magpiebrain

Sam Newman's site, a Consultant at ThoughtWorks

Posts by samnewman

You may of noticed that posts to my blog have become more infrequent of late. This is purely down to a decision I made in an attempt to keep my blog fairly focused on Java and web-related topics. I’ve also tried to reduce the number of posts which simply refer to other websites without any type of worthwhile commentary as even I could see that it was drastically increasing the signal-to-noise ratio of my blog. I have however realised that there is still things I want to post and am actually missing that aspect of my daily life. To this end I am planning to offer the following:

# A view of magpiebrain which filters out all non-Java related posts
# An RSS feed for the Java-only version which will become the version of my blog which “Javablogs”:http://www.javablogs.com/ will see
# A normal view of magpiebrain containing everything I post
# An RSS feed for the full view

This is going to have to be added to my already overly long todo list for the blog:

# Implement some of the comment-spam prevention mechanisms outlined by “Jay Allen(The Daily Report – Killing Comment Spam For Dummies)”:http://www.jayallen.org/journey/2003/09/killing_comment_spam_for_dummies, although I may hold fire on that until his forthcoming “plugin for MT(The Daily Report – MTBlacklist Almost Ready)”:http://www.jayallen.org/journey/2003/10/mtblacklist_almost_ready is available.
# A few design tweaks here and there (I’ve noticed that the right-sidebar text doesn’t behave very well in narrow browser windows) and I have a strange urge to try and use some of the web icon fonts over at “minifonts”:http://minifonts.com/. I may get the code 1.1 XHTML compliant while I’m at it.
# Finally get round to adding some about pages (probably using another blog for static pages)
# Add my blogroll to the page
# Implement a private ‘ideas’ blog
# Implement a contact me form which hides my email address

I have next week off – lets see how much I can get done 🙂

October 8, 2003

The Display tag library is a JSP Taglib that provides the advanced formatting and display of tables. As well as the ability to do simple things like style the data, it can also transform it using decorators, provide automatic searching, paging, grouping and even export to CSV, Excel or XML! I deal daily with tabled data and this taglib will be an absolute godsend. To get a good idea of what the taglib is capable of check the “live examples(JSP Display Tag in action)”:http://www.displaytag.org/displaytag-1.0-b1-examples/index.jsp.
Originally spotted over at “Dion(Dion – JSP Tag Libraries)”:http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/dion/archives/000184.html.

October 2, 2003

Shirley E. Kaiser’s very good “Brainstorms and Raves”:http://brainstormsandraves.com/ has been on my blog roll since I started reading blogs regularly. It was therefore a little distressing to see that a web-hosting company has “stolen over 2,400 resources(Brainstorms & Raves – Stealing My Content… Again)”:http://brainstormsandraves.com/archives/2003/09/25/stealing/ of Shirley’s and passed them off as their own. The web-hosting company in question is “Cheetah Solutions”:http://cheetahsolutions.com/, who deserve a damn good kicking if you ask me.

September 26, 2003

Some tard is at it again. This time however the comment was not a piece of spam trying to sell herbal Viagra. I include my response to this person in full:

Dear Mishka,

Contrary to your comments on my blog concerning the post “Another Blog tool –
w.bloggar”:

“Mishka rules !”

I will think you’ll find that you do not in fact “rule” in any shape or form. I
would go as far to say that you do in fact “suck” for your blatant spam tactics
in using my blog as a way of advertising your own website which is little more
that an under construction page, and a bad one at that.

Don’t do it again.

It won’t surprise any of you that this person had an AOL mail account.

_Updated: 26/09/2003 11:01AM_: Naturally the email address given was fake – so I have sent the email on to the one given on his website.

