kebom.net

WRIGHTIA is starting to have a site: www.wrightia...

Paulo Gaspar — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 15:43:00 +0000

WRIGHTIA is starting to have a site:

www.wrightia.com

...with some alternative entry points:

www.wrightia.eu

www.wrightia.pt

Apple to use Intel Chips? (via Yahoo! News)

Paulo Gaspar — Mon, 23 May 2005 20:24:00 +0000

Report: Apple Explores Use of Intel Chips - Yahoo! News

BBC NEWS: one-inch hard drives holding 60Gb...

Paulo Gaspar — Tue, 05 Apr 2005 13:13:27 +0000

BBC NEWS | Technology | Tiny drives set for space boost: "Hitachi's work means we could see one-inch hard drives holding 60Gb instead of up to 10Gb currently."

Why OpenVMS Hasn't Faded Away?

Paulo Gaspar — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 20:24:00 +0000

Why OpenVMS Hasn't Faded Away? I asked myself this just two weeks ago after a consulting intervention arround WebServices on top of Axis + Tomcat running on top of OpenVMS.

Ok, I had already worked - just for a couple of months - on VMS some (quite some!) years ago: it was quite nice... but did not look THAT much nice.

Now I know! =:o)

[Programming]

First video game written in Ant

Paulo Gaspar — Sun, 27 Feb 2005 20:05:00 +0000

Jon Aquino's Mental Garden: "Presenting the world's first video game written in Ant."

Just when I thought I had seen everything...

[Java]

Replacing finalizers with phantom references

Paulo Gaspar — Wed, 16 Feb 2005 23:50:00 +0000

Replacing finalizers with phantom references. A very nice tip via JProfiler.

[Java]

Fink - Unix tools for Mac OS X

Paulo Gaspar — Mon, 14 Feb 2005 21:28:12 +0000

Fink: "We modify Unix software so that it compiles and runs on Mac OS X ('port' it) and make it available for download as a coherent distribution."

How "The Mind Electric" built sucessful software...

Paulo Gaspar — Mon, 14 Feb 2005 20:48:00 +0000

And now a methodology to assist you on your software business:

Graham Glass, of Mind Electric fame, the man behind Electric XML, GLUE and Gaia (now Webmethods Fabric), explains the methodology he used to develop such great products right here, here, here and here, and... lets hope the series goes on.

Again... this is not a talent replacer.

[Programming]

How far can a methodology go?

Paulo Gaspar — Mon, 14 Feb 2005 19:27:00 +0000

Via Joel, Katie Lucas on methodologies :

And at the core of RUP is a small area where you have to use OO design talents.... if you don't have them, it's like having a methodology for running the 100m.
'Step 1: write about running really fast. Step 2: Go and draw a plan of the racetrack. Step 3: go and buy really tight lycra shorts. Step 4: run really, really, really fast. Step 5: cross line first'

I was never able to say this better.

Some people keep dreaming that methodologies or other tools are going to be able to replace talent. That is not going to happen in the near future. Tools and methodologies CAN assist talent but CAN NOT replace it. If you believe otherwise, you might be on track to waste your money instead of investing it.

[Programming]

SPAM: Checking if an ip address is blacklisted

Paulo Gaspar — Mon, 14 Feb 2005 13:38:00 +0000

Feet up! - dev/python/Blacklist-checking.html: "How do you check if an ip address is blacklisted"

It's sort of easy, you reverse the address (say it was 1.2.3.4), and append the blacklist's address (say blacklist.example.net), and then do a dns lookup (of 4.3.2.1.blacklist.example.net). If the address is not found, chances are the blacklist hasn't heard of them, otherwise they're probably scum.

The code is in Python, but any one should understand the idea.
(Also note the unit starting at the "if __name__ ..." statement.)

[Security]

Wx Plotter Fun Tests - Nerd Quiz

Paulo Gaspar — Sun, 13 Feb 2005 02:57:00 +0000

Wx Plotter Fun Tests - Nerd Quiz:

Six form the HVD Alliance around 1TB disc

Paulo Gaspar — Thu, 10 Feb 2005 01:09:35 +0000

Six form the HVD Alliance around 1TB disc [Engadget]:

While Sony and Toshiba (among others) are squabbling over Blu-ray and HD-DVD, CMC Fuji Photo, CMC Magnetics, and three other companies have rallied around Optware?s HVD technology?that?s Holographic Versatile Disc?and founded the HVD forum. They may not come out and say it, but they?ve obviously got bigger fish to fry than the small stuff?their HVD format stores 1TB of data on a single CD-sized holographic disc (yes, that?s over 33 times larger than HD-DVD, and 20 times larger than Blu-ray?s capacity).

