fuzzylizard

Google has finally released Picasa for Linux. I have installed it onto my CentOS box, but have not had a chance to really play with it. So far, all I can say is that it looks identical to the Windows version and it sets itself as a resident program with an icon in the taskbar area in Gnome. This means that to launch Picasa you don’t need to go to the applications menu, instead, you just need to double click on the little taskbar icon.

Picasa for Linux uses a modified version of wine so it is not a true port. However, in the process of making the app work under wine, Google was able to contribute back a lot of patches to the Wine project. As soon as I get sometime to play with it more I will post a full review.

I think this is the first tutorial/article that I have seen about Working with the Google Web Toolkit. I have not read it yet (hopefully I can do that tomorrow), but my quick, very cursory look through it gave me the impression that it is an excellent introduction to the GWT.

I am not sure if anyone would be interested in a Tutorial on Pointers and Arrays in C, but here is one anyway. The only thing it is missing is a few nice diagrams to help C newbies better understand what is happening in memory with respect to how pointers actually work. Otherwise, it is a nice little tutorial.

This post is mainly for me so that I can clear out part of my “Bloglines”:http://www.bloglines.com list of saved articles. Theoretically, these are articles that I intend to read at some point in time.

* “Using Dependency Injection in Java EE 5.0″:http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2006/01/04/dependency-injection-java-ee-5.html?CMP=OTC-FP2116136014&ATT=Using+Dependency+Injection+in+Java+EE+5.0
* “An Exception Handling Framework for J2EE Applications”:http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2006/01/11/exception-handling-framework-for-j2ee.html?CMP=OTC-FP2116136014&ATT=An+Exception+Handling+Framework+for+J2EE+Applications
* “Using Lucene to Search Java Source Code”:http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2006/01/18/using-lucene-to-search-java-source.html?CMP=OTC-FP2116136014&ATT=Using+Lucene+to+Search+Java+Source+Code
* “Twelve Best Practices For Spring XML Configurations”:http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2006/01/25/spring-xml-configuration-best-practices.html?CMP=OTC-FP2116136014&ATT=Twelve+Best+Practices+For+Spring+XML+Configurations
* “Using Spring with JDO and Hibernate”:http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/excerpt/springadn_ch05/index1.html?CMP=OTC-FP2116136014&ATT=Using+Spring+with+JDO+and+Hibernate
* “Integrating Ant with Eclipse, Part 1″:http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/excerpt/anttdg2_ch11/index.html?CMP=OTC-FP2116136014&ATT=Integrating+Ant+with+Eclipse+Part+1
* “Integrating Ant with Eclipse, Part 2″:http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/excerpt/anttdg2_ch11/index1.html?CMP=OTC-FP2116136014&ATT=Integrating+Ant+with+Eclipse+Part+2
* “Asynchronous Messaging Made Easy With Spring JMS”:http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2006/02/22/asynchronous-messaging-with-spring-jms.html?CMP=OTC-FP2116136014&ATT=Asynchronous+Messaging+Made+Easy+With+Spring+JMS
* “Scheduling Jobs in a Java Web Application”:http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2006/03/01/job-scheduling-in-web-application.html?CMP=OTC-FP2116136014&ATT=Scheduling+Jobs+in+a+Java+Web+Application
* “Proper handling of database-related exceptions”:http://www.oreillynet.com/onjava/blog/2006/03/proper_handling_of_databaserel.html?CMP=OTC-FP2116136014&ATT=Proper+handling+of+database-related+exceptions
* “Zero Configuration Networking: Using the Java APIs, Part 1″:http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/excerpt/bonjour_ch08/index.html?CMP=OTC-FP2116136014&ATT=Zero+Configuration+Networking:+Using+the+Java+APIs+Part+1
* “Advanced Configuration of the Spring MVC Framework”:http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2006/03/22/advanced-spring-configuration.html?CMP=OTC-FP2116136014&ATT=Advanced+Configuration+of+the+Spring+MVC+Framework
* “Zero Configuration Networking: Using the Java APIs, Part 2″:http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/excerpt/bonjour_ch08/index1.html?CMP=OTC-FP2116136014&ATT=Zero+Configuration+Networking:+Using+the+Java+APIs+Part+2
* “Zero Configuration Networking: Using the Java APIs, Part 3″:http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/excerpt/bonjour_ch08/index2.html?CMP=OTC-FP2116136014&ATT=Zero+Configuration+Networking:+Using+the+Java+APIs+Part+3
* “Maven 2.0: Compile, Test, Run, Deploy, and More”:http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2006/03/29/maven-2-0.html?CMP=OTC-FP2116136014&ATT=Maven+2.0:+Compile+Test+Run+Deploy+and+More
* “Agile Object to Relational Database Replication with db4o”:http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2006/04/12/object-to-relational-database-replciation-with-db40.html?CMP=OTC-FP2116136014&ATT=Agile+Object+to+Relational+Database+Replication+with+db4o
* “Database Connection Pooling with Tomcat”:http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2006/04/19/database-connection-pooling-with-tomcat.html?CMP=OTC-FP2116136014&ATT=Database+Connection+Pooling+with+Tomcat
* “Configuration Management in Java EE Applications Using Subversion”:http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2006/05/03/j2ee-configuration-management-with-subversion.html?CMP=OTC-FP2116136014&ATT=Configuration+Management+in+Java+EE+Applications+Using+Subversion
* “Testing Java in an Object-Oriented Way”:http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2006/03/28/testing-java-object-oriented.html
* “Understanding Service Oriented Architecture”:http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2006/04/04/understanding-service-oriented-architecture.html
* “Exception-Handling Antipatterns”:http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2006/04/06/exception-handling-antipatterns.html
* “Why Spring JDBC?”:http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2006/05/09/why-spring-jdbc.html
* “An Introduction to Java Persistence for Client-Side Developers”:http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2006/05/23/ejb3-persistence-api-for-client-side-developer.html
* “Learn how to discern which design patterns and frameworks would work best for your enterprise applications”:http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-01-2006/jw-0130-pojo.html?lsrc=jwrss

Not too many articles to read, eh?

I found this article titled How NOT to lead geeks on digg.com I believe. It is an excellent article on how to ensure that you get less them 100% out of your IT people. The topics include things like downplaying training, giving no recognition, using management speak, ignoring the geeks, and so on. Overall the article is well written and worth reading. As always, what is even more worth reading is the discussion after the article.

“Javalobby”:http://www.javalobby.org has a thread going about 3D renderers built in Java, specifically, if any exist. In that thread I asked what the best library or technology for doing 3D in Java was. The response I got was the a link to the Java Gaming FAQ. If anyone is thinking of doing 3D in Java, I strongly suggest starting here. It has a fair amount of information and a lot of links.

This is probably stating the obvious, but one of the things that I like about using Hibernate is the simplicity it offers in regards to changing databases. The application that I am working on uses Derby as its RDBMS, however, I was having a few problems with it and wanted to change over to MySQL. Using Hibernate, all I had to change were a few lines in the hibernate.cfg.xml file and I was set. I ran my test suite and the whole thing just worked. Now granted, in the mapping files I had set the primary key to use native instead of hard wiring it. If I had not done this, I would have had to change 1 or 2 lines in every single mapping file, but still, not a lot of work to change databases.