netsmith

UIScrollView looping and lazy loading

2010-06-11T09:41:00.007-05:00

Recently, I got to do some fun exploration of what you can do with a UIScrollView. Specifically, in the areas of Lazy Loading views/tiles, and looping around the scrollview when the user scrolls to the beginning or end. For this usage, the scroll 'view' is a full-screen window into the scrolling canvas which displays one of the contained views, one at a time, with the bounce-style scrolling

How I built FeederTweeter in less than a day (appengine/oauth/tweepy/feedparser/bitly)

2010-02-22T15:13:00.033-06:00

In this post, I'll look at some basics of what it took to stitch together a simple appengine web app which checks an atom feed and posts new entries to a twitter account. This is mostly an exercise, though I do intend to use it personally. I realize there are existing sites (and blogging services) that provide this type of functionality out of the box. I'm not planning on making the service

5 things you should know about developing for Google appengine

2010-02-19T15:56:00.007-06:00

I've been building a few apps on google app engine over the last year (after spending 10 years doing java apps), and here are some things I noticed not many people are discussing when they mention appengine:It's pay for what you use, but it will probably be completely free for you. The free usage quotas are _generous_ and even when you reach them, the sophisticated billing google has set up

Angled linear gradients in sass/fancy-buttons

2010-02-03T13:00:00.015-06:00

I'm so happy with how simple it is to make a nice looking button for a web-page with the combination of fancy-buttons and sass/compass that I just had to share:Recently a design concept came back that included buttons (done in photoshop of course) in this style:I had used fancy-buttons in the prototype of this project (www.coolchars.com). I was very happy that my html boiled down to simple '

Detecting iPhone/iPod/iPad clients on Google App engine

2010-02-03T11:27:00.006-06:00

Recently, while working on a fun little side project (www.coolchars.com), we needed to detect and render a very different page for iPhone users (no Flash and slightly different page structure to accommodate iPhone copy&paste)When the iPhone (or iPod/iPad) requests a url, it includes a user-agent string like the following:Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like

Continuous Quality of .py files on app engine experiments

2009-12-08T14:45:00.013-06:00

I've been working on a few small experiments with appengine capabilities (sending e-mail, receiving e-mail, sending and receiving instant messages over xmpp) . It has given me the chance to try Ale on some projects smaller than Flexvite, and I've really enjoyed it. Typically I get the skeleton of the experiment up in about 60 seconds by using the helloworld quickstart, then adding pyflakes and

App engine [local] hello world in 60 seconds

2009-12-04T08:02:00.004-06:00

I'm toying around with a little experiment at http://github.com/mpstx/Ale It helps you get a tool stack configured quickly to do appengine development without affecting your system's default python environment or installed apps -- something I spent more than a little time rolling by hand during the development of Flexvite. Here's a little preview:To create an _Isolated_ (no global installs/

I'm tired of typing "self." before every assert method in a python unit test

2009-09-22T20:26:00.007-05:00

If you've spent anytime using the python unittest framework, and you have any appreciation for things being succinct, perhaps you will find something useful in this approach to co-opting the basic assert methods and making them available in a global context (as opposed to them only being available on the TestCase instance (through a 'self.' reference). It seems safe enough since these methods

A small jquery+iso+timezone+browser recipe

2009-09-19T12:37:00.009-05:00

So, on my current project (Flexvite), I wanted dates and times to adjust themselves to the browser's timezone on-the-fly throughout our site and without any extra steps for the user (like setting a timezone on their account). HTTP posts will include a datetime with a timezone that you could parse out, but I wanted it for HTTP gets also, and without having to do any hidden frame or secret post

Hotkey screen capture and post to Campfire with Spark + Pyro + Applescript + OS X screencapture

2009-08-19T11:23:00.005-05:00

I found something _reallly_ handy with applescript (finally!). Here's the applescript to do an interactive screen capture (os x style) and post the result immediately to a campfire room.property N : 0 set N to N + 1 set picPath to ((POSIX path of (path to desktop)) & "Picture_" & N & ".png") as string do shell script "screencapture -i -tpng " & quoted form of picPath tell application "Pyro"

