I have been sick for last two weeks, most of the time offline, listening to podcasts and audiobooks and doing more or less nothing. I have caught up with the backlog of episodes, saw lots of videos from Macworld.
Among the audiobooks I was listening two, some recommendations:
The Company is good parody of the corporate life. Starting with missing donut, it tells the story of a new hire in large corporation, governed by strange rules. It soon has an interesting twist - find for yourself. The book is available as MP3 CD, so you can save time ripping it to iPod.
Apple released today the 10.5.2 update. After over a year and half with Mac platform (and over 2 months on Mac only work environment) I become fearless and installed update without too much worries :-). Year ago, I guess I would be quite concerned whether the Service Pack will or will not render my work notebook useless with unreparable registry ... I still remember the fun after SP2 got installed ...
After long time, I stumbled upon something that is both educational and practical. Since Doug Lea's classic, this is very readworthy work on concurrency in Java world. It focuses on Java 5 features and addresses both Web applications as well as GUI apps - each group having their own share of concurrency related problems
Here is the Amazon page for the book - check the reviews. There is also a sample chapter available on the book's website. If you have Safari subscription, you can read it there as well.
I am having the pleasure working with Spring 2.x since about October last year. It is my return back to Spring, after first encounter in 2005 (counting only larger projects). Same as in previous project, it has been so much fun :-). So much fun in fact, that I was spending my evening playing with code and reading up what is new in 2.5, rather that blogging ;-)
I am still amazed about how nice is the whole thing designed and how many ways it can be used. It's flexibility is simply breathtaking. The price for the flexibility is complexity - sometimes it is not obvious what of many options should be chosen and what are all these options anyway :-).
This one took some time to figure out - it is one of those problems that are obvious after you know the solution but hard to see beforehand.
I had the ResourceBundleViewResolver configured with Tiles 2, like this:
[code language='xml']
[/code]
and the view.properties was:
[code language='xml']
parent-view.(class)=org.springframework.web.servlet.view.JstlView
parent-view.(abstract)=true
about.url=/WEB-INF/jsp/about.jsp
form.url=/WEB-INF/jsp/form.jsp
list.url=/WEB-INF/jsp/list.jsp
[/code]
It kept givin exception saying that /WEB-INF/jsp/list.jsp does not exist. Which it did. I tried couple of things, no result.
I am back to Java and on mission of re-discovering Spring coolness - and in awe how much was added since 1.2 to current 2.5.1. Thanks, SpringSource and hundreds of contributors.
Data layer of the current project is based on iBatis and Spring DAO. We have decided to try out the Abator tool from Apache (part of the iBatis suite) to generate initial version of data mapping (as we inherited the database schema).
Only necessary part is abator.jar (there are no other dependencies).
Of course, I mean the other Steve, Steve Jobs. My world is revolving around few Steves. Steve Jobs is usually Steve Nr. 2 - and no, Joel - the Steve #1 is definitely not Ballmer :-). But every year, for two brief occasions - Macworld and WWDC - Steve Jobs becomes Steve #1 for very large amount of people.
I was waiting with this post full day to allow the new-ity of the keynote sink in and reality distortion field to evaporate .... This is my take on the latest from Appleverse - and an answer to all who were asking whether I did already (pre)ordered and what :-). The answer is - nothing so far. I even have mixed feelings about the four Macworld news and here is why:
Continuation of this post.
As every TiddlyWiki, the main building block of the MGTDTW (MonkeyGTD TiddlyWiki, if you are wondering what kind of monstrous acronym is that) is a tiddler. And the only one building block because everything is a tiddler. How does this map to the GTD approach ?
The GTD workflow works with projects, contexts and actions. Action (or task or todo) is smallest building stone. The actions in GTD are really small actions. Every goal that requires multiple steps is a project - thus project has multiple actions. Context is an environment for executing the actions - e.g. Office, On-Line, Errands. Action can be in of the the state: "next" - ready to be started, waiting-for (something else needs to happen before you can start), future (something you may want to do later but not really a task right now) or done. OK, this is slightly oversimplified - for real explanation check the resources in Part I.
Last few weeks I have been using one application on iTouch much more than before: YouTube. Within my how wireless network, I can have an access to the videos on YouTube without sitting behind the computer - for example while walking on treadmill (I recommend walking slowly) or on a sofa :-).
Very interesting videos and actually worth the time spent on them are Google technical talks from Google channel. Few examples of videos I watched and liked:
Thanks to Kovid Goyal, the Sony Reader's very own terrible software (iTunes wannabe) can very soon be decommissioned from my software collection. The libprs500 project, multi-platform solution written in Python works very well and allows to move data between Sony and your Mac / Linux / Windows. The UI is actually pretty decent, considering that it is not native Cocoa app:
You can also edit metadata, which is very important because of the limited screen space on PRS500. As added benefit, the application gives you a reader for LRF file format that allows reading unprotected LRF books on the Mac/Linux as well in addition to Windows. Here is a snapshot: