What's That Noise?! [Ian Kallen's Weblog]

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20060422 Saturday April 22, 2006

I'm The Decider

If there's anything to be said for the innovations in the tools of creation and distribution of our present day, it's that contemporary political humor has gotten so much funnier!

Sitting on my own brain, waiting for the end of days
Corporation profits, Bloody oil money
I'm above the law and I'll decide what's right or wrong

I am the egg head, I'm the Commander, I'm the Decider
Koo-Koo-Kachoo

(check it out)
Thanks, Adam!

           

( Apr 22 2006, 05:26:39 PM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060421 Friday April 21, 2006

The Hard Work of Making Java Easy

The Java backlash that began a few years ago was mostly a J2EE backlash, not against the Java language per se. Too many people took the blueprints too seriously, too literally or just too damned religiously. Too many applications that didn't need EJBs were using them, letting the container manage low level application plumbing invited slow and buggy behaviors that were painful to debug. The backlash has made a lot Perl/Python/PHP enthusiasts express self-righteous vindication and have helped morph the J2EE backlash into a broader Java backlash. Geez, even IBM is getting all spun up on PHP, whodathunk? But I think the dismissal of Java is premature. None of the P languages or Java are without hazards. These days a lot of developers are over the blueprint kool-aid and are standardizing on a simplified and productive stack:

However, there is still a rapid development gap. I've heard Java called a "high ceremony" language. Where you can often prototype a lot of functionality in a modest amount of code with the P languages, you end up writing a lot more code to do the same things in Java. On the other hand, the run time errors, sorcerers and hackers adherent to the P languages are at least as guilty of the same brand of excessive zealotry as the blueprint adherents. The practical heresy demands recognizing that you can get it really wrong in just about any programming language. As far as the high ceremony, Java and J2EE are guilty as charged. As if to punish Sun, the developer community has innovated just fine without advance posturing within Sun's prescribed processes (the good news there: many within Sun seem to realize that they can't carry on as a cathedral and, in fact, are embracing the bazaar, bravo!). Spring and Hibernate each offer a degree of code simplification but require a bit of XML-hell. Even though the XML is way simpler to maintain than say, struts-config.xml and EJB deployment descriptors, you've reduced your compile-time safety code maintenance but increased your runtime hazards with more XML. Xdoclet or JSR-175 annotations can simplify a lot of the XML configulation required for Struts and Hibernate but then you might end up in another kind of hell: annotation hell. Choose your hell well!

To really bring rapid development and prototyping to a Java environment, there a lot options to look at such as dynamic JVM languages:

Jython
By most accounts, a mature but quirky Python for the JVM
JRuby
An immature but progressing Ruby for the JVM
Groovy
A failed experiment or work in progress, depending on who you talk to
Ruby on Rails doesn't run on JRuby (supposedly, it's coming). Grails (the artist formerly known as Groovy on Rails) is on v0.1, I'm not holding my breath. What about getting the simple life "convention-over-configuration" in Java? You get some of it simply by using Maven; organize your code to the Maven convention and compiling, testing and packaging your application just works. Eclipse provides so much developer support for Java already, using Maven and Eclipse together is great way to keep a lot of the high ceremony out of your way. But for application development, there are a few rails-alike frameworks for Java that I'm still interested in trying: rife and trails.

I expect in the months ahead to be writing applications with plugin support and that the big win for the dynamic JVM languages for me will be in easing the rapid development of plugins. In other words, I probably wouldn't write an end to end application with them but given a set of interfaces for extension points that can be automatically tested, writing the extensions in JRuby or Groovy sounds compelling.

I actually haven't had time and opportunity to substantially try half the things I've mentioned thus far. Surveying the number of tools, languages and frameworks it's clear that there are a lot of things to consider and that a lot people are concerned with (and working hard on) bringing the down the high ceremony of Java. I'll still be using P languages in the future, too. Down the road, I suspect virtual machines (JVM? parrot? mono/CLR?) will make a lot of these issues fade away and the questions at hand will be around when to use closures and when to use objects, when to annotate and when to externally declare, when to explicitly type or auto-type and so forth. The languages will be incidental as they support shared constructs and virtual machines.