Objective C blocks

2008-12-27T20:31:00.000-06:00

Good discussion around Objective C blocks: http://www.mikeash.com/?page=pyblog/friday-qa-2008-12-26.html

App store observations

2008-09-21T11:29:00.004-05:00

Having a few apps on the store, and having closely followed rankings, popularity and pricing over the past couple of monthes, here are a couple observations:There are still plenty of business issues (mktg, customer service, ip, taxes, etc) to deal with even though Apple takes care of some (distribution, payment, part of taxes). I think there's some opportunity there (publishing houses, co-ops?,

New apps on the store RSS feeds

2008-07-27T19:55:00.002-05:00

RSS feed for new apps on the app store:feed://webobjects.mdimension.com/iPhoneApps.rss- or -feed://feeds.feedburner.com/RecentlyAddedIphoneApplications-PinchMedia

Environment Optimization: Marco Polo + Synergy

2008-07-17T06:30:00.000-05:00

Wow. Synergy + Marco Polo = Lots of automatic goodness.I've got a laptop and a home computer which occasionally cross paths. When I bring the laptop home, I like to use both it and my home computer in parallel -- sometimes compiling/linking software on one, while doing research on the other. Synergy works great for sharing my keyboard/mouse between them. Now, with Marco Polo though, life

Interacting with GIT

2008-06-22T15:16:00.006-05:00

Git interactive rocks!It's a quick and easy way to stage several files [for a subsequent commit], regardless of location and name, without an IDE or ninja master scripting skills . . .example follows: [my typing in bold]machine1$ git add -i staged unstaged path 1: unchanged +7/-2 Classes/AllViewController.m 2: unchanged +2/-0 Classes/AppDelegate.h***

Time to GIT you a quick update

2008-06-16T06:32:00.000-05:00

I've either been living on an island, or I'm guilty of being a slowly boiled frog depending on how you look at it. Let's compare the default output for 'svn up' vs. 'git pull' shall we? My annotations are in bold...In this corner: 'svn up' . . .$ svn upU Classes/ClassA.m <-- _awesome_ single letter indicator forU Classes/AppDelegate.m <-- what happened to the file

WWDC 2008 wrap-up

2008-06-15T18:06:00.004-05:00

I just got back from WWDC 2008 . . . Unfortunately there is a confidentiality agreement that prevents me from posting any technical details here, but if you hop around the rumors/news sites, you can find most of the juicy details.In general, is was a very well produced conference. For me, the best thing about it was the chance to talk one-on-one with some of the engineers behind key

Does it GIT any better than this?

2008-06-15T07:32:00.001-05:00

Cool GIT feature of the moment: Content based tracking of files.I renamed a file in a project, and then did a 'git rm', and 'git add' to update the index and subsequently committed and pushed the changes. Then, on the origin repo, I executed a 'git status' to see what changes were pending. GIT displayed:# renamed: AllViewController.h -> RootViewController.h # renamed:

The Pragmatics of Innovation

2008-06-14T07:32:00.000-05:00

This guy is one hell of a speaker and he has a really great (pragmatic) perspective on innovation. The idea that people sometimes tend to look back at innovations without considering any hard facts is something of an understatement. Scott explains that true innovation comes from rigorous habits, not doing what you're told sometimes, and not letting past failures stop you. It's also

It's GIT'ing better all the time.

2008-06-10T07:30:00.003-05:00

Goals:I have some source code that I need to share between a desktop and laptop sporadically. When I'm working on the code on the laptop (potentially disconnected from any network for several days), I want all the same scm style capabilities (tagging, branching, roll-backs) that I get when I'm working on the desktop.I don't want the overhead of maintaining a server securely or paying for a hosted

Eric Schmidt - What can others copy from Google, how does his style compare to other CEO's

2008-06-07T08:03:00.001-05:00

Great video with CEO Eric Schmidt on a variety of mgmt topics, challenges he faces at google, and how he tries to facilitate the focusing of the energies of passionate engineers and founders. He alludes to what he thinks would be hard for others to copy, and what wouldn't.One thing in particular that Eric mentions is along the lines of: When you have smart people, encourage debate on anything

Attaining Agile Mastery -- Forget the word Agile!

