The blog has moved to a new location: www.freshblurbs.com

The catch is - IntelliJ IDEA does not really work on a PowerBook G4. Let me be more specific: it is so slow, it is useless for any practical use. Now, whoever's fault it is - that's the fact and it was really poisoning my PowerBook experience.

Since I am a Java hacker, most of the time, you get an idea how serious my clinical condition was getting.

Long story told short - I have been using IntelliJ on my new iMac Core Duo, for a while now, and I am delighted. Works flawlessly and gives an absolute best experience for Java development. And, oh, yeah - I think I have less of Split Personality, now :)

P.S. I would just suggest that you be careful with what plugins you install. There is some plugin that screws up IntelliJ on Mac. It happened several times to me and I had to wipe out (including preferences and application support stuff) IntelliJ to get it work, again. I was not able to hunt this plugin down. I had a whole bunch just installed, each time it happened. Just be careful. It's one of the cool plugins, apparently since I was tempted to install it, not once but several times. Yet, it is not one of the crucial ones, since I am very happy with the bunch I have right now (JBoss, SVN, CVS, Groovy plugins are all fine).

I did not use ANYTHING except iWeb. Just three average photos. All photo processing (color, reflection, border, size, shape, orientation etc) was done in iWeb. Also, pay attention that the collage is actually three images and iWeb did not merge them into one but preserved as three images.

Dude! Forget about Intel-powered Macs. iWeb is a far more important news :) It is a revolution in web design.

WoW

It came with JDK 1.4 default installation and I tried finding JDK 5 download, in vain. Just to check Apple Developer Connection site and find this scary message: "Java 2 Platform Standard Edition (J2SE) 5.0 Release 4 is based on JDK 1.5.0_06 and improves functionality of J2SE 5.0 on PowerPC-based Mac OS X Tiger systems. This release is not compatible with Intel-based Macintosh computers."

Not quite troo. A quick look in the usual place and voila - there is JDK 5 pre-installed! Just need to move the symbolic link.

This is the same as you needed in PPC Macs:
Go to /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions
rm CurrentJDK
ln -s 1.5 CurrentJDK

And there we go:
# java -version
java version "1.5.0_05"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.5.0_05-84)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.5.0_05-51, mixed mode)

Wohooooo!

HTML is layouted using divs and CSS, of course - a la Web 2.0.

Here is my quick attempt, for your tasting:
http://web.mac.com/inadarei/iWeb/Site/Welcome.html

iWeb is truly amazing. I would never believe creating such an editor was possible, given the limitations of HTML.

Apple keeps surprising. Oh my!

In his latest Blog/Podcast Tim Shadel shares his team's negative experience with JSF. I must admit, I NEVER liked Java ServerFaces. And not only for the reasons mentioned by Tim. Many complaints from Tim may be relevant to Tapestry as well. Yet, I like Tapestry. I think it is a niche framework but I have used it on some projects and do not regret. These projects were intranet, web-based applications, though. I don't think I would use Tapestry for web. I would not use Java ServerFaces at all, though.

Here are my two cents why I hate Java ServerFaces:

"Rocket Scientists" who forget about simplicity and tend to build overly "generalized" (bloated is a better word) theoretical models are doomed for failure.

JSF would have never made it, if big vendors did not support it so much. Sun went religious about JSF without any real, objective reason to support specification that nobody ever tried in real life. Usual problem of JSR: coming up with spec before the implementations (Oh, God!). This zealous support will help for a while. But, in the long run JSF has to fail and get replaced by something much simpler/elegant, in Java. Or else - serverside Java will fail with it and everybody will begin using RoR or whatever other crap will be out there at that time. Sad. I really do not like Ruby, as a language (no, I am not static typing fan, I love Python) and I think RoR is not that good, at all. I will miss a vast wealth of open-source Java libraries and frameworks, too.

So, repeat with me and memoiaze, before it is too late - Simplicity is the key!

Rickard Oberg (I think) once said that the value of a framework is not in what it allows but what it does not allow to do.

I think RubyOnRails proved that point very well. And I think, contrary to what Tim Shadel says in his Podcast (even though he has many valid points) the main problem of JSF is not what it does not allow but how much it allows and how bloated it has become because of it.

Renewable, bio fuel is not a new idea. It has been in development for long. What is new - is seeing it in mass production. GM has announced the new line of E85-based cars.

Important thing is that, it seems, this type of fuel has some muscle. Pay attention that GM cars are large SUVs, not like the tiny electric hybrid crap Toyota produces :)

It really looks like a breakthrough. Very excited.

I do not know what is the problem of Jakarta Feedparser. They have not had a binary download for a very long time and SVN URI on the site is wrong. Neverthless, it is an awesome tool. I just wish I did not have a headache of finding its proper SVN address each and every time I need to compile it.

Posting it here (until the next time they change it) to find easier, next time I need it, and to share with others that might need it:

http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/jakarta/commons/dormant/feedparser/trunk

How do you tell a marketing person from an engineer?

This is very nice and IMHO the professor was an asshole for giving no credit :) After all, it's his fault that he could not formulate question without ambiguity.

I have long been bitching about how slow TVs are adopting Internet. Just scarce teasers really does not fly. And, voila, here is a Net-based TV station: Mobuzz . Honestly, it's more like a video podcast, right now, but I like the fact, per se. I really want, ideally, all TVs to move to broadcasting on the Net as their primarily medium of delivery. It just makes sense. And to think about what TV stations could do with your personomies, if they were broadcasting online is incredible.

As for Mobuzz. It's kinda fun, nothing too serious. The anchor is quite hot  and cute. That's good. Her voice cracks periodically, though. Or she's having a permanent cold with caughing  She might want to work on that a little bit.

All in all - fun and nice. Cheers to Mobuzz

Do you know how many microseconds are there in a nanosecond? You thought it was 10^-3, eh? Heh, think twice and no, I have not gone nuts. At least, not yet. Read on.

More seriously, what am I ranting about, here? Time precision in Java, is the topic.

Today, I needed to profile a process which takes less than a millisecond (10^-3 seconds). Up to and including JDK 1.4 the precision of Java time used to be order of a millisecond and for anything more precise you were pointed to JNI, which is a nasty place to be pointed to, let me say. Fortunately enough JDK 5 has added System.nanoTime() method and Sun has honestly implemented it in its JDK. Thanks a lot to Sun, for that but - hold the excitement, for a second.

Does this method really give the precision of a nanosecond? Let's check it (using a tuned version of the code from Vladimir Roubtsov):

Following are the results of running this script on different platforms:
Windows: delta = 1265 nanoseconds
Linux: delta = 1015 nanoseconds

Let me, also, note that Windows machine was a 1.7GHz IBM ThinkPad laptop, whereas the Linux box is a dual-Xeon server. The results are quite close, to ignore any hardware and software differences and declare that:

There are approximately 1-1.3 microseconds in a nanosecond... at least, in Java ;-)

Pierre Wielezynski coined the term Personomies and explains what it means. I am a strong believer in Social Web and the personomies are, probably, were it all starts.

There are, already, many useful services (Bloglines and del.icio.us come to mind, immidiately) that touch different sides of a personomy. Yet, we are still to see what a full-fledged personomy looks like.

Exciting times it is, indeed, on the web.

See something familiar?
http://www.live.com/ and http://local.live.com/

If they wanted to copy Google, they should have used Google APIs. At least, it would be more compatible.

LOLz, Microsoft never changes, does it?