This Old Blog

Update 7/9/2005: Here is the link to running the module stand-alone . Update 6/17/2005: Thanks to roxie for the comments that helped clean up the broken bits. The following came about with the help of Charlie Hunt at Sun and Geertjan Wielenga , whose blog contained a series of posts about NetBean Module making for Dummies. The problem, however, was that I was below even the dummy level. So after a series of back and forth question-and-answer emails between the three of us, I was able to come up with a process as well as a series of steps for creating the NetBeans Module and for doing something with it after building the module. What follows is a distillation of that entire process. It should be noted that it would make life much easier if there were additional support tools inside of Netbeans to take care of a lot of this, especially the hand-jamming of files. Geertjan talks about using Maven along with another NetBeans module. At the very least I certainly wish there were a more in...

I sat through the two hour finale of Star Trek:Enterprise, silently chastising myself for wasting all that time. I would have been better entertained watching paint dry. Both episodes were weak, with the second the weakest of any Star Trek episode I've ever seen. I thought it was worse than any episode of the original series, which in my not so humble opinion contain the worse Trek episodes of any Star Trek series I've ever seen and is why the original series deserved to be canceled when it was. The first good-bye episode, "Terra Prime", shows why Peter Weller was so good as Robocop. His wooden delivery and clock-like timing were perfect for that role. Unfortunately those attributes were ill-suited for the part of isolationist leader Paxton, determined to drive all aliens off Earth. Paxton is a radical, a revolutionary, and the actor chosen for that part should have exuded fire, energy and emotionalism. Instead we got Weller. And we got a story with absolutely no surp...

After having come away bloody and battered battling Fedora Core 4 test 3, I was in no humorous mood when I came across OSNew's (www.osnews.com) story titled "The Java Vs Mono Debate Continues on Gnome". But before I tear a new one for Miguel, let me rant a bit about Gnome and Fedora Core 4. I bloody well hate Gnome. I think what sends me ballistic is the spastic spatial default mode in nautilus. Every time I install a new version of Redhat with its default Gnomish desktop, I wind up with all the Gnome bits and the nautilus spastic default mode. And yes, I do indeed care more for KDE than for Gnome. It wasn't always that way. In the early days of the KDE vs. Gnome competition I preferred Gnome much more than KDE. It looked better, seemed to execute faster, and when Nautilus first appeared it was really nice and much superior to Konqueror. But then the bloody GNU ideologues took over, and we had one ideology war after another sapping time and energy that should have gon...

Finally had enough with some of the annoying nits of this blog's page template to do something about it. I had to go hunt down where the ordered list and unordered list XHTML tags were being defined in the style sheet for this particular page template and modify those styles. It's one thing to pick a graphic for the unordered bullet, it's another to pick a graphic for an ordered (enumerated) list. When I want a numbered list in my posts, I want a numbered list in my posts (see the post preceding this one for what I mean). Right now the slight tweaks have removed that graphic bullet everywhere. I have a suggestion for Google. Take some of those card-carrying PhDs you have working on the neat stuff and have them whip up a nice template editor, or better yet, a complete template composition tool. Yes, you'd get some hideous pages. But the system is already pretty easy to correct anyway. All I have to do is reset my messes by picking another stock template and then start ov...

I've now got a new roach killer sitting on my bookshelf: O'Reilly's "Java In A Netshell, 5th Edition." And if you're a Floridian, you know how important having a good roach killer is. I've had a Java Nutshell book sitting on my bookshelf since 1.1. I never had one for 1.0 because Java was small enough to understand. I could use Javadoc exclusively to find everthing I cared to know. The latest version weighs in at 1224 pages and covers the core part of the language. Compare this with the 4th edition, which stopped at a svelt 969 pages. The new version also returns to the use of marking each package section in the book, making it a lot easier to navigate to the package (and class) you're trying to look up. The 4th edition dropped the marking and annoyed quite a few programmers, some who recommended not bothering to purchase the book just on that one flaw. The book is organized as follows: Part 1. Introducing Java Introduction Java Syntax from the Ground ...

