Programming and
publishing news and comment
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Author of Radio UserLand Kick
Start
Tuesday, December 02, 2003
Self-promotion: Stephen Ibaraki has published the transcript of an interview
with me regarding Radio
UserLand Kick Start, weblogging, and Java. One question will be of particular interest to Radio users: "Could
you provide five tips from the book?" Tip number 1 is one that I make
often when talking about the software: Turn on nightly
backups. 11:58:41 AM | comments
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In the Java
Specialists newsletter, Heinz Kabutz and Carl Smotricz have devised a way
to write BASIC programs in Java with a series of case
statements for line numbering, a GotoException,
and horrendous formatting: Carl told me that it was possible to program GOTO
in Java. Naturally I was curious, so I asked Carl to give me an example. ...
What makes me scared is that the code runs and actually works. 10:57:52 AM | comments
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Monday, December 01, 2003
Conferenza publisher Shel Israel writes that anti-Microsoft sentiments
are obscuring the considerable
amount of good that the Gates Foundation charity is accomplishing in the
battle against malaria, AIDS and other diseases: A century from now, the Gates Foundation will be known for the human
suffering it battled and hopefully defeated. Some of today's most insidious
killers may be as non-existent as yesterday's botulism or bubonic plague. The Gates Foundation, with an endowment of $25 billion, is the largest philanthropy
in the world. One of the reasons it is viewed cynically is because some
of its work appears to have strategic implications for Microsoft, such as the
foundation's ownership of five percent of the broadband communications
provider Cox
Communications and the placement of 40,000 computers running Microsoft
software in low-income and remote libraries in the U.S. However, I'll certainly agree that the good works his fortune makes
possible will outlive the backlash against Microsoft's monopolistic business
practices, especially if his money produces dramatic successes such as a cure for malaria.
6:08:25 PM | comments
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In an interview
about Java programming, author Bruce Eckel uses a term several times
without explanation: POJO. The same acronym is popular on the Apache Geronimo developer's list, so I
looked for a definition. It stands for "plain old Java objects,"
simple classes that are implemented as an alternative to Enterprise Java
Beans and other complex methodologies. It appears to have been coined by Martin Fowler in the book Patterns of
Enterprise Application Architecture: The alternative is to use normal Java objects. This always causes surprise
because it's amazing how many people think you can't run regular Java objects
in an EJB container. I've come to the conclusion that people forget about
regular Java objects because they haven't got a fancy name -- so I've given
them one: POJOs (Plain Old Java Objects). A POJO domain model is easier to
put together, quick to build, can run and test outside of an EJB container,
and isn't dependent on EJB (maybe that's why EJB vendors don't encourage you
to use them). 10:18:12 AM | comments
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Wednesday, November 26, 2003
The Foo Fighters remake of Prince's "Darling Nikki," released as a
B-side gag, has become
an unexpected hit. It's hard to believe now, but the song was once so scandalous it inspired
the movement to put warning records on albums: The world might have been a slightly different place if an 11-year-old
Karenna Gore could have prevented her mother from listening to her Purple
Rain cassette: "Darling Nikki" has the near-mythological honor
in pop trivia of being the song that compelled Tipper Gore to co-found the
Parents Music Resource Center with other congressional wives, who in 1985
successfully pressured big record companies to create a warning-label system
for pop records. The song's included on the Foo Fighters' Everywhere
But Home concert DVD released Tuesday. 11:44:05 AM | comments
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Monday, November 24, 2003
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Copyright 2003
Rogers Cadenhead. Last updated 12/2/2003; 12:04:22 PM.