2008-05-17T19:19:00.004-05:00

Here's a thought that has been bouncing around my head:To attain mastery of practicing Agile, try never again using the word itself to explain things you do or why you do them. Oh, don't get me wrong, the word 'Agile' is valuable for a assigning a name to the umbrella over those wonderful principles. But, if you don't know WHY those principles are important, when to make exceptions to the

From Tiger to Leopard

2008-01-27T19:45:00.001-06:00

Well, I finally bit the bullet and got Leopard at home (on a mac mini). So far, the transition from Tiger has been relatively painless. Here's a breakdown of the highs/lows for me compared to Tiger:Spotlight performance: +1; (usable!)General OS responsiveness: +1;Safari Speed: +1;Safari Reliability: -1; (has crashed on two different web sites for me so far! -- guess I'll go back to my

Don Brown is working on serious Maven 2 improvements

2008-01-27T19:41:00.000-06:00

Stumbled on this interesting work going on around Maven 2. Don claims to have reduced some maven build times significantly.

Links

2008-01-24T17:01:00.000-06:00

Tutorial on writing a custom wicket accordion/outlook style menu component: http://karthikg.wordpress.com/2008/01/24/developing-a-custom-apache-wicket-component/Options for showing an ajaxy 'wait' indicator in wicket:http://www.nabble.com/best-practice-for-a-wait-page-td15070792.htmlLast.fm announced you can now stream full songs and albums (from all major labels) for free...http://www.last.fm

Wicked Fast Wicket

2008-01-22T20:50:00.000-06:00

If you're familiar with Maven, I'd say you can have a wicket template project up and running with IDE support (if desired), in much less than 5 minutes. The magic is here:http://wicket.apache.org/quickstart.htmlIt uses a maven archetype to generate the project structure, and then you can use the typical mvn eclipse:eclipse or idea:idea to get your project into an IDE. 2 methods for running

Wicket is taunting me.

2008-01-15T21:27:00.000-06:00

After some vigorous hand wringing and what I thought was thorough forum searching, it turns out that no custom behavior/code is necessary to handle adding a browser-cache-stopping-but-not-totally-random-or-once-in-a-while-new-when-it-shouldn't-be url parameter onto JS and CSS links in Wicket. The magic line of wicket code which eludes forums and wiki documentation follows...drum roll...In your

Environment Optimization: Eye-fi + Smugmug. One step wireless photo sharing and backup (at full resolution)

2008-01-14T20:08:00.000-06:00

After recently acquiring an Eye-fi SD card for my camera, I decided to take the plunge and figure out a photo backup/sharing solution. I have relatives and friends that share photos using the various photo sharing sites (which inevitably try to make you pay for prints, shoot spam or advertising at you, and/or reduce the photos to a size that doesn't allow you to print a high-res version on your

Environment optimization: iCalViewer

2008-01-14T19:13:00.000-06:00

I've been successfully using iCalViewer for a little while now. See those nice little bubbles that are semi-transperant over my desktop background in the video below? -- those are upcoming appointments/meetings. I've found that this nearly eliminates the need for me to manually check my calendar on any regular basis. There are features to toggle which iCal calendars' events are displayed and

Environment optimization: Single Hotkey to large Terminal

2008-01-14T18:58:00.000-06:00

So I finally got around to checking out Visor. I'm already an avid user of Quicksilver which gives me speedy keyboard access to anything I can remember the name of. Since I use terminal so often though, it only makes sense to have a single hotkey which can summon and dismiss a large, visible terminal session. Here's what it looks like when you hit the hot-key (I choose Command-Tilde).

Here comes the Tardis

2008-01-12T21:55:00.000-06:00

A recent post on Patrick Kua's blog about explaining rituals compelled me to go add a link to my personal development philosophy page on my wikispace. That compelled me to review my wikispace. After reviewing my booklist , meetings , interviewing , and presentations philsophy pages, I had a realization. I have not been doing a good job of updating those pages with things I have learned and

Gadgets, Games, and Hardware

2007-12-29T15:25:00.000-06:00

Here are exciting things I got to play with first hand this holiday season:RocketFM - turns your pc/mac into an FM broadcaster. Any set of speakers with an FM tuner can now become a jukebox if I just set my laptop near it. Super Mario Galaxy - 5 stars !Good variety in level design and difficulty progression (easy if you've played mario games in the past though)Good intentional use of the wii

