The Goldfish Chronicles

I’ve had the necessary pause from blogging caused by being in a mental vacation from coding. So I thought I’d do a few admin things today. The Jakarta website is where you really see how much of a meritocracy Jakarta is. It’s all just a matter of having the confidence to go out and change it. So naturally I don’t have that and I’m simply changing the Lang site to try and make it good

So to that end I was googling for Commons Lang. It’s a definite grass-roots product, slipping into lots of other projects and appearing in the oddest places, and it gets a lot of little mentions on Blogs. I’m amazed I’ve not seen anything bad yet.

I linked to the article I wrote a while back, went googling to find a french version and ended up finding a chinese version. I’m in chinese! Quite exciting for me.
I also found a zdnet.co.uk article which references me But no french version.

Next step…. Get an understanding of what’s going to be in Lang 1.1.

Amazon have a good price on Shirazi’s Java Performance Tuning book, 14.99 USD.

Also of interest, his website and an interview with Dr Heinz Kabutz [subscribe to his newletter, very good Java talk].

Wonderful article as picked out by Cafe-au-lait. Well worth a read.

Only bit I pick fault with? The bit about reinventing the wheel. Reinventing the wheel means a large amount of maintainance. If I stick to JDK 1.1 and write all the additional bits by hand, of course this is bad. Should I write my own StringUtils or use Commons Lang?

Maybe the time spent reinventing the wheel woud be better spent building unit tests around other peoples wheels That said, I agree that you shouldn’t choose middleware for middleware’s sake and that it is important to have a trust level for the wheel’s you buy/obtain from people.

Everyone needs a web-designing wife. It’s so useful
She, the cat’s mother, put together a nice little page to list the weblogs that are on the Flamefew development machine, so now I can stop listing them on the ‘Weblogs I check’ and just have a portal page to go click on.

And adding to the Todo list: Change this page to be an Apache directory template, so it automatically adds new blogs. Incidentally, this is a Java project I’d like to do someday, or find. A file-system viewing servlet system. With templates. I suspect it could handle Russell Beattie’s picture viewer, as well as JCVS under one interface concept, just a question of different presentation plugins for different types of files or context.

I’ve spent the last week complaining at a canuck friend that I want threading in pine, while he tried to convince me to move to mutt.

And tonight the Uni of Washington release Pine 4.50..with threading!!!
Installed it on my home file server….
I’m addicted. First time I can think of that a piece of slashdot news affected me that much.

Although pine suggests it has a SuSE mode, I found the ’slx’ standard linux one was the one that worked locally for my user. On my server, I had to link /usr/lib/libncurses.so over to 5.2 of this in /lib. It also fails to see openssl is installed, so I’ll have to hunt that down a bit.

To sort by thread: $ then H
To collapse and expand in this mode: /

Will have to see how new mails appear etc. I assume the thread gains an N.
Thankyou Pine people

I have a project over at xmlwriter.sourceforge.net which makes life much easier to output Xml. No more pissing around with buffers and escaping character entities and forgetting to close tags.

There’s another project known as xmlenc which does much the same thign but at a lower level, so we’re going to put XmlWriter’s over-eager API on top of that project. So I need to find things that can justify that over-eager API.

One of these is hooking it to the JARV project, an API which wraps Xml Schema, DTD, Relax-NG, TREX and probably others as time goes by. By pretending to be a SAX writer underneath a version of XmlWriter, I can quite happily check the xml’s validity as it writes it out.

I’m quite happy with how it’s worked Need to get the new version 2.0 released on sourceforge with this.

Y’know what I’d like? An “import as” statement.
So I would do:

import java.sql.Date as SqlDate

It would then allow for some nifty C-typedef stuff like:

import java.lang.Integer as UserId

[Integer would still work].
C# tries this, but fails. It has aliases for the namespace, so I can do:
using company = Com.MyCompany
and then:

company.PoohBar pb = new company.PoohBar()

But this is not that great. Would be nicer if they had just used import/as and allowed the ‘as’ to be a dotted name as well as a class name.
This is all just syntax sugar, compiler would lose it all, so should be easyish to add
Bit annoying how C# forces you to import wildcards everywhere. Damn sloppy.

The Apache conference is currently going on in Vegas [I hear it’s quite cheap to do a conference in Vegas, I bet it’s cheaper in Louisville].

Some interesting blogs from people there:

Andrew Oliver
Pete Royal

Last night I gave a presentation to the Cincinatti Java Users Group on ‘Jakarta Commons Core’, a kind of informal internal name for a bunch of Commons projects. It took us a couple of hours to drive up there, which fortunately went without incident, and we made it just in time.

The talk went well enough I think I did my usual slideshow [okay, second time now, I finally have a structure to talks] which is currently available here.

I generally try to sell things a bit, trying to get people to use the libraries, trying to get people to see that the doors into the apache community aren’t that hard to open, and trying to show some of the interesting things out there.

So I rambled on. Mentioned the Java weblog world, various of the big arguments that have happened at Apache/Jakarta since I joined, got a free dinner Then we got home late last night and I’m trying to stay awake this afternoon.

Oh.. biggest bit. There were about 25 people there. None of whom I knew [apart from a few guys I came up with, so that’s a lie]. Biggest group I’ve talked to.

Three major things accomplished this weekend.

I wrote a review for builder.com, just one more needed before I can buy the dual-cpu server to replace my current 4U server and lower my rent.

I put together a talk to give tomorrow at the Cincinnatti Java Users Group meeting. It’s on Commons Core, the JDK++ libraries at Apache Jakarta Commons.

And I deleted/moved 3600 emails out of my 3900 full inbox. Usually I do this around the 2000’s, so it was starting to burst at the seams.

Next step, deal with the nice big lump of Apache work I have lined up for me.