Estimated Complexity

Monday, November 13th, 2006

From the Apache Harmony bug tracker:

Unknown Novice Moderate Advanced Guru Needs James Gosling

Porting a Java Program to PHP

Sunday, November 12th, 2006

In Processing XML with Java, I used an example of plain text, XML-RPC, and SOAP clients that communicate with a Fibonacci number server I run here on www.elharo.com. Originally I wrote the servers in Java using the Java Servlet API. However, problems with Tomcat meant that the server went down every few months. When I moved this server from Linux to a Mac I didn’t even bother to reinstall Tomcat, and instead decided to port the servers to PHP 5. PHP has its own idiosyncrasies, but I use it for other things on this server (including this blog), and it didn’t seem worth keeping Tomcat running just for a few simple scripts.
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Ad-blocking Yahoo Groups

Friday, November 10th, 2006

Recently Yahoo Groups mailing lists seemed to all start sending out obnoxious image ads in various messages:

Yahoo Mail Ads

Needless to say, this makes me a lot less likely to subscribe to yahoogroups mailing lists. Most new lists are going to Google anyway. However there are several legacy groups I subscribe to that probably aren’t going to switch immediately.
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AWT on the Event Dispatch Thread?

Friday, November 10th, 2006

Last night I was teaching my Intro Java class about Swing windows, and specifically discussing the event dispatch thread. I dutifully warned everyone that all creation and update of Swing components had to happen on this thread, usually by calling SwingUtilties.invokeLater(). Then one of my students asked a question that stumped me:

Is the same true for AWT components?
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MacBook CoreDuo First Thoughts

Thursday, November 9th, 2006

The new CoreDuo MacBooks from Apple look cool. I’ll probably get one whenever my current 2002-era TiBook dies, though hopefully that won’t be soon. There are a couple of things I wonder about though.
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Banded Geese Continue

Friday, November 3rd, 2006

I spent a couple of hours in Prospect Park early this afternoon on a really nice, chilly Fall day. The lawns and leaf litter were practically covered in sparrows, and many other species were evident too. Overall I saw 36 total species including the first Hooded Mergansers of the season (about 10 on the lake). There are now over 120 Northern Shovelers on the lake, with more arriving on every north wind. I also managed to relocate all four banded geese I first spotted on Monday. They may stick around through the winter as well.