This was posted today on techno.blog(“Dion”): techno.blog(“Dion”): The Brits like to kick a man when he is down… and very funny it is too! Not sure of the source of the images but it is so typical of the British approach to [lack of] success.

Lots of the great and the good around campus today, including AMs and MPs. This is why! Digital Technium which was Officially Opened Today Apparently some of our communication’s group PhD students had to look busy at their workstations inside although it was definitely a day to be outdoors!

Martin Fowler mentioned UMLet in his recent article on UmlSketchingTools which I blogged about earlier this week. A paper in which the authors (Auer et al, 2003) describe the ideas behind UMLet is very insightful and pretty much echoes my own experiences of over-blown UML tools in the teaching domain (and I’ve tried ArgoUML, Poseidon CE, Together and Rational Rose with variable — but mostly limited — success over the last three or four years).

Excellent article by Ron Smith on IBM developerWorks on how to set up and use Python with Eclipse and Ant. Will definately be using this to set up Eclipse 3.0 with Python support when the final version is released.

O’Reilly Network interviews the Pragmatic Programmers Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas in OnLamp. Many nuggets including this one: **ORN**: Ward Cunningham once told me “With better IDEs, static languages such as Java are almost as easy to program in as dynamic languages.” You’re both fans of the Ruby language, especially when compared to more static languages. Do you think that the potential shift to writing business applications in slightly more dynamic languages such as Java and C# […] is good for programmer productivity and ease, or do those languages not go far enough?

Well what a match! I blame Motson … he couldn’t resist telling us how England had been in this or that situation before and lost! But I’m not gutted because we played well and went down fighting. Roll on the world cup! [image (c) BBC]

In about 45 minutes time (19.00 BST) I will be teaching some Engineering Summer School students how to register for, set up and use a Blogger.com group blog. Should be fun. The title link is to the support site. The only fly in the ointment is that England’s Euro2004 Quarter Final against host nation Portugal kicks off at 19.45! Still, nanny has given us all permission to leave early, so hopefully we won’t miss much!

A new tutorial article by Stefan Bodewig on the OracleTM Technology Network has been brought to my attention by a news article on TSS (thanks Sudhakar Ramakrishan). Describes the new , and tasks that should make ant even better! Will print and read the detail later, but I can’t wait to try some of these out on the EG-140 build (which needs all kinds of scripting tricks to work).

Another approach to UML diagramming. This time publicised in Martin Fowler’s Blicki: MF Bliki: UmlSketchingTools. UMLGraph uses a mixure of javadoc tags and pic macros to do the hard work. Dr Spinelis argues for his declaritive approch in “On the Declarative Specification of Models, IEEE Software, 20(2):94-96, March/April 2003 which is on-line in PDF format at http://www.spinellis.gr/pubs/jrnl/2003-IEEESW-umlgraph/html/article.html. Worth a look I think — as is the author’s (Domidis Spinellis) book Code Reading.

Jeremy Rayner’s June 15 blog entry directed me to another free drawing tool for UML diagrams. Thanks for the link! < p>I mentioned violet a couple of days ago. It is really simple, unfortunately it doesn’t have the ability to move classes around once positioned. This makes it a a bit hard to use. It is open source so that could be fixed of course! < p>Visual Thought is a drawing tool so it has the same advantages as Visio in that it’s not designed for MDA or for code generation, so you can happily use it for agile modelling.

BBC Match Reports on South Africa 31-17 Ireland Argentina 50-44 Wales Australia 35-15 Scotland. All the home sides lost the first tests, but there’s potential there!

BBC Match Report quote: New Zealand gave coach Graham Henry the perfect start to his reign as England suffered at Dunedin’s “House of Pain.” I’m gutted that the match kicked off 8.00 am UK time and I forgot to set the Sky+ box! Still Ireland versus South Africa this afternoon and Wales versus Argentina this evening. And the European Cup too! Super Saturday!