets). [pberry] [rebelutionary]
Isn't calling your compeditors dead a standard FUD tactic?
3:29:00 PM
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New iBook Vies for Portable Crown. With its latest laptop, Apple is trying to reclaim the notebook throne it once occupied.
Priced at $1,800 when configured with 256 MB SDRAM and a 30 GB Ultra ATA hard drive,
Apple's new iBook is putting some serious heat on the competition from rivals Dell and
Sony. [osOpinion]
A bit more affordable than an TiBook.
3:17:31 PM
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Interesting Performance Stats on GenToo Linux.
My buddy Demitrious just ran a real world benchmark test on GenToo Linux. Stats. Bottom Line? What RedHat does in 5 seconds, GenToo does in 0 seconds (i.e. too fast to measure accurately). That's impressive. www.gentoo.org. Demitrious likes it a lot and that makes me think it's good since he's hard to please (and a better hard core *nix guy than I am). [The FuzzyBlog!]
2:58:36 PM
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WiFi. It'll Change How You Compute.
WiFi. You won't expect it to but it really can change how you compute. At least for me, it makes the computing experience much more human by liberating me from the confines of my desk. That's wonderful. [The FuzzyBlog!]
I'm hella jealous.
2:48:49 PM
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A half decent definition of MVC from JavaPro's Almost All Java Web Apps Need Model 2
The MVC pattern consists of three kinds of main classes: Model, View, and Controller. The Model represents the application object or data. The View is the display of the model, and the Controller takes care of the user interface interaction with the user input. Prior to the MVC pattern, these three parts existed in one class, making the application inflexible and difficult to reuse.
2:35:20 PM
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You know there are a lot people iin the Mac camp making noise about OS X canabalising the Linux camp. Personally, I'd say that Linux geeks are getting OS X boxes because they can easily be added as yet another *nix box to a *nix network. Y'know, having Linux, Solaris and OS X on a single LAN is a whole lot easier to do than Windows and anything else (including other versions of Windows).
This is AND logic, not OR logic.
Not that Journos would be able to understand that logic. They need some form of division to act as the driving dynamic in the story. *pthht*
2:31:54 PM
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The Cofax Open Source project is taking off. Wow! Lots of downloads at SourceForge. I'm now aware of two consulting companies using it to make money. [paradox1x]
An open source developer getting happy that people are making money with his creation. Who'da thort? :)
2:06:55 PM
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Installing Software with Jakarta Ant. A great O'Reilly article on using Ant to install software as well as compile it for you. This greatly shortens [paradox1x]
So all we need now is the ability to get those splash screens happening from the ant install script. Hmmm. SWT. :)
2:05:14 PM
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You know, the whole idea of web services exposed from SQL Server is pretty cool - for internal-use services. What I worry about, though, is people exposing these services directly on the internet. Over the last few years, we've finally gotten to the point where people have learned not to expose their databases directly to the internet; but exposing web services from the DB makes it that much more tempting again. I've seen newsgroup postings where people are thinking about doing this...pretty scary. [Greg Reinacker's Weblog]
I wonder if people will ever learn that exposing complex systems to the internet is just asking to be haxx0red?
1:54:56 PM
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Ok, I couldn't stand it any more. Why does every article I read on this subject lately advocate using custom SOAP headers to transmit user credentials for web services? I just don't get it. I started writing a whole rant on it, but it got a bit long; so see my story here.
[Greg Reinacker's Weblog]
Hmmmm. WebServices is starting to look interesting. Hmmmm.
1:53:05 PM
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Fast Food drives Japanese girls to sex? I suspect not really. I suspect the most telling part is:
"While I'm having it off it feels like heaven," gushes a 17-year-old we'll call Akiko. "It's 'cause the guys are nice to me then. Usually, guys who're really cold say things like 'You're cute,' or 'I like you,' when we're having sex. It's like the guy really needs me. When I feel like that, it really gives me a thrill."
So the short answer is that Japanese guys don't lavish enough attention on the gals. I bet the first guy in Japan to figure that one out is going to busy as.
1:20:33 PM
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Besides, It's lots of fun to build something like this :-) [I<<K.VM.NET Weblog]
Heh. Heres a weird one. That, and his site name is making radio generate broken HTML.
