Breezy's Blog
Wednesday, March 30, 2005
[Programming] [DB]
Talk about timing. I started looking into assorted available database servers, for possible usage on my windows box, was looking at a recent versions of MySQL and found that slashdot has just mentioned the release in an article on it The new beta release providing many of the previously missing features (like transaction and stored procedures). Wide acceptances, impressive performance, and available supported language support (including Java and .NET) makes me lean towards MySQL. But I'm sure much of this functionality may exist in other products as well if you look hard enough.
The article also mentioned another available database, which I had heard of but was a little unsure of the details, called Firebird. An introduction was provided by linux journal. Firebird looks to be another popular open source database which is derrived from the open sourced Borland InterBase RDBMS.
There is of course always PostgreSQL which seems to get pushed alot by the Redhat folks.
IBMs CLoundscape is another possible product. There is even an article on usage with Eclipse. This is not to be confused with DB2 product lines.
There are a few comparisons and benchmarks , including MySQLs available on these products. Even some limitations or more specifically some gotchas are indicated.
Friday, March 25, 2005
[Programming]
While reading up some on
Kernel Traffic, I found an article related to Genetic algorithems and libraries used in the involved in the Linux Scheduler. This was mentioned previously on Slashdot.
This was kind of interesting work. more information is available on
Jake Moilanen's Linux Kernel Homepage
In thr process of reading some on this, I thought it worth wild to look for some additional info on GA and found a few of the following:
- The Genetic Algorithms Archive (hosted on the The Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence)
- Genetic Algorithms FAQ
- Introduction of Genetic Algorithms
- Wikipedia's Definition of Genetic Algorithm
Somewhere down the line, I would like to investigate usage of these types of algorithms in future development.
In the process, I also found some links related to Protein folding, which is not related, but I know Amy's friend David works with that and he might at some point find it useful but I can't find his email address.
Found an interesting pager related to Mind Tools which I found while looking for Problem Solving Tools which lead me to Problem Solving Techniques page.
This kind of makes me think of some of the stuff discussed in one of the books I am reading called The Thinkers' Toolkit: 14 Powerfil Techniques for Problem Solving..
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
[Programming]
While poking around, I found news of Google opening up a Google Code part of their site. It appears as though this will be were they will release to the public, coding related products, APIs, and related open source projects.
This might be worth keeping an eye on in the future.
[Programming]
While reading up on Slashdot, I found an interveiw with
Miguel de Icaza on Mono. Mono is an open source implementation of the C# language including the virtual machine and some corresponding libraries. This is similar to the .NET framework developed by Microsoft.
This got me thinking once again about the possibility of working with Eclipse and this. In the process, I found an Eclipse plugin to allow C# development from Improve Technologies. The plugin requires some additional plugins. It requires Solar Ecpilse which are a collection of useful web service development related products. I believe it will also be necessary to obtain a compiler and runtime environment for C# such as the Mono or MS's .NET Framework SDK.
There is also another nice article about just this type of scenario from Web Services Journal.
More to follow.
Tuesday, March 22, 2005
[Blog] Just looking around some more on Blogger.com and found they now have the option of advertising the blog via Weblogs.Com. I am going to try and enable it and see how well that works. I hope maybe to have some interest in the community for some of the technical related items on my site.
I seem to be having problems in that each time I reference weblogs, it asks for login but when I access from blogger.com, it allows me to visit it. Not sure what is causing this. Maybe some network issues.
After some additional poking around, it seems it may be related to one of my many pop-up blockers. I now have a pop-up blocker as part of Googles Toolbar, one as part of Yahoo's Toolbar, and I believe there may be some similar functionality in Internet Explorer. I also have something similar at home on my Norton tool.
This could be the road ahead with compeating pop-up blockers. What is a person to do?
Saturday, March 19, 2005
Yesterday, I finally started working some with the Eclipse-SRS plugin. My inital attempt was flawed in that I didn't make a SRS Project and as a result was unable to define the subordinate requirements related elements like Use Cases, Functional Requirements, Components, etc. This seemed to provide some possibilities. Although I'm still uncertain as to how the requirements could be transformed into a UML or related diagram but perhaps that can be addressed later. This tool seems to be more for tracking and reporting on it and less derrivative products (UML diagrams, code, etc). However, it is XML based so a case could be made that the XML requirements could be transformed accordingly.