                   

( Apr 21 2006, 09:03:42 PM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060420 Thursday April 20, 2006

Mindstorms Open Source

I've been wondering how Lego will maintain a business around Mindstorms and at last, I think we have an answer: they'll hop on ye olde cluetrain. By enabling the community of Mindstorms enthusiasts to drive innovation openly, I finally feel confident that the Mindstorms technology will enjoy long term viability. From the Gizmodo post:

Jon Lund took some time out from liveblogging the CustomerMade conference in Copenhagen to email in and tell us that according to Soren Lund of Lego, the software behind the upcoming highly anticipated Mindstorms NXT will be published as open source; Lego is currently in the last stage, figuring out which public domain license to use before releasing it. Power to the people! (read on)
The dreaded EOL'ing scenario, such as that suffered by the Sony Aibo, would have been a really crappy outcome for Mindstorms. Instead, they're innovating and opening up. Thanks, Lego! Oh, and one hting: BSD/Apache style licenses, please!

         

( Apr 20 2006, 03:25:53 PM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


Commuter Blues

I suspect I'll be opting to casual carpool more often with BART eliminating free parking at the Contra Costa county stations I frequent. That could raise my already-not-inconsequential commute costs 15%. And how timely. Gas is already exceeding $3/gallon and the chatter on the radio is to expect $4/gallon! In that scenario, I wouldn't be surprised to see carpool drivers putting a cup out for the riders as their fuel prices put them in the squeeze. Meanwhile, the Big Oil Companies are ringing in record profits...

One possible ray of light for the BART ride option is the report of WiMax service coming:

WiMAX is similar to WiFi but can carry signals across greater distances. WiMax is also being considered by Silicon Valley public transportation officials (free registration) who want to let passengers browse the Internet on local train systems like BART. They want to run a test from July to December. WiMAX, they believe, might be a better technology to do hand-offs as the train rushes through various wireless coverage zones. read on
(via burtonator)

Maybe the price hikes will help them pay for a software test harness; BART's bugs have rendered the system unusable in the past.

     

( Apr 20 2006, 07:19:57 AM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060419 Wednesday April 19, 2006

Air Force One Tagged

This is totally amazing! With all of the gazillions of dollars and BTU's of hot air poured out over "homeland security," here comes Marc Ecko laughing in the face of the beast by tagging (as in, the spray paint kind, not folksonomy) Air Force One!

Coming next: "Mark Ecko In Gitmo"

         

( Apr 19 2006, 09:29:21 AM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


Buh Bye Scott McClellan

Here comes a changing of the guard at the War House: McClellan Out as White House Press Secretary. Now I just wonder what the final parting words from Dubya to exiting Press Secretary Scott McClellan will be, let's see:

  1. You're dead to me.
  2. Will ya still be joining us in Kennebunkport?
  3. Recall the first rule of the war club: nobody talks about the war club.
  4. Keep what you've seen to yourself 'cause I have some stories of my own. Remember that cutie in Helsinki?
  5. Don't go writing any books now, you know I don't read!
  6. Ya know what they say, Scotty: What happens at the white house, stays at the white house.
  7. Publish memoirs and I'll make sure you're joining Dick Cheney's next hunting party...
  8. Ya know the "forget everything you've just seen" light flash in Men In Black? Was that real? Ya think we can do that? It'd be for the good of us all.
  9. You're not going to one of those quote think tanks, are ya?
  10. If things don't go well in Donnie's corner, would ya like to come back as Secretary of Defense?
Follow along.

       

( Apr 19 2006, 06:43:50 AM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060418 Tuesday April 18, 2006

Taking on the World

I posted last month about how winning feels good. With the thrill of victory comes a new challenge: what's next? Well, my daughter's team's second place showing in the Odyssey of the Mind regionals was followed up by first place in the State competition, so next up: the World!

The World competition is in Ames, Iowa. I've never been there. I've flown over Iowa plenty of times, traveling to and from Chicago. But the corn fields, cattle corrals and pig pokes of Iowa ... will be a new to me. All told, we're running up thousands of dollars to pull this off but I'm sure for the kids this will be one of life's great experiences, so it's all worth it. I have an alter-ego running a separate blog to track that endeavor and our challenges. We've got paypal links to accept donations (tax deductible, even) but simply talking about and linking to that blog will help, so please shine a little light on us.

