[@696]
OSS Java So now than Sun said open source Java will happen at some undetermined point in time, everybody is doing the happy-joy-joy dance. How quickly you forget? Don't you remember when Sun said it would have Java standardized? Way to go, Sun. Keep on dangling that carrot… [@680]
Hitched! Matt is getting married. Congrats! His parents must be ecstatic. He's finally moving out. [@652]
IDEA vs. Eclipse I've read/heard it a thousand times, Eclipse is faster than IDEA, and it still makes me laugh. They both are slow as molasses at times. [@554]
Jtest I'm playing with Parasoft Jtest. I find it quite interesting that they are using Eclipse as a framework. At least it makes for familiar ground. The verdict so far: good. It's extremely slow, but it does generate useful tests and reports. Amazon Tag Library I wonder if there is a need for a tag library, like the Google TagLib, but for the Amazon API. Arjun has suggested it. I don't really know how much work it would be, but if there is some interest… Let me know. Amazon Talking about Amazon. I had an interesting chat with someone working there yesterday. I found out a bit about the technology behind the scene, and how they handle 600 hits per second. Fascinating stuff.

[@012]
The Day After… We went to see The Day After Tomorrow yesterday with Vik's sister. It was quite refreshing, and surprisingly low-key for a big budget movie. I've read about people complaining it was too preachy and eco-friendly for them. I didn't get that feeling at all.  

[@662]

Pulsed Out

The Pulse will no longer be included in the JDJ Newsletter. Here's what I received this morning:

Hello, Erik,

After we'd put the newsletter together as usual, and after I'd sent you the link, at the very end of the day yesterday our CEO changed the newsletter content. He wishes to try out white papers in the space that Erik's Pulse has been occupying.

We'll maybe return and request running your column again at a future time, but right now it would probably be best to count us out for the next little while, as we give our CEO's white paper feature some time to see if it's effective.

Thanks, in the meantime, for a fabulous feature. Hope we'll keep on working together, even if it turns out to be on something different from the "Pulse" idea, in the future.

Regards, Lin

--
Lin Goetz
Online Editor, SYS-CON Media

Of course, the Pulse will continue in the Javalobby Newsletter.

[@557]
JReleaseInfo Patch #2

I've submitted another patch to the JReleaseInfo Project.

[@125]
Gone fishing… Going to spend the night at Vik's sister. She's been house/dogs sitting all week. We're going out to dinner first. I'll probably be linkblogging from there tomorrow. [@670]
Patched My patch made it into JResourceInfo 1.1.0. Amazon I have a phone meeting setup for next week with a corporate recruiter at Amazon. They called last week saying someone mentioned my blog and that they should try to hire me. I'd be a fool not to listen to what they have to offer. I'm not quite sure how that would fit with my primary goal, which is to move back to Europe, but I have to keep an open mind about these things.

[@542]
How do I do it?

A few days ago, the folks on #mobitopia were wondering how I manage my Linkblog, etc. They thought it would be something interesting to blog about. I've briefly explained the process before, but I'll go in more details this time around.

Here goes nothing.

How many feeds do you read?

I monitor around 1600 feeds on a daily basis.

How long does it take to read them all?

First, I don't actually read everything. I usually scan the subject/topic first and weed out the stuff I'm definitely not interested with.

Second, I rarely read everything at once, but when I do, it takes a little over an hour. I usually spend 30 minutes or so here and there throughout the day.

Which news/feeds reader do you use, and why?

NewzCrawler. Everything else I've tried (and I've tried them all) chokes on the sheer volume, or lacks some major functionality I really need.

When I find something of interest I post it using the Blog This! editor:

Items are held in the Scratchpad until published:

If needed I can also manually add or edits links:

As soon as I'm done reading and there are enough links on hold, I publish them:

That's it.

I've streamlined the process as much as I could. Everything is pretty much automated at this point.

Why links and so little commentary?

I'm terse by nature.

I've never really been interested in blogging per se. I like reading blogs because they provide a gold mine of information. They also makes it impossible to efficiently manage my bookmarks. Keeping bookmarks on my blog seemed like the right way to go. Apparently it caught on.

I also don't believe it is my job to educate (or sway) people. I'll show you the way, you can draw your own conclusions.

Where do you find new feeds?

On blogs. In my referrers. If you mention it, I'll subscribe to it.

The truth is really out there.

[@555]
Troy

We went to see Troy over the weekend.

JAR Version Magic

Eugene posted some interesting comments on including version information directly in a JAR's manifest. “I did not know that.” — Very nice, though somewhat limiting.

Wasabi Chips

Do you like Wasabi? And I don't mean the badly dubbed movie we recently watched.

Do you like Tim's Cascade chips?

I just picked up a small bag of the limited edition at the grocery store. This stuff is the bomb. If it wasn't for the high-carbs, it would probably be my snack of choice.

GUI Designer

I needed to quickly build a simple Serial Number generation application for one of the projects I'm currently working on. Since I pretty much suck at doing UIs, I decided to give the IDEA GUI Designer a try.

As a prototyping tool, it simply rocks. I wouldn't want to do very complex UIs with it, but for the simple stuff, it's pretty straight forward.

In many ways it reminds me of the CodeWarrior GUI thingy, but more powerful. More complex to use though. I did haveP to read the tutorial and had to hunt for the ant integration instructions.

[@086]
JReleaseInfo Patch I've submitted a patch to the JReleaseInfo Project. If you have a need for a nice ant solution to manage your version/build numbers, you oughta give JReleaseInfo a try.