It’s the end of another term. Four weeks without students but lots of boring admin to do. powered by [performancing firefox](http://performancing.com/firefox)

I’ve just returned to my office after attending a Lunch and Learn session on Blogging and the uses of Blogging in education. Nichola van den Berg from LIS was the presenter and she gave a very nice introduction to blogging to an audience of academics who were new to the subject. A couple of things that I took away from the session were (1) I could do more to get my students blogging and (2) I could do more with this blog.

I have just registered for the domain cpjobling.org via the free version of Google Apps. I’ve got a new web site up and running but it’s a bit sparse. However at only $10 for nominet site registration and free web, application, email and collaboration hosting (within limits) it’s a snip!

Three items of note from Charles Nutter’s ‘blog: 1. [JRuby 0.9.8](http://headius.blogspot.com/2007/03/behind-scenes-jruby-098-released.html) has been released with 98% support for Ruby on Rails. The road to a 1.0 release seems well signposted. 3. Netbeans support for Ruby and JRuby is “[even better than expected](http://headius.blogspot.com/2007/03/netbeans-6-ruby-support-even-better.html)” (see the [demos](http://blogs.sun.com/roumen/entry/two_demos_jruby_on_rails) on Roman Strobl’s blog) 5. [Ruby on Grails](http://headius.blogspot.com/2007/03/ruby-on-grails-why-hell-not.html) – Charles has analyzed the contents of the grails project and concludes that it could easily be fronted by JRuby rather than Groovy.

Glen Smith has launched a new blog aggregation site called GroovyBlogs.org. Created in just 20 hours in Grails, the site attempts to gather all the news that’s hot in the Groovy world and present it in one place. The source code is also available.

The [learning lab](http://learninglab.swan.ac.uk) at my University launched its first podcast today. I feel obliged to blog about it as Chris Hall interviewed me about the *Blackboard Quest* that I developed as a Blackboard training exercise for first year engineers. The podcast is [here](http://learninglab.swan.ac.uk/podcasts.html). The interview itself is quite quiet compared to the rest of the podcast, but then people have always said that I mumble! powered by [performancing firefox](http://performancing.com/firefox)

I have published another literate program on literateprograms.org. This one shows how the Rot13 encoding system can be implemented in Java. However, that is trivial! The real point is to document the basic use of JUnit testing and Apache Ant which are standard tools in the professional Java developer’s toolbox (in fact they make Java just about usable Within 24 hours of the first mention of my program, another literate programmer had documented the altogether more elegant implementation as a sed script.

I am grateful to [Dion Almaer](http://www.almaer.com/blog/archives/001379.html) for pointing me to a new add on for Windows called Enso Launcher which allows you to launch applications right from the keyboard. For example you just hold the Caps Lock key and type Op[tab]Ex release caps lock to open explorer. Not quite as quick as [windows]+E but not far off!. It also does stuff like spell checking any text anywhere. It also has the function I use a lot: changing upper case text to lower case text in any program or text field in programs other than Word!

I have installed an instance of [DokuWiki](http://wiki.splitbrain.org/wiki:dokuwiki) which I am intending to use as a home page. Its current location is [eehope.swan.ac.uk/~eechris/dokuwiki/index.php](http://eehope.swan.ac.uk/%7Eeechris/dokuwiki/index.php) but eventually I hope to move it to [eehope.swan.ac.uk/~eechris](http://eehope.swan.ac.uk/%7Eeechris). powered by [performancing firefox](http://performancing.com/firefox)

I’m in the process of moving my Bloglines aggregation settings to Google Reader. The features that I like abou Google Reader that prompted this move are: I can add multiple tags to RSS feeds Reader shows you what’s new (and also what’s old) in all feeds or across tagged items: no more navigating complex folder structures the list display is easier to scan when you’re busy it’s easy to share feeds or individual articles

Mentioned in episode 100 of the Java Posse was a new (to me) open source language for the JVM called Fortress. Using a notation that looks literally more like mathematics than either Mathematica or Matlab, and claiming a place in the application domains that have been Fortran’s province since year dot, this looks like a language and a project that deserves further study.

I’ve been teaching Groovy as part of one of my final year bachelor modules for about two years now. My module EG-358: Software Applications gives a sort of overview of how software engineering is applied across the range of platforms from desktop through to embedded (I cover the Enterprise in a Masters level module) and it takes in such esoteric issues as design patterns, collaborative development, agile development, IDEs, real-time, concurrency, etc.