Nice suggestion for us code monkeys: Programming Fonts. I'm giving Andale Mono a try now. It indeed looks neater than Courier New.

...will create the weirdest things.

Via Erik: JFaceDbc. Have a look at your DB from within Eclipse. Neat. And pragmatically-programming too:

Use a Single Editor Well.
The editor should be an extension of your hand; make sure your editor is configurable, extensible, and programmable.

Ever had to get a hold of the contents of an InputStream as a String? Or as an OutputStream? Or did you ever have to any other I/O conversion? IOUtil (Avalon Framework and Phoenix) might interest you very much then. Download it from Apache's site.

Yesterday, I got me a fresh CVS copy of Cocoon 2.1, you know, just for fun. Since I haven't used Cocoon at work for quite some time now (hmm, almost 2 years I guess), I've only glanced at it once in a while. I'm still lurking on cocoon-dev though.

The first thing that hit me: 2 years ago, cocoon.war was already a healthy 6-8 MB. Now it has become 35 MB. Whoa! Would that mean we get 6 times the functionality?

Further on, the build went smoothly this time. Back in the days, you had to dig through some README.TXT and INSTALL.TXT to find the right command (something along the way of ant -Dbuild.webapps=xxx install, not exactly intuitive). Now a ant war did the job perfectly. It got my PC busy for 25 minutes, but without a hitch. I hope there is a shortcut to compile while developing on the codebase, because I can't imagine coding with such a large turn-around time.

My last pet peeve: no proxy support. Somewhere in the samples, there is an "aggregator" which fetches some RSS feeds (I think) to display. However, the HTTP connection times out, which makes me think that it doesn't go through the proxy. And I haven't found a clean way to get through, either.

Anyway, the demos looked spiffy, and there was lots of them.

Scary how much you miss though when only looking at the comments, and not at the code: I thought blocks were still a work-in-progress, but it seems they have been implemented already. Marc's apples are in there too. I'll certainly have to look closer at these.

Nice to see things have evolved so quick. If the control flow is now stabilized, maybe I can have a try at introducing Cocoon at the workplace (Koen, are you reading this?)

Update:Thanks to Bertrand's comment, I got the proxy working. I was trying to use -Dhttp.proxy and -Dhttp.port, as I found somewhere, but it has to be -DproxyHost and -DproxyPort. Thanks Bertrand!

I'm sure quite a few of you have already seen this: Hibernate Joins JBoss Group. I'm not sure yet what to make of it. It's a great opportunity for Gavin, as he will be able to spend more time on developing Hibernate. On the other hand, tight Hibernate-JBoss coupling (forcing you to use JBoss if you want Hibernate) is not an impossible scenario either. But Bill Burke seems to be very defending about this in the comments: "There will be no lock-in, because it gives no competitional advantage, on the contrary". A point that makes sense.

Anyway, future will tell. All your designs are coupled loosely enough so you're not dependent on your persistency layer, right?

Vincent sends me to yet another personality test. I came out "INTP", which is the architect. That sounds fairly right. Another description is here.

Just to tell you "If you think I'm arrogant, so be it, it's my nature. At least it's not vanity."

Since I've lately complained about my envy for people who know how to create something that doesn't make you sick, and since it actually has been quite a long time since I've tried to learn something brand new (to me), I've just ordered Designing With Web Standards. Recommended by Koen.

Knowledge like this won't stop me from making you puke at my design, but at least I'll make you puke according to web standards...

This article, and the one it links to, are a nice read. Frameworks are indeed often hard to learn, and you're tempted to just fork them into your own codebase. This gets rid of "how can I do that in the most general way, so that it will work on a J2EE server as well as a mobile phone". But it brings the burden of keeping up with the interesting extensions/bug fixes/... that are written on the framework. Which brings us to the final question: "Can you really let it go?" Probably not. You don't abandon your child. But at least, Martin Fowler now grants us his permission to write less-than-ideal software. Which we were doing anyways.

Does this increment my Java Idiot Score"?

Start here.

In need of a new design for your site? Open Source Web Design seems like a good place to start.

Use different Quote Level Colors in Mozilla Thunderbird. Too cool. It's nice to live on the bleeding edge.

Always living on the bleeding edge: giving thunderbird 0.2 a spin. Looking good, so far.

Fun stuff to give a spin in my spurious free time: Access USB via Java.

Well, there you are, blogging, sharing your view on Life, the Universe, and Everything, and you see you've got quite a few hits (more than you expected when you started, anyway), and thus, you are content. You rant a bit about your job, but only because it interests you. After all, it is the thing you wanted to do since you were a kid. You rant a bit about politics, but only because it is "en vogue" to do so, because frankly, you're pretty content with the current Powers that Be. You rant a bit about your wife and kid, but only because you love them so much.

Overall, you're pretty satisfied. You write, you got read.

And then, you get "new comment added" notifications that read like

Pls send me the most recent Java Interview Questions Thanks.

On a blog entry that rants about the stupidity of searching for interview questions on the net. And you wonder how much people actually read.

I've been thinking about putting a "Java Interview Question" guide together, available for only €100. I would've been a rich man by now.