The things Users say…: Installment 1

Got a user requested system amendment recently.

You got to fear an amendment that starts

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1. Introduction.

Contrary to policy…
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It’s a worry! Only got one of these stories at the moment, but I’m going to start numbering them. I’m sure the next one wont be long! Think I’ll start measuring Mean Time Between Worrying Statements (MTBWS).


Gnoll

Tune in next week for another adventure of GNOLLS IN S-P-A-C-C-E!

Struts: the King is Dead, long live the King!

Earlier in the year, just after JavaOne, I attended a CJUG meeting. The speaker, an Enterprise Architect for a federal government body, gave a general overview of JavaOne.

One of the point he made was that Struts (among others) was becoming ‘functionally stable’. That active development was moving to newer frameworks.

Well this trend has been confirmed by this post at Simple Thoughts

Merging Struts with Webwork2 does not surprise me. I always found WebWork easier to install and configure, while Struts has a big user base.

Gnoll

Open Power

At times over the last year or so, I’ve read about projects to produce open source software for spacecraft and satellites. Stuff like this and this .

Last Thursday I went to the monthly meeting of the Canberra Linux Users Group. The presentation/demonstrations on the night were about MythTV. This project has two major software components, a frontend and a backend. The way I understand it, the backend has the smarts to drive and capture images from multiple heterogeneous TV tuner cards.

Yesterday, Doc Searls, in his weblog, talked about his current home fit-out and the related Open House article in the Linux Journal.

The final straw, was the news this morning about the Montreal Climate Summit

Over the last few months, an ideas has been loitering in my braaain. That ideas is the development of an open source software suite to monitor and control small scale power systems/stations. What I’m talking about is the Operation Centre software for these systems. The systems I have in mind scale from home alternate energy systems up to small scale commercial system. The kind that a farmer or small business might invest in to produce power, where the excess is dumped into the grid (for money).

What do people think of this as an open source project?


Open+Source Power+System Power+Station Open+Power

Pop-up adds on TV? (News and Ads as one: Part 2)

This Content is King post with comments was posted to Cameron Reilly’s blog today.

It’s about this story in ‘The Age’.

For me these ‘pasted billboards’ are to TV, what Pop-up ads are to the Internet! To pursue this analogy, the scrolling banner is the text ad of TV.

I beg that content produces use the scrolling banner and keep some visible border between the content and the promotional materials that pay for it.

Do we need to go to the US magazine solution, where full page ads (and multi page ads) must have a ‘this is paid advertisement’ at the top or bottom of their advertorials. How could you police this solution on the global Internet, anyway? This enforcement issue is why I used the word ‘beg’ in the previous paragraph.

Is 'News and Add as one', the future?


I must get around to that RSS to text to voice hack sometime!


Cameron+Reilly News+Ads Content+King Pasted+Billboard Scrolling+Banner

News and Ads as one.

Had the idiot box on while I got ready for work this morning, again!

I note that in one of the human interest stories they ran, they 'painted' the shows logo into the interview. I’m not talking rolling banners here.

It was an interview with Terry Vo, the kid that lost two hands and a foot, last March in Perth.

Anyway, the background for the interview was a couple McMansions. They 'painted' the logo onto the front of one of the houses, over the front door. It was well done. It was behind the head of the interviewee (and partly obscured) and looked like a large shop sign.

So much for ‘pictures never lie’.

Ads News Pictures Never Lie

Is this really News, I think NOT!

Had the idiot box on while I got ready for work this morning!

I note that in the top of the hour ‘News bulletin’, before the sport, they 'reported' the winner of Australian Idol. Since when is this classed as News?

To think, this is going to count as local content and not as ad time!

One of these day I’m going to rig up a RSS to text to voice hack! One of these days…

voice hack news Australian Idol

Not a good weekend

Sometime between Friday evening and Sunday morning, someone broke into my car…

And stole the battery!


The bastards!

Is SBS a MSM organization?

Just been reading the Public Journalism Network blog site.

One recent entry is ‘Why People of Color Don't Trust the News Media’. For me, this poses the question “Is SBS a MSM org or not?’

It’s an ethnic broadcaster, in that is includes non English language programming etc.

But there are three aspects that scream MSM to me:

1. It does not specialize in a specific language group
2. It’s a federal government ‘business entity’,
3. with big business ads.

What do people think?

Getting content into Google

Tired of waiting to be web crawled by Google, try this

http://base.google.com/base/default

My big question is:

How do they stop spammers submitting spam?


Tune in next week for another adventure of GNOLLS IN S-P-A-C-C-E!

Noon Friday.

All the presentation work is finshed.

Just the last big exercise to do!

We found no big holes in my knowleadge. But its been a while since I last played with threads, networking (expect FTP in Jakarata Commons) and GUI classes stuff. All my recent UI work has been using framework for web interfaces, stuff like Spring & WebWork.

Time to hit the books and get that certification!

Anyone need a Java programmer in Brisbane or Melbourne?


Tune in next week for another adventure of GNOLLS IN S-P-A-C-C-E!

Start of Day 4

About to begin the 4th day of my basic Java course.

Over the last 2 days, it's still been filling small holes in my basic Java knowleadge. Also found out about a few things/classes new to version 1.5, particularly Generics.

W'll see what today brings.


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Filling Holes

Just about to start the second day of the SUNs Java(TM) Programming Language cource (SL-275). Day 1 was language basics. So, as a self-taught java programmer, I knew most of it, but we did fill a few small hole.

So, if this cource is going to be of any value, we had better fill some bigger holes, later on!

But, when it comes down to it, it's resume build. I know the language (I think), but no commerial experence, so can't put it on the resume.

Time to start, today.


Tune in next week for another adventure of GNOLLS IN S-P-A-C-C-E!