It’s also a great learning tool, since you have a working tool in less than two minutes and you can start playing around with modifications.

As before, new videos are posted here: http://aeroplanesoftware.com/sakai-training-videos

Here is your link.

The Spring Framework has come to be synonymous with enterprise Java. It’s a great example of the cream rising to the top in an open source “free market.” I think I’ll attend Wednesday’s webinar on Spring 2.5.

The book is about a software team, but it’s very much written for the layman. So if you have either a professional or personal interest in software, but are not yourself a coder, I can highly recommend the book as a way to get a better understanding of just what goes on to make software happen.

It’s especially good for software spouses. My wife tells me she thinks my work is very mysterious. I’m putting this one in her queue!

Happy New Year everyone.

1. it is a traveling show, so you don’t fly to it, it flies to you. This alone makes it cheap cheap cheap by conference standards.
2. attendance is capped at 250, so you have real face-to-face contact with the experts.
3. it is relentlessly pragmatic. This is about real projects, real clients, and real techniques. There is no vaporware and no technology that is only theoretically useful.
4. it (usually) meets on the weekend. Aside from the obvious effect that it doesn’t interrupt your work week, your fellow attendees are automatically of a higher order, because they want to learn about software on the weekend. I’m not saying this makes us better people — maybe the opposite — but it does weed out the casual.

It’s very technical, and very focused on Java in the so-called enterprise, though a couple of these guys are also Ruby advocates, and there are sessions to match.

Probably the best thing about NFJS is that the speakers are all exemplary engineers and professionals, so for the purpose of career development they are very good role models. I came away with a list of things I just have to start doing better:

• automated tests: I don’t have to be sold on the value; It’s time to stop talking about it and start doing it.
• mastering the tools, IDE: Eclipse and IntelliJ can do amazing things if you let them. Here’s a hint: if you do any of it with the mouse, you’re less productive than you could be. The speakers are living advertisements for IntelliJ IDEA. They almost have me convinced that $500 is a small price to pay for what it gives you.
• mastering the tools, languages: dynamic languages are in. I can’t really play with the big dogs without being able to apply JavaScript and Ruby or Groovy or Beanshell wherever they make sense.
• public speaking: stories make for good speaking, and they don’t even have to be your own stories. Even on a technical topic, people want to hear what it has to do with their lives.
• Java is not dead yet, though it has been sleepy there for a while. It is evolving to a platform for other languages, so you can shake off the limitations of Java-the-language if you want.

If you want to sample a good cross-section of the kinds of things you will see and hear at NFJS, take a look at their book, the NFJS Anthology.

By the way, the speakers are also living advertisements for Apple MacBooks and Mac OS X, but I’m already on board that train! TOOT TOOT

So it’s kind of a drag we can’t do all the things that flash can do on an iPhone. But once again, I have underestimated JavaScript on the browser. Check out http://static.popcap.com/iphone/ for a beautifully realized version of Bejeweled for the iPhone. I’m not really saying we don’t want flash, but this just goes to show that we’re not slumming without it.

After an unsuccessful bid to get my employer to spend $160 on me for a year of service, I paid for it out of my own pocket and never regretted it for an instant. It satisfies my every nerd book craving for about $500 less per year than I was in the habit of paying.

They have a higher tier of service that includes videos and tutorials, but I haven’t coughed up the money yet.

Highly recommended. By the way, they have nothing to do with Apple’s excellent Safari web browser. It’s too bad they permitted a namespace collision.

I have been fascinated by the implications of online social networks since Friendster hit the scene. Friendster suffered from small-mindedness about the possibilities and has been overrun by the competition. MySpace is the current champion, but they suffer from small-mindedness about third parties playing in their “territory.” Not to mention that MySpace is just ugly as damn. I have always appreciated Facebook’s clean design, but until now I only used it find out what kind of parties my son’s babysitters go to.

The web exposes many contradictions, and one of them is that on the one hand it is a democratizing, “flattening” phenomenon, giving individuals and small groups a medium to communicate with the same reach as gigantic corporations. While on the other hand, the web also benefits from monopolies. A site like eBay is more valuable to everyone because everyone uses it. Amazon.com has such a wealth of information because people would rather write their reviews there than in a second-tier space. Up to now, the problem with social networking applications is that each one requires you to build your connections, your profile, your network up from scratch. What the web needs is a de facto standard social network. Of course, each one of a thousand of competitors has been scrambling to be the Big One.

What makes the Facebook announcement so exciting is that they are opening up their enormous network to nearly unrestricted access by third party developers. This means that an entrepreneur can create the next great viral application without having to lay the groundwork of building yet another social network and drumming up the critical mass necessary to have a hit. To be sure, you will still have to compete for attention on the Facebook platform, and the competition will be fierce, but the flywheel is already spinning. This is how low the barrier to entry is once your application is running on Facebook: someone clicks a link to your app and it becomes a part of his suite of Facebook applications. When he publishes something cool with it, all his friends are notified and if they want the application too, they just click the link… Wash, rinse, repeat.

Zuckerberg reveals some pretty astonishing facts about Facebook: at present, their signup rate is 100,000 new users per day. They get 24 million unique visitors in a 30-day period. And this one amazed me: 50% of those login to the site every day.

Here’s a prediction: in very short order, a third party developer will introduce an app on Facebook so successful, that Web 2.0 startups everywhere will suddenly decide to become Facebook startups. This is a positive feedback loop with enough generative power to turn MySpace into a footnote. It’s too early to call the race, since MySpace still has a lot of weight to throw around, but the Facebook people clearly get where this can go, and they have just lit the fuse on a rocket sled.

A couple of closing remarks: Whenever the subject of Facebook comes up in education circles, I just hear paranoia and fear. The grownups want guidance on how to make it just go away. Well here’s the thing: Facebook is no more or less safe than the world we live in, and we are perfectly capable of behaving accordingly. The question we should be asking is “How can we use it to make the world a better place?”

Final note: At one point in the talk, Zuckerberg says something like, “We don’t have a large development team. There are only 85 engineers…” I had to laugh. How do you get 10 people pulling in the same direction, let alone 85? I encourage you to sign up and play around for a while. It has the cohesiveness of something built by two people, and I mean that as the highest compliment.

#!/bin/sh
# Takes standard input in Markdown format and converts it to Confluence wiki format
# Usage:
#      markdown2confluence.sh < markdown-file > confluence-file
umask 077

TEMP1=/tmp/markdown2html.$$
TEMP2=/tmp/html2confluence.$$

trap "exit 1"               HUP INT PIPE QUIT TERM
trap "rm -f $TEMP1 $TEMP2"  EXIT

Markdown.pl $1 > $TEMP1
java -classpath jparsec-1.2.jar:confluence_converter.jar jfun.markup.Html2Confluence $TEMP1 $TEMP2
cat $TEMP2

The heavy lifting is done by Markdown.pl which you can download from the link I gave you above, and jparsec, which is a framework in Java for building parsers, with the parser built for this purpose available here.

The Html2Confluence class is not perfect, but the source code is available, so what are you waiting for?