No Fluff Just Stuff

Podjango

Mike Levin — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 16:01:03 CST

podjango: A Minimalist Django Application for Podcast Publishing: Podjango is a Django-based podcasting tool. Anybody taken a look? Of course, since we roll our own here at Swampcast, we're all ears!

Thanks to Jim White, semantic aficionado extraordinaire at Internet Foundation Classes eXtreme! for the shout-out

JarAnalyzer in Google Code

Kirk Knoernschild — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:00:23 CST

JarAnalyzer now has it’s own Google Code location. You can browse the source code online, check the source code out, and do all of the other exciting things that you can do with a subversion repository. The source in the google code repository is the same as can be found at the JarAnalyzer homepage (which is also where the binary is still found), except that the Google Code location also contains the JarAnalyzer XSLT.

Eventually, I hope to move the documentation over to the Google repository. Yeah…right! Update the documentation? I don’t think so!

JavaOne 2009 Call for Papers Open!

Alex Miller — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 11:00:23 CST

Start your engines kids - the JavaOne 2009 call for papers is open…

Interesting new focus areas this year:

And here’s some good advice from previous years to keep in mind:

Last year was my first time both attending and speaking at JavaOne and while speaking to 1000 people was high on my list of terrifying life experiences, it was also a thrill and something I’d like to do again.

I suspect we’ll see a strong Java SE 7 focus this year as well, so should be fun. I was expecting to see the Java SE 7 platform JSR show up for last year’s show - I certainly hope it’s there in ‘09. Keep an eye out for my Java 7 preview article in an upcoming JavaWorld….

I’m on Twitter

Kirk Knoernschild — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 08:00:22 CST

I’ve jumped on the Twitter bandwagon. Possibly a little slow, but better late than never. I’ve started following a few people, and so far I find it fun and interesting. I intend to post mostly on tech stuff. I’ve also included my tweet feed on the right sidebar of this blog. Or you can subscribe to my tweet feed separately. Or you can start following me now! You decide.

Printing an array in multiple table columns

Matthew Bass — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 16:00:06 CST

<% @categories.in_groups_of(2).each do |group| %>
  <tr>
  <% group.each do |category| %>
    <td><%=h category.name %></td>
  <% end %>
  </tr>
<% end %>

What are you staring at? Move along, move along.

Fast Sphinx indexing with foxy fixtures

Matthew Bass — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 13:00:10 CST

Can Sphinx and foxy fixtures place nicely together? Due to the way Sphinx indexing works, foxy fixtures will often slow down the indexing process drastically. This article explains how to overcome this limitation.

Android, G1 and Java

Mike Levin — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 11:00:11 CST

Tonight's GatorLUG topic calls out GatorLUG: "6:40 ~~7:45: Presentation~~ The Android G1 Cell Phone - What it does out of the box, How to write custom apps | Allen Rout"

A response: "To add,

I think Allen will be demonstrating using some Java programming skills

to make the G1 do new things (not unlike Brad Fitzpatrick, the creator

of LiveJournal, recently using his G1 + some Java to make a garage door

opener: http://brad.livejournal.com/2394707.html).

Cheers,

Martin Smith, Systems Developer"

So, Brad writes:

"This is a follow-up to my previous post to say:

SO. **ING. AWESOME.

I got it all working. I now have an Android Activity (GarageDoorActivity) which interacts with an Android Service I wrote (InRangeService), letting me start and stop the service's wifi scanning task. The service gets the system WifiManager, holds a WifiLock to keep the radio active, and then does a Wifi scan every couple seconds, looking for my house..."

Since my garage door opener is bigger than an Android phone, this appeals to me. You gotta read the whole post...

Yep, the times, they are a changin'.

Speaking at VSLive! Dallas 2008

Josh Holmes — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 08:00:24 CST

One of the things that I've missed during my tenure here at Microsoft is speaking at some of the independent national conferences such as VSLive. But if you look through the speaker's list at VSLive Dallas you'll find a fellow named Josh Holmes... Woot!

I've actually got 4 talks and I'm sitting in on the ALT.NET panel on Tuesday night.

Definitely come out and see us - Register online or call 800-280-6218 using Priority Code SPHOL and receive $300 off the package of your choice.

