Macintosh Creator Raskin Dies at 61

Although I’ve been an IBM PC owner/user since the age of 3, I can respect what Jef Raskin, a human computer interaction expert amongst other things, did f or the industry through his invovlement in the development of what was to become the Mac. Jef Raskin was the 31st employee of Apple and passed away ...

Reflected toString() methods : My Take

There was a post here that advocates using the ReflectiveToStringBuilder from commons-lang t o generate your toString()’s. I must admit that I too have thought about doing this. In particular after looking at the common-lang usage in some Matt Raible’s code. It’s a neat idea but I think its practicality is determined by the architecture ...

Writing custom Struts RequestProcessor to trim fields

One of the web applications I maintain had a need to have fields trimmed. I had previously just relied on validation to return an invalid field if it had been left in an untrimmed state by the end user. Not necessarily the most ideal situation so I looked for a way to automatically trim fields ...

Using del.icio.us + Foxylicious as your bookmark management system

I’m toying with the idea of totally using delicious and Foxylicious (the Firefox plug-in) as my bookmark system. Part of my problem is that I use multiple machines (laptop and desktop at work, couple desktops at home) and I like to have synchronized bookmarks at each. I’ve been using delicious for awhile but just haven’t ...

Experiences with JIRA

At work we’ve been toying with the idea of replacing Bugzilla with something a little more flexible, nicer looking, and easier to use. I’ve been meaning to look into JIRA for some time, having come across it many times in the oss world. So today I decided to spend 15 minutes and sign-up and download ...

My Firefox extensions of choice

I recently installed a few more firefox plugins on my ubuntu laptop (running Firefox 1.0) Current list: Add Bookmark Here Gmail Notifier Google Pagerank Status Bookmarks Synchronizer Gcache ColorZilla ForecastFox FoxyTunes Foxylicious I have the first 5 running for a long time and the add bookmark here and bookmarks synchronizer are two plugins I couldn’t ...

Choosing a laptop for development

Just last week I was faced with the decision of choosing a laptop that I would be travelling with but also be using for development. I needed something powerful that I could develop on and have no problems running jboss, the database, and eclipse. Eventually decided on a Toshiba A70 tha t came stock with ...

Google the copycat? or innovator?

I just read another blog entry where someone called Google a copycat. And to some extent we should agree with that. However (and a big one at that), its not so much whether you are first, second or even third to market, its the quality of your offering and buzz you’re a ble to create ...

Zen Micro and Podcast Listening

A couple weeks back I decided that I needed to bite the bullet and pick up a portable MP3 player. I was initially thinking about cheaping out and going with an iPod shuffle, but the availability is limited in Canada it seems and I’m not sure if I would be too happy in the long ...