The Goldfish Chronicles

There’s a certain amount of Java-ness to this as the Zaurus is a neat Java platform. However the particular game that made my jaw drop is probably a QT game.

Missile Command was this amazingly simple game I liked on the BBC B. We had these analogue joysticks that were pratically mice and you had to move the joystick to a point and hit the button. So a good mouse game.

An even better touch-screen game. Especially when the author has it running in sideways mode so as to get the most out of the screen. Playing Javanoid on the Zaurus nearly a year ago was a good wow moment, this is another. It’s just FUN.

fasza. i swapped the ambicom cf card out for a netgear one. it failed. i did a hard reset. it worked. i’m online

might be a nicer way to enter than thru the MT interface. have to ask around.

I got my latest LJ today and it’s managed to at least interest me a bit. LJ does this a lot. It has a couple of pages near the front with interesting statistics and quotes on. Hint to any other magazine, this stuff is cool.

It’s like the rollover on a website. It’s sticky. Knowing that IBM have 5,000 Linux support staff is stickiness.

LJ does bore me a bit because it’s too low level linux. But that’s a problem with me more than it. It has cool articles on i18n this month [and a crap one showing how to i18nise a file. If you code in C. Woo]. Very impressed with the Indianisation of Linux and the Long range wireless system in Guinea. This is seriously cool stuff. And a good way to write an article. The S.Africa article is also good, much the same as the Indian one.

Anyway. A good enough one this month.

Heh. Blog pointed out by rebelutionary: shemnon concerning irritations amongst the Jakarta membership, centering on one rather irritating character [he is, I ignore him, life moves on].

Mike’s comment is that it’s another person who doesn’t think that Jakarta is the greatest brand in the world. Kinda weird to see that on the same day as my posting a long rant to the reorg@apache website that Jakarta is a great brand in the Java world, even more so than Apache, and that it needs to be preserved Maybe I’m just being defensive. Apache reorg list continues to discuss possibilities. Initially it was a discussion to throw away the top level projects, promote all projects to the top and create categories, like SF.net foundries but better.
However, it seems to have ground down currently into major schismic differences between the Jakarta community and the Apache community. Seems Jakarta has evolved from a traditional Apache project and is a) large, b) low on members [an apache member is a trusted committer who is an actual employee as such of the non-profit ASF] and c) allowing new projects in too quickly [or by the looks of things, simply allowing new projects in].

It’s even seen some semi-mock suggestions of a secession of Jakarta, which won’t happen as I don’t think it’s legally possible. Also very few would even contemplate it as a real thing I think. Not the best time for Howard Ship to start discussions on whether Tapestry might join Jakarta.

One of the areas it hits me on is that the first step of reorg is a new Apache Commons top level project, with no discussion of how Jakarta Commons or Xml Commons or APR might interact with it. So getting interesting.

My viewpoint to a comment of “there is no language but java, and jakarta is its prophet” is that that is kinda true. When doing Java, the habit is to not mix it with other languages. SQL is kept standard, IE-HTML is avoided, OS callouts from Java to perl are avoided. It’s a mindset, a stereotype, and it works. And Jakarta is a prophet, a prophet of open-source, not Java. I don’t think Java people much care about converting other languages over [unless they be C#/VB people? their last shot at redemption *grin*], we’ve won our niche and can sit and evolve in it. So Jakarta prophesizes not to developers, but to companies using Java. Look at our products, they’re good, come use them.

Article published

Hopefully the first one out the door, it’d better be as I had it written and submitted before release *whistle*.

I’m still unsure about the whole journalist thing. It’s a nice way to have an open-source business case, ie) learn about open source things and write articles on them. I can at least pay for the servers on which I develop and I get to do advertising as such. It’s also nice to be learning how to write a bit better and to be getting my name out there.

This article was fun to write as I planned from the start to include a fair amount of becoming part of an open source project as well as just the project itself. Hopefully someday I’ll look back on these articles and laugh at the pathetic writing shown therein.