Google Collections quick intro

2007-11-07T21:36:00.000-06:00

Finally a java collections library that takes advantage of java 5 features to make code more expressive and concise!Some quick examples: Coding in the small with Google Collections

Software Professionalism - Autos (Automated Tests) make for sustainable, realistic software

2007-11-02T16:50:00.001-05:00

Statement: AWe, responsible software development professionals, MUST build sustainable, realistic software. I've intentionally chosen not to use the word 'working' in that statement. 'Working' seems to be a word that is easily perverted to alternate definitions. It's not enough to build software that works once! It's not enough to build software that can be judged as working after

Beyond simple refactorings and IDE portability of projects

2007-10-24T17:28:00.000-05:00

I recently did a short presentation at work on some of the java pattern based search and replace features that can be found in IntelliJ (SSR) and Netbeans (jackpot). The nice thing about these two features is that they let you specify a custom refactoring without worrying about whitespace or lines and you can match against more than just the raw text (i.e. - match 'where the base class is xxxx'

links: presentation style

2007-10-02T19:25:00.000-05:00

http://www.presentationzen.com/presentationzen/

Using the powermate with Test Driven Development (TDD)

2007-08-04T18:14:00.000-05:00

Just picked up a new (to me) gizmo called the Griffin powermate from newegg.Lately I've been doing a lot of test driven development at work, and it struck me that I'm having to hit the awkward eclipse key combinations (or opt for a scenic mouse driven route) for running and debugging tests repeatedly. When I was looking for some new gadgets to try with my Macbook Pro, I stumbled on the powermate

DevX article on some linguistic tools

2007-08-03T17:03:00.000-05:00

Rod Coffin and I just published an article on some java linguistic tools at DevX.http://www.devx.com/semantic/Article/35088

Rails Conf Day 2, 3, 4 (Portland, OR)

2007-05-21T20:00:00.000-05:00

Day 2, 3, 4 of Rails Conf notes . . .Key Note(s)The keynote started with a mac-like commercial parody from http://www.railsenvy.comSome interesting stats on Ruby/Rails:RubyConf 2001 had 40 attendees.RubyConf 2007 had 1600 attendees.600 Rails plugins10,000 people on rubyonrails (list)More and more ruby/rails books, in both english and other languages. Mkt. share of books on shelves has

DevX Article on Semantics in Applications

2007-05-18T15:38:00.000-05:00

Rails Conf Day 1 (Portland, OR)

2007-05-17T20:00:00.000-05:00

Rails Conf Day 1Portland is a beautiful place to fly into. I've never seen so many trees. The plane flew right by Mt. Hood (a spectacular view). Today I attended the Rails Guidebook Tutorial session. The hosts (Dave Thomas and Mike Clark) donated their time in exchange for the attendees making a donation to charity. Thus far they have raised around $12,000 for charity. The url to donate (

Continuous Integration And Testing Conference (CITCONF) - Day 2

2007-05-02T21:53:00.000-05:00

Disclaimer: These are just my notes -- by no means thorough, guaranteed to be accurate, or containing anything I can take much credit for. Lots of talented individuals participated in group discussions at the conference.What happened on CITCONF day 2?I saw the OpenSpaces concept work -- in person -- better than I could have imagined or predicted. I attended sessions with varying levels of

Continuous Integration And Testing Conference (CITCONF) - Day 1

2007-04-28T08:59:00.000-05:00

I just finished Day 1 of CITCONF here in DFW. It's an openspace style conference focused on the area of continuous integration and testing. Openspace means that all the attendees determine the topics of discussion.The surprises:For something that is not a 'vendor based' conference, Citconf seems incredibly well sponsored (food, drinks, swag, etc)There are some very experienced people

Mac links

2007-03-18T08:49:00.000-05:00

Having a mac and exploring all the new software/customizations one can install on OS X is like being a kid in a candystore. Here's what I've collected over the last month and halfhttp://netsmith.wikispaces.com/Mac+links

Attaching and modifying a running java program

2007-02-28T08:22:00.000-06:00

Java 6...http://www.fasterj.com/articles/hotpatch1.shtmlThis article brings to mind the quote "with great power comes great responsibility".