I like integrated development environments (IDEs). When implemented correctly they make development very efficient, especially for the Lone Coder. I got bitten by the IDE bug with Borland's Turbo C 1.0 when it was released back in the late 80's. I drove over to a local college bookstore (UCF) and picked up my very own copy when it first came out. From that moment forward I've used IDEs on every environment and for every language (and yes, folks, emacs does qualify as an IDE). The best IDE out on the market today is Microsoft's. While Borland might have started early and had a long distinguished run, in the end Microsoft overcame all odds. The only problem with the Microsoft IDE is the cost. Depending on what features and languages you purchase from Microsoft, getting to use its IDE can range from pricey to too-damned-expensive-for-my-budget. Oh, and the obvious limitation: it's only available for Windows. For the most part I've stuck to emacs (and even xemacs) a...

Blogger sucks. Late Saturday night I tried to create a new blog for posting Java articles, and it failed. Twice. The creation process hung twice at 10%. When I went back to my dashboard and tried to delete the bogus blogs, I wound up deleting the good working blog. The only thing that saved me was a browser window open with all my May entries. I cut and pasted the entries to Word, then recreated blogbeebe and cut and pasted them back as new/old entries. The problem is there are few other blog hosting sites that have the same level of features as Blogger/Blogspot. And an email to support only got me an automated response. I'll stay here and I'll back up. But from this point forward I'm looking for a new home. I know what I did and I did not select the good blog for deletion. There's a flaw in the system. If I hit another disaster like this last one then I'm afraid it's another painful search for another blog home. Does anybody have any good suggestions?

People tend to ask me if Linux is right for them. It's a fair question to ask given all the hype and press surrounding the operating system as well as the nearly daily articles about Window's security woes. I always have to stop and think about the person asking me that question because, even though they're very bright and quite good at what they do, they look at their computer as an appliance, a means to an end. For the majority of the people who ask I either direct them towards a Mac with OS X or to an upgrade of Windows to XP, especially with service pack 2. In both cases this usually means a hardware upgrade, especially if they go with OS X. But in the end they really are happier with Apple or Microsoft, far more so than if I had sent them on their way with Linux. How is it that a Linux guy wouldn't evangelize and point those folks towards Linux? Because Linux still isn't ready for the general masses. Read the following story of my very recent experiences when I...

In my last post on the subject I (see "Why Pamela Jones Deserves to be Outed") I hypothesized that MoG was outing PJ because of the heat MoG was getting from the Linux fanatics, egged on in part by PJ herself. A message appeared on the Yahoo SCOX board today that seems to echo that sentiment (a highly recommended message I might add). Re: PJ on MOG by: jwhitf (M/Boston, MA) 05/09/05 11:30 am Msg: 263006 of 263069 <<<Moreover, what, exactly, do you suppose MOG is up to? What's the point, if not an attempt to intimidate and silence Ms. Jones?>>> Simple; she's venting. She's angry and casting about for a way to get back at PJ, assuming that PJ is the reason she's being so roundly criticized. Anybody who's been in enough flamewars realizes that there is a point where frustration boils over and it is extremely difficult to keep from responding irrationally. PJ's been baiting MOG for some time now -- I'm not surprised MOG lost it. The p...

There's been a firestorm of controversy raging on the Yahoo SCOX boards since Friday, May 6th. That's when Maureen O'Gara (or MoG as she's known to her fans), that hard-hitting investigative journalist, published her latest Pulitzer prize contender titled "Who Is Pamela Jones?" (see http://www.clientservernews.com ). I'll leave it to the gentle reader to follow the link and read for themselves the artful, witty, and modest way Maureen followed the elusive trail of nefarious Pamela Jones, that trouble making gadfly of hard working SCOX and publisher of "super" blog Groklaw ( www.groklaw.net ). Sarcasm aside, there is an important reason why PJ, or Pamela Jones, should be publicly identified. PJ, through Groklaw, has made herself a high-profile celebrity through her actions on her blog. She's had tremendous help from the community in finding evidence, publishing court documents, and providing eye-witness accounts of the ongoing SCOX vs. IBM cou...