Entries from 2004-02-25 to 2004-04-29
Thu, 29 Apr. 04
Emacs Wiki Journal
CategoryEmacs
The code that builds this journal is now in my custody :-) Gary V. Vaughan does not use it any more and transfered code maintenance to me. emacs-wiki-journal.el will find its new home on my ProjectPage:emacswikijournal.
Mon, 19 Apr. 04
Java Code Generation
CategoryEmacs, CategoryJava
Today I published a new elisp package for the JDEE. It provides some additional code generation templates. Read about it here.
Boxes
CategoryEmacs
I have had plans to build a little package to handle the little
soapboxes on the right side of my website. Currently I have a
#right markup anchor on every page, which gets
translated to a div tag and the boxes follow
thereafter. I wanted to get rid of the anchor and wanted to be able
to write the boxes everywhere on the page.
My wish has been granted. I found exactly this package at Terry Patchers website. I will try out his tp-ew-boxes package soon.
Asia and Back
CategoryTravel
My girlfriend and me went to Asia. My last time in Asia was when I traveled India as a student in 1991. This time we did not come far. We went to Istanbul where my Tina had laser surgery on her eyes. A Laser operation is very cheap there, compared to the prices you have to pay in Germany. We stayed on the European side, but the clinic was on the Asian side. So we came only 5 km into Asia, and when we came back she had to wear glasses.
Istanbul is quite an impressive city. 20 million people live there. No grass. No trees. Only concrete. Kilometers of newly built blocks with flats. But also the old city. We only had time for the most important buildings like the Hagia Sofia and the Topkapi Palace, but there you could really breathe the history.
I saw some pictures of the landscape just outside the city, a Turkish biker posted in the forum of http://vstrom.info. They where quite nice and totally different from what I have seen. When I have a motorcycle again, Turkey would be worth a tour. Guess which model I have an eye on?
Wed, 10 Mar. 04
Containers and Registries
CategoryJava
For my favorite Java project, a persistent simulated world for autonomous and intelligent agents (they are quite stupid right now), I have been looking around on what basis to build it. It is not distributed right now, so Jini is probably overkill, but I wanted some foundation which gives me the benefits of a Service Orientated Architecture with the possibility to update parts of the world at runtime. I looked at several open source containers. There seems to be an ongoing war between the followers of PicoContainer and the worshipers of the Spring Framework, where the PicoContainer dudes are mainly concerned with the pureness of the Inversion of Control Pattern, whereas the Spring guys are trying to defeat them by throwing wagon loads of beans onto them.
I wasn't very impressed by both of them. The interesting ones where others. Very promising is HiveMind. The best ideas for configuration I have seen so far. With auto dependencies between services, automatic marshaling from configuration to Java objects and line precise error reporting. Module B can contribute to Module A's configuration. Very cool.
But HiveMind has one drawback. it is currently only meant to assemble an application. There is almost no life cycle support. A framework that does that right and also has been build with live updates in mind is the OSGi Service Platform. There are existing open source implementations at http://oscar-osgi.sf.net and http://www.knopflerfish.org. The specification and API are very elaborated, but IMO a little bit too concerned with backward compatibility. For example they are using the obsolete Dictionary class everywhere instead of the newer Map interface.
But overall OSGi makes the best impression. It just needs the neat configuration possibilities of HiveMind. Time to build a new service, a ServiceConfigurator.
Tue, 9 Mar. 04
Use EmacsWiki:PlannerMode for the Journal
CategoryEmacs
As I mentioned a few days ago, Sacha Chua suggested to use
EmacsWiki:PlannerMode
as a blog. I had a look at her new version. It really shines at the
ease of use. A quick remember-to-planner and you are
done. The cross linking from daily pages to plan pages is also
neat. And RSS syndication a really cool for simple static blog. I
will use EmacsWiki:PlannerMode
for my private Journal, to test it further, but for the public one
I'm still very comfortable with emacs-wiki-journal.el.
It looks better, even without icons :-)
Automatic Menus
CategoryEmacs
Not edible. These a for the website. At first I thought it was a
good idea to have links to the other pages on each wiki page. But I
found I never used them, I used a quick "C-c C-a" for the WikiIndex
instead. So I wrote some simple functions to generate the menus
automatically from a simple lisp form which defines the website
structure. See my emacs wiki
config if you are interested. The functions
oa-emacs-wiki-make-{primary,secondary}-menu are called
from the header include file.
Mon, 1 Mar. 04
The Journal's Code
CategoryEmacs
To maintain this journal I use a slightly altered version of
Gary V. Vaughan's emacs-wiki-journal.el. You can get
the modified
version from my elisp archive (source). Or get the
original
version.
I joined the EmacsWiki today
CategoryEmacs
Finally made my own user page at the EmacsWiki. You
will find it at EmacsWiki:OleArndt.
I also listed my site on the EmacsWiki:EmacsWikiMode
page. Almost immediately I got feedback about the journal. SachaChua
suggests the use of a EmacsWiki:PlannerMode
based blog. This system has advantages, I would automatically solve
the 'too long journal' problem, but it would publish the task list
as well. Is there a way to have a public and a private planner
project? I will look into the newest planner sources, just need to
emerge tla before.
Wed, 25 Feb. 04
Finalized Web Page Publishing System
CategoryEmacs
The wiki based web site is works quite well from the technical point of view. Now I need to fill the pages. There needs to be more content. This was the weak point of the old German website as well. I just didn't find enough time to update it regularly. This time it will work out better, I'm sure. The Emacs Wiki Mode makes it so easy to add new stuff, that the barrier should be lowered enormously.
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