September 26, 2003

The “Prevayler “:http://www.prevayler.org/ persistence engine for Java might be a good project. Really it might. I have qualms about the basic principle which has everything stored in memory, with robustness provided by the fact that all calls to the persistence layer are logged and can easily be reloaded. For a decent sized database driven J2EE application the amount of data can easily outstrip the maximum available memory. I don’t even have a problem with their solution which is basically to wait until you can get enough ram (although their “out of date( Breakthroughs In Memory Technology)”:http://www.prevayler.org/wiki.jsp?topic=BreakthroughsInMemoryTechnology post on the subject states we should have holographic ram available to us by now!) even though this smacks of a “Don’t worry about the code, lets throw money at the hardware to sort it out” approach.
No, the thing that bothers me is the downright egotistical closed-minded nature of the developers. It doesn’t take long for any reader of their Wiki to see what I mean. The piece “When Should I Not Use Prevayler”:http://www.prevayler.org/wiki.jsp?topic=WhenShouldINotUsePrevalence for example:

When Should I Not Use Prevalence

…

When you do not know how to program.

The problem I have with this is the fact that these people with their consistently arrogant attitude have resulted in alienating a large percentage of the Java programmers out there who are now less likely to look at prevlayer seriously. As a technology for small scale apps I don’t have a problem with it. What I do have a problem with is the thought of having to deal with coders who make Mark Fleury look like the “Dalai Lama(His Holiness The Dalai Lama)”:http://www.tibet.com/DL/ when it comes to dealing with people. If you are serious about publishing and informing the public concerning what you think to be a good idea, the last thing you want to do is call everyone stupid and ignorant.

September 25, 2003

Some of you may recall my earlier experiences with “Ganymede”:http://sourceforge.net/projects/ganymede/ were “less that successful(magpiebrain – Ganymede – Log4J Logging inside eclipse)”:http://www.magpiebrain.com/archives/000087.html. To recap Ganymede is a plugin for eclipse that receives messages sent from Log4J. My problems revolved around the complete lack of documentation to explain how to get the thing to work. Anyway, “Will Sargent(Will Sargent – Terse Systems)”:http://tersesystems.com/ was kind enough to point me in the right direction and explain “how to get Ganymede working(magpiebrain – Comments: Ganymede – Log4J Logging inside eclipse)”:http://www.magpiebrain.com/cgi-bin/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=87. After remembering to add a Socket Appender for my program it worked a treat. I don’t like it as much as Chainsaw or “LogFactor5”:http://jakarta.apache.org/log4j/docs/lf5/features.html (both of which are standalone Swing applications) in terms of functionality, however Ganymede is much more convenient that either of them as it sits right in my IDE.

If it added some more flexible filters (I cannot for example say only show INFO messages and above for a given category), allowed me to change the background of the eclipse view, added a tree-based view and a search function then I’d be a happy bunny. Oh, and some documentation of course – although I suppose it wouldn’t take me long to write that myself…

September 19, 2003

“XPlanner(XPlanner Homepage)”:http://www.xplanner.org/ is an open source project management tool for XP. I’ve been wanting to get involved in XP for a while, but it looks increasingly likely that I’ll have to move jobs before that happens. Still, the availability of a good looking project management tool makes adopting at least some aspects of XP more attractive…
XPlanner simply requires Ant, a database and a Servlet container to work.

September 18, 2003

After much trouble with international dialling codes (which was finally sorted thanks to “this handy site(Country Calling Codes website)”:http://www.countrycallingcodes.com/) I managed to fax my “application(Becoming a JCP Member)”:http://www.jcp.org/en/participation/membership/ to join the “JCP(The Java Community Process)”:http://www.jcp.org/en/home/index over to Sun. A couple of days later and email informing me that my application is being processed, and also giving me details to enable access to the private forums and draft JSR’s. Unfortunately I can’t tell you what I’ve seen unless you’re in the JCP too 🙂

September 18, 2003

Much kudos to Will Sargent over at “Terse Systems”:http://tersesystems.com/ for pointing out an eclipse plugin called “Ganymede”:http://sourceforge.net/projects/ganymede/, which captures “Log4J(Log4J Project Homepage)”:http://jakarta.apache.org/log4j/docs/index.html messages inside eclipse itself.

_Updated 11:51am_: Well, from the screen shot and descriptions at Terse Systems, it looked good. However I have been completely unable to find ANY documentation on how to actually install and run the thing! The downloadable packages come with no readme files, the homepage is a directory listing, and the only readme to be found on the sourceforge site was useless. It might be the greatest project in the world but if no-one knows how to use it, whats the point?

September 12, 2003