Mike Bowler

I'll be speaking at the Toronto Java Users Group next Tuesday on "An Introduction to Ruby for Java Programmers"

One of the advantages of learning a new language is being exposed to new idioms and new approaches to solving old problems. In this talk, we will introduce the Ruby language with particular focus on the idioms and concepts that are different from what is found in Java.

We will introduce concepts such as closures, continuations and meta programming. We will also examine powerful techniques that are practically impossible in Java due to its compile time binding of types.

No experience with Ruby is assumed although an understanding of Java would be helpful.

This talk is based on one I gave at Colorado Software Summit a couple of years ago although it's been updated and expanded.

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=9900617139
Toronto JUG: http://www.torontojug.org

One of the arguments that I've heard many times against using open source is that if things don't work properly, there's nobody to sue. Now I've always thought that this was a silly argument since companies hardly ever do sue their vendors but they've wanted the ability to do so.

So I thought this article at CIO magazine was interesting. Here's they're suggesting that you shouldn't sue even if you feel that the vendor deserves it. That sort of blows the whole "we need someone to sue" argument out of the water.

In recent conversations with IT executives I asked them if they had ever sued a software vendor and whether, in retrospect, it was a good thing to do.

Most had known about or participated, in some capacity, in the litigation process against some well-known and some not-so-well-known vendors. And what nearly all of them had decided was that suing your software vendor just wasn't a smart thing to do.

Here's an interesting video on the steps a letter passes through once it's dropped in the US Postal Service. The first 30 seconds or so are specific to Send Out Cards (which I resell) but then it's all about the Postal Service.

Completely out of character for me, I'd like to recommend a restaurant. I was out for dinner on Friday night with some of the organizers of the Agile 2008 conference that will be held in Toronto this summer. We met for dinner at a restaurant that I'd never heard of before and I was really impressed. The food was delicious and the service was excellent.

The restaurant is Adega at 33 Elm Street in Toronto, just minutes from the Eaton Centre.

Here's a really interesting idea for teaching kids about business. Real franchises for kids 5-15 where they can sell beeswax candles, organic soap, jewelry or apparel. The startup cost is low and it's a real business where the kids can make money.

Link from Niche Geek.

The slides for last night's talk at TSOT are here. The talk was a walkthrough of the code in Date.once()

Note that I've stripped out the background in order to make this a much smaller download. It doesn't look as pretty but it's a fraction of the original size.

I'll be speaking at the TSOT Ruby on Rails Project night tonight. Come on out and join us.

Event on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=10139329652
Announcement: http://correlations.wordpress.com/2008/04/02/tuesday-april-8th-tsot-ruby-on-rails-project-night/

HtmlUnit 2.0 has been released. Although I started this project back in 2002, I haven't been actively involved in a long time. I'm really pleased to see how far it's progressed since I let go.

Marc Guillemot writes:
Four months after release 1.14, I'm glad to announce the availability of release 2.0. Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this release and particularly to the committers Ahmed Ashour and Daniel Gredler.

From the large list of improvements contained in this release, following are particularly important:

• first release to target Java 5: HtmlUnit now makes intensive usage of Java 5 features, particularly of generics
• HtmlUnit DOM now implements org.w3c.dom making interaction with 3rd party libraries easier
• improved support for incorrect HTML code
• and as always a very large number of improvements in JS support with a major achievement: the GWT 1.4 tests now pass when simulating Firefox as well as when simulating Internet Explorer

This major release contains a few incompatible changes and can't be dropped as a replacement of HtmlUnit-1.14.

Have a look at the changelog for more details.

Changes: http://htmlunit.sourceforge.net/changes-report.html
Download: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=47038

ibiblio.org synchronization request: http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MAVENUPLOAD-2009

Page on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/HtmlUnit/10454838218

I see that the Mozilla Foundation is sponsoring the red panda exhibit at the Toronto Zoo. The red panda is, of course, also known as the firefox.

More pictures from the red panda exhibit here.

I was at a Send Out Cards (SOC) event in Mississauga on the weekend. In talking with other people, I was quite surprised how many people use primarily stock cards from the SOC catalog rather than custom cards.

For those who aren't familiar with SOC, you can send physical greeting cards from your computer that get printed and dropped in the mail from their location. I use it a LOT.

Granted, there are over 12,000 stock cards there so it's not hard to find something appropriate. The reason is surprised me is that not only are custom cards more personal, they're also a lot of fun to create. The SOC site makes it really easy to stick thought or speech bubbles on a photo you've uploaded so it's trivial to create something that's highly personalized.

I generally only send a stock card if I don't have an appropriate photo for the person I'm sending the card to. Even if I don't have a photo of my own, I've found quite a few appropriate photos from searching flickr (the only gotcha here is that you have to watch the licensing to see whether the photographer is ok with you using the pictures).

Based on what I saw on the weekend, I seem to be in the minority. I'd really like to know why most people seem to be sending stock cards. It really isn't that difficult to do one that's custom.