DigitalHobbit

I don’t have a Gmail account, but if I ever get one (on that note, please feel free to leave a comment in case you have a spare Gmail invitation ), I’ll be sure to try GmailFS. GmailFS turns your 1 GB Gmail account into a Linux-mountable filesystem. I’m not sure how useful this [...]

I just spent an hour playing with Groovy, and I have to say that it is very promising. I have not experimented a whole lot with the actual Groovy syntax, but based on what I have read as well as on my limited experiments, Groovy is a nice mixture of popular scripting languages such as [...]

As I mentioned in my previous posting, I am currently in the process of converting my main desktop from Windows XP to Linux. One of the main things I know I will struggle with (unless I just give up and live with an annoying dual-boot situation) is support for computer games.

In many ways I am [...]

I originally wanted to call this post (or series of posts) “Patterns of Home Computing” and provide a lot more background on how I use my various computers at home. However, as I really need to catch some sleep I will keep this initial posting reasonably short.

About 2 months ago, I have bought two new [...]

Martin Fowler shares some thoughts on JUnit, mostly about why JUnit instantiates a new instance of the test class for each test case. As usual, he has some good points. The posting also contains some information on JUnit’s TestSetup feature, which allows several test cases to share a single setup and teardown routine.

This BoingBoing entry mentions a new product designed to block BitTorrent packets. Apparently the developer (Akonix) is getting companies to buy and deploy this product by spreading lies about the BitTorrent application and protocol, saying that it causes users to inadvertently share sensitive files.

Sounds like a silly product in the first place, as a few [...]

Here is a nice article on Freeware suggestions under Windows. A lot of good stuff in there, as well as in the comments.

Wired News has decided to no longer capitalize the “I” in “Internet”, which will now simply be spelled “internet”. At the same time, “Web” becomes “web” and “Net” becomes “net”.

I wonder if this sets a big enough precedent that other people start adopting the new spelling. It kind of makes sense to me.

We recently moved back from the suburbs into San Francisco proper, but our new house is a little smaller than the old one. In particular, there is a lot less counter space than we are used to in the kitchen, which means that things very quickly fill up if we are not careful, at which [...]

Prevayler 2.0, a prevalent persistence engine, was released a few days ago.

This is the first time I have heard about this project or about this type of persistence engine, but it sounds very promising. Prevayler can be used in lieu of a (relational or object-oriented) database in many cases. It is based on simple mechanisms [...]

The upcoming Make: magazine from O’Reilly sounds very interesting. It is published as a “mook”, a magazine / book hybrid, and covers a wide array of technology and what people can do with it. It sounds like the focus will be on concrete consumer projects, including things like kite aereal photography, home entertainment, websites, etc. [...]

There is a free book on Subversion version control. I have not had a chance to look at Subversion yet, but I am planning on upgrading my CVS installation at home (which I am keeping out of principle more than anything, as I don’t actually do all that much development at home these days) to [...]

I’m still evaluating Eclipse 3.0 to see if I could imagine switching from IntelliJ IDEA to Eclipse. Overall, I’m still pretty impressed with Eclipse, with the exception of a few shortcomings I mentioned before.

Another important feature that Eclipse lacks out of the box is support for XML editing. I find this somewhat surprising, as pretty [...]

I just came across this article on Boing Boing about the new Paranoia XP pen & paper RPG, which was publicly developed using open source methodologies, including a Wiki and blogs. This mostly caught my eye because I actually used to play this RPG about 15 years ago as a teenager…

Games * Design [...]

Javalobby has launched a very useful new site: JDocs.com.

JDocs offers easy access to Javadocs for many widely used APIs, including the JDK, XML APIs such as Xalan, Xerces, JDom, Castor, and JiBX, frameworks such as Struts, utility APIs such as the Apache Commons APIs, and many others. Currently, about 50 APIs are covered on JDocs, [...]

Dave Thomas has an interesting proposal on turning excess body fat into laptop energy. He calls this the LipoBattery. It would solve both the problem of overweight programmers, as well as the lack of battery power in laptops.

As soon as they actually invent this thing, please sign me up for the beta test!

EclipseME is an Eclipse plugin for J2ME development. I have not installed it yet, but it sounds well worth checking out. Here are some of its features:

Multiple wireless toolkit support Wireless toolkit preferences Platform component and definition support Create new J2ME Midlet Suite Project Create new Midlet Java Application Descriptor (JAD) editor Automatic incremental preverification Eclipse launch support for Emulator Midlet debugging support JAR [...]

I found this nice website on anonymous web browsing. It covers official anonymizers as well as other services that can be used for this purpose, such as Altavista’s Babelfish. Interesting…

An introductory article on the Groovy language has been posted at IBM’s developerWorks website. I have only skimmed it briefly so far, but I definitely need to take a closer look at this article as well as at Groovy in general.

Groovy is a dynamic language that runs on the JVM. It looks similar to [...]

The first teaser for the upcoming “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” movie has been released. Frankly, there’s not much to see, as it does not contain any actual footage from the movie. Regardless, at least it is another sign that the work is proceeding. There is also a nice history of the movie. I still [...]