Ted Neward has a piece over at OReilly [http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/user/view/wlg/2072] in which he discusses why he doesn’t subscribe to magazines anymore.

I used to be a major magazine fan, I had international subscriptions of Java Developers Journal, Java Report and Doctor Dobbs Journal. Java Report was my favourite, I learnt lots and loved the more academic view it had on the world. Java Pro was a crappy Windows-style mag, and JDJ was pratically an advert it was so commercial. DDJ was cool, but would often be way over my head.

Ignoring UK PC/Amiga magazines, I’ve subscribed to DDJ [constantly for 4 years or so], JDJ, Java Pro, Xml Dev Journal, Java Report, JOOP, Windows Developers Journal, Sys Admin, Visual .Net Magazine(? pretty bad, I get it now and the name still doesn’t stick), Linux Journal, Linux Magazine [well I’ve bought it every month for ages now], MacWorld, Embedded Linux Journal [at least, they kept sending me free copies], C++ Report and bought numerous other mags.

While I used to wait anxiously to read the gems of wisdom in Java Report and DDJ, now I find that the improved JDJ is still pretty ignorable, DDJ had the temerity to do an issue without a Java article, not that I read them much anyway, I get DDJ just for Swaine and maybe Stevens, Java Pro is still a pretty rag, the Linux magazines are passable, but also missable, and the rest are pretty useless. I can learn more from an online article, or even from a session of reading blogs than I seem to get from the magazines nowadays. I had been searching for new good mags [ie C++ Report, Windows ones] by subscribing to them [cheap in US], but I find my level of interest is just not high enough [I’m looking for C# Report basically] and they create more fire-hazard in my basement.

Maybe I just need to save my money, focus on my safari subscription and read more blogs.

At last, a minor sense of achievement from a partial bit of work. Built an RC1 for Commons-Collections and got the Commons-CLI project nightly build going hopefully.

Both are projects I linger on the fringe of and need to get more involved in. Hopefully I will as I throw away classes from GenJavaCore.

The Apache reorg mail list continues to bounce back and forth with ideas for how to restructure the Apache projects. Scary stuff.

A week without Java to talk about. Well not quite true, we’re near the end of a development cycle at work so there’s lots I could say about development cycles, given a beer and long enough rope with which to hang myself.

Bad side of it all is that the Java bits at work tend to be so intense that when I get home I just sit down and play Europa Universalis [very very cool historical game on the PC] or on the cheap N64 I picked up last year, or read a book [current book is vol 2 in Piers Anthony’s Incarnations of Immortality. JMX book from OReilly is also occasionally making a showing, and I’m struggling to get my head around NIO Selectors in the OReilly NIO book at Safari. ]

So the XmlWriter project gets shortchanged [we just found a project named xmlenc, I think I’ve mentioned it already. I’m doing poorly at finding time to reply to those emails] and various Jakarta ones don’t get the attention I’d like to give them. Lastly, I want to create a simply Image gallery servlet for my wife to put pictures online on one of our servers. I start many endeavours for her [BattleShip game, Todo program, others] and nearly always fail to see them through. Not enough of a personal itch I guess.

Pete Cassetta, pointed out a new project on sourceforge named Xmlenc. It’s to a large extent the same concept as XmlWriter, but with different reasons for existing.

Pete’s also created some great benchmarks which do a nice job for showing XmlWriter’s speed [which was never intended, it was meant to not use memory and be easier to code]. Xmlenc has the edge on speed, but without as much fucntionality. We’re talking to Xmlenc’s creator [Ernst de Haan] and hopefully can come up with some good ideas.

My next jobs being, to put Pete’s benchmarks on the webpage, to write a SAX benchmark for him to run and to integrate JARV somehow via a possible reverse-SAX dragon-punch move.

Seems today is my day on cafe-aulait. [rhyming!].

Not one, but two releases as the headline news!
Commons Lang and String Taglib.

Now the release month is out the way [although we have v2.2 of our product at work to release over the next few weeks] I’m starting to slowly get back into the routine of actually doing code at Apache and not release handling.