These are the articles I read while doing today’s Bloglines trawl that I thought worthy of note.
A long held artical of faith in the Java world is that Java is a Single Language solution. It’s the biggest differentiator between .NET and Java, for example. A summit was held at Sun HQ (reported by Tim Bray) [thanks to dion on TECH for the link] in which it is clear that Sun is interested in other languages that could run on the JVM. The obvious ones are Jython and Groovy, but present was Larry Wall (of Perl fame) and Guido van Rossum (of Python). An interesting topic to watch, particularly as dynamic languages features in my Software Applications course. I’ve added Tim Bray’s web log to my Blogger account.
Jon Udell has just published an inspirational column in his “Prime Time Hypermedia” series on O’Relly.net. Called Software Movies, Jon shows how you can make much more immediate, high-impact, demos using video capture than is possible with text and images. He demonstrates this with a great example of how he used Windows Media Encoder (WME … a free download from MicroSoft) to capture a video demo of using xpath to make queries on his blog. (The video of WME was itself created using a commercial screen video capture system called Camtasia Studio (from the same people who make SnagIt). I’ve downloaded WME myself and an feeling inspired to do something similar for my courses, and will do, as soon as I have a decent microphone!
This is something that I always forget how to do. Here is the recipe adapted from Linux Server Hacks.
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This created two files, ~/.ssh/id_rsa and ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.
5. Then copy the key pair to the host you want to login to
$ ssh -l userserver "mkdir .ssh; chmod 0700 .ssh"*
$ scp .ssh/id_rsa.pub *user@server:.ssh/authorized_keys2 6. Now you can login using
$ ssh -l eechrisserver**
and you don’t need a password. Exchange of public keys authenticates you.
Chapter 2 of Jennifer Versperman’s Essential CVS (O’Reilly): CVS Quickstart Guide is online. I used it for quickly setting up my CVS repository on eehope.swan.ac.uk. The best tutorial introduction to CVS is the in Pragmatic Version Control (thoroughly recommend).
I am grateful to Adrian Colyer who has just annnounced the imminent arrival of some flash demos of AspectJ in aAction and also the online availability of presentations (and interviews) made by himself and Rod Johnson at a recent meeting (AOP2004) of the BeJUG (Belgian Java User Group).
I am grateful to the author of the “You are number 6″ blog for pointing out two great sources of information on All Things Java Related. In future I’ll be asking Fred and Eric about a lot of things! Definately a couple of links for my course pages.
Found a couple of useful sites which I’ll use to get LaTeX working with XEmacs. Using XEmacs to edit LaTeX files and Sridhar Lavu – LaTeX on Windows.
Came across this survey of Screen Presentation Tools by Michael Wiedmann whilest looking for ways to do lecture slides/notes in LaTeX. I was directed to that page by blog entry LaTeX beamer on the but she’s a girl… blog by way of a Google Search for LaTeX beamer. This was after finding a reference to the LaTeX beamer package (a similar package to Prosper) in New Beamer from Kai von Fietel’s Geek Notes2. I found Kai’s quote by Googling LaTeX+slides+handouts+notes.
Another result of the LaTeX beamer search was the google directory page Computers>Software>Typesetting>TeX>LaTeX>Macros> which has links to other useful tools.
I liked Together for Java. Before it was bought by Borland, Together was available to academic institutions for free. I used it in my teaching. It had some of the best looking diagrams, could round-trip Java code, and auto-create sequence diagrams. All great stuff when you’re in the business of teaching Modeling and Java to beginning programmers. When Borland bought Together, the free academic licensing deals dissappeared also. Last year I had to rewrite my UML tutorials for Rational Rose (available for free for academic use from IBM) which is far less friendly. In fact most of my students preferred Poseidon Community Edition! Now Borland have released a Community Edition of Together (announced in a news article on the theServerSide.com. I’m downloading it (60 MBytes) now to give it a test drive. It has the usual licensing requirements as JBuilder and Delphi, so it’s a bit awkward for student use (they need an Internet connection to install it), but even if the code syncronization is gone, the diagrams should still be useful.
In the follow-ups to the TSS announcement, violet (already blogged here) was mentioned as were JUDE and OpenSource reverse engineering tool ESS-Model were also mentioned. Both of these will be well worth a look I think, but UMLet (blogged here) still has a lot of appeal for student use (if only it did sequence diagrams!).