     

( Apr 18 2006, 05:20:20 PM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060411 Tuesday April 11, 2006

User Generated Content By Any Other Name

Today, like many days, the phrase "user generated content" left my lips in the course of conversation. It's a habit. OK, maybe it's a bad habit. Since Tim Bray posted about his hatred for the label, I've been increasingly self-conscious about using those words. I agree, it's laden with exploitative connotations. Derek Powazek adeptly decomposed the nastiness further. Yes, not long ago editorial, movie editing, audio mixing and other tools of creation were only accessible to the pros. Yes, the burst of creativity that has accompanied the mass-amateurization of media of all kinds begs for an improvement of the vernacular. However, Scott Rosenberg, lamenting the absence of a credible replacement, reminds us that content from the pro's still has value (Seymour Hersh didn't blog the latest plan of attack, now did he?). Breaking habits often requires conscious adoption of an alternative. So, what? People Contributed Media? Individual Creations? Actually, I'm more intrigued by "user distributed content" but maybe I'll post about that later and then I'll have to wring my hands over a better name for it.

 

( Apr 11 2006, 09:57:02 PM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


Public Libraries

I've always been fond of public libraries, they can be a great resource and it's so... non-web (2.0 or 1.0). I've used 'em for youth sports coaching materials, current non-fiction, jazz CDs and such. They can also be real funny; sometimes they have contemporary titles but other times there's no hope in getting what you want without going out to the bookstore to buy it. I did a search for a title, "What Would Buddha Do at Work" on Contra Costa Library catalog and the first hit was for What would Buffy do? : the vampire slayer as spiritual guide. Buh!

   

( Apr 11 2006, 10:52:37 AM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060325 Saturday March 25, 2006

Seven Habits of Highly Effective Blogging

A common question from newcomers to the blogosphere is "how do I get my blog read?" There are all kinds of ways gather attention to yourself but there seems to be a set of best practices that come out whenever this topic comes up. So here's a rough swipe at a blogosphere visibility FAQ.

Post Conversationally
Use links to reply to other blog posts, cite sources and define terms. If you just treat your blog as a pulpit, a soapbox in a silo, your only hope of acquiring attention is to be a celebrity a priori. In other words, Arianna Huffington didn't need any best practices when she started blogging, she was already an attention focuser. So what if you're not famous? Don't be a wallflower, converse with links. If you read a blog post that you want to comment on, you can certainly leave one (if the blog permits comments, I don't since I don't have time to administer spam) or better, post to your blog linking to the permalink of the blog post you're commenting on. I don't bother with trackbacks either, too much spam to be useful to anybody.
Pay Attention To Get Attention
Use a feed reader to keep up with the conversation. I like endo and NetNewsWire but as the readers built into browsers get better and become full featured authoring tools (watch for innovations from Flock and Microsoft IE7), they'll be the read-write tools, the IDEs (integrated development environments) of the web. OK, now make it easy for folks to subscribe to your feed. Set up an account on FeedBurner and dress up your templates with feed-adding URLs (MyYahoo, Bloglines, etc).
Make Sure A Sound Is Heard In The Forest When Your Tree Falls
Most blogging platforms (be it the CMS like Movable Type and/or authoring tool like ecto) support sending an XML-RPC ping when you post, use it! Technorati also has a Ping form that you can bookmark. The benefit is that you'll be indexed by Technorati's real-time search system.
Claim Your Blog
Associate your Technorati profile, picture and tags with your blog by registering and claiming your blog. Your posts will be more visible in Technorati search results (with links to your profile and display of your picture) and with tags assoicated to your blog, the blog directory.
Tag Your Posts
The blogsphere's posts are neatly bound together by topic on Technorati's tag pages. Pick the top 5 or 10 subjects that your post is about and embellish your posts using reltag, Technorati has the tagging quick-start guide. Editing tools such as ecto and MarsEdit make it easy to add tags.
Post Often
The blogosphere's attention is focused on right now, not then. As Seth Godin points out:
Take a look at the top 10 blogs and you'll notice that many of them post dozens of times a day.
No, you don't have to be that prolific but if you have something interesting to say, say it early and often. On the other hand, don't prattle. Frequent posters who talk about nothing aren't doing themselves a favor in the over all data stream.
Be Well Formed and Valid
Your blog is much more palatable to the tools of consumption if they are easily parsable. HTML renderers such as web browsers, indexers like Technorati and feed readers just work better when your output validates. Use the tools at Feed Validator, check your markup and CSS.
So I think that sums up what I've observed in the big contest for attention. Yes, there's more to it than that and no, I don't follow these rules at all regularly 'cause I'm too heads down on building plumbing for the underlying fabric. But since I get asked these kinds of questions every few weeks or so when someone I know jumps into the world of micropublishing, now I have a permalink to refer them to <grin /> Once you've got these basics, check out Ten Technorati Hacks. Welcome to the blogosphere!