The Paradox of Choice, Domain Driven Design, Mac OS X, and where have I been?

2007-02-11T13:45:00.000-06:00

Long time no post!What are my lame excuses for not having posted in a while?I've switched out of the consulting realm and taken an exciting opportunity working for a small software product company in Dallas. I'm really excited about the chance to make an impact starting at the ground floor. We're building a really exciting team, and setting the bar as high as we can reach.I've "switched" to OS

Lightning Talks

2006-12-26T11:08:00.000-06:00

There is an interesting [new to me] phenomena which seems to be spreading through a few technical conferences. It's called the Lightning Talk (i.e. - Google Test Automation conference lightning talks).The idea is that the conference provides a series of sequential 5 minute presentation slots with only one strict requirement: the talk must be 5 minutes or less. This has some interesting effects .

Public committment, the neocortex, and metrics in software development

2006-12-19T12:26:00.000-06:00

I've been thinking a lot lately about how sweeping organizational changes can be effectively introduced and sustained. Blue Ocean strategy introduced me to the concept of tipping point leadership but I was left asking myself: "How do you make it last?". Then I stumbled on this video of Kent Beck talking about "Ease at work". Deep in this presentation I pulled out this useful tidbit:Ken

Ebay Architecture Presentation slides

2006-12-18T17:01:00.000-06:00

Great set of slides (wish I had the audio!) on how eBay scaled their architecture to where it's at today. http://www.addsimplicity.com/downloads/eBaySDForum2006-11-29.pdf

Java 6 is out!

2006-12-11T14:47:00.000-06:00

http://java.sun.com/javase/6/ Top ten things to know about JAVA 6: http://blogs.sun.com/dannycoward/date/20061211

Alistair Cockburn - Redefining Software Engineering

2006-12-05T17:06:00.000-06:00

I listened to a decent podcast with Alistair Cockburn today. http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail1682.htmlhttp://www.itconversations.com/audio/download/itconversations-1682.mp3It covers some interesting subjects like:What is software engineering?How can new agile methodologies be effectively applied to people withvarious personality types? (particularly people oriented towards stability)

Couple of new wiki pages....

2006-12-04T18:49:00.000-06:00

Posted a quick book review at: http://netsmith.wikispaces.com/Blue+Ocean+Strategy+-+W.+Chan+Kim%2C+Renee+Mauborgneand started a 'metrics' brainstorm page at : http://netsmith.wikispaces.com/MetricsAlso, found out that Dave Nicolette has a nice blog at: http://www.davenicolette.net/agile/

OPML and Grazr!

2006-11-30T22:00:00.000-06:00

I migrated the feed/rss/podcast list on the right side of the blog to use a neat new ajax widget (http://grazr.com) which is backed by an opml (aggregation of rss/links) file. Scroll down a bit and check it out!I chose http://www.opmlmanager.com for my opml hosting. That allows me to store the raw opml on the web here: http://www.opmlmanager.com/opml/mpstx.opml. Then just point the Grazr

Great Talk from Ken Schwaber - Father of Scrum

2006-11-30T18:10:00.000-06:00

Check out this great talk from Ken Schwaber (father of scrum) Some things I took away from the talk:Concept of a 'Design dead product' -- that is to say the gradual cutting of code quality over time (to satisfy deadlines) which backs a a team into a corner of design debt and steadily slows achievable velocity per iteration/sprint."Scrum master also known as 'the prick'" QA is apparently a great

Scrum and XP from the trenches

2006-11-29T08:50:00.000-06:00

90-page document on one person's experience implementing scrum/xp with 40 people -- what worked and what didn't.http://www.crisp.se/henrik.kniberg/ScrumAndXpFromTheTrenches.pdf

Saccades and the like

2006-11-13T19:30:00.000-06:00

Entry on new research regarding saccades, and more importantly a statistic on how often people blink (15 times a minute). Fifteen times a second seems like an excessive amount of times to pop-up a reminder to remind someone staring at a computer screen to blink. I wonder how I can do that effectively in http://netsmith.wikispaces.com/Blinky . . .http://blogs.zdnet.com/emergingtech/index.php?p=

