magpiebrain

Sam Newman's site, a Consultant at ThoughtWorks

Posts by samnewman

A few “new and upcoming”:http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/new.html books at “O’Reilly”:http://www.ora.com/ caught my eye:

* Oracle Regular Expressions Pocket Reference covers the Regular expression support in Oracle 10. Too bad I’m stuck with Oracle 8 at the moment
* “Even Grues Get Full”:http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/grues/ is the fourth collection of “user friendly”:http://www.userfriendly.org cartoons
* “TiVo Hacks”:http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/tivohks/ covers all kinds of neat tricks with what I consider to be the greatest use of Linux in the home, the godlike “TiVo”:http://www.tivo.com
* In a similar vein, “iPod: The Missing Manual”:http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/ipodtmm/ details all kinds of information concerning the “iPod”:http://www.ipod.com/ipod/, the second greatest gadget I own after the aforementioned TiVo.

August 6, 2003

A long piece over at “TheServerSide”:http://www.theserverside details the launch of Apache’s Geronimo project, which aims to produce a fully certified J2EE implementation.

One of the core commitments is for the J2EE implementation to be fully J2EE compliant. The Apache Foundation has access to the J2EE TCKs, which make the certification possible. The core developers who have “signed up” include: Richard
Monson-Haefel (OpenEJB), Geir Magnusson Jr. (Apache), Dain Sundstrum (Core Dev Network), James Strachan (Apache), and more.

Give the variety of Open Source projects out there which are already implementations of various bits of the J2EE specification (I thinking here of “Tomcat”:http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/, “JBoss”:http://www.jboss.org/, “OpenEJB”:http://openejb.sourceforge.net/ etc) it will be interesting to see if how many of these existing implementations become part of the project or if any will be rewritten. The inclusion of both OpenEJB developers and JBoss developers (or more specifically the guys who form the “Core Developers Network”:http://www.coredevelopers.net/) is interesting – I wonder which one will get used? There doesn’t seem to be a website for the project as yet. Expect more on this in the coming weeks.

August 6, 2003

Macromedia has released “RSSU(RSS Untangle – RSSU)”:http://www.macromedia.com/software/drk/productinfo/product_overview/volume4/coldfusionmx.html#rssu, a Java RSS parsing library. From The Serverside:

RSSU is perfect for building Java based RSS aggregators. It parses any version of RSS (.91, .92, 1.0 and 2.0) from a stream, URL or file into an intuitive tree of Java objects. If you don’t know the version of the RSS feed (as you often don’t when aggregating feeds), just use the AutoParser, and it will figure it out for you.

RSSU supports and exposes all known tags in all RSS versions, including image tags, and will even retrieve the bytes of images referenced in feeds for you. You can also use RSSU for generating different versions of RSS. The project comes with a ColdFusion MX custom tag and component interface so it can easily be integrated into ColdFusion applications as well as J2EE.

It seems to have fuller support for more advanced RSS features compared to “Informa”:http://informa.sourceforge.net/, however it isn’t free or opensource – it has to be purchased as part of “Macromedia’s”:http://www.macromedia.com/ “DevNet Resource Kit Volume 4”:http://www.macromedia.com/software/drk/productinfo/all_volumes/#4.

August 6, 2003

So, I got home a little late with the full knowledge that I had lots to do tonight. My stereo needed packing up before I take it to the local “Rega”:http://www.rega.co.uk/ trader for “repairs(magpiebrain – My CD Player)”:http://www.magpiebrain.com/archives/000012.html, I had to follow up a couple of issues related to my work with the “Informa(Informa – A Java RSS API)”:http://informa.sourceforge.net/ library, and I needed to get on with my second article concerning Java and RSS. I managed to stop myself playing “Planetside”:http://www.planetside.com/, however still then spent an hour trying out the “FeedMonster”:http://www.bradsoft.com/feeddemon/beta/index.asp agregator and the “w.bloggar”:http://wbloggar.com/ blog client, and then started watching “Dante’s Peak”:http://us.imdb.com/Title?0118928 of all things (good in a “Deep Impact”:http://us.imdb.com/Title?0120647 kind of way). Needless to say the next couple of days need to be allot more productive – I’m planning to go to the “Summer Sundae”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/leicester/music/2003/06/summer_sundae_preview.shtml in Leicester this weekend and need to have my first draft done of the second article by the middle of next week…..

August 5, 2003

That’s to a link I found whilst looking at “FeedDemon”:http://www.bradsoft.com/feeddemon/beta/index.asp I found out about another blog client, “w.bloggar”:http://wbloggar.com/faq/. I like it a lot – although its lacking in two areas. Firstly I can’t find a bookmarklet, secondly there doesn’t seem to be a way to force a spellcheck prior to making a post. These are both things “Zempt”:http://www.zempt.com/ can do, that said the interface for w.bloggar is much nicer, and it has more in the way of formatting tools. I think I’ll try and use w.bloggar for a bit before deciding which to keep around.
_Note:_ Updated to fix a spelling mistake picked up by my pedantic first commenter – thanks for the input 🙂

August 5, 2003

Eric Burke posts on his O’Reilly weblog concerning the new version of his tool, “AntGraph”:http://www.ericburke.com/antgraph/index.html.

AntGraph uses an XSLT stylesheet to convert any Ant buildfile into a “dot” file, which is then converted into a GIF image using “Graphviz”:http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/graphviz/ from ATT labs.

To be honest I think if your Ant files ever got complicated enough for this tool to be really useful then I’d suggest rewriting them, but it looks cool anyway.

August 4, 2003

Over at “java.lang.NullBlogException”:http://www.ktorn.com/roller/page/ktorn/ I spotted a post concerning a “howto(Apache Tomcat On Linux = Step-by-Step)”:http://www.cardon.biz/docs/tomcat/index.html written by Michael Cardon on load balancing Tomcat instances using Apache. Given the problems we’ve been having here at work with our “Foundry(Foundry Networks Home Page)”:http://www.foundrynetworks.com/ load balancers (which I REALLY don’t want to get into right now), this might be very handy for me in the not too distant future….

August 4, 2003