                 

( Mar 25 2006, 09:26:08 AM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060316 Thursday March 16, 2006

Endo

Years ago I thought AvantGo was sooo cool. I'd sync up my Palm Pilot, get on the bus and read the web sites I'd subscribed to. Ah, how times have changed. Lately, I'd been using Sage to read feeds in Firefox but the interface has always seemed inconvenient and Firefox is kinda slow and leaky under Mac OS X.

Last week I installed Endo (brought to you by the maker of ecto). While I was a little thrown by the way the feed group bar shifts focus, my feed reading has definitely been enhanced. The floating window notifications when it's updating are cool. The way it shows post tags right at the top (under the blog post title) is also very nice. I could imagine improving the feed focus on the left hand side (I'm hitting the scroll bar too much). I should be able to reorder the feeds so I can read them in order of importance (or if Endo calc'd importance on the fly by watching which feeds I go to first and mapped that against their update rates, better). But really no substantial complaints. It integrates nicely with ecto and has hooks to integrate with mail and chat applications but my favorite thing about Endo is: its cache! I spend a few hours everyday commuting, reading feeds on while I'm on the go is great! I basically left the laptop load up feeds before I hit the road and catch up on stuff while in transit.

Thanks Ado!

         

( Mar 16 2006, 01:14:00 PM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060312 Sunday March 12, 2006

Winning Feels Good

A few victories to report:

Winning isn't everything, but when you're playing (or watching) the game, it's the outcome you want. That was my weekend, good stuff.

               

( Mar 12 2006, 09:12:32 PM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


Etech Highlights

I know this is late coming and everybody's already moved on to SXSW. Sometimes I just leave things dangling a little too long but I have some scattered Etech notes and may as well get them out of the way.

So here we go. This years Etech Conference in San Diego was a real treat. The speaker sessions, the usual running into friends of past and present and the sunny reprieve last Wednesday were overlaid by a recognition of how much the technology world has changed in the last year. As the novelty of tags, AJAX and Ruby On Rails are wearing thin, people are getting down to business building real applications. The hype wake that's followed Yahoo!'s Web 2.0 acquisitions last year has spun up a lot of innovation -- a lot of tinkering projects are growing up and some are getting funding. Yes, a treat; albeit at times in a scary too-sweet-like-bubblicious way; see Building to flip is building to flop (via Marc Hedlund's excellent session Coder to Co-Founder). I can't do justice to the whole conference (see the Technorati Etech06 post stream) but heres a review of my highlights.

The Live Clipboard demo at Ray Ozzie's Tuesday keynote was truly awesome. Microsoft is vivificating data out of web pages that can interact with other services and applications. Contact information embedded in web pages as hCards will transparently be manifested as vCards. Events expressed as hCalendars will be manifested as iCals. With the potential for microformat expressions of the basic building blocks of many import human-centered entities being conjured up by Microsoft Internet Explorer, the web becomes a much more valuable medium.

Chatting with Tantek about it the next evening, I wondered if Microsoft's commitment to the technology might extend as far as making contributions to Mozilla so that Firefox and Thunderbird users can enjoy benefits comparable to those promised to MSIE users. Tantek seemed confident that the Mozilla community will soon enough implement the same capabilities. On Thursday, Bart Decrem seemed to imply as much; when Flock loads a page it recognizes microformats and can conjure the data so that it may be sent to other sites and applications. As Decrem put it, it's part of Flocks support for "roundtrip attention." He demonstrated Flock in that session (with Chris Messina) dragging web entities (inline images, highlighted blocks of text for citation, etc) to Flock's "shelf" and incorporating it into blog post authoring. And Flock does the right thing; text cited is marked up in the blog post as <blockquote /> tag with a cite attribute. Flock is an IDE (integrated development environment) for micropublishing and remixing on the web.