Java - Infrequently asked questions

2006-11-07T17:53:00.000-06:00

http://www.norvig.com/java-iaq.html

Cool list of presentations to go through

2006-10-30T21:02:00.000-06:00

http://www.softwaresecretweapons.com/jspwiki/Wiki.jsp?page=GreatSoftwareEngineeringSpeechesAndPresentations

No Fluff Just Stuff 2006 - Dallas

2006-10-30T18:59:00.000-06:00

I attended No Fluff Just Stuff last weekend in Dallas. To give you an idea of where I'm coming from.... though I've been doing JAVA related goodness for 10 years, this was the first JAVA conference I've ever attended. I live in the area where the conference was held, so there was very little travel necessary.Sessions I attended ...Working with Rules Engines - Venkat SubramaniamEffective Teams (

New entries on Ways to Debug Code wiki page

2006-10-25T19:43:00.000-05:00

Added some new entries (under the java section) to the http://netsmith.wikispaces.com/WaysToDebugCode page....

Another good reason to give DRY serious consideration while writing code....

2006-10-25T08:12:00.000-05:00

Another good reason to give DRY serious consideration while writing code.... "That there is wide spread belief in this myth is unfortunate because I have found that violating design principles or writing overly complex code is often the stumbling block to achieving good performance. In this case, not following DRY left the String concatenation operation and subsequent HashMap lookup scattered

Using Virtual Sockets to Fix Software Broken by Firewalls

2006-10-25T08:01:00.000-05:00

http://java.sys-con.com/read/216367.htm

Fwd: agile pres

2006-10-25T07:59:00.000-05:00

How agile development at google works . . .http://www.javamug.org/mainpages/presentations/AgileDevelopmentatGoogle-DallasJUG.pdf

Hierarchical Temporal Memory

2006-10-25T07:57:00.000-05:00

On the subject of how the brain works (as theorized in the On Intellgence Book by Hawkins) and how that will be implemented in software/hardware by Numenta:http://www.numenta.com/Numenta_HTM_Concepts.pdf

Spring Forward 2006 Presentations

2006-10-25T07:54:00.000-05:00

http://www.chariotsolutions.com/javalab/presentations.jsp

More updates to wiki

2006-09-12T07:43:00.000-05:00

Closing on and moving into a new house has been taking up a lot of my free time lately. Lee contributed some updates to the http://netsmith.wikispaces.com/WaysToDebugCode wiki page (at the bottom).

Update to the wiki

2006-08-22T21:52:00.000-05:00

http://netsmith.wikispaces.com/WaysToDebugCode

No Fluff Just Stuff (Texas Lonestar Software symposium)

2006-08-21T21:59:00.000-05:00

As part of my plan to continually develop my Knowledge Portfolio, I just signed up to attend No Fluff Just Stuff in Dallas on Oct. 27th.

Some cool java newletters . . .

2006-08-16T21:44:00.000-05:00

In an effort to continue building my knowledge portfolio, I've decided to take the plunge and subscribe my e-mail address to a couple of mailing lists that have some pretty interesting content which I've been following in the past via the old school 'check the website periodically' method...You can find the archives of the newletters (and ways to subscribe) through the following links:http://

Some new brainstorms on the Wiki

2006-08-11T07:46:00.000-05:00

I've added a new section on the wiki (in the left menu) for what I'll call brainstorms...that is ... wiki pages that are no where near polished or done, but I wanted to jot down some notes so I can start improving them. The first two pages I've created that fall into this category are:http://netsmith.wikispaces.com/WaysToDebugCodeandhttp://netsmith.wikispaces.com/What+should+be+in+a+DAO+testAlso

Hibernate Audio/Video Resources

2006-08-09T07:34:00.000-05:00

Lately, more than one person has asked me for some resources to guide them on how to easily present what Hibernate is, when it should be used, and how the EJB 3 (JSR-220) spec is related. I usually recommend listening to the authors (Gavin King, Christian Bauer) presentations for a strong point of reference and writing code yourself to gain first hand experience using the API. Here is a list of

Source now in hosted Subversion!

