Archive for the 'General Discussions' Category

I was surprised when the following email came through my inbox last night.

URGENT! PUBLIC HEALTH ADVISORY FROM JAVAONE TEAM
The JavaOne conference team has been notified by the San Francisco Department of Public Health about an identified outbreak of a virus in the San Francisco area. Testing is still underway to identify the specific virus in [...]

We’ve got a fairly significant Swing application that we couldn’t port to Java6 until Apple released a compatible JVM. Fortunately that finally happened last week.
I’m down at JavaOne this week and was motivated to take a stab at resolving the couple dozen compilation problems and get things running.
It really wasn’t too difficult. The most annoying [...]

Just about to head to the airport enroute to San Francisco.
Really looking forward to the conference. Rather than attempt to blog a lot, I’m going to experiment with Twitter. Crazy Bob has compiled a list of JavaOne twitter’s.

Download Java6 Now!
About Java for Mac OS X 10.5 Update 1
This Java for Mac OS X 10.5 Update 1 adds Java SE 6 version 1.6.0_05 to your Mac. This update does not replace the existing installation of J2SE 5.0 or change the default version of Java.

Joe’s talk at the Java Posse Roundup on UI Polish and Usability has been posted (actually it was posted last month, I’m just working backwards).
Lots of interesting discussion about formal usability testing and good design in general.
I completely agree with a distinction being made between usability testing, design (information architecture and use cases) and polish. [...]

Today was our first hack day of 2008. I’ve been helping coordinate these events for the past year and a half and they’ve proven to be a solid source of inspiration and motivation for all participants.
Unfortunately for me, today was more or less a day of false starts. Like always, I had a number of [...]

I just got home from Open Web Vancouver 2008 and I must say that MacBook Pro’s definitely reigned supreme amongst all presenters.
The crowd was slightly more diverse but still plenty of MBPs and even a handful of MacBook Airs.
Keynotes by Zak Greant and Tim Bray were very well received and very much inspirational in their [...]

We recently finished a short two week spike that involved using Hibernate Search (backed by Lucene) to index additional attributes that were persisted as an xml snippet stored in CLOB field.
Simple enough goals:

What does the performance curve look like?
Can we search the indexed attributes? (the biggie here was to still be able to do a [...]

A rather humorous debate has started in the office around mail and calendaring solutions. Humorous because everyone running Windows loves Exchange and doesn’t see what the big deal is.
We’re a software shop with about 1/3 (of ~50) of the employees being in development. Most developers have recently migrated (from Linux/XP) to OS X. Windows has [...]

So I’ve been working off and on over the past 6 months on a little side project, JDBCSpy. I’ve mentioned it previously so this post is just a little update.
It’s far from my day job and really just serves as a bit of an outlet. You’re free to argue about whether it’s a creative outlet [...]




  • Pet Peeve: Don’t email my password to me in plain text You know the drill. Signup for some random service on the internet Receive a confirmation email with your account information or Forget a password for some random service ...

  • Eclipise Memory Analyzer (MAT) I must say the Eclipse Memory Analyzer looks pretty slick. There is some pretty good material over on the developers blog. Lastly, there was a talk on it ...

  • Open-source Web-based Code Review Tool: Rietveld Guido van Rossum, of Python fame, has recently released a Django-based application that enables web-based code reviews... Rietveld. It supports any language and currently can hook into Subversion repositories. You ...

  • An implementation of the JVM in Javascript? Caught this over on JavaPosse Google Groups. Essentially, some bright fellows over in Japan have developed a bytecode->javascript compiler. There's a demo floating around that took a Tetris ...

  • Facebook Chat? So it looks like the Facebook Chat service has finally started rolling out to my network (Facebook Chat has been mentioned previously). Not quite sure how ...