DW10 IronRuby and Silverlight, Like Peanut Butter and Chocolate
Josh Holmes
Wednesday, December 10 – 1:45 p.m.
As the DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime) and IronRuby become more polished, it's time to start applying those technologies in new and interesting ways. One of my favorites is in a Rich Internet Application with a Silverlight front end. A perfect joining of two great technologies – IronRuby brings the dynamic abilities to your code that XAML gives your UI. From animations to logic to simple HTML DOM manipulation - it's all possible and a lot of fun. In this session, we will cover the basics of the DLR, a touch of Ruby and play with it all in the context of Silverlight.

DW16 User Experience for Architects: No Longer Optional
Josh Holmes
Wednesday, December 10 – 3:15 p.m.
The user experience is a core part of new applications and those with the best user experience will prevail. When I say user experience, most people think of the graphics and the front end. This, however, is just the lipstick on the application and considered "small d" design. The "big D" Design starts well before the UI layer and can have profound implications on your application architecture. Is it a SaaS application? Or is that one of many front ends? How does that impact your services strategy? How does the information flow impact your database structure? These and hundred more questions are all ways that the user experience decisions can affect the architecture.
In this session, we will cover a primer on user experience for the architect and discuss the various ways that it will affect your application architecture.

DTH6 Mashups from the Ground Up
Josh Holmes
Thursday, December 11 – 9:45 a.m.
When building a Mashup, there are a lot of choices that come into play. Most people they with choosing the UI technologies that are going to be used, but they are wrong. They should be thinking about the information that is going to be used and how to get to that data. Mashups are about exposing new and interesting looks at data so the first thing that you have to do is figure out how to get to that data. Only after that do you start looking at the various front end technologies from AJAX to Silverlight to any number of other Rich Internet Platforms.
In this session, we will compare and contrast building out SOAP services verses REST services with ASMX, WCF and ADO.NET Data Services. We will demonstrate consuming those various services with AJAX, Live Maps, Silverlight and many more front end technologies.

DTH10 Best and Worst Practices for Building Silverlight Applications
Josh Holmes
Thursday, December 11 – 1:45 p.m.
Silverlight, as it's relatively new to much of the community, is putting people through some bumps and bruises as they create amazing experiences for their users. There are a lot of best and worst practices that are starting to emerge as the platform matures and more and more applications are being written. How and where to keep the state management? What networking stacks make the most sense? When does it make sense to use Silverlight or any Rich Internet Application (RIA) platform?
In this session, we will give a cursory overview of what it takes to build a RIA and dive deep into the best and worst practices with Silverlight.

VSLive! Dallas 2008

RichFaces confirmation dialog #3

Max Katz — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 16:00:07 CST

As one reader pointed out here, reusing Facelets custom tag confirmation dialog wasn’t possible because the component id was hard coded. Placing more than one tag on a page would give duplicate id error. I will show you how to pass an id to the custom. Once we can do that, it’s possible to place any number of confirmation dialog tags on the same page.

We are going to add confirmId attribute to the custom tag to pass the id:

<richx:confirm confirmId="confirm1" label="Save" action="#{userBean}" />

Let’s looks at changes for /WEB-INF/tags/confirmation.xml:

<a4j:commandButton value="#{label}"
   onclick="#{rich:component(richx:concat(confirmId,'confirmation'))}.show();return false" />
 
<a4j:jsFunction name="submit" action="#{bean.save}" />
 
<rich:modalPanel id="#{confirmId}confirmation" width="250" height="150">
...
</rich:modalPanel>

The changes are on line 2 and 6. Looking at line 6 first, that’s where we prepend the id. This allows to give a unique id to the modal panel. Looking at line 2. That’s where the modal panel is opened. Unfortunately the following will not work:

<a4j:commandButton value="#{label}"
   onclick="#{rich:component(#{confirmId}'confirmation'))}.show();return false" />

or this:

<a4j:commandButton value="#{label}"
   onclick="#{rich:component(confirmId'confirmation'))}.show();return false" />

To solve this problem, we need to create a Facelets function to concatenate two strings into id string.

