As you can tell, I’ve managed to go and change the styles a little bit. Let me know what you think! I’m sure you were all tired of the old styles.
Naming Conventions
When foo people don’t know how to name things, they call it XXXXImpl. Worse yet are those that perhaps call it Standard. How about you use Default? If there is any deviation, at least people will know about it.
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.
Explaning XP…
Kent Beck really should have titled XP Explained as “Embrace Change for the Better” instead of simply “Embrace Change” because I have seen too many misconstrue this as:
Embrace Change…
- Because I have to (I’ve been told to);
- For the sake of it (I don’t know why I’m doing it);
- Since I heard it was good (But I don’t bother to see if it’s helping);
The V&A Museum and the National Portrait Gallery
I ventured out to visit the Natural History Museum at South Kensington today but the drab wet weather the long queues that formed outside made me decide that the wait was not worth it. Instead I took the opportunity to cross “Museum Lane” to the side that houses the Victoria and Albert Museum. This museum displays probably one of the largest collections of decorative arts including contemporary and historic, and just like most other museums in London entrance is free.
The museum itself houses apparently 146 different galleries and regularly hosts a number of seminars discussing various topics in contemporary art. The building itself is massive composed of several floors each with different parts displaying various works such as ceramics, glass, metalwork, furniture, photos and paintings. Though some of the selections are not always relevant or functional, many of them you would still appreciate as being impressively decorative.
After a while of walking around I caught the tube and visited the National Portrait Gallery. The gallery is yet another free institution most well known for the large collection of busts in paint, picture of photos on display. Its prime location between Trafalgar Square and Leceister Square makes it extremely popular and definitely worth the visit. Being Britian’s national gallery, you should find it no surprise that many of the busts inside are mainly English people. On the first floor that I visited there was a eerily life-sized portrait of Dame Judi Dench and even more amazing 3D display of JK Rowling (the author of Harry Potter) in a setting that truly looked life like. Of the exhibitions that I visited, I definitely enjoyed the “Look at Me” the most. This exhibition was commissioned and took a close look at the lives of teenagers from around England, some of which were predictably amateurish but others that were both powerfully relevant and presented magnificently.
A Visit to Leeds Castle
Thanks to the great organisation prowess of Laura, I got to visit Leeds Castle today with a great bunch of people including Team BaM, Jamie, David, Laura and so many others. It was officially my first visit to a castle of any kind and I found it surreal walking around on the grounds all day and enjoyed the good but albeit frosty English winter day.
Despite its name, Leeds Castle is not at all associated with the city of Leeds that lays north west of London. Instead this historic building was named after the village of Leeds in Kent with the closest major city being Maidstone. The trip is excellent with an hour and half coach trip departing from Victoria, dropping you off, and picking you up at the bottom of the castle grounds. I highly recommend you book in advance, as it is a popular destination for locals and visitors alike.
The castle itself is surprisingly small, surrounded by on all sides by a lake and only accessible on one side through its bridge. The castles grounds are massive and are home to a fantastic aviary and falconry, a decently sized hedge maze and grotto, a vineyard, a unique but bizarre dog collar museum and the rolling green parklands, some of which visitors use as a golf course.
After first meandering through the castle looking at some of the lavish decorations and richness of recreations of room settings we spent a bit of time in the aviary. The last former owners apparently established the most exotic British collection of birds that the caretakers maintain even today. Birds form all over the world fill the 40 something cages, providing a closer look at some amazing birds including the majestic toucan, colourful macaws, noisy galahs and cockatoos. There is even a demonstration that involves the number of birds kept in the falconry, displaying their flying and hunting abilities. The hedge maze was probably my most favourite part of the day, as we split into several groups and attempted to race each other to the middle of the maze where its grotto is. All in all, a fantastic day and visit to another part of England.
More pictures can be seen if you click on the picture above or here.
Explaining Agile…
Agile is more about the mindset than it is a methodology.
The Goodness in JGoodies is Great: A Brief Tutorial
I’ve been heads down at work lately developing a desktop application, something that is a bit refreshing considering I’ve mainly been working on web applications or distributed systems for some time. Desktop applications have some nice things but developing them also means they have their own fair share of pain (acceptance testing a multithreaded app is not fun!).
The last time I had developed anything remotely serious desktop wise was back during University days when I was using Borland’s JBuilder 2 (yes that means Java 1.1 and AWT) and then slightly later, the terrible Microsoft’s J++ (and non-java classes). I have repeated found that IDEs are wonderful things for building prototype UIs, but anyone who has had the horror of maintaining any of the automagically created code in the background, will agree with me at how terrible it can be.
Not willing to repeat mistakes of the past, on my current project we have had great successes leveraging the JGoodies Forms Layout Manager. The makers of this opensource component specifically designed it with maintenance and addressing the common tasks of simple forms without being excessively verbose about it. They have an excellent white paper on their site and their APIs are intuitive, but I thought it might be useful stepping through a step by step guide anyway. Read more “The Goodness in JGoodies is Great: A Brief Tutorial”