I leave for a few days tomorrow, heading to the East Coast. My sister-in-law is getting married so all of us will be heading out. Work has continued on its crazy train so I'm hoping to recharge my batteries a bit while I'm gone. People tend to look at me funny when I say that I'll be relaxing by writing code but it really helps me. I want to look into things that are very much non-work-related.
I think I might finally jump into Groovy. Things like this integration w/ del.icio.us and playing w/ the new Bloglines web services are really cool and give me tons of ideas. Though if I do need to do something work-related, I guess using Groovy and Spring together will fill that void.
Now, we'll just see how much time I actually have...
Richard Jones has implemented Linux filesystem using Gmail for the storage. It's done in Python and looks quite, quite cool.
It uses libgmail which also looks fun.
Cool article on SiteMesh, very cool way to handle look-and-feel issues in J2EE apps.
Scott McClure gives a nice overview of what a Mini-app is and why it could be useful. These are little apps which aren't overly complicated and do one thing really well.
I'm in a fantasy football league and right now, we don't have 'real-time' stats on Sunday's. I'd love a little app which could grab the latest stats by parsing Yahoo or ESPN's game page and then display them in a nice way. Sure this would only be used one or two days a week but it definitely would be useful.
I think I might look into it and possibly use Flying Saucer as the front-end.
AntFlow looks to be quite cool once it is released. Basically it is built on Ant and allows you to drop a file into a directory and have workflow described within it. Hopefully it will be out soon.
Dion posts about Spring's PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer class which allows you to share configuration very easily. He uses an example of a properties file which is used both in the code as well as by Ant during the build process.
It is very easy to keep repeating your configuration when developing anything larger than a few lines of code. I know our current system doesn't share things and so we have duplication between build information and stuff needed within the app.
The Irish won against Michigan St.. The score shouldn't have been as close as it was but I'll take it. There were some good things to see but still plenty of places for improvement.
Any time you beat a team who has had your number for the last few years, you have to be happy. Now, there will be 3 straight home games against Washington, Purdue and Stanford.
The amazing thing about sports is that you are always one second away from turning off the TV in disgust and then in the next moment something happens and you are glued to your seat.
Today around 1pm, Notre Dame was down 9-0 and the Cubs were losing 2-0. Definitely not the kind of day I was hoping for. But then the Irish turn it around and the Cubs rally for a win. The bad day turned great!