Tutorial for building J2EE Applications using JBOSS and ECLIPSE - “Tutorial covers step-by-step development of J2EE components, starting from setting up Eclipse, JBOSS and Lomboz. Lomboz uses Xdoclet (Attribute Oriented Programming) for rapid development of J2EE components.”
via delicious (which has a broken link) and then google.
GeekCorps - “A US-based, non-profit organization, we place international technical volunteers in developing nations. We contribute to local IT projects while transferring the technical skills needed to keep projects moving after our volunteers have returned home.”
and blogafrica.com - “an effort to identify and celebrate webloggers in Africa and to get webloggers outside of the continent interested in Africa” (no, i don’t think they mean me, either).
both via Ethan Zuckerman via Joi Ito.
Guardian article on moblogging/photoblogging, listing quite a few resources. (Thursday January 15, 2004).
And “Is photoblogging good for photography?” (Oct 2003). The latter via www.textually.org/picturephoning/.
X-Men 2 Writers Signed for the Ender Screenplay. (Dan Harris, Michael Dougherty - whippersnappers).
via Penny Arcade.
Comments like “UGLY TERRIBLE HACK” tend to indicate good code rather than bad: in bad code ugly terrible hacks are considered par for the course. It would therefore be both hypocritical and meaningless to go through the comments looking for embarrassments. But also fun, so let’s go. - kuro5hin. A quick, superficial look at the style and content of the leaked Windows 2000 source.
de-junking. Microsoft’s William Adams talks about a simple scheme he and his book-crazy daughter have for ditching some of their books (to make room for more).
We need the opposite process here for getting books, tech or otherwise, delivered. If he hadn’t been microsoft, perhaps we could have used a pipe.
There’s no mail here. The import tax from SA is 40% if we bring things over ourselves.
Both Cameron and I thoroughly enjoyed DeBernier’s “The War of Emmanuel’s Nether Parts”, a last-minute recommendation for the 11hr trip here, by some pals of Adam’s at his excellent 30th birthday party.
Started on China Mieville’s “The Scar” again - Sam’s recommendation. But any fiction is just an excuse not to memorise some more irregular verbs. Not quite at the “reading portuguese for fun” stage.
Sniffing around for something to read, scraps. cryptonomicon excerpt. in the beginning was the command line, dredged up for a somewhat ignorant cs. Oreilly’s open books such as free as in freedom, some articles from znet, a number of tutorials on the twisted framework for networking in python.
No tv, no radio, no internet in my new apartment. Plenty of free space, and the liberty to “kick back and do my own thing”. So far, this has extended to getting a fat dose of the flu (-4 swimming ability, +1 nightvision (on account of my red nose)), and a couple of late-night coding sessions. I am reminded of knuth’s “why i don’t do email”, though in my case, I don’t do deep thought or groundbreaking contribution to the field of comp sci, either. “What I do takes long hours of studyingsleeping and uninterruptible concentration… sleep.”
A conduit to some new music from john appeared today and will i expect come to be worshipped.
Anyway, I think when I next work in Europe I will park myself next to a good library and university.
Enjoying (a relative term) working with easymock and spring framework’s JDBC abstraction, the latter of which last year’s team will recognise as being very similar to that which was foisted upon them by YT. Most people will freak at the dependencies. I snipped them for myself, knowing what I need and don’t… I wanted to know the code inside-out anyway. I lose out on future features and whatever polish the forthcoming 1.0 release may bring. I have what I want. Uhm the best “redesign for test” article I have read is the excellent “Designing Testability with mock objects”, published as a java news brief last year by object computing inc, who this month are touting a trendy and probably decent look at “Groovy - scripting for java”.
Setting Quicksearch default to something other than google
Google are predictably being dicks, some more (also wired Jan 2003 - “Google vs Evil). but more importantly, my pages come back far too high on their search results (they come back).
So here’s how to change your default search engine in dave bau’s quicksearch deskbar taskbar, if this is what you’re using:
Create or edit ::quicksearch install dir::/localprefs.js
Add one line:
defaultsearch=”fst”;
…where “fst” is the shortcode for your preferred search (here, fst is for alltheweb (the fst name’s legacy)). This line overrides the default “gg” value (google) of the same variable, as set in preferences.js
Mmm, this post should solve my over-high ranking problem.
Apache HTTP Client 2.0 final released. last 30 days activity </spy>.
An (unannotated) list of language books for non-academics, as recommended by readers of the linguist mailing list. I’d love to see these ranked. I suppose I can make it a small project for my students, using amazon api. (Not that the rankings are to be trusted, big surprise)
I think of these I have only read:
The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker (loved it. essential reading for everyone).
The Power of Babel, John McWhorter (a bit of it while staying at cameron’s).
Simple runnable google API samples (click on GoogleSearch in the left frame), scroll down and pick an example), and
jdk 1.5 samples, both executable from the browser, close to the javadoc.
at zamples.com.
Via erik’s blog again, i think.
BitTorrent Sites and Software - a big list, by Kevin Elliott, via Erik’s Weblog.
A number of interesting things via slashdot today.
Government officials and massively multiplayer game designers sharing ideas on the best ways to deal with community feedback via slashdot. Last month I read with interest the related: US Treasury to Post Previously Private Email Addresses Online.
TeacherReviews: down in response to threat of legal action but now it’s coming back. via slashdot.
Congress Eyes Whois Crackdown - “it was proposed that putting false or misleading information in your DNS whois record should be a federal crime”. via… hmm… slashdot.
excel as database - funny comic strip. via joel on software.
Cameron’s Introductory Shona Language guide is in a new location. This is a site containing lessons and resources on the Shona language of Zimbabwe.
There seem to be many ways to add a cygwin equivalent “command-prompt here” to the windows shell. Some methods are rather complex, but the first method listed here by Bruce Eckel is the simplest I have found to work. Tested on Windows XP, with dir names including whitespace. shiver.
Here are some windows command prompt tips if you haven’t “command-prompt here” on your folder right-click menu, or aren’t getting filename completion with tab. I think there’s also a working ms powertoy for “command-prompt here”, on most win versions. here’s the winxp powertoys page, for example.
Wired interview with Mars Exploration Rover flight software architect, about graceful degradation.
Interesting for me because of the parallel with my previous project (telematics).
“on a good day, we can only transmit less than 5 MB”.
(oh we used to DREAM of transmitting 5 MB 
“For us, maturity and support are the biggest factors in software decisions. We want something that’s been around a while with a wide user base.” Mmm, clues.
introvertster, via a comment on Don Park’s blog.
“Cafédirect, the Fairtrade hot drinks company, started trading publicly today, offering investors a chance to buy shares in the socially-conscious company.
[…]
“Under its “gold standard” trading policy, Cafédirect, which was established in 1991 by Oxfam, Traidcraft, Equal Exchange and Twin Trading, pays on average three times the world price to growers and yet still manages to make a profit.”
