Starting A New Collection

My kit of development tools never seems to cease expanding from the sheer multitude of technologies, techniques and amazing people to learn from. In contrast to my development kit, the other one that I am trying to kindle more awareness of, the process toolkit, grows much more slowly because there aren’t as many people as impassioned or maybe aware of what is a useful thing to try. I am lucky to have worked with some great people, subscribe to some good blogs and I am willing to learn from other people’s experiences.

The first step in learning about anything (thanks Dave and Ade) is to Expose Your Ignorance, and in doing this I hope that others can benefit from this. As I find something that I really like, I’m going to blog about what I think are effective practices that are worth adding to a toolkit, starting with a series of Retrospective Exercises. I look forward to any comments and I hope to add more to these as time passes and apply them to my future projects.

Getting the Computer Name in Java

Ant has always had a little hack for trying to get the computer name because it apparently doesn’t come natively. I thought that this was simply because Java didn’t have it available. Today I found that was wrong and stumbled across this little gem today, trying to do it programatically, and even though it’s not a system property, it still works like a charm.

InetAddress.getLocalHost().getHostName()

Warning to Gmail Users

For those that use Firefox and Gmail chat, be sure you have added Gmail to the “Allowed Sites” for popups before you click on the “Pop-out” option. It seems that gmail is *really* determined to pop out that window and will continue to try for an infinite number of times, effectively blocking your current firefox window.

Cool app (reminds me of the AOL chat applet), but just beware.