Ramblings

2006-07-08T06:45:00.000-07:00

Test blog from Journler 2.0 which was just released this week.

Test from Marsedit

2006-06-30T04:52:00.000-07:00

Okay, Now to show you one of the horses. (Now modified in Qumana to enlarge the picture.)


define function foo() 
  type int f;
  return f;
}


(defun foo(x)
  (+ 2 x))

How does that look.

Test again form Qumana

2006-06-30T04:49:00.000-07:00

This is a test of inserting picture into Blogger. This is a group of artists that take old cedar logs and turn them into horses. Now to add a line from Marsedit.

Powered by Qumana

Maine extends iBook program for $41m

2006-06-29T19:35:00.000-07:00

Way to go Apple!

Maine extends iBook program for $41m: "The state of Maine has extended its educational laptop program with Apple for another four years. Ma..."

(Via MacNN.)

ECTO - a better blogging client?

2006-06-25T19:12:00.000-07:00

Is ecto the one for me? It has rtf editing. Now sure yet if I can do a table. Looks like I can get pictures from iPhoto. But how to upload?

Looks like iPhoto does not work for Blogger. Sigh. This interface I could live with but I may just have to switch off of Blogger.

MarsEdit

2006-06-25T18:40:00.000-07:00

Now I am trying MarsEdit. Is this a better editor?

It is not a WYSIWYG editor. It sticks in the html tags.

2006-06-25T09:20:00.000-07:00

This is a test from viJournal. I am on a quest to find the best blogging editor for me.

Welcome to MacJournal!

2006-06-22T13:07:00.000-07:00

Use the Journals toolbar item to see your journals, and use the Entries item to see the entries for that journal. You can delete this entry to get started (or just make a new one).

I hope you enjoy using MacJournal!

Blogger widget

2006-06-20T07:52:00.000-07:00

Well, there is a dashboard widget that lets me a simple post. But not to many options for formating. I can not do underline and I am not sure I can do anchor tags but let me try to put in raw html apple.

Qumana Test

2006-06-20T07:47:00.000-07:00

Well, I just downloaded Qumana for Mac and am trying it out. I have been able to delete old posts. Now to see what other things I can do with it.

Powered by Qumana

Mac Blog or this one

2006-06-07T07:46:00.000-07:00

I just got iWeb and I am thinking of changing. It looks like a much nicer interface than what I have now and it works with my .mac account.

Total Cost of Ownership

2006-03-07T14:09:00.000-08:00

Here is an interesting article on the cost of owning a computer, or your company owning a computer.
http://www.networkworld.com/best/2006/022706bestbreaker-schwartau.html?page=1

You might not agree with the authors conclusion but there is a spead sheet you can use to see for yourself. You have to follow some of the links to get it.

2005-12-17T08:00:00.000-08:00

After attending the Austin Java Users Group (AJUG) this last Tuesday at Sun Microsystems office in Austin I decided to give NetBeans another look. I have been using eclipse for some time, even during my three year contract at Sun. I had used Forte for a few months back at the beginning of the contract but gladly switched back to eclipse mainly for refactoring support. Now they promise NetBeans is better than ever. Well, over the new few weeks I be taking a closer look and maybe I even try it out my current project that is using JBoss, JSF (myfaces), EJB3 (hibernate) and PostgreSQL.

First, it looks like the finally have the Mac look and feel with the menu bar.

Second, in the beta version the only font is their monospace font. Switching to any other font loses bold and italic. This I hope they fix in the next release since I personally like Monaco. Well, I am wrong. They actually have others and I have starting using Courier New since bold shows up better than monaco.

The options for formatting code continue to be weak. Only a few options.

Even the advanced options add nothing to the basic palette for formatting Java code.

Code templates. It still seemed hard to find the correct menu combination for editing an initial code template. This is something I have to do for each client. I have to add their copyright or disclaimers to each file and it would be nice if the template editor was easier to use. I could not find the list of text substitutions. I just need YEAR to follow the copyright. Also, I wanted to change __USER__ to my name instead of my login handle. The online help seemed to be out of sync with the version and the directions for editing __USER__ seemed just like the old Forte procedure. Sigh.

