Blogger has just launched a new plug-in for Word that allows you to write your Blog articles in Word and upload it. _All *the *_usual **stuff that you’d expect. Tables and images are not supported.
You’ll find the download page at http://buzz.blogger.com/bloggerforword.html.
I have quietly admired Kathy Sierra’s approach to teaching for some time now and own all the Head First books (including the 2nd Edition of Head First Java). Kathy and her colleagues launched a Web Log Creating Passionate Users in December of last year. Today’s article Ten Tips for New Trainers/Teachers might be a good lauch point for me to learn about and apply some of these ideas in my own teaching. It’s all rather opportune as I’m just starting out on a new course called “Web Applications Technology” and the first lecture (old style) is already written.
I have played with Maven on and off for a while but as documentation is a bit patchy, I’ve been eagerly awaiting the “Maven Book” by Vincent Massol and Tim O’Brien’s (Maven: A Developer’s Notebook, O’Reilly, 2005) since it was announced some time ago. It’s been on pre-order at Amazon.co.uk for months but it finally arrived yesterday. I worked through chapter 1 in about two hours. Chapter 3 looks particularly interesting. The books comes with some interesting extras such as
The Maven Book Wiki www.mavenbook.org
Subversion repository for the code www.mavenbook.org/svn/mdn/code
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p>If you’re intrigued, there’s a copy of Chapter 1: Maven Jump Start online. My only concern is how much of the book will still be valid when Maven 2 finally gets out of beta.
The incredible testimony to the US Senate by George Galloway. Needs to be recorded here for posterity.
I’ve just completed a couple of lab report marking sessions and saw the usual mistakes being made. By the usual process of serendipity I noted Writing Between the Lines from Andy Hunt (pragmatic programmer) which is well worth directing my students to. Here’s a nice pithy quote that I could see myself adding to the red-ink comments that I typically add to a returned report:
Remember that writing is a conversation. […] Explain it to me like I’m sitting right here with a confused look on my face. Odds are that I am.
Note to self, latest version of Knoppix is 3.8.1. If I have time, project this (long) weekend, is to install Knoppix on our old home PC. I have the version that comes with Knoppix Hacks but might want to upgrade.
My blog template seems to have gottem messed up. I’ve had to save my sidebar settings to start a new look. I was getting bored anyway!
There’s some weird and wonderful stuff out there. Here was map I created at http://www.world66.com/myworld66 of the places I’ve visited in the world so far (site and image both gone from the internet!) It was a little misleading because I’ve only been to Georgia, Florida, Arizona and California in the States and New South Wales (well actually only Sydney) in Australia. Still, it’s a bit of a giggle.
I got my hands dirty trying to fix a bug in Megg last week. My main motivation, for what turned out to be a long weekend’s work, was a desire to use Mike Clark’s pragmatic automation template announced back in July last year.
./templates/pragouto-template../pragauto-template.Intrigued, I uploaded the latest HEAD version from the CVS repository at sourceforge. The problem became even more intriging when I ran “ant test” on my new sandbox copy and it failed!
I dug deeper and found that the test failed because megg was looking for the provided java templates directory at./templates/java but failing to load ./java/megg.xml (not ./templates/java/megg.xml!) when later attempting to parse the megg properties.
When attempting to load a directory in the local folder ./java, megg would fail wto find template files in ./templates/java.
Templates would be loaded fine from the templates collection distributed in the Jar file (or added by me), which is why I assume the problem has not been noticed before.
I have attempted a fix to local file handling whereby megg now tries ./java then ./templates/java then $HOME/.megg/java and finally $HOME/.megg/templates/java before resorting to the jar file. If fact, my added code can actually find files at any path prefix, although I haven’t yet added that feature to the CLI (e.g. as an option -t <em>templates_dir</em>).
I made my changes by creating a new class to represent the TemplatesDirectory which also allows the code for handling local file templates to be somewhat simpler. I also took the opportunity to use commons-io to make file copy a bit more transparent and the commons-io groups’ best practices advice on using java.io.File object rather than strings to manipulate file names.
I haven’t yet tested the option to download from a URL (which didn’t work when I tried it before my changes). It’s next on my to-do list. However, I have invited Megg’s developer (Jeremy Rayner) to have a look and possibly merge my changes into a test branch for review. Just need to find out how to generate a patch file from CVS manual!
It was nice to be busy!
Just watched this Screencast from Jon Udell on the power of client-side scripting and web services. It it Jon demonstrates a little bookmarklet that takes an ISBN from a page (demo works with Amazon) and looks the book up in a library. Jon’s blog has a page where you can create your own bookmarklet for various library catalogue systems so I created one for Swansea University. Here’s it is:
javascript:var%20re=/([/-]|is[bs]n=)(d{7,9}[dX])/i;if(re.test(location.href)==true){var%20isbn=RegExp.$2;
void(win=window.open('http://voyager.swan.ac.uk'+'/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?SAB1='+isbn+'&BOOL1=all%20of%20
these&FLD1=ISBN%20(ISBN)&DB=local&CNT=25','LibraryLookup','scrollbars=1,resizable=1,location=1,
width=575,height=500'))}
To use this, copy it into notepad and remove the newlines, then just drag the bookmarklet to the browser toolbar. Now when you visit Amazon and see a book you’d like, click on the bookmark and a pop-up window will show you if it’s in the library. Cool!
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p>Jon takes this further further by using a Firefox plugin called Greasemonkey which allows its user to add bits of DHTML (“user scripts”) to any webpage to change its behavior. Jon’s greasemonkey script allows the Amazon web page to be changed on the fly to show if the book is in the library and if it’s out, when it’s due back! Now that’s cool!