Software problems aren't like mathematical problems. They have no clear boundaries or axioms and the problem domain is always shifting and evolving and changing. This fundamental difference ensures that while mathematical knowledge has a long shelf life, technical knowledge seems to last little longer than most popstars. And the changes wrought in programming are not just shallow refinements or surface innovations but fundamental changes wrought by order-of-magnitude shifts in the virtual landscape.
During my recent return to Javaland, I have noticed many improvements in newer releases of well established frameworks and toolkits, as well as many new ones. One such new release is version 2 of Spring framework. It is not really a hot news, because the final version of 2.0 is out for almost a year (October 2006), but it is new to me, because I spend pretty much all of last 12 months in DotNet, C# and OLAP worlds, with only brief visits to older Struts based, Spring-free Java projects.
As the September 28th is approaching (the day when the new iPod touch will be available in Canada), I have a real dilemma: do I go with the "iPhone without the phone" or not ? The price $329 for 8 GB iPod is pretty high - compared to $279 for 80GB classic - which would allow me to carry all my music, some movies and all podcasts with me. On the other hand, the Touch has WiFi and can be used as pretty decent Web browser on top of iPod functionality.
Hi, all Java gurus inside and outside of Thinknostic - I have a very interesting problem. Imagine the following situation: we have three existing Java Web applications, written back in 2000/2001, based on open source libraries of that time: Struts 0.9/1.0 and JSP 1.x (no JSTL) with Tiles for Web layer, Apache Torque for ORM, early version of Quartz for job scheduling, Jasper Reports for PDF reports and Freemarker as template engine for email creation. The application has been (and still is) in production for almost 7 years and works great. Now the customer is expanding the functionality and wants add several Ajax features - in short, version 2.0 is on the table.
A linguistics professor was lecturing to his class one day. "In
English," he said, "A double negative forms a positive. In some
languages, though, such as Russian, a double negative is still a
negative. However, there is no language wherein a double
positive can form a negative." A voice from the back of the room piped up, "Yeah, right."
Found on the Net :-)
After three amazing weeks, I am back again on-line - reading through emails and trying to sort out and process over 15 GB images. Shooting RAW has consequences :-).
Some of the see-worthy places and stories from the trip will start appearing here as the time permits to process my notes from the road. Stay tuned ...
Europe 2007 - 3: Pisa, Tirrenia and Firenze # Pisa and Firenze # After wonderful evening in Verona, the next day after a very good breakfast (they even had whole-wheat breads), we spend few hours in the garden of the hotel and taking pictures of the peacocks and around 10:30 we left towards the coast, south and the leaning tower.
Europe 2007 - 2: Südtirol and Verona # Welcome to Italy: Verona # After the breakfast, we took off from Scuol direction Martina, via brief drive through Austria to Italy. If I would not consult the map, I would barely noticed the border crossing, because there was no passport control on neither of the Switzerland-Austria or Austria-Italy border. You will not really notice that you have left Switzerland either, unless you notice the prices on gas stations being suddenly in Euro. And you will definitely not notice you are in Italy for quite a some time as the villages will still look very German (or Austrian, if you wish), with signs in German (and often in gothic Schwabach letters). This region – south Tirol aka Sud-Tirol aka Trentino – Alto Adige – is ethnically and historically part of Austrian empire and is part of Italy for less than 100 years.
Europe 2007 - 1: Switzerland, Lower Engadin # The flight went pretty quickly. It was less than 7 hours, anyway. We crossed the night and the Atlantic in a short time and landed at 6 AM in rainy, wet Zurich.
The car I have retrieved from Europa car was Spanish Volkswagen make – Seat Leon. According the specification, it was a “medium size car”. And it maybe was, for European circumstances. For me it felt fairly small – our luggage did barely fit into the trunk. If we had more than two normal size and one half size cases, we would be in trouble. One small piece had to fit behind my seat.