Random musings of a restless mind.

There was an interesting post on The Server Side last week, regarding the difference in focus between the PHP and Java open-source development communities. PHP developers are comming out with huge volumes of collaboration and portal applications, whereas Java programmers seem to be obsessed with the latest and greatest framework. Large corporations are more likely…

It’s been a while since I last posted. Life can really get in the way of blogging 🙂 Having worked with Struts for a while now, I’m starting to agree with some of the criticisms. One of the most common tasks I need to perform is to set up an page with data before displaying…

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!