MyCalls.net bills itself as Wake Up Calls and Reminder Calls. In order to get to the airport in time to eventually be denied boarding on a flight to Canada, I used this service. Was nice to have my phone ring at 5am with a wake-up call and even call back 5 minutes later since I'd snoozed it. Definitely worth the $0.99. And for future reference, a certificate of adoption is not sufficient evidence that the 6-year-old travelling with you and your wife is an American if you're going to Canada. After jumping through a few hoops, we're finally actually enjoying the Great White North.
December 2003 Archives
Congratulations to Thomas Diesler, one of our developers on drools. He's joining the JBoss Group. Rock on Tomsk!
I would like you to Welcome Thomas Diesler that will start with us on the 1st of January 2004 (at 0h00, and I will verify this). <applause />Thomas will work on the Web Services for J2EE 1.4 and is also interested in better integrating a rule engine in JBoss. He will work out of M�nich and he is thus our first true German-speaking engineer.
Thomas is also the stereotype of the Red-Pill guy: he left East-Germany while he was at the army by doing a risky trip through slavic countries (he was then condamned to a life-sentence by the East-German authorities), had to swim between borders, etc. and .... a few months later... the Berlin wall felt! Somehow frustrating I guess ;)
Slack : Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency is a nice, quick read. I'm glad it was only $11 and change, though, as it's not one that I'll be reading again anytime soon. DeMarco's main point is that an efficient organization has no room to maneuver into being an effective organization. He then spends 200 pages providing examples and specifics along with some remedies. While not specifically a handbook of how to fix your organization, I think that by helping bring some of these faults to light, we can all start getting better. After all, the first step to recovery is admitting that you have a problem.
Another entry in the small but growing management library that suggests purposely slowing down and smelling the roses could actually boost productivity in today's 24/7 world, Tom DeMarco's Slack stands out because it is aimed at "the infernal busyness of the modern workplace."
This set of utilities seems somewhat misguided.
Tired of writing the same old code over and over again to catch InterruptedExceptions on Thread.sleep() calls?
The example that is so proudly displayed demonstrates how the library makes it easier to sleep without having to catch and ignore those apparently useless InterruptedExceptions. What this fails to realize is that when an InterruptedException is thrown, chances are, someone is trying to shut things down or otherwise do, I dunno, something exceptional. If you're ignoring them, then you're not addressing the circumstances correctly. You certainly don't need a library to help you ignore them more effeciently.
Thread.sleep(...) doesn't throw InterruptedException just to annoy you. It's done for a reason. Understand the reason and code appropriately.
O'Reilly Open Source Convention 2004 has issued a call for participation.
Individuals and companies interested in making presentations or giving tutorials are invited to submit proposals using the form below. Proposals will be considered in two classes: tutorials and convention presentations (sessions). Presentations by marketing staff or with a marketing focus will not be accepted; neither will submissions made by anyone other than the proposed speaker.
"RELAX NG is now an International Standard" says James Clark. Maybe this will remind folks that the W3C (or JCP or...) doesn't have a stanglehold on standards.
I have just been informed that RELAX NG was published by ISO as an International Standard on 1st December 2003. The full title is: ISO/IEC 19757-2:2003 Information technology -- Document Schema Definition Language (DSDL) -- Part 2: Regular-grammar-based validation -- RELAX NG
groovy 1.0-beta-1 is out! proclaims James. I've redeployed the website, so it should be the latest'n'greatest now. Plus, it matches the new haus theme. Much thanks to Sam for picking up much of my parser slack. Even James started diving into it towards the end.
This is the first ever release; so I'm sure there maybe mistakes or issues with the source / binary distro; we can fix any issues & do more releases much quicker now. A last minute feature that made it into the release (complete with typeo) thats not yet been documented is the script 'groovysh' which runs a groovy command shell. Its like the swing console but works on the command line - you just need to enter a blank line to execute a command (so hit CR twice).
drools/drools-groovy was imported by James Strachan yesterday. There ya go, Ted.
Current directory: [codehaus] / drools / drools-groovy
Files shown: 8
Being from the south (by the grace of God?), we really haven't experienced much snow. My son, particularly, has only seen about a 1/4-inch of snow on the ground. So, for Christmas this year, we're fleeing to the Great White North to spend some time with our little Canadian friend Jason van Zyl. Of course, I made the mistake of going to Canada in January of this year, and swore I'd never do it again. Memories of frozen hair and snow-blindness apparently fade all too quickly. At least Noah will get to play in snow that is deeper than he is tall. And that's what really matters. Oh, and maybe we'll actually get some work done on the Maven book.
Howard Katz recently announced XQEngine on the [xml-dev] list.
XQEngine is a compact (roughly 250K) embeddable component written in Java. It's not a standalone application and requires a reasonable amount of Java programming skill to use. It has a straightforward programming interface that makes that fairly easy to do. It's single-threaded and should work well as a personal productivity tool on a single desktop, as part of a CD-based application, or on a server with low to moderate traffic. (Making the engine thread-capable is not overly difficult and remains a future project.)