To keep things simple, we are going to add the Facelets function to the same tag lib file:

<facelet-taglib>
   <namespace>http://richfaces.org/richx</namespace>
   <tag>
	<tag-name>confirm</tag-name>
	<source>tags/confirmation.xhtml</source>
   </tag>
   <function>
      <function-name>concat</function-name>
      <function-class>function.FaceletsFunctions</function-class>
      <function-signature>
         java.lang.String concat(java.lang.String,java.lang.String)
      </function-signature>
   </function>
</facelet-taglib>

FaceletsFunctions class looks like this:

package functions;
 
public class FaceletsFunctions {
   public static String concat(String a, String b) {
      return a+b; 
   }
}

If you want, you can use something more interesting such StringUtils join function as shown here. That’s basically it. One other thing we need to change is links to close the modal panel to use this function:

<input type="button" value="OK"
   onclick="#{rich:component(richx:concat(confirmId,'confirmation'))}.hide(); submit(); return false;" />
<input type="button" value="Cancel"
   onclick="#{rich:component(richx:concat(confirmId,'confirmation'))}.hide();return false" />

Now it’s possible to place any number of confirmation dialog tags on the same page:

<h:outputText value="Text:"/>
<h:inputText value="#{userBean.text}" />
<richx:confirm confirmId="confirm1" label="Save" action="#{userBean}" />
...
<h:outputText value="Text:"/>
<h:inputText value="#{userBean.text}" />
<richx:confirm confirmId="confirm2" label="Save" action="#{userBean}" />
...
<h:outputText value="Text:"/>
<h:inputText value="#{userBean.text}" />
<richx:confirm confirmId="confirm2" label="Save" action="#{userBean}" />

Seam, WebBeans and GlassFish

Jason Lee — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 13:00:35 CST

Links for 2008-11-17 [ma.gnolia]

Aaron Gustafson — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 11:00:11 CST

American Airlines Debuts Mobile Boarding Pass

Finally, some intelligence from an airline: passengers in select cities will be able to have their boarding passes sent to their cell phones or PDAs for scanning.

Saved By: Aaron Gustafson | View Details | Give Thanks

Tags: airlines, boarding passes, mobile, technology
The State of Web Standards

Opera releases info on MAMA's findings regarding web standards usage worldwide (and more).

Saved By: Aaron Gustafson | View Details | Give Thanks

Tags: Opera, web standards, MAMA

Trinidad - new releases

Matthias Wessendorf — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 08:00:10 CST

It has been a while, since we got the last Trinidad release (August 2008). Today, there were two new releases:

Trinidad 1.2.10: A JSF 1.2 component library (and more)
Trinidad 1.0.10: A JSF 1.1 component library (and more)

Both are mostly identically, however the 1.2.10 contains some more fixes that were made to the core (JSF 1.2 related).

You will find the release notes here:

for 1.0.10
for 1.2.10

The download page will be updated soon and the bits are already available via the maven repositories.

Have fun!

Generative Ambient Music: Bloom

Neal Ford — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 16:00:10 CST

One of the techniques I describe in The Productive Programmer is focus, distancing yourself from the all too common distractions in modern office environments. I suggest that you can wear headphones (or earbuds) while coding as an indicator that others shouldn't bother you. Some developers can code to music (in fact, some developers have a hard time not coding to music), but others fine it distracting. If you are in either group, you should try ambient music. The goal of ambient music is to create non-offensive background music. I find Muzak-style background music incredibly annoying and distracting, partially because they always choose sappy music (or taking good music and sappifying it) and partially because of a personality quirk described here. Ambient music strives to create a sonic background that not only doesn't distract but qualifies as good music. You can search for ambient music as a category on Amazon. Ambient music frequently uses techniques borrowed from Minimalist music, where you create a melody (which is too stong a term for some minimalist music) that repeats with minor variations.

Brian Eno is one of the pioneers of ambient music. He and Robert Fripp recorded the track The Heavenly Music Corporation on the album No Pussyfooting in 1972 by combining some experimental tape loop techniques from Eno, combined with Fripps guitar loops (called Frippertronics). No Pussyfooting is still available, and quite enjoyable. But the interesting part about it for this post concerns how it was created. Once Eno and Fripp had all the equipment set up, they started the tape loops and recorders for the background track and retired to Eno's front room and drank tea while the album recorded itself. No Pussyfooting has some early examples of generated ambient music (they were certainly not the first to experiment with generated music, but the first in a main-stream context). Eno and Fripp created several albums together. Eno has created a large catalog of ambient music (including the classic Music for Airports, recorded by several ensembles including the incredible Bang on a Can All-stars), and Fripp expanded the ideas behind Frippertronics using electronics for a stunning collections of recordings called Soundscapes.

