I’m looking to attend the meeting on the 12th as detailed in the link below. It’s a BCS meeting but they’re open to professionals who aren’t members. I would caveat that the presentation is likely to be high-level given the mixed audience but it would give a view from someone high in IBM on what is happening with Java in the next few years. Its being hosted over in Kingston University so I am probably looking at getting a taxi over on the night. If you’re interested give me a shout.

http://www.bcs.org.uk/branches/kingston/index.htm

AOL are now offering RSA Security devices to strengthen authentication! The article.

Go here.

I intend to write more on this but needless to say me being an ATG Dynamo fan having an open-source ‘Inversion of Control’ framework is of significant interest. Have a look here for a discussion on theserverside.com.

Thought I’d write a quick note on this (since I forgot). In the Yang style t’ai chi styles I’ve studied the single hand pushing hands form has been done at just below shoulder level. In this case you push from the shoulder of the pushing hand towards the centre and yielding towards the opposite shoulder of your opponent. In wudang style the push is directed towards the opponents hip on the same side as the pushing hand. The yield then is directed to the hip on the opposite side.

In the case of the Yang style this is an example of two of the first four powers – ji and lu. The ji is directed at the opponents centre and the opponent is forced to lu (yield or roll back) and direct the force away in order to maintain their balance. In wudang it is again an exercise in ji and lu, however in this case the exercise strengthens and flexes the kua (the inguinal crease in the hip joint). It is the kua that allows someone to bend at the hips without bending the spine.

View here.

View here.

The PDF is worth a good hard read and the lessons learned are useful for anyone using either technology. Follow the serverside link to get to the report.

The server side thread on the subject

My post:- Experience of the WSAD team does appear to be key here. The WSAD/WebSphere developers made some crucial errors that a couple of weeks experience or indeed a review of the freely available literature would have pointed out were complete folly. Why not break the timesheets down into time spent learning the product and time actually spend developing?

Further key bizarre decisions in the development process (like the lack of a code versioning and sharing tool as highlighted below) are incredible. This may not be fair but the J2EE developers did come across as quite naive.

However, I do concede the point that out of the box .NET is probably quicker to pick up and use – largely since one would use the common microsoft libraries and this means you don’t have to make decisions/design common functionality and libraries. I do feel that with an established J2EE team with a framework that they are familiar with we would see far better developer performance.

Microsoft view: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1645550,00.asp

This one centres around patterns for self service applications. Seems quite relevant. Not read it yet myself, would welcome comments – view here.

The second redbook concerns WebSphere security on Z/OS platform – of particular interest to myself. View here.

Made all the more worrying by how readily a proof of concept exploit has appeared. Better get patched up people! Netcrafts article is very interesting.

You’ll need FTP access to view the presentations here.

Today I had a private lesson from my teacher who first introduced me to Wudang style tai chi. Wudang is a name chosen to imply the heritage from the Wu family style but to show that it is a different style (very similar though).

The chap who’s teaching me has an web site at realtaichi.com. if you want to know more about Wudang style or practical taichi have a look at taichichuan.co.uk.

Today I went through the first section of the long form again. I haven’t been practicing the square form recently (a training version of the long form) and this activity showed me that my posture and the accuracy of my form needs to be addressed.

I must practice.

Handy struts hints.

An article on Java World has recently been posted discussing Struts best practices. Theres a discussion surrounding the article on theserverside too.

Click the following for the Jakarta Struts Live free book.

As an aside the server side is always worth a look.

An old pet subject of mine has always been AI, Machine Learning, data mining, etc. It was certainly of interest when I came across weka. Not read up on it yet but it looks very interesting. Will post more later.

Seems there are discussions afoot for the next version of the JSR-94 – look here for the discussion and oppurtunity to contribute.

This Introscope product from Wily looks to be of considerable interest – will have to make some time for a read through and edit this post with an opinion.

This looks to be a good one. see here

This is a darn fine article on session management in WebSphere. Well worth a read and seems pretty comprehensive.

Of particular interest to me was the session back up option that allows the session to be stored in two servers. The theory being that you would lose one at a time (either through error or planned outage) and that all the sessions could be maintained through this process. Restrictions include that the session state data must be stored in serializable beans and I imagine you would get spurious errors if these beans were to change their signature and you ran two versions of these beans at the same time.

Well worth a look though.

Bit old but this is a good overview for non-techy’s. Has WebSphere bits in but again, a bit old.

Available here.

Fingers crossed this will be my next phone. I currently use the P800 and find this to be very nice indeed – so nice I didn’t feel it was worth the effort to upgrade to the P900 that added a few small features. The P800 is getting a little old now and the P910 with the additional features (larger memory, small keyboard, etc.) makes this worth looking at.

Go here. Not read it yet but its free so….

A PDF giving a high level is available here. Its a bit ‘yay, java, yay’ and largely quotes the core j2ee patterns books but is worth a read.

I now own a hockey stick bag for my sabre too.

Will get some practice this weekend methinks.

Loads of fun! Build an evil layer and defend it! NICE! get the demo here(around 200mb)

Hoping to listen to these shortly but bit awkward at work :D

Webcasts

Got a sabre to be precise, know the first 5 or 6 moves of the sabre form.

Looking at some personal tuition to get the wudang long form learnt and nailed. Any thoughts welcome.