magpiebrain

I’ve been away for a while (due to a debauched weekend and an illness whose effect I doubtless exaggerated), so I thought a brief roundup was in order

* Matt Riable has posted an “interesting piece([DisplayTag] Changing a row’s CSS class based on values in the row. )”:http://raibledesigns.com/page/rd?anchor=displaytag_changing_a_row_s on getting the “Display Tag Library”:http://displaytag.sourceforge.net/ to style rows based on table values.
* Simon’s posted an “overview of JRules(JRules – A brief overview)”:http://www.redhillconsulting.com.au/blogs/simon/archives/000132.html on the JRules business engine. It doesn’t seem as flexible as Drools, but is interesting due to its support for the ILog Rule Language (support for which could doubtless be added to drools as a semantic module). I did find a helpful pointer to Ronald G. Ross’ “Principles of the Business Rule Approach”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0201788934/002-9283932-1911238?v=glance which has gone on my wish list.
* I discovered “Nagios”:http://www.nagios.org/, which appears a lot of what “Big Brother”:http://www.bb4.com/ does, only for free. Too bad in my new job its unlikely I’ll be doing any system admin stuff like I am now.
* Keith Donald has “checked in”:http://jroller.com/page/kdonald/20040308 the latest version of his and Seth Ladd’s validation framework into the Spring CVS sandbox. I’m in the process of integrating this with my command-framework.
* Daido Metal has announced a “toy car”:http://www.engadget.com/entry/1882334012266534/ that uses a water-powered fuel cell to generate hydrogen. I really need to read up on this kind of stuff…
* David Miller’s “Zebra Tables”:http://www.alistapart.com/articles/zebratables/ for “A List Apart”:http://www.alistapart.com/ shows you how to style your tables nicely using some CSS and Javascript.
* I became even more of an IoC Zealot, and as such started “defending the constructor(Daniel Bonniot’s Weblog – Are constructors useless?)”:http://www.jroller.com/page/dbr/20040309#are_constructors_useless.
* I read a book about “loosing a penguin(Penguin Lost )”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1843430959/ref=sr_aps_books_1_1/026-5985556-2226861 and a “bigger book(Paul Auster – collected prose)”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0571218474/qid=1078933755/sr=2-3/ref=sr_2_3_3/026-5985556-2226861 arrived.
* I also realised my books to read stack was growing rather than shrinking, and that I had less money than I thought. I think these two facts may be related.
* I discovered a lovely little shop on the “Portobello Road”:http://www.portobelloroad.co.uk/ that sells very nice cupcakes.