Matt O’ Rama

Good looking Java web reference app

DSO Guy: Web 2.0 Scaled Out Reference App…

Well check out the Examinator Web Reference App. It’s goal is to demonstrate and document everything from “Build and test” to “Deployment” for a high scale, realistic, web application. It strives to be well written and as simple as possible while still being a good demonstration of best practices. It also strives to document all the relivant pieces so others can learn from it. This is quite a challenge and I’m sure dissagreement will exist on some of the choices. I think it’s an excellent start and the right set of goals.

I love real examples and this looks like great.

JavaFX Eclipse Plugin is available

JavaFX Eclipse Plugin is available – The Java Posse.

Good, I was looking for this to happen before I start playing with JavaFX.

10 Useful Techniques To Improve Your User Interface Designs | How-To | Smashing Magazine

10 Useful Techniques To Improve Your User Interface Designs | Smashing Magazine.

A bunch of good and easy-to-implement tips. Smashing Magazine does a great job so if you like this article, check out some of their other stuff.

Update: Here’s another good article from Smashing Magazine “Data Visualization: Modern Approaches” which includes a ton of cool infographics like this one:

Musicovery screenshot

Java 7 Announcements – Finally!

Java 7 Update from Mark Reinhold at Devoxx

That link has the full list of announcements of stuff that will be in Java 7. This isn’t everything but it’s a good list. Here’s my favorites:

What will be in

• Modularization – 294 and project Jigsaw

Cool.

• 292 – JVM Support for dynamic languages

Yay!

• Null dereference expressions – Null checks with ‘?’ syntax similar to Groovy… lettingn developers avoid a nest of null checks.

This is objectively awesome. Less code is a big win.

• Multi-catch – (yes!) allows a comma seperated list of disjunctive exception types in catch clause.

I second the (yes!). Less code again, is win.

What will not be in

• BigDecimal syntax

Grrr. This sucks. I’ve been working on a financial system for over a year and the BigDecimal syntax is insanely painful. I’m really not happy about this.

One of the commenters on this post questions the lack of mention for JSR310 which is a revamp of the Date/Time system. I’d love to see this go in and since there’s already a great implementation in use I hope it makes it. Dates are second in my list of complaints right behind BigDecimal in terms of API confusion.

In all, I’ll be excited to see how Java 7 evolves as it comes closer. It’s still a year away probably but it’ll include some nice changes.

Clay Shirky talk on the “cognitive surplus”

So how big is that surplus? If you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project—every page, every edit, every line of code, in every language Wikipedia exists in—that represents something like the cumulation of 98 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 98 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 98 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads.

Clay Shirky on the “cognitive surplus”.

Great stuff from Mr. Shirky. Well worth the time to watch.

Rands in Repose tshirts to support First Book

Rands in Repose bamboo tshirt – Supporting First Book!
One of my favorite bloggers, Rands, is giving 100% of the proceeds from his new tshirt to First Book, which helps give books to kids from low-income families. Like Rands, books are one of the most important things in my life and I’m more than happy to help give kids books. Please consider donating to First Book even if you don’t want one of the rad tshirts.

Google is smarter than your company

You may have heard about our [directory assistance] 1-800-GOOG-411 service. Whether or not free-411 is a profitable business unto itself is yet to be seen. I myself am somewhat skeptical. The reason we really did it is because we need to build a great speech-to-text model … that we can use for all kinds of different things, including video search.

Google shows Microsoft how to connect the dots « counternotions.

Man, Google is on the ball. One of my favorite quotes about them comes from Adam Bosworth (coincidentally one of the favorite CS thinkers). He said Google uses Bayesian algorithms the way other companies use the if statement. Even if you don’t know what those are, I’m sure you can guess that Bayesian algorithms are more complex than if. They’re working at such a higher level of abstraction than other companies it’s laughable. MS collects data from the web to make search better, Google collects data from the web to make everything they do better.

Gift Ideas For People Who Are Not Me

As everybody who might buy me presents has told me already, I’m very difficult to shop for since I tend to just eventually buy everything I might want for myself. So, here is a list of things I’m putting on my personal wish list I’ll be sending to Santa, disguised as a bunch of gift ideas for somebody very cool in your own life so I don’t seem like the kind of doofus who puts his christmas list on his blog.

Gift Ideas for Other People
Books (everything here should be findable on Amazon.com)
PulpHope
Heavy Liquid
Herbie Archives Vol. 1
Locas
Absolute Sandman
Scott Pilgrim Vols. 1 & 2
USA trilogy by John Dos Passos
Refactoring to Patterns by Joshua Kerievsky
Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks
Liberation by Brian Francis Slattery

Xbox 360 Games (again, on Amazon or a local game store)
Midnight Club: LA
Lego Batman

Blu-Ray movies
Godfather trilogy (the Coppola Restoration)
The Dark Knight