Which brings me finally to Bloom. Bloom is an iPhone application created by Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers. When you launch Bloom, it starts a gentle drone sound as a background, and gives you the option to create ambient music by tapping the screen. When you tap, a note plays based on the location of your tap. You can tap single notes or chords. After about 5 seconds, the note repeats and continues while it gently decays. Using Bloom, you can create your own ambient music. I can play with Bloom for hours. It is one of the best iPhone applications I've found: a trully innovative application that takes great advantage of the iPhone interface.

The other option when you start Bloom is for it to generate music for you randomly. That brings us back around to focus. Using Bloom, you can generate unique, non-distracting music for an entire day. Rather than buy a collection of ambient recordings, you can generate your own ambient music. Bloom lets you set several "moods", changing the tonal range and drone sounds to add just enough variety in the music to keep it just interesting enough to not distract. What used to take tons of studio equipment now runs on the iPhone. This makes a great way to help enhance your focus in noisy environments. Allow Bloom to create music for you that doesn't distract yet effectively drowns out all the other distracting sounds in your cube-ridden environment. Bloom is a great example that the iPhone isn't just another mobile device: it's a new platform for software development.

What Does that .NET Namespace Mean: System.* and Microsoft.*

Brad Abrams — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 13:00:06 CST

I need your feedback... I am chatting with some co-workers about the perception of in the .NET Community of what the System.* and Microsoft.* namespaces mean. So I had the crazy idea of just asking you!

For this exercise, I'd like you to think about a new "feature area" of the .NET Framework... Would you instinctively draw any conclusions about that area based on if the namespace where System.* or Microsoft.*? If that feature area were in the Silverlight subset of .NET, would that change your mind at all?

There are basically three schools of thought among my co-workers -- which one is closer to your perception?

1) They are the same or it really doesn't matter. The root namespace between System.* and Microsoft.* have no meaning... Microsoft appears to be arbitrary about when functionality goes in one or the other.

2) Part of the Framework vs. Addons.

System.* indicates stuff that is logically part of the framework. It is 100% supported, solid-long term design that will not need to churn, safe to bet on, stable, likely will get great tooling support. Designed to be very interoperable and could work anywhere .NET is. This may ship as part of the redist or maybe an out of band (such as ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET AJAX, etc).

Microsoft.* is the bleeding edge stuff or value-add. It is typically very cool stuff that adds on to the framework and enhances it, but maybe a work in progress... over time you might expect some of those concepts to go into the framework. As an example, the great work patterns and practices does often falls into this bucket.

3.) Part of the core redist vs. addons

System.* means it ships in the core redist. You are not able to ship it with your application. System.* stuff only ships when the redist revs. You would not expect Microsoft to do any out-of-band releases in the System.* namespace for example.

Microsoft.* means it is not part of the core redist. A note: as we move stuff into the core redist you'd expect us to change the namespace from Microsoft.* to System.* meaning you'd have to tweak any calling code *if* you wanted to take advantage of the new version.

So, what do you think? Which one best fits your thoughts this? I'd love any other comments...

Tapestry 5.0.16 (Release Candidate) it OUT!

Howard Lewis Ship — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 11:00:24 CST

The latest release of Tapestry, Tapestry 5.0.16 (Release Candidate), is now available.

Tapestry 5.0.16 is the release candidate; we encourage users to download this version. In about a month, the Tapestry PMC will run a vote to grant it release status, barring any blocker bugs (critical bugs with no workaround).

In the two months since the previous release, we've addressed over 80 issues, including many bugs and a few last minute improvements. New features include a LinkSubmit component (dearly missed from Tapestry 4), new support for reporting Ajax errors on the client side, smarter client-side validation, support for several new locales, and much new documentation.

Tapestry 5.0.16 is available for download, or via the central Maven repository.

Camps and Community (MAX BOF)

Shashank Tiwari — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 08:00:22 CST

Come join me at the “Camps and Community” Birds-of-a-feather session at Adobe MAX 2008 in San Francisco. Its at Room# 2000 at Moscone West and starts at 9.30 PM on Monday November 17, 2008.

We will share experience from past Camps we have organized and participated in, for example:

We will also talk about community sites, events and more.

Bring in your questions and share your experience and ideas to make the community interaction and support better and more effective. Come and let us know how we can work together to organize more camps and more community interaction opportunities.

