Read My Mind!

Texas DOT Traffic Map for DFW

I really like this traffic map from the Texas Department of Transportation.

ZoomClouds is Neat

I was noodling around mashup tools kicking around the idea of doing something for Hack Day at work today, and I stumbled across something very interesting in a minimalist cool sort of way. ZoomClouds is a REST web api for making tag clouds over any RSS feed. Here's a cloud I made over Google Science and Technology news. It has a moving 24 hour window.

The 24-hour Dot Com

Wow, this brings back memories of 1999! I had seen Dozomo before but had no idea it had such an amazing origin.

Right now we are at the Wizards of OS conference in Berlin to make a performance art/business project. The mission is to create a dotcom business from scratch in 24 hours. That means designing and programming a complete and useful web application, recruiting people, doing marketing, creating investment programs and much more. After 24 hours, the complete business will be sold on an eBay auction, and everyone involved will be rich!

(link)

Dozomo should not be confused with the other, very cool, Internet Commandline Yub Nub.

Utterly Cool, Vintage Mechanical Computer

Yahoo! Groups : friendsofdigicomp is a Yahoo Group devoted to these extremely cool, erectorpunk mechanical toy computers from the 60's.

I need very badly to build a working replica out of toothpicks and rubber bands.

Thanks to Paul Wickstrom for this link.

Annotations in J2SE 5.0

LtU links to an article by Don Shwarz which explains the new annotation syntax in J2SE 5.0 (the release formerly known as "J2SE 1.5") and gives some examples of how they might be used. While I can see the immediate benefit of annotations to help with code generation and instrumentation, and I can even see where this could make some very clever tool integration easy, I have reservations. I think this has the potential to encourage ugly, unmaintainable code dependent on the spelling of a weakly typed attribute. I'm concerned that this is just a response to pressure from the .NET camp by adopting one of the slimiest mutants lurking in the MS can of worms. Annotations solve a problem which could have been solved better by adding a little syntactic sugar to truly support bean attributes. Why not just remove the need for all of that verbose getX/setX stuff with a "writable" keyword to be used in the variable declaration. The compiler could even generate default accessors and mutators if they aren't otherwise declared in the class for compatibilities sake.
All in all, I think this addition to the language is useful, but ripe for abuse. For instance, I'm certain this will encourage even more java<->XML nastiness. ;)

Attribute-Oriented Programming with Java 1.5 | Lambda the Ultimate

(disclaimer: I work for Sun, but my opinions don't even remotely represent those of Sun Microsystems Inc.)

Continuations in Java.

A great idea from Stephan Michels and Torsten Curdt. They've added continuations to Java though a custom class loader. ContinuationClassLoader.java - view - 1.6

/**
* The classloader breakes the methods of the classes into pieces and
* add intercepting code to suspend the execution of the method.
*
* This code is based on the original idea of the BRAKES project.
* (http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/~eddy/BRAKES/brakes.html).
*
* @author Stephan Michels
* @author Torsten Curdt
* @version CVS $Id: ContinuationClassLoader.java,v 1.6 2004/04/06 07:40:48 antonio Exp $
*/

To understand what a continuation does, imagine a "save game" for any application, where you can freeze a moment in the program execution store it and jump back to it at any time. (Yes that can cause problems with side-effects like database updates and device initialization, but it can make a website much more reliable).
For more on continuations look here.

Memories of Housecalls Past

Plumber->Electriction->Digitician

As early as the 1990s, a few pioneers made house calls. But the business has surged as word travels among neighbors, friends, co-workers, and professional networks. A conservative estimate of at-home service puts it at a $7 billion market -- and growing. Prices for home visits range from $30 to $125 an hour. The Judge family paid nearly $300 to fix an $800 computer.

In 1993-94 I was part of a small consulting firm that worked with corporate customers during the day and moonlighted doing housecalls for home users and small business at night. Ten years later, people are still using an Operating System that costs them over and over again. When will the madness stop.

Posted a CVS Merge Script

Managing release numbers and merges in CVS requires quite a bit of repetetive, fault-prone work. Sometime back, I scripted some of the more predictable things I ran into for a release strategy which included releases to "QA" in a branch for patches and bug fixes while new development continued in another branch (or more than one branch for multiple lines of development). The script also calls a build script and scrapes the results for failed compiles, scans CVS output for files that need to merge and various other things I've managed to screw-up manually at one point or another. I'm posting it for comments, so try it out and I will appreciate any feedback you might have if you see something that should be fixed or improved. Here's the script (perl) and a walk-through of some of the merge and release process. (These are the examples I mentioned in the presentation in Austin Feb. 3). If there is enough interest, I might post this to Freshmeat for the amusement of others.