So, whats new here? Nothing under the sun!
1:05:52 PM
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DotNetGuy: Jeroen Frijters is implementing a Java VM that sits on top of .NET. He's started a blog about it. Good luck, Jeroen! WAY COOL! [Sam Ruby] [rebelutionary]
Wrong wrong wrong i tell ya.
1:01:00 PM
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On Monads and Functional Programming. On Monads and Functional Programming
Another old stomping ground I've been going back to a bit is Ward Cunningham's original WikiWikiWeb. Here's something I recently contributed on monads and functional programming...
Think of a monad as a set of rules that enforce linearity on the use of a type.
If you have a type that describes changeable state then just letting that type run loose in a functional program would ruin the concept of a function. A function maps a domain to a range. If the type includes state that can change, then the function would not be able to map a specific domain value to a corresponding and unchanging range value.
Functions can pass the entire state of the program around to each other. Instead of changing state, the function would simply pass a new state in place of the old state.
Monads essentially do the same thing, but the advantage is they hide the state itself so a function is not burdened by passing it around. Once a type is wrapped in a monad, the state can be changed directly because the type system makes the function appear to be replacing the old state with some new state, when really the computer is executing side effects (setting variables, calling SOAP, writing to a file, etc. [Patrick Logan's Radio Weblog]
Monads make my brain hurt.
12:05:03 PM
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Poster Child for Functional Programming?. Poster Child for Functional Programming?
While glancing through the decompiled SortedList code I noticed there is a serious bug waiting to happen... HashTable suffers from the same problem. In this case the documentation states: Key objects must be immutable as long as they are used as keys in the Hashtable. [Cook Computing]
Great stuff Charles! This is sure to lead to a lot of people staring at what looks like perfectly valid code for hours, tearing their hair out and wondering why their experiencing such strange sideffects. [Drew's Blog] [The Wagner Blog]
This has been a common mistake in hashed and sorted collections for a long while. The worst case is an object database like Gemstone where a Dictionary (hashtable) can be made persistent. Now you've got multiple processes modifying objects over hours, days, weeks, and so on. Some process could modify a key, lose an object in a collection, and not even discover it is missing until the season changes!
These kinds of problems led me to believe most objects should be immutable. Subsequent practicing this belief convinced me that it is practical. [Patrick Logan's Radio Weblog]
It is suprising how few bugs you get in a program when you develop it using this philosphy. And it's even multi-threadable because you don't have mutable state to get screwed up by non-deterministic code paths.
12:04:32 PM
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Shared Nothing Message Passing.
Poster Child for Shared Nothing Message Passing?
"If not done right, multithreading opens a Pandora's box of ill effects. With no apparent repeatability, values can turn to utter garbage. Counters can fail to increment. Your application can suddenly freeze. Resources such as database connections can unexpectedly close or become exhausted. Some of the most challenging puzzles in a senior developer's career arise from sleuthing a threading issue. The big problem is that these puzzles usually take time to solve, which can have a serious effect on product delivery dates, or worse, on product reliability."
A beginner's guide to threading in C#
[Sam Gentile's Radio Weblog]
The guys who invented shared-memory multi-threading in the late 60s, early 70s discovered these problems early on. Which is why they went on to develop higher-level, shared-nothing mechanisms in the mid/late 70s.
Why Java and subsequently dotNET adopted this troublesome 1960s technology at the core of their architecture is curious if the intent is an efficient but widely applicable language for developing concurrent Internet applications.
It's like managing your own memory allocation, only worse. [Patrick Logan's Radio Weblog]
12:03:01 PM
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Enhanced Collection Performance. Enhanced Collection Performance
I've not run into collection performance issues yet, but if you have to squeeze something more out of your collection classes, the GNU Trove free software looks like a winner. [Patrick Logan's Radio Weblog]
Who said Java was a memory hog? Heh. I did. Last time I ran up NetBeans.
12:02:22 PM
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Open Source J2EE workflow products are heating up! There are now 4 production ready projects where 3 months ago there were none. [rebelutionary]
So how do workflow tools and CMS tools differ again? Is one a subset of the other?
