Archive for February, 2005

Next Entries »

iWork

Thursday, February 3rd, 2005

got a chance to play with apple’s new iWork today. iWorks consists of two application: keynote 2 for presentations and pages, a kind of design oriented word processor.
both apps work pretty much the same way, you start by selecting a template, then you fill the placeholders with your own content. because it’s apple iWork is really easy to use. a set of icons here, a bit of drag ‘n drop there, integration with iPhoto and iTunes…
i have to say that i was quite impressed when i saw the presentation of iWork at steve job’s key note at this year’s mac world expo; i was somehow disappointed when i got to try it today - i am not sure why, you can make great looking presentations with keynote, and neat documents with pages, but still… i think the power of iWork comes from the collection of presentation/document templates that come with the package. as you’d expect from apple these are *really* well designed. but after that, you get two easy to use but - in terms of features - average programs. i can do a lot more with OpenOffice/NeoOffice/J (at least with documents, i don’t know any software that can match with the animation effects of keynote, they are a class of its own), if i invest the time doing it all by myself :)

anyway, both are a way to create good looking presentations/documents very quickly and easily, i’ll add them to my collection

Tags:

Posted in an apple | No Comments »

eating for the lazy

Thursday, February 3rd, 2005

i have become really lazy in terms of eating/food preparation. i have never cooked anything since i moved to my new place, i eat out every day. luckily, the largest food court of the southern hemisphere is only 500m away. they have ~15 restaurants and cafes, ranging from chinese over mexican to italian.

in case i get hungry in the evening, here’s my latest recipe: grab a bunch of (green) grapes + a slice of cheese, have a byte of cheese, then a couple of grapes, a byte of cheese, grapes…. as simple (and lazy) as it can get…

Tags:

Posted in a kangaroo | No Comments »

sydney’s best bar

Wednesday, February 2nd, 2005

the best bar in sydney (i know) is the blue horizon bar. (yes, i’ve just been there) it’s located on the top floor (36th or so) of the shangri-la hotel… a 5 star hotel in the rocks. they mainly serve cocktails which all cost around $18 but it’s definitely worth it. the view is awesome, you can see the harbour, circular quay, opera house, harbour bridge, north sydney … took some pictures, i’ll hopefully post them next week.

Tags:

Posted in a kangaroo | No Comments »

microsoft in the test

Wednesday, February 2nd, 2005

how cool is that … testing the msn search engine by comparing the number of search results for “.net sucks”/ “java sucks” with google … LOL

see http://gregluck.com/blog/archives/2005/02/msn_test_drive.html

Tags:

Posted in a laptop | No Comments »

learn ruby

Wednesday, February 2nd, 2005

hmmm…. i’ve been thinking about it for a while, have read a couple of articles, heard people praising it as you can only praise something really good. finally i read this post and now decided: i have to learn ruby. now all i need is a bit of time (sigh) and a good starting point, probably a book, ’cause i hate reading through huge web pages.

Tags:

Posted in a compiler | No Comments »

blogs of the pros

Wednesday, February 2nd, 2005

i’ve started reading the blogs of various ThoughtWorkers - apart from some .. informational noise :) there’s a lot to learn from them.

oh, and i get them rss-fed into mozilla thunderbird every day, apart from being a great email client this also a wonderful rss reader. it presents the feeds as if they were email accounts.

Tags:

Posted in a laptop | No Comments »

unit testing - jmock

Wednesday, February 2nd, 2005

i came across a tool called jmock. looks like a collection of generic mock objects so you don’t have to write mocks objects for all your unit tests - more on that after i’ve played with it a bit…

there has been a request for readings on unit testing - junit.org is a good start i guess, plus maybe one of these colorful XP books (eXtreme Programming) around, to get the motivation behind test first. i’ve read xp installed which is a nice introduction and am reading ‘planning xp’, which is - as the name suggests :) - more about he planning/management side of xp projects.

Tags:

Posted in a compiler | No Comments »

java developer day sydney

Wednesday, February 2nd, 2005

i just attended the 1st 2005 java developer day here in sydney.

the first part consisted of a couple of presentation:

introduction to java5 aka tiger

a short introduction to the new languagae features: auto boxing, generics, enums, annotations and the new for loop. nothing new, except that i didn’t know that you can create classes on the fly within an enum e.g.:
public class bla {
public enum month (jan(31), feb(29), mar(31), apr(30) ...) {
private int noOfDays;
public month(int numberOfDays) {
noOfDays = numberOfDays;
}

public int getNoOfDays() {return noOfDays;}
}
}

a demo to java studio creator

studio creator lets you create java applications by dragging widgets on a screen and attaching actions and data sources to them, looks like a nice tool for prototyping.

java studio enterprise

they showed the current version which basically allows you to model enterprise applications in uml, edit the generated source, deploy, test and profile in one tool. the coolest feature was that it would record the user interaction with the deployed application and this could be used by the integrated load generator to simulate any number of users using the system for profiling it.

james goslig

the 2nd part was a ‘james gosling’ unplugged session. (for those who don’t know it, james gosling is the ‘inventor’ of java). supposed to answering questions from the audience he basically told a lot of interesting and funny stories and bashed on microsoft, ibm (especially SWT), the dmca, c++ and others. he talked about computer architectures made of soap bubbles … i’ve forgotten the rest, but it was great :)

Tags:

Posted in a kangaroo | No Comments »

new power book

Tuesday, February 1st, 2005

apple just released the new power books. faster (but stil G4) processors, more ram, bigger hard disks, built-in bluetooth2 and wireless lan, illuminated keyboard, a third speaker for better sound (15″+) … no more excuses, i have to get one.

Tags:

Posted in an apple | No Comments »

enterprise patterns, refactoring, test first

Tuesday, February 1st, 2005

i just started reading the book ‘patterns of enterprise application architecture’ (martin fowler, 2003).

it’s (so far) an excellent introduction to and collection of design patterns for enterprise systems. every pattern is explained, there is an example and a ‘when to apply’ paragraph.

i am currently working on a java project using cmp entity beans for persistence and stateless session ejbs for the business logic. the business layer is backed up by a number of unit tests. unfortunately these have to be run in a j2ee container using J2EEUnit.

after having read the first couple of chapters i started refactoring the project. i replaced some nasty if-else clauses with a set of classes using the Strategy pattern. the next day i refactored all my business logic into POJOs (plain old java objects). thanks to my suite of unit tests i know that everything still works as supposed to. the next step is now to refactor these tests to not test ejbs but the pojos, so i can test my businees logic outside of a j2ee container. oh beautiful world.

Tags:

Posted in a compiler | No Comments »

Next Entries »