Also at Tuesday's keynote (2006-03-07), Jeff Han showed off a tactile multi-input touchscreen device. Tablet PC's are nothing new but these applications weren't your garden variety touchscreen tricks where you use a stylus to doodle and scribble (hoping that the handwriting recognition mistake rate is tolerable). He used his hands, his finger tips were employed as multiple styli that could manipulate data gesturally. There was an incredible playdough-with-pixels application programmed with fluid physics. He grabbed globules of stuff, squished it, pulled it apart, mushed it together and rolled it around while creating currents and eddies within a virtual oil-and-water lava-lampscape.

For years, starting with Windows 95, I've longed to see the replacement for the traditional desktop metaphors that operating systems use. Accessing data as files, via folders, dragging to trashcans, clicking on notepads and cutting/pasting to ethereal clipboards... we've trained ourselves to think within the confines of deficient interfaces. No doubt there's rhyme and reason to these metaphors but as humans we're always conforming to their constraints. Instead of us training ourselves to think that way, the computers should be taught to accept input and provide output that agrees with how we already think. Children don't need to be taught how to fingerpaint, they stick their hands in the goo and do what comes naturally. We should all go back to preschool from time to time, lest we forget how.

Han's other application was photo browsing. On a plane that served as a virtual light board, he used his fingers to zoom in and out, slid them around the board, stretched and shrunk pictures and arranged them manually. This was drag and drop without starting and ending points, without mouse pointers or mouse-downs.

It was truly awe inspiring to see him gesture his way through the data. OK, enough real and proverbial gushing, check this out.

Bradley Horowitz discussed Yahoo!'s embrace of user generated content (nothing really new there, right) and the epiphanous embrace of user distributed content. The beauty of Flickr isn't just in the community's folksonomic organization of the content it generates, it's in how widespread it's distribution reach is through mashups (like Technorati's tag pages, though he didn't cite us specifically) and blog post embedding. Yahoo! is clearly on a roll with the fabric of feeds that they produce, consume and remix.

Another highlight for me of course was my preso at the Data Dump. I showed that "Web Pages Lie But The Numbers Don't" by demonstrating how blog spammers reveal themselves when you watch their publishing metrics. Normal publishing operations have consistent characteristics, there are baselines to measure against, as far as their blog creation rates (in the case of domains that host blogs), post creation rates, link creation rates, tags and so forth. After my swim through the data underlying SEO dirty business, David Hornik provided a humorous wade into what VC's really do: email about schmoozes and meetings, shmooze about email and meetings and meet about emails and schmoozes. Such grueling duties, the object of which oftentimes boiling down to an email with "Introduction" as the Subject:, requires taking frequent breaks (Hawaii, Cabo, Hannukah, Aspen, etc) but provides fodder for other email Subjects.

Microformats and Flickr seemed to be the big winners at this Etech. Between people jazzed by Cal Henderson's geek out How We Built Flickr tutorial on Monday, to Antonio Rodriguez showing off Tabblo to passers-by, to Bradley Horowitz' singing the praises of Flickr and the emergence of Yahoo!'s FUSE vision (find, use, share, expand) and countless other cites in various sessions -- Flickr was ubiquitously on the lips of Etech speakers and attendees. Ray Ozzie really energized the interest in microformats with his morning keynote, by the time the evening rolled around, the microformats session had a packed house. The audience wasn't just listening, they were participating; observed all around were people creating hCards, reading about hCals and whispering to each other about the application potential.

Enough speaking of Flickr@Etech (again), see it. James Duncan Davidson's Etech Flickr stream is a good photographic chronicle of this years conference. Doc's is good too. That was my week.

                               

( Mar 12 2006, 02:22:48 PM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060228 Tuesday February 28, 2006

Winter Fights Back

Last week we had the early taste of spring, with cherry blossoms blooming. Warm weather was asserting itself but clearly winter won't leave, at least not without a fight. Right now, it we have sunny skies in the east, and cracking thunder, and torrential rain and hail. The rain gutters are over flowed, rain water shooting off of the roof. The dog is freaked out.

They fight. And fight. And fight. And fight. And fight.

Minutes later: it stops. All is quiet. The dog is sleeping, again.

It's a lot like life.

( Feb 28 2006, 08:08:09 AM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060226 Sunday February 26, 2006

Hug Yours

I don't know these folks, but having read the Dear Elena postings, I know them well enough. I'm hugging my little ones a little extra.