12:00:04 PM
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Logica opens SMS to landlines. Would I buy a new fixed line phone just to use SMS on it? I doubt it - I don't see any compelling applications at the moment - and I have a mobile already if I want to SMS someone. [rebelutionary]
I'd use it such that machines I am responsible can sms me when they need help.
11:59:09 AM
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Clover is a pretty nifty tool which determines the code coverage of your unit tests. And amazingly enough - this is the weirdness of the Internet - only after discovering it and using it did I realise that it's written by Cortex eBusiness, a cool Australian J2EE company that used to have an adjoining office to me and Niki at the ATP. Bizarre coincidence. [rebelutionary]
Yet another toy for the toy box. Cool.
11:58:32 AM
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Are we starting to see a Moore's law at work in power?
Business Week: >>>Good news is ahead, however: Unlike the relatively mature internal combustion technologies, fuel cells are improving in efficiency by about 30% a year, according to McNeil. "It's moving so fast," says Joseph Cargnelli, the vice-president for technology at Toronto fuel-cell concern Hydrogenics. "that a fuel-cell engine that we developed a year ago is outdated today due to new materials, more power density, and more robust construction."<<< Note that fuels cells represent a jump in substrate for personal power generation. As a result, the price performance improvements may accumulate quickly. Right now, it is on a 2.5 year doubling rate. Further, by decentralizing power production (fuel cells that run in the basement for $2 k a pop), transmission loss is eliminated. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
Take a large number of these devices, add hydrogen from crops, and voila. End of the petroleum age. End of the era of scarcity of power.
And, it's almost enviromentally sustainable. Wow.
11:55:25 AM
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Business Week. 30 Gb read/write DVDs on the way. There is also an interesting story how Japan lost one of its most innovative scientists to a US company.
>>>True to form, Nakamura is debugging his next breakthrough: an ultraviolet laser that he hopes will make possible disks that hold twice as much as the upcoming generation. That could give rise to a whole new species of couch potato.<<< 60 Gb ! [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
Finally, something capable of backing up those 160Gig hard drives.
Of course, the media conglomerate is going to try and kill this because we are going to use it to "steal" their "content". Bah humbug. I can't give a rats arse about most of the media's "content".
11:53:39 AM
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Scientific American: Last Mile by Laser. Newly revived over the past few years after having been invented in the 1970s, FSO relies on low-power infrared laser transceivers that can beam two-way data at gigabit-per-second rates. Small-scale FSO systems have already been installed around the world by several vendors. [Tomalak's Realm]
Another possible way to out flank the telcos? I bet this happens after people start p2p “cabling” with WiFi.
11:50:00 AM
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Jelly. I've been thinking about XML pipelining quite a bit lately on Jelly, such as scripting the calling of SOAP services, producing the request using a pipeline, getting the result, working on it in a pipeline while integrating with beans, XPath, Jexl, JMS etc. Maybe Jelly and CyberNecko could work together quite nicely to provide a really cool XML processing engine that works with SOAP, JMS, HTTP, SQL, XSLT, Ant etc. This could be really cool stuff... [james strachan's musings]
Another toy to play with.
11:48:40 AM
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The problem with charging for content. You must have noticed it - the fast-growing trend among content sites to start charging for content. But just because it works for some, it won't necessarily work for all, and there appear to be a lot of site owners who have not grasped that yet. [WriteTheWeb]
The real problem with sites that are demanding pay-per-view is that in all reality, they are boring "content" sites. The real interesting sites with real voices are, more often than not, free for view. I'd much rather read scriptingnews.com than nytimes.com.
Such is life.
11:10:53 AM
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Where Wizards Fear To Tread. One of the new features coming in Perl 5.8 will be reliable interpreter threading, thanks primarily to the work of Artur Bergman. In this article, he explains what you need to do to make your Perl modules thread-safe. [Perl.com Perl.com]
I hate to say it, but the perl guys underestimate the difficulty of making library code threadsafe. Its really really hard to mix multi threading and modifiable variables. Things just spin out of control.
11:05:27 AM
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Why Google is number one [Geeknews]
Hmmm. Fifty people eery week play with ideas. How novel. Bring communication back into the design. Without using formal meetings.
