As I am installing Gimp 2 on Mandrake, I have also had to install FreeType2, a Open Source font engine (used, amongst other things, by Nautilus in the Gnome environnement). The documentation on the FreeType project website is definitely a must-read (funly enough, that is what they say themselves about FreeType Glyph Conventions): it is very interesting and you end up learning lots of things about digital typography.
Anyway, I thought that was worth sharing; now back to Gimp…
Here we are: the long-awaited J2SE 5.0 (codenamed “Tiger”, which reminds me of the first Java book I ever read, Java in a Nutshell) is out with a ton of new things, ranging from boxing/unboxing to generic types. I certainly didn’t have the time for anything those last few months, so I guess I should try to look into it soon. Anyway, it was an excellent event to start blogging again; it has certainly been a long time!
In the cardboard box (“I am living in a box”) are also changes to Weblogism – which happens to deeply irritate me at the moment: new design, an efficient way to fight spam through bBlog, etc. An interesting thing is that some pages in Weblogism make new versions of Firefox mysteriously crash. If I have time, I will also look into that…
Whoever wrote that comment entitled “A bit too Bateman-like” is a plain genius. That’s just it. And he could have written exactly the same about the latest Bateman, Driving Big Davie, even though it is slightly better – probably because of the presence of Dan Starkey.
Oh. I remember. I wrote it… I guess that makes me a genius, then. :D
I’ve always known it, Odie /is/ the star. Not that machiavelic cat…
/Lorem Ipsum/ is one of my favourite sites when dealing with web designing or any typesetting work. It always comes handy when you need to fill a page with text without copying-pasting hundreds of times the same sentence (which gives an unnatural look to the page).
Here is a new one: lorem-ipsum.info. It gives the whole lot not only in pseudo-latin, but also in esperanto, volapük or other languages:
בהבנה העמוד פיסיקה אחר ב. אחד ב אינטרנט פוליטיקה שימושיים, בה לראות בידור מונחים ארץ. ארץ דת העיר ספינות ברוכים. קודמות מדויקים שמו את, רבה אל כדור בחירות תקשורת.
חפש את לציין מדינות תאולוגיה, שמות אגרונומיה עזה של, בקר או ערכים ובמתן מדינות. לוח מושגי משפטית דת. כדי על עמוד ופיתוחה, רבה לטיפול הקנאים דת, גם דפים הקהילה היסטוריה סדר. יוני סטטיסטיקה של ויש.
גם היא העזרה בקרבת התפתחות, תנך לערך אודות גם. את שתי הארץ למחיקה, ב מתן יידיש תאולוגיה אגרונומיה. זאת הרוח בהשחתה מבוקשים של. אם סדר אחרים הגרפים, צעד בה איטליה וכמקובל. בחירות האטמוספירה זאת אל. אספרנטו ופיתוחה את אנא.
בקר דת מוגש המדינה, אחרים שינויים גם לוח. בהבנה שימושי אם שכל. בה בדף מחליטה לטיפול, זאת מתוך בגרסה מיוחדים על. רבה ב אינו זכויות, לטיפול אירועים לוח בה, צעד העברית ואלקטרוניקה על. זכר משחקים סוציולוגיה בה.
I’ve found my new toy.
As I struggle every time I look for it, here is the command to recover an older version of a file:
cvs -Q update -p -r <em>revision filename </em>
Read in today’s Guardian wrap:
The Wrap’s appetite for stories involving highly dubious scientific formulae is today satiated by the Times, which gives us the maths behind the perfect football chant.
It goes like this: “[C x I/A] + P (S + H) +T squared.”
The formula, dreamt up – sorry, we mean painstakingly worked out – by Rogan Taylor, director of the football industries group at the University of Liverpool, is explained thus: Contribution multiplied by Intensity divided by Aggression, added to Performance, multiplied by the sum of Spontaneity and Humour, added to Topicality squared.
The Wrap’s initial attempts at singing a new anthem in the office this morning ended without much success, but not before colleagues had kindly suggested the addition of some more colourful terms to spice up the magic formula.
When I bought the French magazine called Login:, that was because of the big lizard on the cover. I’m fond of lizards, that’s probably why. But it’s another article which attracted my attention.
CodeWorker is a parsing tool as well as a source code generator. The article, pretty simple to understand, gave only a glimpse of the full power of the beast. I was really impressed. And the more I thought of it, the more I was considering using it on the project I am currently working on, for generating:
I only started this afternoon from examples and I did the first three items in the list above, generated from the SQL scripts creating the tables. Plainly speaking, the whole business tier is now virtually implemented. What was supposed to take at least 10 days only took less than 4 hours. Once the Struts classes are generated, there will be just a few blanks to fill in, a few methods to add and pages to decorate – still a dreadful jigsaw to my eyes, however. Simply amazing.
The applications of such a tool are just unlimited. Just think of a PHP website with Smarty; you write the scripts for handling CRUDs via Smarty with the proper CodeWorker templates as well as the SQL scripts – and you’re just ready to begin a project in excellent conditions.
Now, that being said, such a powerful tool has drawbacks: it is indeed very tough to master and it takes a while to get acquainted with the templating language. But all in all, it’s more than worth it. Certainly for me a brand new way of working; the fewer lines of code, the fewer mistakes I do and the better I feel.
Michael O’Leary must have been somewhat annoyed: 14% drop from last year’s €264-million profit. It must be said that the year has been particularly tough because of the war in Iraq and the increase of oil price. But apparently, everything’s going to get back to normal:
“We think there’s going to be an absolute bloodbath next winter and the lowest cost [airline] is going to win, and from our perspective we’re going to be the last man standing,” the company’s deputy chief executive, Michael Cawley, told Reuters.
How will they do that, you might wonder? Well, Michael O’Leary has the answer:
“Our view is that [fuel] prices will fall this winter, or next year,” he said, pointing out that the company would absorb higher oil prices by making cost savings in other areas.
Here’s my idea of what might happen: first of all, they might start to consider firing all those expensive pilots and hire instead learning-to-fly trainees, a bit like big football teams try some new young players on the pitch during great matches. They would therefore ensure that the next generation of pilots will be fit for flying. Now, that would be a bloodbath!
They should also decide to remove all those useless seats in the planes; they really take too much room – and are so uncomfortable that no one would notice… We could easily put an additional 20 people in a plane, couldn’t we?
Then, raising the price of coffee could be an excellent move forward. I mean… A cup is something like, what? €2.50? Well, 5.00 should do. Sterling, of course.
After all that, I can tell you, customers will rush out of the plane, bleeding beyond all expectations. And profits will be back to normal – a standard €250-€270 million.
I think I should therefore post onto it, what do you think?
Well, been busy those last few days – a bit of a change, isn’t it? I’m working on a J2EE project after I managed to escape the dreadful VAJ/Swing-like-but-not-quite-Swing project (ish). An interesting stuff where, at long last, I’ll be able to do clean things. Add some small lumps of Struts as well, just a cause, which I’m going to use in quite a decent manner – probably for the first time – and you get a projet where I might learn one thing or two.
I had prepared a post or two about Java Studio Creator, but didn’t have the time to quite deepen things. Since JSF is not that mature yet (sounds like a good euphemism), Struts was chosen on this project. But, time helping, next year, or the year after, we might decide to choose JSF with Java Studio Creator. But not just yet.