How vista is made

Found on slingshot - thats just hilarious. Just remember: dinosaurs had a large body and a small brain and the brain was in the tail.

http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html

Yet another summer job

Dear all, here is another summer job offer. Please contact me if you are interested!

This position requires probably a student that has completed 2^nd year (B+ grades or better) and has undertaken papers that gave them experience with Java programming environment. We will need a student that is motivated and able to think pretty independently – eg be comfortable with searching web for the tools/compliers they may need, and setting up the environment on a PC. There will be plenty of help available but it won’t be a hand holding situation.

The project involves editing, compiling and testing J2ME applications (mobile games). The source code is already written and tested, our project is to edit it to work on different devices.

Let me know if you think you have a suitable candidate for this work. It will be for the whole summer vacation period (10 days off at Xmas), 30 to 40 hours per week, paid at Student Job Search type rates and based in Wellington.

JUNG (Java Universal Network/Graph Framework)

I have found a very useful open source Java library that seems to be suitable for projects dealing with graph/network analysis, small world stuff and visualization.
Its called JUNG (http://jung.sourceforge.net/) , and people from UC Irvine and MS are behind it. In a nutshell, it provides a lot of graph algorithms "out of the box" including shortest path , clustering, generating graph layouts .. (see API doc for complete list: http://jung.sourceforge.net/doc/api/index.html ). It also does the anti gravity - spring based animated layout and supports custom renderers for nodes and edges, all very very easy to use.

Next IIST Seminar

Our next IIST seminar is on UML:

Presenter: Prof Dorina C. Petriu, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ont., Canada

Title: Performance Analysis of UML Software Models

Date: Wednesday, 13th December 2006

Time: 13:00-14:00

Venue: AgH3.43A (student project room), via video conferencing in Wellington

Interships @ State Service Comission Wllngtn

There is another offer for interships from the State Service Comission. Plase see me for details if you are interested.

Internship @ SAP Research in Palo Alto

The Open Source Research group of SAP Research in Palo Alto is
looking for interns (3-6 months), to start at any time (not just in summer).

Open source research comprises analysis (analysing and
understanding open source software development processes, projects,
communities) and construction (contributing to and building open-
source based applications and components as part of our research
development efforts).

See my for details if your are interested.

Kiwiplan Presentation

Gareth Gronin from Kiwiplan will present the company on Wednesday, 4 October, 2-3PM in AgH 3.43A. See www.kiwiplan.com for company details, the company is interested in employing Massey graduates (Software Engineering and related disciplines), and in sponsoring post grad research projects.

Latex and Eclipse

Glenn found a Latex plugin for Eclipse: eclipse Texlipse (http://texlipse.sourceforge.net/).

VAJ

I have found an old copy of VisualAge for Java. It had a very unique powerful GUI builder. If you are interested to play with it, come to my office with a memory key.
/Jens

NZHerald article about Roy Fielding

This is abpout Roy Fielding's NZ link. Roy is the father of HTTP, and the father of REST.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/story.cfm?c_id=5&ObjectID=10403888

Latex session

Hi, there will be a short session on Latex on Friday 19 Sept on Latex. This might be useful if you have to write a report or article soon. I will cover some issues such as choosing a document style, tables, figures, graphics, and bibtex. Venue: my office.

/Jens

Presentation by Kiwiplan

Another employer interested in hiring you. Well established, export oriented company in Auckland, focus is on Java technology.

Wed, September 27, 2006, 12 - 1pm
SSLB6

Google Internship

For details click here.

Business Computing and Web 2.0

Just discovered:

Corporate America wakes up to Web 2.0
Web 2.0 meets the enterprise

That is what we (Jonathan and myself) were just thinking about. Note the nice features on the web page: there is a shortcut to bookmark the articles on delicious, and a mind map showing related articles.

Eclipse-based IE for Google's GWT

Found here:

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/topnews/wpn-60-20060720IDEforGoogleWebToolkitDebuts.html

Presentation by ORION: give aways + jobs

There is a presentation by ORION on the 3 August at noon in SSLB3. They are given away a portable playstation! There are more good reasons to attent: Orion is one of the biggest Java shops in NZ and has employed our graduates in teh past. E.g. Jonathan Wright (Jared's brother) is working for them.

Java Actions

Java Actions let you move all gui component logic to an Action object, allowing it to
be used in multiple places (i.e. appear in multiple places in the gui).
There is clearly no reason to have any more than one Action object of
each type (I believe) - so that means Actions are inherently singletons.

If that is correct, does Java treat each Action as a singleton, or
should I explicitly make them all singleton classes.

The question arises due to code like this:

JMenuItem helpItem = new JMenuItem(new HelpAction());
.....
JButton helpBtn = new JButton(new HelpAction());

I have spent a bit of time rewriting the GUI components to deal with
Actions, as they tidy the code up quite considerably.

Cheers,
Jonathan.

Non-deterministic plugin loading and menubar item ordering

I was wondering if anyone knew in Eclipse how they went about placing menus
in the top menu bar. For example, how do they position 'Edit' after
'File', and how does the WOP plugin menu get added in the
place it was added.

This is the current problem I'm wanting to refine in Centruflow - as
little tweaks throughout my system can result in menus moving all around.

Cheers,
Jonathan

Opening files in Java

I have spent a bit of time tonight looking into ways of opening files in Java such that they are loaded using their default viewer (i.e. loading MS Word documents in MS Word). There are the hacks that makes the OS-independent believer in me cringe, for example:

Runtime.getRuntime().exec("rundll32 SHELL32.DLL,ShellExec_RunDLL \""+fileName+"\"");
and
Runtime.getRuntime().exec("cmd /c \""+fileName+"\"");

Both will equivalently load any (?) file, but only within Windows...

Then I stumbled upon two similar projects:
The JDIC library and similar functionality in the soon-to-be released Java 6.
Both of these abstract away the underlying way in which to load the files.
This is mighty handy, and so I thought I'd post it here to let everyone know.

Cheers,
Jonathan Giles.

Java Properties Rant

[rant]
Grrrr, Sun's annoying me. I've been wasting my time trying to get a problem fixed that I don't think can be fixed other than by emailing Sun - but there is a chocolate fish there for anyone that solves this for me :)

Basically, Properties in Java can now be XML. I thought "swell, let's use that". As specified in the JavaDoc here it is necessary to include the DTD reference at the top of the properties file. That is no problem, as the file contents is listed on the page. When I save the xml in XML Spy however, it complains that the DTD is invalid. Looking at the file 'http://java.sun.com/dtd/properties.dtd', it is slightly different than what is on the page: it now has a nice copyright message and whitespace. It appears that this is causing the DTD to be invalid. It doesn't matter, the Properties object still happily parses it so no problem there.

Today I wrote some code to actually change property values and write them back to the XML (retaining all comments, etc). I set the DocumentBuilderFactory to not validate the file, as I knew it wasn't valid thanks to Suns DTD. However, I still get errors when trying to parse it due to the unexpected statement in the DTD.

I thought I could get around this by copying the DTD to my local codebase and using it there - but the Java Properties object expects a hard coded reference to their DTD or else it fails - so there goes that idea.

As far as I can tell, Sun is the single point of failure in my code, and they decided to fail.

Anyone have any ideas? It appears others have found my problem, like here.
[/rant]

Please let me know,
Jonathan Giles.