Author: Jakub

I spent some time this weekend getting J2ME SDKs off the big 3. The verdict: Motorola – no idea what’s going on there. Big download, no emulators (at least not detectable by Netbeans/SunOne) – need to spend some time going through their documentation. Nokia – sweet install, no problems. 2 emulators out of the box…

One of the difficulties in contracting is working out a rate. Agency salary surveys should be treated warily as their interests lie in getting the contractor at the lowest price possible. As such it is important to have an up to date objective reference point. ITJobsWatch is an automated service that indexes current advertised jobs,…

Dim’s off in the states at the moment, so what did I do with my weekend? Hired Splinter Cell 3 on XBox. Holy cow! I thought the first one was good – this was pure genius. I have never played anything that has ever engaged me so much. Graphics, gameplay – WOW! The soundtrack? Done…

I came across a free collection of presentations by the who’s-who of the Java industry from the Javapolis conference in Belgium last year, available at Javalobby. Talks from the creators of Sping, Hibernate, JDO, the list goes on and on… Good intros into pretty much everything doing the rounds.

NASA have announced the open-sourcing of a system called Java Pathfinder (not the rover). The idea is that it goes over every execution path in a Java program and detects problems such as deadlocks, NullPointerExceptions and the like. From the site, the system seems like it has room to grow – it can handle sources…

A couple of phrases have been getting mentioned lately around the tech sites: Dependency Injection (DI) and Inversion of Control(IoC) – both terms refer to the same thing. Fuzzy terms that you read when you’re looking up something else and bleep over. Start paying attention – this stuff is going to make your life so…

Whenever you go through a tech book it’s important to keep in mind that the environment has changed since the time of writing, and therefore the author’s word should not be taken as gospel. After all, that most of this stuff will be out of date in 6 months, if not earlier (that is if…

Woohoo! My first running mobile game!

One of these is real, and the other is a joke. Can you tell which is which? Remote controlled badgers Remote controlled rats I have this theory that there’s this bunch of guys at the US Department of Defence whose job it is to surf around joke sites looking for potential weapons programs…

It occurred to me a while back that programming games would be far more interesting than doing business applications all the time – anyone who codes for a living could probably agree that you need to flex the brain muscles every now and again… So I did some thinking and came to the conclusion that…