The Goldfish Chronicles

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.

Woo. My article on JSTL was published.

This was the first article I wrote simply describing someone elses technology, so more in the way of research and pre-planning was required. Watching all the other JSTL articles and books get released from more experienced writers was quite depressing too, and having my wife’s illness helped it get pushed further back.

I got some good comments though, which is very nice. The E-Newsletter team happened to send out my tip on using jstl:include earlier in the week, only the comments are viewable online I believe.

Latest edition of the Java Pro magazine has an article detailing the Jakarta Taglibs. Nice to see the String taglib get a mention, last article I saw on them [OnJava.com I think] was authored before it was released.

Nice that the JavaPro one lists the String taglib as one of the Core taglibs I think in functionality it is, but it lacks the age of many of the others. Thanks to Commons-Lang, String taglib is getting maturity from two directions, so hopefully it’s rapidly stabilising.

Sadly I’ll be smashing that stability to merge many tags together. A few posts to the Users list have made me realise that the String taglib is rather large currently so tags like <str:rightPad> will become <pad target=”right”> or some such. Left and Center would merge in or something. I’m still detailing the likely tags with a couple of power-users.

Well I made it. One year of writing tips to go out in email. 120 tips. Not that all of those have been published yet, they’ll slowly filter out over the next 4 months I would imagine.

It’s been fun, but increasingly hard. There’s only so many ideas that a) fit in 150->350 words including code [online articles don’t usually include code] and b) aren’t just hackneyed repeats of over sources but come from something I’ve learnt or a package I’ve found very useful.

I think I made it with a lot of them, but have no great beliefs that there weren’t some hackneyed ones in there too. Anyway, resignation email just went in, I feel free and ready to focus on articles

Just signed up to safari.oreilly.com, though the oreilly website failed to work and after a day or two of conversing with the safari tech support I got it to work by going via safari.informit.com. Very odd.

I like this idea. If I can get my old psion netBook setup again [not got the PC software installed and the IBM gigadrive is full of shit that my Mac OS 9 put on there] it would be nice to read. Need to check the small print to see if I’m allowed to put it on a PDA or if I have to have a constant net connection.

I’m also considering a PC next to the bed. I have an addiction with the infernal computer I think. If I can get a wireless version of a Sleekline machine, then I just might.

Having mentioned that Java newsletter [see below] I feel I ought to plug my own, else I’ll be up for a darwin award. I write the tips for builder.com [about to hit my first year]. You can subscribe at the following page and there’s also an example.

At last, finished the submission of an article on JSTL for builder.com. I’ve been hacking at it for 2 months now it seems, somehow it just became this immovable object. It’s nothing special, just a cursory introduction to JavaServer Pages Standard Tag Library, but it’s the first article I’ve written that wasn’t about my own code.