This got me started looking some more on Requirement Management tools for Eclipse. In the process I found an interesting article from the Tigris folks which seems to focus on levels of requirement management and a Requirements Markup Language (an XML markup).
There was also another tool called Objecteering / UML which might be worth looking at but was unable to find any inital screen shots or anything but what is listed sounds promosing with UML requirements being included in the product.
Also found some sites with comparisons.
- Systems Guild
- Volere site (which has a nice list of requirements tools)
- INCOSE Requirements Management Tools survey (which I think I've mentioned previously)
More to come...
Friday, March 18, 2005
[Programming]
While investigating other things, I find an article indicating there was some concerns in the Java community around Java persistence standard as mentioned in the article on EWeek It seems to be all about Java Data Objects and the new
specs being suggested. This is based on a Java Specification Request (JSR-243).
The concept seems to revolve around the ability to have a standard data object model which can allow persistant data to be worked with using a common API. In effect, this means a file, a relational database, or an object oriented database all would use the same interfaces.
This may prove useful to investigate some more.
[Programming]
While reading around some more, I found mention of another technology called Aspect Oriented programming (AOP ). There is an Eclipse
Aspect J Projects.
It makes mention of the Aspect Oriented Software Development site as well. It seems to be originated out of Xerox PARC group. There is a FAQ available.
Put simply, this is a Java extension which allows for ease of improving modularity of complex systems. It includes error handling aspects, contract enforcement, distribution concerns, feature variations, context sensitive behavior, persistence, and testing. Each of these types of items tends to be contained in multiple modules preventing true object oriented encapsulation of all this. It "crosscuts the system's modularity".
This may prove an interesting technology to investigate some more at some time.
[Programming] Was reading up some on some Eclipse related news and noticed an artcle on Pollinate (newsgroup), which is derrived from Apache's Beehive. This is a foundation product provided by Bea to provide a better infrastructure for deving web services using J2EE and Struts technology. It also involves Instantiations.
Struts is a frame work based on the Model View Controller paradigm. It provies its own Controll portion and is able to work with other Model (like JDBC, EJB, Hibernate, iBATIS, and Object Relational Bridge) and View (like JavaServer Pages, JavaServer Standard Tag Library (JSTL) / Java Server Faces (JSF), Velocity Templates, XSLT, etc) portions.
All of this may prove beneficial in web services development. It seems to be an attempt to provide functionality similar to that found in MS Visual Studio development environment to ease Java development.
The artcle also talks about some of the JSR-175 (metadata annotations), JSR-181 (annotation driven programming mdel for web services)
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
I was starting to look into the possibility of working with some Application Servers. In the process I found a comparison over at The Server Side site.
One of my requirements was free. I have worked with an earlier version of Tomcat which worked well, but I was curious about the JBoss (
downloads). It makes mention of an Eclipse Plugin for JBoss that I may look at sometime. This is an application server that deals with the J2EE for high end java development. I still need additional training or tutorials on this since I still am not comfortable enough on J2EE to really take advantage of this. I will probably check out the J2EE 1.4 Tutorial and related items.
More to come..
Monday, March 14, 2005
Started looking around some for existing educational related software. One of the sites I found was the School Forge which contains a number of open source projects related to education.
Related sites include the KDE Edutainment Project.
Another site with some categorized products at Seul site.
Wednesday, March 09, 2005
I was reading up on a Slashdot article which talks about a new MacX emulator called CherryOS. Apparently, this is based on the
PearPC - PowerPC Architecture Emulator. When I have enough disk space sometime, maybe I can play around with this. But it appears as though you might also need a real version of MacX to install since it is just a CPU emulator. However, it may be possible to use one of the available PowerPC based OS such as the Darwin version of the Mac which is the open source for part of Apple's OS. May be worth looking at through this route but it may still be limited somewhat on functionality (what do you expect for Apple to do, give it away complete?).
This goes along with other x86 emulators like the Bochs IA-32 Emulator.
Sometime when I have time to toy around some, it might be nice to install many of these and try emulating emulators :-).
