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Blog census has available the 10gb of blog posts it managed to find, and a 3 mb file of every blog url it managed to find. download page via boingboing.net.

Mmm, data.

The IBM “WebSphere Studio Application Developer Version 5 Programming Guide” redbook is finally out for free public consumption (11meg pdf, or online html), as of July 17.

It’s ok, but as most of us have used WSAD 5 or 4.9 for a year now, we know most of this stuff. Still, very good for newcomers and I’ve been trawling it for tips. (People go on residencies to play with these tools with a gang of enthusiasts and experts, and then they author the redbook, so you would hope for many tips).

It also made me go back to the Struts Web Application Diagram tool, which seems better under 5.0.1. Whilst not mature, this lets you whizz through laying out a flow, and create the real forms and actions, and you don’t end up with write-only code that looks like it’s been produced by a microsoft wizard.

I didn’t quite use it in the order Husted suggests might be used (see Development Cycle), but the tool seems flexible enough that you can start where you want. I’ll be trying to reverse-eng an existing struts-config later.

(See chapter 10 for a glimpse at that particular tool. (hyperlink difficult))

The redbook also confirms that the wizards for assembling web apps around a db (using data access beans or data access tag libs) are still disappointing, effectively write-only, and only useful for trivial apps.

I’ll be interested in Beck and Gamma’s “Contributing To Eclipse” (work in progress (pdf)).

geek coding fun for londoners: The eXtreme Tuesday Club (XTC) and Thoughtworks-sponsored geeknight.

Via Joe Walnes’ blog.

javdoc enhancer from ibm alphaworks.

“This tool enhances the Javadoc HTMLs in three respects: semantic information, sorting, and navigability.”

Of particular interest… “The Documentation Enhancer provides the following semantic information:

• Call-graph information: for every method, what other methods may call it and what are the methods that it may call. This analysis uses sophisticated type analysis algorithms to resolve virtual calls.
• Effect information: for every field, which methods may modify or inspect it. For every method, what may it do (modify, forward, inspect) to its parameters and to static fields, and what values it may return (if applicable).
• Reference information: for every class, which classes reference it and which classes does it reference. The same information is provided for packages at the package level.
• Executable classes: classes that have a main(String[] args) method are detected and marked as such. ”

And yes, “This information is based on the method implementations, which means that the product breaks Javadoc’s philosophy of providing information based on class and method signatures only.”

I think the semantic info is mostly stuff your IDE should provide for you, as you navigate, or when you request specific reports of packages. Still interesting, and I expect the sort and navigability enhancements are useful while reading javadocs.

“Every now and then you need a quick email address for just a single email.”

Imagine and quote any mailinator.com email address when you need to, then go pick up your mail using the quoted name. no account creation necessary.

mailinator FAQ

Just blogging this quickly as a reminder before I go to bed; what a great simple idea. It’ll probably get abused into the ground Quite a fun whiteboard, with choose your own topic title (or just guess one and see what’s there) Can imagine a whole WikiInMailinator set of pages coming up only to melt away again, nice to visualise in time.

Via Jason Hunter’s blog which is normally quiet. I’ll just listen more closely from now on.

half-life 2 movies, the best of which is the kleiners lab demo, I think. (84mb, fast uk). It reminded me of the great atmospheric experience the first game gave. Here’s a choice screenshot. out of there faster than you can say “good enemy AI”…

movies of XIII, cell-shaded First Person Shooter. (the first?) (platform: xbox).

If the 57 meg dload isn’t your thing, the short, but repetitive weapons demo gives an idea of the clean graphical style. scooby doo where are you.

more golan levin type stuff to check out when i have time:

• John Maeda
• bewitched.com
• benjamin fry
• groupc.net
• proce55ing.net (language), fluid example
• bodytag.org (author of above fluid example, these cool wee java-img-processed movies, and spun, which i prefer to yugop’s popular ribbon.

wsad 5.0.1 update (public download, 240mb).

interesting wired article about “backscatter” x-ray machine that stops at the skin. old news apparently, but in the news because it’s being considered for use in airport security.

I’m just interested in the clever technology (and whether it’ll miniaturise into a pair of sunglasses 8-| ).

“[the scanner] does basically make you look fat and naked, but you see all this stuff” (meaning guns and bombs carried under clothing)

short wired article on last.fm, a streaming radio station which tailors the stream to you, by trying to match your tastes. primitive rule used to assess whether you like the track: did you let it play to the end? Still, all about adoption. I’ve always been hypersensitive to the value of the data being thrown away when sitting listening to drive-time radio, when a song comes on that you feel surely forces everyone to change channel. or turn up.

see also gnoosic (gnod’s world of music), audioscrobbler, and any number of sites.

ah, the last.fm servers have been slashdotted on account of that wired article (can’t very well say they’ve been wired). flooded, then.

A nice (educational) blog post from space about food and drink, and how it behaves (and doesn’t behave) up there. tricks with surface tension. This is one of Science officer Ed Lu’s letters from onboard the international space station.

Via Slashdot.

some iss images.

an ant task for java2html is finally available. Of course, Maven users have had this kind of hyperlinked code output for free for ages. I would have linked to the sun enterprise java blueprints as an example of java2html output, but those docs are no longer online browseable.

Here’s some example output.

esr’s The Art Of Unix Programming (manuscript, in progress). via this post of eric’s at artima forums.

George Monbiot’s top ten world-changing books. via stegan.