DigitalHobbit

We are very excited about moving into our new house this Friday. All of the basic utilities are taken care of, we have phone service and cable TV, etc. Unfortunately, DSL won’t be active until Wednesday, so we’ll be without high-speed Internet access for around 5 days! I guess we’ll be busy unpacking and therefore [...]

Sun has decided to rename J2SE 1.5 to J2SE 5.0, as this is a very significant relase with important changes to the Java platform. According to this The Server Side posting, Sun also considered getting rid of the “2″ and going with J5SE instead, but this was not a good choice because of the J2EE [...]

The Eclipse Project has released the final version 3.0 of the popular Eclipse IDE. I am currently IntelliJ IDEA and I still very much love this IDE (even though I’m still stuck with version 3.0.5), but Eclipse 2.1 looked very promising when I played with it briefly a while ago, and I am sure that [...]

According to this Slashdot posting, the BBC has announced that it will be releasing new radio adaptations of Douglas Adams last three Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books. The clou is that Douglas Adams himself will provide the voice for Agrajag, a character whose reincarnations keep getting killed by Arthur Dent. Apparently, Douglas Adams always [...]

My company just instigated a complete ban on instant messaging clients, supposedly for security reasons. While I agree that instant messaging applications may not be the most secure and probably should not be used internally for sensitive information (for which an internal instant messaging deployment of some sort would be preferable), I feel that instant [...]

O’Reilly has produced an interesting poster about the History of Programming Languages. But beware: the PDF file is 39″ wide, probably because it covers every minor version of every programming languages, rather than just important milestones. Apparently you can also get a printed version of the poster for free when you order two books from [...]

Firefox 0.9 has been released a few days ago, and it certainly looks worthy of upgrading to (or installing, if you’re not using it yet).

Joel Spolsky lists three reasons to switch web browsers today. Of particular interest is the following one:

You’ll help break the Microsoft Monopoly on web browsers. Microsoft took over the browser [...]

I just discovered SQLCreator, an interesting looking Java-based SQL client. Apparently, the goal of this application is to aid developers, and it includes many features that allow developers to search for tables by column name, etc. It is free for personal and commercial use, but there is a small advertising message area at the bottom [...]

Microsoft has launched their Resources for Java Developers website. In addition to some interoperability guides for Java and .NET, it mainly includes a long article titled The C# Programming Language for Java Developers. I have only briefly skimmed it so far, but it looks like it provides a nice introduction into C# for Java developers. [...]

I just logged into my Yahoo Mail account for the first time in a few days and was alerted to the fact that my storage size has been increased from 6MB to 100MB! For more information, see this article at Wired News.

This is a very smart move on Yahoo’s side that is bound to take [...]

Martin Fowler shares some of his experiences of synchronizing several computers. Interesting timing, as I have just ordered a new laptop myself (although I admittedly don’t program a whole lot in my virtually non-existent spare time these days, thanks to my two daughters who tend to keep my busy… ). On the PC side, [...]

iRiver recently announced the impressive PMP-120 audio / video player, which looks very exciting and has a long list of features. It plays all the relevant audio formats (including MP3, Ogg Vorbis, and WMA), as well as video formats (including Mpeg, DivX, and XviD). It has a built-in speaker as well as a 3.5″ TFT [...]

Cudos to TiVo Inc., who decided to get rid of the premium Home Media Option and instead made these additional services (online scheduling, digital music, digital photos and multi-room viewing) freely available as part of the standard subscription. For an additional monthly fee, I would not have considered subscribing to these features, but for free [...]

Thanks to Boing Boing for alerting me to the upcoming Combover: The Movie. This looks hilarious!

I came across an interesting link on the wireless weblog: CellForCash.

They make it easy for you to sell your old cell phones by sending you a postage-paid box. The few phones that I have checked only sold for slightly above $10, but since they make it so easy, I may very well take advantage of [...]

I came across a very nice page on RSS Readers. This looks like a very complete listing of RSS Readers, including client-side applications for various operating systems as well as web-based aggregators.

Before I got into blogging (writing but even more importantly reading blogs), I never quite understood the big deal about RSS. Sure, there were [...]

Bruce Tate, the author of Bitter Java and the upcoming Better, Faster, Lighter Java, published an interesting blog entry on mountain biking and J2EE. He definitely has some very good points, as J2EE has been getting more and more complex since its inception. Lightening up by using some of the simpler, often open source solutions, [...]

Several blogs have reported that Amazon apparently added a new beta feature called Plog, which they define as a personal blog on their website. It sounds like a plog is mostly a different and slightly more up-to-date way of presenting recommendations to the user. On their website they list a few of the more popular [...]

Another useful link: Java-Source.Net is a nice collection of open source Java software. It appears to be very complete.

A blurb in the Javalobby newsletter mentioned the Napkin Look and Feel. The purpose behind this is to visually indicate that an application is just a prototype and nothing more, in order to prevent managers from assuming that an application is almost complete when they see a nice-looking prototype. I have to say this is [...]