Awhile back I blogged about how nice it would be to have offline support built into Google Reader. At the time, I anticipated some form of integration with Google Desktop. Fortunately, the folk at Google smiled down on me (and many others) today and provided the functionality in part to show off their new Gears ...

This is the first part detailing my experiences writing a basic html screen scraper using a combination of bash, python and structured grep to retrieve, massage and present data. The results can be seen at onesecondshy.com. Code will eventually be published there as well. First off, motivation. The motivation for this little project was to ...

We make pretty good use of Confluence at the office so it was interesting to read Frank Kelly’s take on wiki’s in the workplace. To a certain extent I agree with his arguments. We’ve been using it as a storage repository for feature breakdowns, roadmaps and design reviews amongst many other things but it has ...

Quick lesson learned. If you have a property change listener registered against a specific property name, you have to use removePropertyChangeListener(String, PropertyChangeListener) and not removePropertyChangeListener(PropertyChangeListener) when you want to remove it. Basically, you cannot do the following: PropertyChangeListener foo = new XXX(); public void enable() { addPropertyChangeListener("SomeMessage", foo); } public void disable() { removePropertyChangeListener(foo); } ...

Interested post over on the Terracotta blog (actual pdf available here) concerning performance between Terracotta’s caching mechanism and the JBoss TreeCache. If you’re in a situation where scalability (and reliability) are a chief concern, you should definitely check the open source Terracotta offering out. Even if you don’t necessarily live in a high-throughput environment, the ...

The following is a response I got from Matt @ Cenqua regarding my recent blog on Crucible. It is good to hear you are getting something useful out of Crucible. You mentioned that the thing you really want is “diff-based reviews”. I just want to check if that means the same thing as what we ...