Archives for 2004 - John Topley’s Weblog

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2004

Living With The iPod • Thursday, 23 December 2004

I’ve now had my iPod for three months and am therefore able to offer some further thoughts on the pros and cons of iPod ownership. I’ve bought a couple of accessories, these being the Apple carrying case with belt clip and an iPod Dock.

E-Mail Of The Year • Monday, 20 December 2004

In order to be considered for the prestigious E-Mail Of The Year award, correspondents have to demonstrate a mastery of the English language that verges on childlike, a flair for getting straight to the point without any of those social niceties like introductions, but most of all, the point that they’re getting to has to be so off-wack as to leave me paralysed with incredulity and completely incapable of replying to them.

Six Degrees Of Separation • Wednesday, 01 December 2004

I try to avoid writing about things that I’ve stumbled across whilst browsing—preferring instead to concentrate on creating my own content—but via a six degrees of separation-like process, I’ve come across something so remarkable that I just have to tell you about it.

Jakarta Struts Demystified On Tomcat • Sunday, 21 November 2004

I’ve been working on modifying the Web Forum application so that it runs on the open-source Jakarta Tomcat web container, instead of the proprietary Oracle OC4J application server.

Unfinished eXPerience Reloaded • Saturday, 06 November 2004

This is the third in a series of two articles in which I deconstruct the Windows XP user interface and show some areas in which it’s lacking or is just plain unfinished.

Golden Google • Saturday, 23 October 2004

Google are golden at the moment. Their search engine has been number one for as long as anyone can remember, they’ve just successfully gone public and now they’re churning out innovative and useful software at a rate of knots.

Jakarta Struts Demystified Part 4 • Saturday, 16 October 2004

Last time we wrote most of the JSP to display the list of topics and I introduced some of the Struts custom tags for looking up message resources, conditional processing and collection iteration. Without further delay, let’s write the code that makes each topic subject a hyperlink.

Jakarta Struts Demystified Part 3 • Sunday, 03 October 2004

I’ve decided to make a couple of changes to this series. First off, I’ve had requests to make the full source code for the Web Forum application available for download. Initially I didn’t want to do this because I only wanted the relevant code to be associated with each installment. I’ve changed my mind because it’s going to save me a lot of time if I don’t have to strip out code every time I write an article. Secondly, I’ve decided to split the series up into much shorter, bite-size chunks.

A Bite Of Apple • Saturday, 25 September 2004

I didn’t seriously consider anything else for a minute. Sure, I’d read comparative reviews and there are devices out there that offer more features for less money, but they’re just not the same. They don’t automatically switch on when you plug the headphones in, or gradually fade the backlight off. You can’t personalise them. They don’t come in packaging that has been as fastidiously designed as the device itself. They’re just not “Designed by Apple in California”.

Lost Opportunities • Sunday, 19 September 2004

For the first time since I started this site in May 2003, I have exercised self-censorship and removed some content. I have deleted the articles Opportunity Of A Lifetime and Opportunity Knocks and all comments associated with them. What started as a name and shame exercise in response to a piece of unsolicited e-mail, has turned into something rather unpleasant.

Child’s Play • Saturday, 21 August 2004

I recently had some software recommended to me by a six year old. Not directly, but via her Daddy, who casually mentioned to me this amazing software that his daughter was having a lot of fun with.

Nothing For Nothing • Tuesday, 10 August 2004

My name is Catalin I am assigned to choose an ERP for our company based in Bucharest, Romania, Europe. The maximum number of simultaneous users of the ERP will not be bigger than 60.

Summer Madness • Friday, 30 July 2004

It looks like the silly season is upon us again. Respected PC Magazine columnist John C. Dvorak writes about Windows' security problems and implores Microsoft to spend some of its billions of dollars on fixing its software.

Jakarta Struts Demystified Part 2 • Saturday, 17 July 2004

Last time I introduced this series of articles and the Web Forum application, and I explained what would and would not be covered. This time I'm going to cover the data and business object layers, and we'll roll our sleeves up and cut some code.

Reality Metaphor • Saturday, 10 July 2004

I've just had a strange thought. Imagine what it would be like if you took the desktop metaphor popularised by MacOS and Windows and turned it inside out and applied it back to real life.

Marketeers Can't Count • Thursday, 01 July 2004

What the blazes is going on with software version numbers? Sun have just announced that the next version of Java is going to be branded as Java 5 and not Java 2. So instead of J2SE 1.5 and J2EE 1.5—I'm ignoring the Micro Edition because my mobile phone doesn't have a JVM—we're going to have J2SE 5 and J2EE 5.

Jakarta Struts Demystified Part 1 • Wednesday, 23 June 2004

Just over a year ago I started to learn how to use the Jakarta Struts J2EE web application framework. During this journey it became apparent to me that there were some aspects of Struts that I found confusing at first, and that many other developers were going through the same difficulties. This series of articles is an attempt to address this problem.

The RDD Advantage • Wednesday, 16 June 2004

Starting a new J2EE project is a daunting undertaking. The technology choices alone are myriad and bewildering. Can you afford to fail by not using RDD?

