So is this what the end of the world looks like?
It certainly is a first to my knowledge. Good luck guys!
Archive for April, 2008
Slashdot down
Wednesday, April 30th, 2008Managing drives and devices in Linux
Friday, April 18th, 2008Although I’ve got persistent device naming etc. configured, I’m still hoping to fully grasp & master the needed configfiles for udev, hal etc. So I found a few links (lots of overlap but hey):
- HAL and device management
- A Linux Planet tutorial : Adding additional hard drives in Linux
- An ok article on the horrible sys-con website : Device Management with udev and HAL on Fedora Core 4
- The recent state of udev
- HAL reverse engineered (@opensolaris)
On a sidenote, the annoying bug in Ubuntu Hardy Beta (causing new mount dirs to be created in /media with appended underscores) appears to have been fixed. Time to install some more (92 in fact) updates 
Update: I forgot to add a nice PDF from Linux Magazine on the subject : Dynamic device management in udev
Discovering the galaxy on picture a day
Monday, April 14th, 2008Or at least that’s what I try to do
I doubt the link to NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day will ever leave my bookmarks toolbar.
Can help one to put things into perspective at times
37signals workplace experiments
Monday, April 14th, 2008The people of 37signals have been experimenting with the workplace routines we’ve all come to know and love in our lives. This post from March 5th outlines some of their ideas, while the recently written ‘Urgency is poisonous’ gives a few conclusions after a good month.
I have to admit it did hear the bells of truth (?) when I read these pieces, certainly the latter one. Speaking for myself; although urgency has helped me out in the past (mostly studying things which didn’t really take away my interest), but when I’m doing the work I like (love?) I can’t say ‘urgency’ as such makes the endproduct better as a whole in general, rather the contrary.
I love the pragmatism the author shows when he is talking about these subjects. An imho great oneliner from the author’s reply to a comment to the latter post : ‘You can’t afford to put out crap products, that’s what you can’t afford to do.’
Nuff said.
Theming & Skinning WebSphere Portal 6
Monday, April 14th, 2008A few OSGi related links
Tuesday, April 8th, 2008- OSGi and Open Source ecosystem : Piero Campanelli provides a nice list of projects related to or supporting OSGi.
- A short tutorial into Eclipse, Equinox and OSGi
- And the Equinox Quickstart guide
JDK 6u10 early access features Nimbus Look ‘n Feel
Monday, April 7th, 2008Although I found the Ocean look to be a major improvement of the Metal look and feel (L&F), Nimbus seems a big step forward once again. And not an unwelcome one at that.
It does deserve to be said that a project with a Swing frontend I’ve been working on for a client for sometime now has been running Ocean as default look for a while now. It’s primary user group are users with no technical expertise whatsoever, and after I disabled the native theme for a while to do some Vista testing and forgot to re-enable it later for the next release build, they’ve specifically asked me to switch back to Ocean afterwards when I had ‘corrected’ the issue. I still need to ask whether that was due to use of colors, font, dpi or messy Swing native theming.
Which brings up a question that crossed my mind a few times; how many or few colors can/should a business app gui use in it’s UI, before it gets that screaming feeling or transforms to the written equivalent of The Box Factory?
Since I try to adhere to splitting the layers and reusing components (sort of), the use of color seems pretty important when designing editors and viewers of different sorts. I suppose it should all be abstracted out to the presentation model right
Irony
Monday, April 7th, 2008As I finish my last post on ScribeFire it seems broken (I did upgrade my wordpress to the latest version, but everything worked out just fine). So it’s back to BloGTK for the time being
Interesting article: Instant Messaging for Introverts
Monday, April 7th, 2008Still need to finish reading it ’cause it’s looooong.
In the author’s own words : “Ultimately, I can’t offer a solution that will magically and perfectly
bridge the gap between IM lovers and IM haters, but I hope I can at
least shed some light on what the situation looks like from both sides.”
TidBITS Opinion: Instant Messaging for Introverts
‘Back in the day’ (some 8 years ago give or take) I helped translate TidBits to Dutch for a while, so this was a surprising encounter (I’ve since moved to generic hardware & Linux, though I’ve been pondering on the MacPro the last few months so that might change yet)
A few interesting Java/Design related talks
Monday, April 7th, 2008Over the last few days I’ve watched a few nice talks, so even if only for future self-reference, I’ll give a list here:
- OSGi : The Foundation: Talk by Peter Kriens, who is the lead for OSGi. “His pres shows you why a spec like OSGi is crucial, what it really encompasses, and what the future developments will be.
” Very interesting since my knowledge on OSGi is (was) sparse at best.I’ll be taking another look at Eclipse RCP and Equinox. - Overview of Desktop Java Techs : Talk by Scott Delap who is the author of Desktop Java Live. “Scott Delap provides an overview of Swing and Eclipse RCP technologies in today’s world of RIA applications”
- Romain Guy on the state of desktop Java : interview with the co-author of Filthy Rich Clients.
- Joshua Bloch on Closures, Resource Management, Google : Responsible for the Java Collections framework among others in Java, currently responsible for the Java arch @ Google. Quite the Java guru
- Chet Haase discusses Java FX, Update N and JDK 7 : the other co-author of Filthy Rich Clients.
- How to design a good API and why it matters : a classic must-see talk by Joshua Bloch. “In this talk (recorded at Javapolis), Java library designer Joshua
Bloch teaches how to design good APIs, with many examples of what good
and bad APIs look like.” - Desktop Patterns & Data Binding : actually posted this link to a talk by the JGoodies lead a few days back, which I found to be very useful in explaining the organization of view logic in Java Desktop Apps.
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