The last New Year's Eve I was employed by EarthLink I had to work all night. No one knew what was going to happen so everyone was prepared for the worst. Anyone working had a couple of days worth of clothes and the office was stocked up with food and water. It was definitely crazy. The doors were going to be locked just in case folks started to hear our way.
Obviously, the world didn't end so at around 1:30AM, I was able to home. Definitely not the New Year's Eve I wanted but overall it wasn't too bad.
AMK takes a look at JXTA and doesn't like what he sees. I would agree that most of the work being done right now is on the internal libraries.
However, one project which is seemingly alive is MyJXTA2 though that project won't help AMK.
Ben Hammersley has put together something cool, code which will grab the feeds of the various sites he writes and then sees if anything is new today and posts to his main weblog.
This is something I've been thinking about because I'm hoping to start an internal blog here at work but still post things here. This might be something fun to do while watching football this weekend.
Lisa Schmeiser, of TeeVee and Television Without Pity fame, has posted the list of things she wanted to accomplish this year and how well she did. It's very, very impressive and definitely depressing for me.
I think I'll try and put something together for 2005 on both the personal and professional level. Hopefully I can post it by Saturday. In fact, I'll make that the #1 item, Post 105 things to do in 2005.
Thinking about it more though, perhaps I should just make it 43 Things and allow some cool technology to handle keeping track of it.
Dana Epps points to a new DeveloperWorks column on writing secure code. Though they seem to be common sense, the main ideas are ones which need to be revisited often.
Use only secure components and only in secure ways.Pass only valid data to a component and be sure that it will be interpreted as you expect. In particular, watch out for meta-characters (the cause of SQL injection, shell meta-character injection, format string, and Perl open() attacks).
Check return values and handle exceptions.
Protect data as it goes between your application and the component.
Larry Williams has put together a mod_python tutorial plus a little Java / Python overview.
I didn't realize Tor was being supported by the EFF. That's really cool.
Also, don't forget the excellent bibliography for information on anonymous communication.
Monday, I will start at EarthLink. The main reason is that a 15-minute commute is much, much better than being in the car at least 2 hours a day. I'm really excited to get started and hopefully will be able to blog more about work than I currently am.
I remembered the parody song various cast members did a few years ago. Great stuff!
Matt gives plenty of links to uses of this. Sounds like it will become the new way of grabbing data from a server.
Richard Jones posts some code which will give some progress feedback to the console. Very useful for an installation script I'm writing.
Jon Udell posts the text from a talk he gave over the summer. In light of Tim Bray's recent summit, some interesting ideas can be found.
Bruce Schneier gives a great list for how to stay as safe as possible when dealing w/ computers. Definitely something to send to your non-geek friends and relatives.
Tim Bray helped put together a summit at Sun, dealing with how developers using dynamic languages such as Jython, Groovy or anything else can still be a part of the Java ecosystem.
Java has a PR problem; while Microsoft marketed the .NET stuff as multi-language from day one, the fact that Java is a three-legged stool (language, JVM, libraries) kind of gets lost under the enveloping carpet of the one-word name “Java”. Partly that’s Sun’s fault; in the early days, the evangelists generally left the impression that anyone writing code in a language other than Java was a second-class citizen. Which is silly; Java’s a good language but I often like to do things in Perl and Python, and so do lots of other developers....
And I confidently predict that as time goes by, more and more of the code written in the Java ecosystem won’t be in Java. This is a good thing.
Phillip Eby goes off on some Python code written by Java developers. Plenty of good stuff to think about.
Jeremy and Sam are looking at the combination of FreeMind a mind-mapping tool and Ant.
Sometimes I wonder where I've been..
The XMLHttpRequest object looks amazing and yet it is brand-new for me.
l. m. orchard over at 0xDECAFBAD also likes it and he is doing some very cool stuff with it.
A few people have pointed out the pure Java Subversion library. An interesting idea came to me while reading the how-to doc. Could a SFS (Subversion file-system) be created?
In general there are two kind of library users - first are using the API to access the repository or manage working copy files, second are extending the library to provide custom implementation for various library aspects, like connection protocols, merge implementation or working copy storage format. This page mainly describes what the first, more common type of users should know to work with the library.
Brent gives a peek inside the architecture of NetNewsWire and shows why NNW doesn't know a thing about RSS or Atom.
In high-level terms, it works like this. NetNewsWire has the raw text of a feed. It doesn’t know anything about it—it doesn’t even know if it’s RSS or Atom or whatever. NetNewsWire’s goal is to turn that raw feed into its data-source and data-item objects.So it turns to the black box (RancheroXML) and says, “Yo, here’s the text of a feed, please do your magic and give me back some data I know how to use.”
His reasons for using a black box are really applicable to anyone doing object-oriented type work. It just makes sense.
This whole thing is not new with me or unique to NetNewsWire or even particularly special—at all—it’s just how programming is done. It doesn’t get you out of having to deal with things like memory management and performance. Using black boxes doesn’t magically make software good.