ItsAllEasy

I was listenting to a podcast and they started playing this song “bacteria”…I liked it and had to find it. I did (Bacteria is near the bottom).

It’s by Jonathan Coulton. He says about it: “The vocal portions of this song were sampled from a Kentucky Fried Chicken training tape.”

He’s a blogger too. Check out Bully Punches you in the mouth.

This is exactly what I was looking for. Great tips.

Update: I setup mine to do this…works like a charm. I love it.

I’m not normally political…but I like the idea of this site:
Welcome to Plogress.com!

This is good. I’m almost certain it is what most web-app teams work toward. From app to app, its good to have a set standard for your overall page layouts. I wonder if this will kind of kick off a defacto standard for basic building-block classes and ids for sites and apps? Just a basic set of common ones. I think that could be useful…may even make the idea of the ‘use my own stylesheet’ option in browsers actually interesting.
Content with Style: A CSS Framework

So, I think its a great start, but I also think think it can be extended for web-apps to include classes for common widgets like date-pickers.

Just from the hostname, I knew this is my kind of site…check out his cheat sheets.
MySQL Cheat Sheet - PHP - ILoveJackDaniels.com

There is an article on slashdot about OSS Bounties. It got me thinking…and not directly about what the article/comments were talking about. I really saw it as a neat idea/addition to an existing feature request and donation system.

If your project already takes donations and has feature requests, you could just ask (as part of donation) which feature the donator is interested in (have a ‘no particular feature option too). Then, on your feature request page, provide an additional ‘donate’ link on each feature. There would really be no expectation of “If I pay for it…it should be implemented”. It would just be a way for the users to suggesting direction for the project while donating.

Will this bring a lot more money to an OSS Project, doubtful. I still like the idea.

This also made me think of the Programming Language stock trading game (btw…took me forever to track that down again…tons of google/slashdot/bloglines searches…google finally won with a search for: programming language market…first result found). It would be interesting to do something similar for OSS…I dunno what the payoff would be…just a fun way to see where your donations are going and seeing where other oss projects are.

I was reading this article about HiveMind and decided to see if there was an article that did a rundown comparison of the IoC containers…I ran across this one.

I really quite liked this 1986 speech by Richard Hamming:
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

…as far as I know, each of you has one life to live. Even if you believe in reincarnation it doesn’t do you any good from one life to the next! Why shouldn’t you do significant things in this one life, however you define significant?

Also:

What Bode was saying was this: “Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.” Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest.

I know this isn’t tech…but I like it: http://postsecret.blogspot.com/

I just read the sample chapter for Raible’s Spring Live book on SourceBeat. It was decent. Here are my thoughts.
Liked:

• The example he is working through is done Tests-first (TDD).
• The explaination/example of using the tomcat targets in ant was good…I’d never done that before (though I knew it was out there) so it was good to see them in action.
• The example of MockStrutsTestCase…I definitely need to try this out (actually Matt asked me at one point if the AutowiringStrutsRequestProcessor would work with it…need to look closer).

Didn’t Like:

• Doesn’t use the spring base test cases to autowire the actions…but I can understand the need for simplicity in this chapter.
• Has comments telling the user to “Organize Imports” I would expect the source example to be complete and then include a hint to do an organize imports.
• His business delegate is “Web Friendly”…basically it takes Strings and converts where it shouldn’t. Not major…just don’t like the feel of it.
• I think he should have split the adding transactions via Spring AOP stuff to a different section. Seems like too much is being crammed into one section.
• Made his form request scope…then explaination of it was confusing.
• Step 8 on page 45 says you need to also list the applicationContext.xml…I don’t think this is true (I’ll have to check) I think the web app context is automatically set as the parent context.
• It was a bit long for a “quick start” tutorial.

All-in-all, it was a good read. I’d like to read the rest, but not sure about 30 a year…

UPDATE: Just read through the ref-guide and found that the reason for specifying the appcontext in the plugin is to get around a problem with MockStrutsTestCase…namely, that it will not load the listeners (and hence the parent spring context). I guess this won’t cause problems when running this way from an actual container? Will there be 2 instances of all the beans in applicationContext.xml at 2 different levels in the context tree?