Remember that I am not an Adobe employee and very much a part of the community like you. I am happy the Adobe folks chose somebody from the community to run this session. Now, lets get the most out of this opportunity and share and learn from each other.

Here is the schedule for all the sessions that are part of the BOF and “Meet the Team” lineup.

Birds-of-a-feather and Meet the team at Adobe MAX 2008

The one listed on the first row that starts at 9.30 pm is the one on “Camps and Community”. You can also access the details from the Adobe MAX North America site by clicking on the “Highlights” link. Here is the url – http://max.adobe.com/na/experience/#?s=1&p=2.

See you there!

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St. Louis Lambda Lounge December meeting

Alex Miller — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 16:00:06 CST

The Lambda Lounge is a new St. Louis area user group focusing on functional and dynamic languages. The first meeting will be December 4th at 6 pm.

At this point, I think topics for the first meeting have solidified. I’m planning on kicking off the meeting with an open discussion about what functional and dynamic languages are and we can maybe arm wrestle about whether the two have anything to do with each other.

Next, Matt Taylor of ~~G2One~~ SpringSource will talk about Groovy MetaProgramming with Categories and Mixins.

Finally, Ryan Senior of Ferguson Consulting is going to do an overview of OCaml, of which I know not much, other than that it is a mixture of object and functional styles, derived from a ML-style static type system (but with type inference).

Should be a great December meeting. The tentative plan for January (on Wednesday the 7th due to the holiday) is for Mario Aquino to talk about functional programming in either Android or Dashboard widget development and for Mark Volkmann to talk about Squeak Smalltalk.

Hope to see you there!

Win a Copy of Advanced Flex 3 at MAX

Shashank Tiwari — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 13:00:09 CST

Thanks to our publishers friends of Ed (APress), we are giving away 3 copies of Advanced Flex 3 at MAX 2008 next week. Stop by at the 360 | MAX booth, where you will surely find Tom and John (and me, many times in the day), and put your name on the list to enter the daily raffle. Please add your name only once. You enter the raffle once and remain a hopeful for all three days. We will pick one winner randomly from the list we have till 7.00 pm everyday and announce the winners right then. The winner goes out of the list and the rest are all carried forward to the next day. So the earlier you enter the better chance you have of winning. Good luck!

Advanced Flex 3

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Constraint, Chaos, Collapse

Michael Nygard — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 11:00:14 CST

Patrick Muellr has an interesting post about being brainwashed into believing that the outrageous is normal. It's a good read. (Hat tip to Reddit, whence many good things.) As often happens, I wrote such a long comment to his post that I felt it worthwhile to repost here.

My comment revolves around this chart of the Dow Jones Industrial Average over the last eighty years. (For the record, I'm not disputing anything about the rest of Patrick's post. In fact, I agree with most of what he says. This chart and my comments aren't central to his discussion about web development.) Some of you know that I've worked in finance before, and most of you know I have an interest in dynamics and complex systems. It's been an interesting year.

Here's a snapshot of the chart in question. It's from Yahoo! Finance, and the image links to the live chart.

Most of the chart looks like an exponential, which suggests the effect of compound growth. In a functioning capital-based system you'd expect exactly that. Capital invested produces more capital. Any time an output is also a required input, you get exponential growth. One of Patrick's other commenters points out that it looks almost linear when plotted on a logarithmic scale... a dead giveaway of an exponential.

No real system can produce infinite growth. Instead, they always hit a constraint. That could be a physical limitation on the available inputs. It could be a limit on the throughput of the system itself. In a sense, it almost doesn't matter what the constraint itself happens to be. Rather, you should assume that a constraint exists.

In systems with a chaotic tendency, the system doesn't slow down at all when approaching the constraint. In fact, it may be increasing at it's greatest rate just before the constraint clamps down hardest. In such cases, you'll either see a catastrophic collapse or a chaotic fluctuation.

I don't know what the true constraint was in the financial system. Plenty of other people believe they know, and I'm happy to let them believe what they like. Just from looking at the chart, though, you could make a strong case that we really hit the constraint in 1999 and the rest has been chaos since then.

Tapestry 5 Ajax Screencast

Howard Lewis Ship — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 08:00:12 CST

This is a follow on to my previous JSF comparison; Jim Discoll produced a Simple Ajax JSF example, and this screencast is the Tapestry 5 equivalent. I promise I'll stop now!