[Hardware]

Ok, "Cell Powerbook" anyone?

Paulo Gaspar — Wed, 09 Feb 2005 23:58:02 +0000

Well, Apple says they are not able to make a thin-enough Powerbook with G5...

Cell Processor Unveiled - Xbox: "Today, at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) held in San Francisco, IBM, Sony and Toshiba disclosed in detail, for the first time, the breakthrough multi-core architectural design - featuring supercomputer-like floating point performance with observed clock speeds greater than 4 GHz - of their jointly developed microprocessor code-named Cell. "

...can that be that we'll just have to wait for "Cell - The Miracle CPU"???

[Hardware]

But are you sure you need scripting?

Paulo Gaspar — Wed, 09 Feb 2005 02:33:13 +0000

People often start using JVM scripting, as I did, to accelerate the development cycle. To be able to shorten the waiting time between coding a change and being able to test that change. This waiting time, which was traditionally used to build the project and run the resulting application, tends to become a quite significant part of the code-test-code-test cycle in the later stages of a project's development, often becoming even quite larger than the coding time itself.

But tradition is not what it used to be....

From my recent experience developing Servlet based stuff with Eclipse + Tomcat, I am sure there are better ways to accelerate the development cycle than scripting. (And this does not necessarily mean that I am building a webpage per Servlet...)

Remember that Eclipse keeps (if you let it) compiling the code on the background while you do your code editing. So, switching on Servlet reloading, you can use the excellent coding productivity of Eclipse and check the result of recent changes really fast. It gets even better with smaller changes when running Tomcat from Eclipse (Sysdeo), thanks to Java's Hotswap, which Eclipse automatically uses to replace a modified class in memory and on the fly.

Moreover, when you think about it, a JVM based script (Pnuts, Rhino, whatever) compiled to memory lives in a class, which can usually be replaced in memory when the script's source file is modified. Why can't we do the same thing in Java???

Well, we can... but we have to be careful. A script can be reloaded because (or, more exactly, "when"):

its compiled class version is only exposed to the other objects in the JVM via a well defined and stable interface;
and the other objects always instantiate it "by name" (from the run-time / reloading mechanism), instead of holding a direct reference to the script's class instance.

Well, this sounds like something quite easy to implement in Java using a bit of ClassLoader magic.

In the typical worthwhile scenario where your application runs using a large stable framework that keeps calling your code (yeah, IOC, of course...), all that code of yours can be isolated with its changes managed by the framework trough the use of a custom ClassLoader.

This applies to both Web Applications (your classes might be page renderers / request handlers in a MegaServlet like Cocoon), Swing Applications (your code being form renderers / handlers, business logic), whatever. And your code can be divided in isolated - and separatedly (re)loaded - modules too.

So, for a code-test development cycle, you would star your application in "reload-changes" mode and keep editing your reloadable Java stuff with Eclipse. Eclipse just had to be set to output the compiled code to the application's reloadable classes directory.

Ok, you can not use this technique for everything, but one thing is for sure:

If you can do it with JVM Scripting, you can doit with the reloadable Java approach described here.

[Programming][Java][Scripting]

Scripting on the JVM???

Paulo Gaspar — Wed, 09 Feb 2005 01:10:31 +0000

I am going to say it again - from the Pnuts site blurb (and it is all TRUE):

Simple and clean syntax
Interactive interpreter
Extensible through its module system
Customizable and embeddable through Pnuts API
Dynamic/static translation to JVM bytecode
One of the fastest scripting language implemenations on JVM
Inherits many advantages of Java (security, portability, etc.)"

The speed part was, in fact, already mentioned a few times on Groovy's "dev" list.

Now, weather it is aesthetically pleasant for you, its a matter of taste. However, while I may find some of Groovy's syntax features quite nice, I must consider that Groovy is NOT as stable as Pnuts, which is already usable (I used it) for at least a couple of years.

So, if you need a JVM scripting solution with the above mentioned properties, go with Pnuts.

But do you?...

[Programming][Java][Scripting]