One feller's views on the state of everyday computer science & its application (and now, OTHER STUFF) who isn't rich enough to shell out for www.myfreakinfirst-andlast-name.com
Using 89% of the same design the blog had in 2001.
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Back-up your data and, when you bike,
always wear white.
It's not perfect, but I've still yet to find a better html table WYSIWYG than what you find in Mozilla's Composer application. Here's a review. Seriously, though that reviewer complains of code bloat, it ain't nothing like you'll find in other apps.
On the same lines, AbiWord still has the best rtf2html and/or doc2html features I've seen. The code bloat's there but, unlike, say, MS Word, it's easy to perform a couple of search and replaces and get all the crap out. Strategic bloat, I suppose.
Oh well, thus ends the freakinname html editor awards for the first half of 2005. VIm still wins the create-from-scratch and the edit-html-editor-bloat awards, hands down.
posted by ruffin
at 5/29/2005 11:17:00 PM
I believe this problem is analogous to the door handle that requires a Pull sign.
For example, much of the 'Swing is slow' reputation comes from applications that execute long-running methods on the GUI thread (such as querying the database over the network in the middle of your mouse clicked method). This is obviously a Bad Idea, and it's one that we preach against with regularity in articles and JavaOne talks.
If you have to regularly remind coders, well, you've got something that needs fixing. Threads in Swing are done right in theory but not in praxis, and its the latter the theory needs to worry about (yes yes, about which the latter should be concerned. Thanks, English majors).
posted by ruffin
at 5/25/2005 07:18:00 PM
For non-techies to assume that hackers are masters of PowerPoint, Excel, and Word is just as silly as assuming Java hackers know Visual Basic. Correlation? Sure, but no matter-of-fact.
Next time someone thinks you're great at formatting tables in MS Word because you could hack a spreadsheet program in a week, ask them how good their [WordPerfect, Abiword, and/or Open Office -- even Mozilla Composer or VIm] skills are.
In other news, I bagged a 266 MHz Beige G3 desktop with 160 megs of RAM from eBay for $59 shipped. So far, so very nice. I'd hate to think of using it as my daily driver (though short of Eclipse, I imagine it'd make do), but after pulling the PCI USB card from my old StarMax I've got a great print server for next to nothing. I'll pull a Firewire card from my Celeron next and have a cheap but [hopefully] reliable file and Furthurnet server soon too. OS X has really changed things, and now OS X hardware is finally cheap enough to have some good, clean, geeky fun. Upgrading to Tiger has opened a license of Jaguar up in the office, and that's what's running the Beige.
Never thought I'd pull out the monitor to the LC for anything but nostalgia time, but there it sits, displaying Aqua whenever the printer needs a little coaxing. Nice.
posted by ruffin
at 5/20/2005 12:47:00 AM
Ever wanted to put a URL in documentation that neither points to a 'real' website nor will accidently send your more curious readers to, say, seventy pop-up windows of pr0n? Try example.com:
You have reached this web page by typing 'example.com', 'example.net', or 'example.org' into your web browser.
These domain names are reserved for use in documentation and are not available for registration. See RFC 2606, Section 3.
Press Release : REAL Software Acquires Database Technology:
'We acquired this technology so that REALbasic users will have instant access to a well-known, industry-standard, fast, dependable, SQL-based database engine on which to build powerful database applications,' stated Geoff Perlman, president and CEO of REAL Software. 'In addition, they will be able to do so on Windows, Macintosh and Linux, furthering our firm commitment to provide cross-platform that really works.'
One thing that's missing (unforgivably missing) on Mac OS X is an Access equivalent, and when I say that I mean the Jet Database Engine, a free, easy to program against, [arguably] rdbms right there with the OS. I think OS X has mySQL in there by default in some versions, but I haven't seen much press for it nor has it been there that long by comparison. Nice to see REALbasic is taking this lack more seriously. (They had an Access like engine before, but imagine this is a step up.)
If they'd mirror VB6 specs/APIs/whathaveyou, they'd really be on to something with Microsoft's decision to end all VB6 support.
posted by ruffin
at 5/06/2005 09:55:00 AM
I've been using JNN as my RSS reader for a while now, mostly because what Gosling stuck into his subscriptions by default (Java and Mac) was interesting enough to keep me looking. I've added a few more sites (easy drag and drop) since, and the now famous "weekend hack" has done a good job at making me a browser junkie in spite of its foibles.
Today while browing around I ran into my first advert couched into the RSS. Was it from the WashPost? Inside Mac Games? (Though their "news stories" are sometimes simply self-pimps, which technically counts.) MacRumors? Curmudgeon Gamer?
Nope, nope, no, and nope.
That's right, true believers. Slashdot. Linux lovers, you've been exploited.
posted by ruffin
at 5/05/2005 01:17:00 PM
So, continuing on Monday's rant, how do we get folks lined up around the block waiting for [Java's next] release? I've been looking at Mac Tiger and wondering about the lessons there for the Java community. One of the things we're missing are showcase desktop applications.
I know - you can name a dozen of them off the top of your head. How many of them are used by non-geeks? How many of those are applications we are really proud of? Each year at it's developer conference Apple gives design awards to well designed and well implemented applications in a variety of categories. People care and people compete - where are our serious Java design awards?
He continues:
Developers are writing these like mad and even though Tiger's been released for less than a week, non-technical consumers are using them. This could have been a Java-first release and people could have been writing widgets for the Java platform. Sun bought Watson from Karelia last year. Watson performed many of the same functionality as Dashboard in a framework that was organized a bit differently. Imagine how Watson would look if you add in project looking glass technology so the widgets rotate and store away nicely. You'd also have to bring Java's HTML and CSS and JavaScript displaying capabilities past the Netscape 4.7 days. Developers would have been writing Watson widgets and end users would have had a compelling reason to care that their computer had Java inside.
Well said. I'm not sure if "Java Dashboard" apps would have met the same success as the intra-OS version in OS X 10.4, but it couldn't've hurt. The reference to Watson is well done; that's a real dropped ball by Sun.
But the bottom line is that Dashboard apps can be written in Java, and there's nothing stopping Sun from extending JDashboard apps, written to hit a certain API, to Windows in a month.
Get on it, Sun.
Here's some more from the same source, from that Monday rant:
Chris has often pointed out that Java on the desktop can not be considered successful as long as our success stories are IDEs and other developer-centric apps. Where are the cool things for the kids? Java is ten years old - the desktop should be rocking.
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