( Feb 26 2006, 05:35:13 PM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


hReview: Nobody Knows (Dare mo shiranai)

This evening, the kids were off having fun with their friends at a birthday party, so we watched Nobody Knows. I thought I'd seize an opportunity to try a quick hReview:

Nobody Knows (Dare mo shiranai)

Feb 25, 2006 by Ian Kallen Nobody Knows (Dare mo shiranai)

A moving, disturbing and excellent film (Japanese, english subtitles)

Based on a true story in Japan, this makes the New Years Home Alone Case look like a blip of a parental lapse. A young mother leaves her four kids alone for months on end in a small urban apartment. The eldest son, Akira, in an intense portrayal by adolescent Yûya Yagira, grows up real fast to look after his younger siblings. Despite a deliberate pace, the predicament that the kids were in, the sweetness of young Yuki (Momoko Shimizu) and the gritty inner-city ambience of Japan keep you rivetted to the story.

★★★★★

I've been meaning to take it for a spin for a while, this hReview was built with hReview Creator and then fiddled with a bit. I think I'll have muck with my stylesheets to give hReviews any kind of a reasonable display.

( Feb 26 2006, 12:11:35 AM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060222 Wednesday February 22, 2006

Making Velocity Be Quiet About Resource Loading

I'd never dug into where velocity's annoying messages were coming from but I decided enough is enough already. These tiresome messages from velocity were showing up on every page load: 

2006-02-22 12:08:02 StandardContext[/webapp] Velocity   [info] ResourceManager : found /path/to/resource.vm with loader org.apache.velocity.tools.view.servlet.WebappLoader
Such messages might be good for debugging your setup but once you're up and running, they're just obnoxious. They definitely weren't coming from the log4j.properties in the webapp. So I took a look at velocity's defaults. The logging properties that velocity ships with in velocity.properties concern display of stacktraces but the constant chatter in Tomcat's logs weren't in there either. So I unwrapped the velocity source and found it in org.apache.velocity.runtime.RuntimeConstants -- all I had to do is add this to velocity.properties and there was peace: 
resource.manager.logwhenfound = false
Ah, much better!

They shoulda named that property resource.manager.cmon.feel.the.noise, seriously.

( Feb 22 2006, 12:40:20 PM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060221 Tuesday February 21, 2006

Whiskers on Kittens

Today, Technorati launched a feature that enables you to identify and collect a few of your favorite things. You can select items as you browse search results, tags and so forth or you can identify them en masse by uploading an OPML file. I started mine by grabbing sixteen blogs that variously talk about the San Francisco Giants (it's almost the Good time of year, baseball time), here they are. As the baseball season gets underway, I expect I'll be refining this a bit. When opening day comes, I hope to have a truly browsable, searchable Giants blog portal of my very own. Hum baby!

Go to Technorati Favorites to start your own collection and put one of these on your blog:


( Feb 21 2006, 09:02:46 PM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060220 Monday February 20, 2006

Code Search Engines

There's been recent much-ado about Krugle that I just don't get. The website isn't even open, yet folks are salivating as if they've never heard of such a thing as a code search engine. Not that I'm invested in anyway in Koders, Codase or Codefetch but they're providing a credible story already for that kind of specialized search. I'll be happy to try Krugle when they open their doors but the level of excitement in the posts about them seems really odd. Wired has some screenshots in their article about it. Let's see the web site live and then get all frothy about it, please! This just smells like more web 2.0 over-hype; people: control yourselves!

What I'd really find useful is code search built into proprietary projects. After reading Using Lucene to Search Java Source Code, I'm imagining building a Lucene full text index of a project at build time, as a maven plug-in or an ant task. The current tools out there to make source code and docs browsable would benefit so much from making them searchable; there's already a Jetty plugin, run your build, start your webserver and search the code base whenever you want to find a particular method call (or something. That would be cool!

( Feb 20 2006, 03:27:44 PM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060219 Sunday February 19, 2006

The Dick Cheney Humor Train

For once in a great while we have a political todo with a real smoking gun and it has been some of the most entertaining political hoopla the blogosphere has ever seen. It's like we're under an attack of laugh bombs from the QLGF (doncha know about the Quail Liberation Guerilla Front?). I posted about the I got shot by Dick Cheney page but the conversation fodder keeps on a-coming:

In association with Zazzle.com
Zazzle
Cheney's Got A Gun (Aerosmith spoof) provides the video and soundtrack
The Bob Rivers Show - 102.5 KZOK Seattle (grr... packaging flash as a windows executable)
Dick Cheney Quail Hunt action packed game
Canned Hunting at its Cannedest
Dave Letterman's Top Ten
And no shortage of hardy hars from Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien and so forth.