2006-08-01T22:01:00.000-05:00

I've set up a subversion project for any source code I post to the blog/wiki. SVN repository URL: http://netsmith-blogwiki.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/I just checked in Blinky to test it out, and it seems to be working ok.If you're using Eclipse 3.2 and want to check out the souce code, make sure to get the latest subclipse plugin. Follow the instructions at http://subclipse.tigris.org/

How to get an OPML feed into your google homepage?

2006-07-31T21:48:00.000-05:00

Several colleagues have been blogging recently, and sending around an OPML file for co-workers interested in following the new posts on those blogs.The downloadable RSS clients seem to have good OPML import/export support, but I'm not a big fan of the fat client RSS readers because I like to be able to check my news on the go -- no matter what computer is in front of me.I am pretty fond of my

hibernate resource

2006-07-31T19:32:00.000-05:00

Here's a random hibernate resource I stumbled on which looks promising: http://www.amicabile.com/hybernate/index.htm

Favorites on Booklist

2006-07-26T21:43:00.000-05:00

I've added some ratings to my booklist page. I've pretty much just got 2 categories right now: 1. I've read it, and 2. I've read it and really really liked it. You can see the ones I liked by looking for the $$$'s (no relation to money, just a character that the wiki engine would avoid parsing).booklist

Remembering to Blink

2006-07-25T19:40:00.000-05:00

So, my day job consists mostly of writing Enterprise java Application/architectures (spring/aspectj/hibernate/j2ee/etc) with web front ends. With the occasional exception (last year I worked on a webstart based swing project which talked to a j2ee server backend), I rarely get to dive into what's new for java desktop applications. I recently went on a search through the internet for a good

more podcasts

2006-07-24T18:38:00.000-05:00

More Podcasts....http://www.itconversations.comhttp://www.itconversations.com/rss.htmlOne I follow: "Tech Nation" http://www.itconversations.com/rss/category-rss.php?k=technation&e=1

Using 2 computers on one desk

2006-07-19T18:01:00.000-05:00

The Challenge: How to best use the 2 computers at my desk to increase my productivity.Comp #1: 3.2ghz laptop, 2 gb ramComp #2: 2ghz desktop w/lcd, 2gb ramAttempt #1Tried Multiplicity from Stardock. It let me use one computers keyboard/mouse to control both computers. To switch computers, I simply slide the mouse pointer to edge of screen towards the desktop I'd like to switch

Java Posse

2006-07-18T08:29:00.000-05:00

I'm continuing to flush out the spring enabled services notes on the wikiI've been listening to Java Posse podcasts for the last month or so. Check them out if you get chance. http://www.javaposse.com . I think there's something about the 4 different voices, and the interactions between them that makes it more interesting to listen to this, than for instance, read the news headlines yourself.This

2006-07-13T22:55:00.000-05:00

Focusing on the wiki right now....

2006-07-11T21:56:00.000-05:00

Tackling big challenges in Enterprise team builds, and a way to jumpstart Iteration 0New build/codeanaylsis product with some very cutting edge features I haven't seen elsewhere (Build Grid, Delayed Commit, Distributed [on the build grid] Code Coverage and Static code Analysis) from the folks at Jetbrains (requires free SDN registration) :http://developers.sun.com/learning/javaoneonline/sessions/

2006-07-11T21:23:00.000-05:00

After parsing through a bunch of old amazon.com, audible orders, and the small bookshelf worth of material I have on hand, I've partially filled out the booklist. In fact, partially may be stretching it since my library is packed up right now, and I've haven't copied over my handwritten notes/reviews/opinions/etc for any of the material. Patience, grasshopper.

2006-07-11T07:31:00.000-05:00

I've added a booklist to netsmith.I'm going to attempt to backfill the booklist with as much as I can remember.I'm want to keep a booklist for these reasons:So that when I give my opinion on a book to someone, they can have some context.So that I can keep track of the development of my knowledge portfolio over time and potentially identify trends or areas where I should refocus my learning

2006-07-10T22:03:00.000-05:00

This post marks the start of netsmith -- a combination of a blog and a wiki site.I have the following vision for the simultaneous development of both :Self Development (researching, writing)Contributing back to the internetHere were my criteria for choosing this setup:Have a reliable, neutrally hosted blog/wiki so that I can focus on generating content.Create a blog for temporal content, opinions