That was a surprise. My webspace provider was down for a few days! They had severe MySQL problems. However, now they are up again and I have the impression that my pages are delivered much faster. I hope, it stays like this.
Today, I ran into a UTF-8 problem again. That was, when I copied a text snippet from Thunderbird into an Eclipse properties file. Be careful, when you copy-and-paste text from your e-mail nto your Eclipse editor. It looks like the encoding of the pasted text
is superior to the encoding of the existing text. It changed the endcoding f the file several times. Solution:
Good luck!
Martin
Please Apple, offer non-glossy displays. I’d get a new Mac immediately!
I often get into a situation in where I search information I have seen somewhere in the Internet. It could be a blog entry, a comment in a forum, some business website etc. When I go to Google, I always get results based on statistics to which all users contribute. But I ususlly search for hits that I have already seen. The more often I have seen them, the higher the ranking should be. So, a good approach for my problem would be:
Do you know any service that provides this feature? Probably something from Google?
I considered to get a Mac this year. I was waiting for the new MacBook Pro models to be up to date. But Apple ships their producs with glossy displays only. Software developers all over the world discuss this issue and in general they agree that working with a glossy display 8-10 hours a day is a no-go.Now, developers have no choice, and this is a critical point.
Yesterday, I asked a collegue to put his notebook with a glossy display on my desk. My suspicion was correct. I was able to see myself, the lights, the room behind me and the window. I wasn’t able to see the whole display at once. I had to turn my head in order to see some parts of the display. I fear that with a glossy display, my eyes will ache after 4 hours.
In conclusion, I am very disappointed. I won’t buy a Mac with a glossy display. I keep my old Thinkpad which is slow, but at least a pleasure to work with.
The move from working on the desktop to working online has started long ago, but in a few cases I stick to old habbits. Of course, I cannot imagine to do Java development with Eclipse in an online enveronment where the platform and all the needed tools are on some server. This would slow down my daily work. But if you think of information such as web sites e-mails and RSS, then it makes sense to have it all somewhere on the web. Most of us use yahoo, gmx, or google for storing their E-Mails and have access from any host as long as they have online access.
Today, I started to move from reading my RSS feeds with Thunderbird to reading with Google Reader. The reasons are simple and yet decisive:
I did not look for long. I went to NetVibes and Google and checked the idea of having an entry page. But this was not accurate. So, my second choice was to look into Google’s Apps. And guess what, when it comes to productivity, they have quite often a solution for you. In my case, it was Google Reader. And while I am moving my feeds and copy the marked entries (takes some time), I am pretty happy about my step. Does anyone of my dear readers use Google Reader, too. What other alternatives can you suggest?
For a very long time, Google has been my primary search site/engine. The other day, however, I stumbled upon a few alternatives.
Cuil is a nice search site which encapsulates some semantic information. for instance, when you search for “Apache” then it will come up with hits distributed by category like “Software”, “Tribe”, or “Helicopter”. That’s quite useful and more accurate than Google’s hit list.
The other site I’d like to mention is SearchMe which is very fast. Results are presented a previews. That is, instead of clicking a link and going to the site, you can just browse WebSites more or less in CoverFlow. And the hits are also very accurate.
For a long time, I have been thinking about client technologies and could not decide which one to choose. There is the web community and the the desktop community. Both of them have good reason for or against a technology. My problem is that I am pushed towards a web/browser-based solution which is by far not my preferred interface. Browser-based solution do not provide the comfort of interactivity a desktop solution can provide. Also, it relies on an existing and fast web access. But these solutions are the trend, hence, it is hard to argue against those.
The other day I came across an article in a German Java magazine which discusses different client technologies and presents an alternative I am happy with.
Fat Client. Historically, before the rise of the web, Fat Clients were the predominant technology. Deployment was one of the crucial issues here. Due to their monolithical structure, Fat Client applications are difficult to maintain and therefore, development costs were rather high.
Thin/Zero Administration Clients. They came up with the popularity of the Internet and solved at least the problem of deployment and they were less expensive. But browser incompatibilities, long loading times, and the lack of integration into web-based application prevented a lasting success. Applets were representatives of this architecture.
Ultra Thin Clients. These clients were very easily to install but they lacked interactivity. At the time, DHTML and Java Script was strictly forbidden.
Rich Clients. Because customers are rather interested in user-friendly GUIs, Rich Clients became popular again. Romain Guy goes one step further and presents an approach called Filthy Rich Clients. The clear emphasis is on the UI – Clients should have a really awesome and modern look including shadows, transparency, animations, etc. as known from the Mac.
Thin-/Fat Browser Applications. Deployment was no high priority issue for Rich Clients, but when the discussion on installation facilities started, solutions like Java WebStart did not become as visible as one might expect. Instead, a step back to asynchronous browser applications followed which were able to work offline. However, Data, Logic and Gui were still tied together such that reuse of components involved some investment of time.
Smart Interactive Clients. Adam Bien proposes in the article to separate GUI and Logic in Desktop Clients as it is done in application-framework architectures. That is, the same logic can be reused in server as well as in client applications. The difference is the GUI which in case of Java Desktop could be Swing and in case of a application-frameworks could be some web framework. The logic layere is accessed through some persistence layer. The client doesn’t know anything about the layer, it only knows logic action he can perform.
Have a look at Google Maps and Google Earth. Both share a common logic but Google Earth provides rich interactivity actions which include far more effort to be developed in a web framework.
Concluding, if you start to implement a new application and do not know what kind of architecture to choose, think in layers and consider persistency. At some point, you’ll make a decision for a browser-based or a desktop-based application. All you need to do is to implement the GUI.