I've been following this Technorati search for the blogosphere's yucks and the posts from About.com's Political Humor feed for most everything else:

And of course, there are the products:

In addition to the Ready... Fire... Aim t-shirt above, there's Dick Cheney: Reducing the burden on social security one old bird at a time and other stuff
Zazzle
I'd Rather Hunt With Dick Cheney Than Ride With Ted Kennedy and such bumper stickers, t-shirts, yadda yadda
CafePress
Yee haw!

( Feb 19 2006, 08:25:33 AM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060218 Saturday February 18, 2006

Is There Anybody Who Hasn't Been Shot By Dick Cheney?

The man is on a veritable rampage. It seems as though everybody is getting "mistaken" for quails, republican donors and other kinds of terrorists and paying for it big time. Here's the news on me:
ouch

Beware, Dick might be after you next. Check it out at WHAT SUCKER GOT SHOT BY THE VEEP? Fill in the form to get a keepsake of your very own.

( Feb 18 2006, 01:13:54 AM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060216 Thursday February 16, 2006

What Does Yahoo! Have Against Baseball?

Yahoo! has feeds, lot's of them. And they have a lot of sports feeds: NFL, NBA, NHL ... they have NASCAR but they don't have MLB? Sure, they have NCAA baseball but that doesn't count. Full coverage of baseball requires major league news. it's time for spring training to resume and they don't have MLB. What's up with that? Sure, too much hot dogs and cracker jacks are bad for you but c'mon. Are they communists or something? I bet they don't like apple pie, either.

Update
Well, they weren't apparent from those pages I looked on. But as some kind readers have advised me, there is a feed for MLB at [XML]. Thanks!

( Feb 16 2006, 11:03:34 AM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060214 Tuesday February 14, 2006

Google Buys Measure Map

Wow, Jeffrey Veen posted to Google Blog, the GOOG is now the proud owner of Measure Map. Congrats to the Adaptive Path folks!

( Feb 14 2006, 04:29:44 PM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


Oracle's "Resistance is Futile" Message to MySQL?

Five months after scooping up InnoDB, a major technology provider to MySQL AB, it looks like Larry is borging them further. MySQL users who depend on InnoDB for transaction support were no doubt shaken by that announcement but, since MySQL has other backends, there's at least some assurance there that transactional capabilities won't be completely chopped into little pieces, wrapped in a carpet and tossed into a Redwood Shores swamp; there's always other vendors, like Sleepycat and their BerkeleyDB product, right?

Bwah hah hah! Larry's got a Bloody Valentine for you now! Seems as though an undisclosed sum has been passed and another one bites the dust. This article suggests that Oracle's also set its sites on JBoss and Zend (the latter of which currently has BD2 support front and center on their home page). Mark Fluery and Larry Ellison ... that has a ring to it!

I think it's time to solve the PostgreSQL database replication problem (no, Slony is not a good answer) for once and for all, lest Larry's bloodthirst vaporize MySQL.

( Feb 14 2006, 03:55:40 PM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060213 Monday February 13, 2006

URL.hashCode() Busted?

I did a double take on this: 

        HashSet set = new HashSet();
        set.add(new URL("http://postsecret.blogspot.com"));
        set.add(new URL("http://dorion.blogspot.com"));
        for (Iterator it = set.iterator(); it.hasNext();) {
            System.out.println(it.next());
        }
I was expecting to get output like 
http://postsecret.blogspot.com
http://dorion.blogspot.com
or 
http://dorion.blogspot.com
http://postsecret.blogspot.com
But all that I got was 
http://postsecret.blogspot.com

Hmmm....

The java.net.URL javadoc says what I'd expect "Creates an integer suitable for hash table indexing." So I tried this: 

        URL url1 = new URL("http://postsecret.blogspot.com");
        URL url2 = new URL("http://dorion.blogspot.com");
        System.out.println(url1.hashCode() + " " + url1);
        System.out.println(url2.hashCode() + " " + url2);
and got this 
1117198397 http://postsecret.blogspot.com
1117198397 http://dorion.blogspot.com
I was expecting different hashCode's. Either java.net.URL is busted or I'm blowing it and my understanding of the contract with java.lang.Object and its hashCode() method is busted.

( Feb 13 2006, 07:37:29 PM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


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