The SquizLogKeith Pitty takes a squiz at the world. |
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The SquizLogKeith Pitty takes a squiz at the world. |
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2FC on the big old radio.
That's one of my enduring memories of growing up in suburban Sydney in an academic household before the days of FM. It was an education in itself. Whether it was politics, philosophy, science, music or other interesting topics, 2FC was the "high brow" radio station whereas 2BL was the ABC station one tuned into to get the sport.
That was back in the late 60s and early 70s. These days 2FC, as it was in Sydney, has become Radio National. It's still on the AM dial in Sydney, which has been inconvenient for a commuting resident of the Central Coast such as myself. You see, I can't pick up a reception to Radio National at home via AM radio. And I spend alot of time commuting on the train.
Recently the ABC provided a local FM frequency for what used to be 2BL. So we can listen to Angela Catterns in the morning and tune into the cricket. But I've been missing out on Radio National.
So I was delighted to learn from Alan today that Radio National is trialling podcasts. This evening on the train home to Gosford I was a happy vegemite listening to podcasts of Late Night Live, Life Matters and The Science Show.
Hopefully the RN podcasting trial will mature into a permanent feature!
Until the last couple of days I'd only heard in passing about Jetty, a 100% Java HTTP Server and Servlet Container.
One of our projects at work, for reasons that I won't go into here, requires a local test environment for each developer that uses up most of the 1 GB of RAM. Only a small part of the system is a web application that exposes a few web services.
Now we would normally use the WebSphere Test Environment within Rational Software Architect to test web applications during development. But in this case it's overkill. The webapp is stable and WTE requires too much memory.
Enter Jetty. The tutorial showed me how to quickly get Jetty up and running. So far, so good. But what I really wanted was to run Jetty inside the IDE. Enter the Jetty Launcher Eclipse Plugin, which was very easy to set up and meant I didn't need to export the WAR and include a definition of the webapp in a Jetty XML file.
So I'm impressed by what Jetty has provided for this particular purpose. Added to that, I'm glad to know that it originated in Balmain (courtesy of Mort Bay Consulting), not far from our office in Sydney!
Yes, cricket can be boring.
There, I've said it. As a cricket addict, often I find myself defending the game, especially against charges that it is dull. But I can't defend this Test Match between the West Indies and South Africa that has recently petered out into a draw. How can people expect a sporting event to be taken seriously when, after five days, it has barely reached half way? That is, if it were allowed to be continued in a timeless fashion, as Test Matches used to be played.
Five days produced a grand total of 17 wickets, of which only one was taken in a second innings! It was a "batfest", with a record eight centuries and a tally of 1,462 runs.
It's Test cricket like this that encourages the popularity of one-day and Twenty-Twenty matches.
It would appear that not only is there still a demand for courses about Java, J2EE and WebSphere, but Java and J2EE are making their presence felt on IBM mainframes.
That's one thing I learnt today when teaching the first day of a two week J2EE course. A major financial institution here in Sydney is developing new J2EE applications that will be deployed on WebSphere Application Server for z/OS (or what used to be called OS/390 or MVS).
I guess that's further evidence that Java is the new COBOL.
Another thing that was painfully obvious to me today was how much of a challenge it is to learn how to effectively develop Java and J2EE applications using a Windows-based tool such as WebSphere Studio Application Developer or Eclipse when one is used to developing PL/I or COBOL applications on the mainframe using TSO/ISPF.
I know that it took me much longer than two weeks to cross that bridge!