My blog template seems to have gottem messed up. I’ve had to save my sidebar settings to start a new look. I was getting bored anyway!

There’s some weird and wonderful stuff out there. Here was map I created at http://www.world66.com/myworld66 of the places I’ve visited in the world so far (site and image both gone from the internet!) It was a little misleading because I’ve only been to Georgia, Florida, Arizona and California in the States and New South Wales (well actually only Sydney) in Australia. Still, it’s a bit of a giggle.

I got my hands dirty trying to fix a bug in Megg last week. My main motivation, for what turned out to be a long weekend’s work, was a desire to use Mike Clark’s pragmatic automation template announced back in July last year. It wouldn’t load from the URL. It wouldn’t load when I downloaded the zip file and copied it into ./templates/pragouto-template. It wouldn’t load from ./pragauto-template. In fact, it would only work when I added it to the templates collection in the project directory and added it to megg.

Just watched this Screencast from Jon Udell on the power of client-side scripting and web services. It it Jon demonstrates a little bookmarklet that takes an ISBN from a page (demo works with Amazon) and looks the book up in a library. Jon’s blog has a page where you can create your own bookmarklet for various library catalogue systems so I created one for Swansea University. Here’s it is: javascript:var%20re=/([/-]|is[bs]n=)(d{7,9}[dX])/i;if(re.test(location.href)==true){var%20isbn=RegExp.$2;

Been watching presentations and demonstrations of Rails and Trails. Bookmarks online http://del.icio.us/cpjobling. Rails is a rapid web application development framework that makes developing CRUD interfaces a snap. It is based on the Active Record pattern, is written in Ruby and has a set of smart classes that automates initial view generation and the controller. By default, the model is essentially an active record. Trails is a Java framework inspired by Rails that leverages Hibernate, Tapestry and Spring to provide similar functionality.

I saw an article on this “coomunity bookmarking” site some time ago (in Thursday Guardian OnLine supplement I think) and signed up. Didn’t quite get it at the time, but today I read another Guardian OnLine article and I saw Jon Udell’s screencast. Now I think I start to understand. It’s a better way to do the kind of “link blogging” that I want to do when I haven’t got the time to write a more detailed entry.

< p>Other JavaPolis presentations that I need to check out are: J2ME Realtime Java AOP/AspectJ EJB 3.0 Hibernate JDO JavaServerFaces Spring Eclipse Struts Tapestry, and TestNG

Just watched Tim Boudreau’s JavaPolis presentation/demo of Netbeans 4.0. Looks good and worth a look over the weekend. I’m keen to try out the much discussed Eclipse project import feature and the mobile application developer tools which, if they work, will give me something more concrete to put into my final Software Applications lectures on “Embedded Systems”. < p>The last time I used Netbeans, I was put off by the fact that it came with it’s own copy of the JDK (which I already had) so it was a bit of a disk hog for no good reason; Mounting a CVS repository only worked if you had a CVS client installed and Ant was not as well integrated.

There’s a complaint in Britain that if you are waiting for a bus, you’ll be waiting for a long time, then two will come along at once! On Wednesday this week, I was burning the midnight oil trying to beg, borrow and steal some examples of realistic Groovlets (servlets in Grrovy) for my final lecture on Scripting Languages in which I wanted to cover web applications. Not one example in all the articles I read on the groovy home site could tell me how to actually get the parameters of a HTTP request as a map (I found out from the javax.

Another great presentation from last year’s JavaPolis, Tim Bray, inventor of XML, discusses dynamic languages and their relationship to Java. One of the earliest discussions on the topic of scripting languages and their potential to make a revolutionary impact on software development was, I believe, first mooted by Johm Oosterhout, the inventor of TCL, in IEEE Computer Magazine back in 1998 [1]. Tim Bray makes an updated case for using scripting (or dynamic) languages on the Java platform for many of the same reasons originally cited by Oosterhout.

Here in the UK, Universities typically send students off on holiday for the four weeks around the period in March-April when Easter falls. At the University of Wales Swansea (or Swansea University as it prefers to call itself [for marketing purposes)]) our Easter break is right in the middle of the teaching period. There are still three weeks of lecturing to go after Easter, and quite a lot of course preparation, marking, exam setting, course reviews and other admin stuff, but nonetheless it’s still a period for taking a breather, catching up on interesting stuff and adding stuff to this Blog.

Level 1 ICCT will be doing the first Ethereal lab to come out of my student Richard Owen’s final year project. Richard has created a wikipage on the ICCT wiki. Richard is looking for comments so hopefully the students will have some.