Geek Gushing
Hurrah for technology. I’ve spent the last week playing around with various bits & pieces, and have been getting cyberwarmandfuzzies left, right and center. Non-programmer-types can probably skip this post, but if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to gush.
First up, a hearty hug and a handshake to Mac OS X. My Blue&White G3 (purchased cheap from a company who, following several rounds of layoffs, now had more PCs than employees) has been sat under my desk for 6 months now—Occassionally prodded or played with, but never really used. But after installing Jaguar, I’ve spent some time learning to love it, and I have to admit, it’s ace. The lovely whoop-de-do UI, combined with the underlying Unix is just a stunning combination. Being able to SSH to my Mac and install all the usual Gnu goodies just sets my nerd-heart a flutter.
Next up, Omnicore CodeGuide. Now this is what an IDE should be like. I’ve used it for a couple of revisions, and have gone on and on to my friends about how much time I’ve saved with it’s real-time MS Word-like error-highlighter, but the new version just made my jaw drop—Being able to edit code in a running app and have it execute without recompiling is a dream come true for this programmer. If you ever program in Java, then get this IDE on your desktop forthwith.
Finally, I giggled like a schoolgirl whilst playing with Apache Axis—The open-source group’s Java implementation of SOAP. While I thought that Microsoft had done a great job with .NET in making it easy to deploy a web service, Axis blew me away with how easy they made it:
OK, here's step 1 : copy the above .java file into your webapp directory, and rename it "Calculator.jws".Now for step 2… hm, wait a minute. You’re done!
Axis developers, I salute you.
OK, enough blethering about computers—back to the funny links…