OOPSLA - Day three

2005-10-18T19:31:00.000-07:00

The morning keynote on creativity was okay but marred by a couple of gratuitous political comments. The wikipedia talk provided some interesting insights into what is free like images of art work from museums.

But Sussman's talk sparked my old love of Lisp and Scheme. One of his ideas is getting children exposed to programming as a language for expressing ideas is interesting. He also thinks more like an engineer in that creativity does not just spring out of nowhere and solve a problem but it needs some training to help the mind focused. Later Foote talked about the history of programming in a way only he can do. Again the idea of dynamic versus static languages came up. I too miss Lisp and Smalltalk. And I have to say, for well trained software engineers the type system seems could be more overhead that it is worth. Now off to a another meeting on sharing past OOPSLA memories.

OOPSLA 2005 - Day two

2005-10-18T11:33:00.000-07:00

Well, I am falling behind on updating my thoughts. Mainly because it more fun to network here than to write. This day was two tutorials - one on type systems and one on domain driven design (DDD). Both good - I now know more about type systems and the problems inside Java than I did before. Also, DDD is something I believe in easily from a mentoring a OO project many years ago. There we spent a little extra time up front learning the domain and then wrote the domain later first. The team, at the end of the project, commented that if we had not done this they would still be coding.

Now back to the Wikipedia talk.

OOPSLA 2005 - Day one

2005-10-17T13:22:00.000-07:00

Well, things are looking up. The tutorial by Joseph Yoder on Adaptive Architectures was very good and just-in-time. My client wants to add some a new feature and this technique is very good fit. The downside seems to be the lack of tool support and the use of hash tables (something I personally don't like) but the upside is the addition of additional items could be user controlled.

The roots of the adaptive architecture seem to stretch back to the analysis patterns from Fowler which I read back in '98.

Also seems to be some similarities with the Cocoa framework that I will look at in later blog.

OOPSLA 2005 - Day zero

2005-10-16T20:09:00.000-07:00

This was my travel day and it had lots of mishaps. Security at our airport does not post any signs stating you should take your computer out of its brief case and put it in a separate bin and they only get you when the screener sees it on the x-ray. So my stuff got another round trip through scanning. Good thing we had lots of time. Then the rental car pickup took almost 30 minutes and the first car had a slow leak in the tire. All toll it took 2 hours to get from the airport to the hotel - about 10 minutes with a cab. Then the hotel had suffered a power outage during the day and their computers where still down. Big line at checkin and we got the wrong room.

I have had good things come from bad starts. So I am hopeful.

EJB3

2005-10-09T18:54:00.000-07:00

First impression of EJB3 -> This can make enterprise programming fun again. But ...

We have been using EJB3 on a project now for about six weeks. it has saved us a lot of time compared to hand coding or using XDoclet but it still not a cake walk. The @Entity is the easy part. The harder part is figuring out exactly how we want the @OneToMany and @ManyToOne relations to work. Also debugging is a bit tricker. We are using the JBossIDE which is not as nice as eclipse JSR220 plugin but it did not support our DB - Postgres. JBoss 4.0.3 final just came out we are hoping it does solve some of the problems or that we get a better insight. More thought later ...

OOPSLA 2005

2005-10-07T12:31:00.000-07:00

The 20th anniversary of the OOPSLA conference is this year. This is a great conference for any one interested in object oriented programming. I started OOP with Lisp and then moved to Smalltalk then to Java. I dabble in Ruby and a long time ago in Neon (Forth). It is great to be at a conference is not about a language as much as about the concept and also about how to do it better. Great research reports and great presentations from people in the trenches. Lots of good tutorials from basic to advanced topics. I will be there - see my schedule.

First Ramble

2005-10-07T10:26:00.000-07:00

Well it is high time I started a blog. I just downloaded ecto for creating entries. Hope this works - I have seen a lot great recommendations and the price is good. I wonder if this software has RSS feed feature?