How cool.
10:58:38 AM
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Cloudmark taps p-to-p to fight spam. Outlook add-in tool blocks junk e-mail from users' inboxes [IDG InfoWorld]
Will be interesting to see if an XML-RPC interface will become available.
Mind you, the way around this is obvious - the spammers are going to start sending individualised messages such that each message has an individualised hash.
The way around this may involve Tree Hashes.
10:30:24 AM
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posted by megnut » June 19 1:42 PM | 3 comments. A great new use of the Google API and SOAP.A neat trick using the Google API and Movable Type to include links to "related stories" based on your blog post. Is this the beginning of more explicit relationships between blog writing and traditional journalism? [via BoingBoing] [Blogroots]
Hmmm, I wonder how much damage this is going to do to the relevance of Google's PageRank? I mean, what this hack is doing is taking PageRank and feeding it back to itself. Iterate that all of the blogsphere, and suddenly Google is going to have tunnel vision problems. Oh well.
If, instead, in the UI the user reviews each of the links generated by the Google search and ack/naks each link, then Google stands a chance.
Maybe.
9:35:55 AM
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More Morbus. Another Interview with Morbus Iff
This is exactly the kind of thoughtful attention to interface design, usability, and de-jargoning software that RSS news aggregators will need to move into the mainstream. It's great to hear that Morbus is putting so much energy into this, as well as the next evolution of aggregating feeds to let the user take more control of the flow:
[The Shifted Librarian]
Yet more proof, if it were ever required, that UI design matters.
9:13:30 AM
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Global Warming Must Be The Culprit!.
Another excellent overview by Michael Fraase in which he pulls together many of the recent stories about the recording industries attempt to find a scapegoat to blame for falling sales of CDs (not plummeting, mind you, just falling). Another handout for my presentations.... [The Shifted Librarian]
The music industry is flapping around like a fish out of water looking for new sources of revenue to pay for it's cocaine habbits.
Too bad the music industry is about to be disintermediated.
9:11:06 AM
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No More TV Whining!.
I can't recommend DVRs highly enough, so if you don't already have one, consider purchasing one in the next year. You'll thank me later. [The Shifted Librarian]
Hmmm. I wonder if we will ever see PVRs here in Oz?
9:09:12 AM
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1GB CD
Wow - 1GB on 1.2 inch re-writable CD! Of course, I still think you're going to want wireless access to the majority of your data and content (and you won't have much of a choice if The Heavenly Jukebox comes to pass), but that's a pretty handy number to have for storage. With MP4 video, could you watch (project?) a movie using a mobile device? That's a heck of a lot of ebooks.... [The Shifted Librarian]
The problem here is that 1Gig is so much not enough any more. Not with 160Gig hard drives kicking around.
Someone want to come up with a reasonably priced backup device?
9:01:01 AM
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Funny thought of the day. Working your guts out as a contractor to make bug free code is bad. You work twice as hard as the hack coders, and then after delivery the owners of the code let you go "because there is nothing else to do", where as the hack coders have a constant stream of work.
Pity my ethics prevents me from doing hack jobs. Means I'm jobless.
Blah.
7:41:53 AM
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Desktop client consists of SWT+Axis. Desktop server consists of Axis+JBoss+Tomcat.
Pity the user download would be like 50meg. (JBoss+Tomcat is about 27 meg download.)
How about desktop server is Tomcat+Axis? I wonder how big that is. And I also wonder how to wrap Tomcat+Axis as an installable Service.
Also, does SWT do win32 systray iconage?
7:25:33 AM
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Hmmm. Radio has some serious requirements for buggerising around with user interaction design. It aint really all that polished for the average user not willing to learn it's internal model.
I hate to say it, but I get the feeling that the web browser as a UI model sucks. It works for read-only information, but after that it kinda falls apart.
Pity really.
7:19:53 AM
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I can see the future. The future involves desktop applications communicating via xmlrpc/soap/etc. The days of centrally located/managed/budgeted servers is over.
Time to play a little more with Eclipse/SWT methinks.
7:12:36 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Brett Morgan.
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