JDeveloper, Apache And MIME Types • Monday, 07 June 2004

I've just got to the bottom of a fairly obscure problem that occurs when using Mozilla Firefox to access a web application developed using Oracle JDeveloper. The JSPs in my application link to an external stylesheet, but the pages weren't styled when viewed using a Gecko-based browser, such as Firefox. However, they were fine when using Internet Explorer or Opera.

We Are One • Sunday, 30 May 2004

It's hard for me to believe, but it's a year today since I first clicked the Publish button in CityDesk and uploaded this site. Actually, that's not quite true because I did have a preview site hidden behind a teaser for quite a while, which John Conners managed to pick up from his referrer logs when I inadvertently cliked on a link to his site!

Santorini Snaps • Friday, 28 May 2004

I've just spent a week on holiday on the Greek island of Santorini, which is the southern most island in the Cyclades group. We stayed in the excellent El Greco hotel apartments in the capital, Fira.

Javadoc Not Backwards-Compatible • Saturday, 15 May 2004

Although occupationally I currently write code for J2EE 1.3, the other week I needed to install the J2SE 1.4 JDK and this led me to discover an interesting difference in the Javadoc documentation program between the two versions.

Software Review: VisiCalc For The IBM PC • Saturday, 01 May 2004

VisiCalc for the IBM PC was first released in 1981. I thought it would be interesting and instructive to take a look at a piece of software that is not only twenty three years old, but that also defined a market. If you're not familiar with VisiCalc then you should know that it was the world's first electronic spreadsheet.

The Enemy Within • Wednesday, 21 April 2004

My partner asked me recently why people hate Microsoft so much and it's a question I've been pondering for a while, as well as thinking about my own attitude towards the world's largest software company. I consider myself to be in an unusual position in that I'm a Java developer who does actually like Microsoft.

What's In A Name? • Tuesday, 13 April 2004

I had a snail-mail letter from my ISP last week trumpeting the fact that they're changing their name from Freeserve to Wanadoo. Apparently they wanted me to be one of the first to know, although they must have felt the same way about my partner too, for two such letters were received in this household and millions more were doubtless in the same situation throughout the country.

Debugging Using DTDs • Thursday, 08 April 2004

Yesterday I spent more time than I would have liked trying to track down a problem with a custom JSP tag library that I was developing. I'd added some attributes to the TLD file and packaged the custom tag as a JAR file ready for use by my test web application.

Is This For Real? • Friday, 02 April 2004

I've just received an e-mail that has totally baffled me. Upon first reading I thought that it was spam and this article was going to be a name and shame exercise, as I did previously. However, now I'm not so sure that it is spam but I don't really know what it is.

If You're Going To Localize, Localize Properly • Sunday, 28 March 2004

Many websites invite their users to visit a regional version of the main site, but unfortunately few seem to manage to get the localization right. I recently had to renew my Norton AntiVirus subscription and I was directed the European Symantec site, where I was confronted with a classic example of poor localization.

Users Are Not Dogs • Thursday, 18 March 2004

The problem of what to do about the browser Back button has reared its ugly head again. Actually it's never really gone away, it's just gone out of focus because other issues have come up and because it appears intractable.

Trash 'n' Learn • Friday, 12 March 2004

If there's one thing that's guaranteed to make people distrust a particular piece of software, it's when it trashes their data. I've often heard users complain of losing data whilst using Microsoft Office. I can't recall ever having had that particular pleasure, but today I did lose an afternoon's work because of using Oracle software.

Open Source Treasure • Sunday, 07 March 2004

One of the things that has struck me whilst learning J2EE is the fact that there's a symbiotic relationship between J2EE and the world of open-source software. There's a bewildering choice of open-source software available to the enterprise Java developer, encompassing everything from application servers to string libraries and anything you can think of in-between.

Doing It With Style • Saturday, 28 February 2004

I'm working on prototypes at the moment of the user interface for the J2EE application we're developing at work. As it's going to be a browser-based interface, I decided it was high time I learned more about Cascading Style Sheets.

No Time Wasters, Please • Tuesday, 17 February 2004

One of the things that really annoys me is when people ask questions and then disappear off the face of the Earth. During the nine months that this site has been running, I've received a number of technical questions either as comments or via my Contact page.

Microsoft Installer And RunAs • Saturday, 07 February 2004

I recently installed the ActivePython IDE from ActiveState. Yes, I'm playing with Python but more on that in a future blog entry. Being a good Windows citizen, the installer for ActivePython is a Microsoft Installer (*.msi) file.

Domain Vultures • Monday, 02 February 2004

During the past week I've received two letters from entirely unrelated companies but both wanting the same thing. My johntopley.com domain.

Design 102: Don't Punish The User • Tuesday, 27 January 2004

I wrote previously about how white space is just as important in good user interface design as the content itself. Whilst booking some concert tickets recently using the TicketMaster website, I came across another example of bad design.

Event Log Paranoia • Sunday, 18 January 2004

As a user of the Windows NT flavour of Windows since 1996, one of the things that I've got into the regular habit of doing is checking the event logs for anything untoward.

Learning To K.I.S.S. • Wednesday, 07 January 2004

Do the best programmers know how to Keep It Simple, Stupid? Is simplicity in itself a desirable goal? I didn't used to subscribe to the idea that simple was always best. I thought that sometimes complexity was the only answer.

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