Page 135 of 141 (2810 total posts)
06/28 [JAVAONE] What’s going on with Java version numbers? — What’s going on with Java version numbers? There was Java 2 (where the version numbers were 1.3 and 1.4) and the Tiger release just coming out is 1.5. The release after Tiger is going to be called 5.0?! What is going on? Talk about sowing confusion. Not that marketing ever was a Sun strength!
06/28 [JAVAONE] Visiting the Java tribe — I am here at JavaOne and living among a very different crowd than I’ve been in lately. It’s the gathering of the Java faithful, and there’s a different feel here compared with the world I come from, the Windows/Microsoft world. Here are some of my field notes and random impressions. The keyboards on Sun computers have different spacings and I keep making mistakes in typing. The mouse has two buttons and no wheel. But the right button does something different from what I am used to. And boy, just taking a screen shot of something, some process crashed and dumped on my screen. (The computer didn’t crash, just the process…) …more later
06/28 [JAVAONE] JavaOne Keynote — As you know I am attending the JavaOne conference. I jotted down my key takeaways during the keynote for myself, which I thought I’d share here. The keynote featured several Sun execs, particularly Jonathan Schwarts, their President and COO. Take Away 1: Java as a platform is incredibly ubiquit...
06/18 What’s a blog anyway? — I am away from home, at my home in Curacao for a reunion of Salas folks from around the world. I saw an childhood friend of mine, Raul, who asked me ‘So what’s a blog, anyway’? I was taken aback, because, what would Raul be doing, reading my blog, and especially with the rather ‘odd’ image that I le...
06/13 Balls — Sorry to make my Blog x-rated, but this picture was just too much 🙂 “ A visitor looks at Rasputin’s [deleted] displayed at the first Russian museum of erotica in St. Petersburg. The museum was founded by Igor Knyazkin, the chief of the prostate research center of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences.(AFP/Interpress/Alexander Drozdov)”. Via Yahoo News.
06/12 BlogBridge Beta, part deux — I shoulda known… There’s cross-platform and then there’s cross-platform. A week later, about 20 testers later, we’ve done 2 more sub-releases (up to 0.5.2 now) to shake out various platformy problems. It’s one thing to get it to run and another thing to get it to run right. **[Java WebStart:](...
06/10 The Day After Tomorrow — Occassionally, I will have either an incredibly positive or negative reaction to a book, play or movie and I will be moved, who knows why, to write a bit about it here. Well, I just saw “The Day After Tomorrow”and it is totally lame...
06/10 [GEEK] Getting URL objects to time out — For some reason, it is not possible to get at the Socket object that the URL object uses for its network I/O. And so, on the face of it, you can’t set or change the time-out time. However here are two, semi-kludge properties that Sun has provided us to overcome that deficiency: System.setProperty(“sun.net.client.defaultReadTimeout”, “10000”); System.setProperty(“sun.net.client.defaultConnectTimeout”, “10000”);
06/07 BlogBridge beta is ON! — Here’s the beta invite email that just went out… Wow, this is exciting! 🙂 “Thanks again for participating in this first beta of BlogBridge. A few comments before getting going: This is an early beta. There are features missing and there are bugs. Please bear with us! One of our expectations of you...
06/06 Cross Platform, for real! — We are busy getting BlogBridgeready for beta (send email if you want to participate.) I hope we are only days away. But in doing that, and updating the web site, I thought this might be of interest… Java really works! Here are three screen shots of BlogBridge, on ...
06/03 RSS not yet mainstream? — Another article in the New York Times about RSS: “Called R.S.S. (the initials are variously said to stand for Rich Site Summary, Really Simple Syndication and more obscure formulations), this increasingly popular online tool turns a morass of disparate information sources into an automatically generated and neatly organized index of the latest articles and postings” You know we are not yet mainstream when the abbreviation periods are included in the name R.S.S. I mean when’s the last time you saw H.T.M.L. or for that matter I.B.M?
06/03 What’s a beta, anyway? — BlogBridgeis getting ready to go into a limited beta test. The purpose is to get some early feedback on the basic User Interface model and the overall product vision. If you are interested in participating, please send an email to email@blogbridge.com. Doing a beta when...
06/02 BlogBridge beta update — The beta test is almost ready to go. The plan is that it will start very small, with only a few users, and then based on feedback and results we will expand it as we release revisions and updates. If you are interested in joining up, send me email at beta@blogbridge.com.
06/01 Pop!Tech Ticket! — Pop!Tech is one of my all time favorite conferences. So favorite that I bought a ticket for this year’s event way in advance. I have hit an insurmountable schedule problem and so I have to miss it this year. So, I have a ticket that I can’t use, they won’t refund (the X*&!@(#&!@#’s) but I can transfer. And it is substantially cheaper than what they are charging now because of when I bought it. If you are interested please contact me directly by email.
05/29 [Geek] Getting ftp task to work in Ant / Eclipse — Note to self: The FTP task in Ant relies on the library: commons-net.jar from Apache. Be not confused, this is different from the library: ant-commons-net.jar, which I believe is the Ant interface to commons-net.jar. In other words, you need them both, in ant_homelib. If they are not both there you can a ridiculously cryptic error message. ** p.s. Didn’t I say “GEEK” ?**Dave, thanks for the words of encouragement.
05/28 Musings on Open Source licensing — As I continue to make rapid progress on BlogBridge, now with a significant amount of help, I am asking myself some tricky questions about licensing, which I thought I’d try out here. (By the way, BlogBridge is the blog reader that I’ve been working on and which is soon ...
05/28 [Geek] Debugging focus problems — Struggling with debugging hairy focus and other UI problems in Swing (Java)? Here’s a handy little tip that I just found out about: When running a Java application, type Ctrl-Shift-F1 and the VM will dump the components hierarchy into standard output. p.s. Editorial comment: I question whether I should enter these super-geeky-limited-interest notes here. In the end, as I am using this blog as my personal lab notebook I decided that it’s ok even though it might put some people off. My new standard is that I will precede the title with [geek] to give early warning and allow people to skip it.
05/27 Funny American Idol commentary — Yes, I guess some of you have never seen American Idol, so you wouldn’t appreciate this ironic and funny commentary: “Finally, following a sax rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” by a former idol, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and John Kerry could stand up, holding hands, trembling but beaming encouragement to each other, as Ryan announced our next American president. “ In ‘American Idol’ Democracy, Fantasia Wins