I wonder what they are doing exactly.
Dell Takes Health Care Online: "Dell Takes Health Care Online
The PC titan is poised to unveil an initiative aimed at containing employees' medical bills. One thing it probably won't cure: Some experts' skepticism
Dell will announce Apr. 10 that it is becoming the largest U.S. employer to offer workers electronic health records that track their insurance claims and drug prescriptions, which the computer giant says is a key step toward letting its 26,000 staffers coordinate their own care in a bid to improve medical safety and contain costs"
I do like my job!
MONEY Magazine's Best Jobs: "Top 10 best jobs
MONEY Magazine and Salary.com researched hundreds of jobs, considering their growth, pay, stress-levels and other factors. These careers ranked highest. (more)
1. Software Engineer"
Topic
I have been asked to give a beginner to mid-level user overview of the Apache Ant project to a group of programmers. Having used and benefited from Ant on current and past development projects, the topic itself is well-known to me.
The presentation will be done in conjunction with another presenter who will be showing testing tools like Clover and jUnitReports. It will be my task to segue from Ant to these testing tools at the end of the presentation.
I plan to cover:
* The basics of Ant
* Power tools
* Best practices
* Calling external tasks like Clover - segue to next presenter.
The challenge here will be to add some life to the project. We are used to the standard powerpoint presentation that tends to be dry, boring and hynosis inducing. I'll be searching for some humorous or interesting material to help make the points. Any ant related anecdotes are always certainly welcome.
What is Ant?
From the
Apache Ant website:
Apache Ant is a Java-based build tool. In theory, it is kind of like Make, but without Make's wrinkles.
Why another build tool when there is already make, gnumake, nmake, jam, and others? Because all those tools have limitations that Ant's original author couldn't live with when developing software across multiple platforms. Make-like tools are inherently shell-based -- they evaluate a set of dependencies, then execute commands not unlike what you would issue in a shell. This means that you can easily extend these tools by using or writing any program for the OS that you are working on. However, this also means that you limit yourself to the OS, or at least the OS type such as Unix, that you are working on.
Makefiles are inherently evil as well. Anybody who has worked on them for any time has run into the dreaded tab problem. "Is my command not executing because I have a space in front of my tab!!!" said the original author of Ant way too many times. Tools like Jam took care of this to a great degree, but still have yet another format to use and remember.
Ant is different. Instead of a model where it is extended with shell-based commands, Ant is extended using Java classes. Instead of writing shell commands, the configuration files are XML-based, calling out a target tree where various tasks get executed. Each task is run by an object that implements a particular Task interface.
ThinkGeek :: Bluetooth Laser Virtual Keyboard: "Don't lose hope! An amazing glimpse of this promised future has just arrived at ThinkGeek in the form of the Bluetooth Laser Virtual Keyboard. This tiny device laser-projects a keyboard on any flat surface... you can then type away accompanied by simulated key click sounds. It really is true future magic at its best. You'll be turning heads the moment you pull this baby from your pocket and use it to compose an e-mail on your bluetooth enabled PDA or Cell Phone. With 63 keys and and full size QWERTY layout the Laser Virtual Keyboard can approach typing speeds of a standard keyboard... in a size a little larger than a matchbook."
In preparation for my latest presentation,
Sales Myths, I want to start out with an example of a myth, namely the origin of the Milky Way in the night sky.
Encyclopedia of MythsThe Milky Way, a dense band of stars that spans the sky, marks the center of the galaxy to which our solar system belongs. In myths, however, the Milky Way has been a road, a river, and a bridge between worlds. According to a Peruvian tradition, the Vilcanota River is a reflection of the Milky Way and water constantly circulates between the two, passing from the river to heaven and back again. The Navajo say that the trickster Coyote created the Milky Way by tossing a blanket full of sparkling stone chips into the sky. Scattered in a great arc, the stones formed a pathway linking heaven and earth.
In many traditions, the stars have been associated with death and the afterlife. The Maya considered the Milky Way to be the road to Xibalba, the underworld. Many Native Americans regard the Milky Way as the path followed by the souls of the dead. According to the Zulu and Ndebele people of southern Africa, the stars are the eyes of dead ancestors, keeping watch on the living from above.
Wikipedia has a good run down including Greek, Eastern, Maori and Christian.
Greek
One legend describes the Milky Way as a smear of milk, created when the baby Herakles suckled from the goddess Hera. When Hera realized that the suckling infant was not her own but the illegitimate son of Zeus and another woman, she pushed it away and the spurting milk became the Milky Way.
Another story tells that the milk came from the goddess Rhea, the wife of Cronus, and the suckling infant was Zeus himself. Cronus swallowed his children to ensure his position as head of the Pantheon and sky god, and so Rhea conceived a plan to save her newborn son Zeus: She wrapped a stone in infant's clothes and gave it to Cronus to swallow. Cronus asked her to nurse the child once more before he swallowed it, and the milk that spurted when she pressed her nipple against the rock eventually became the Milky Way.
Older mythology associates the constellation with a herd of dairy cows/cattle, whose milk gives the blue glow, and where each cow is a star.
Eastern
Peoples in Eastern Asia believed that the hazy band of stars was the "Silvery River" of Heaven
Christian
Medieval Christians believed that the Way was the dust raised by the pilgrims on the Way of Saint James.
Cherokee Indian MythologyA large dog swoops down from the sky and steals cornmeal. The villagers scare him off, and he leaps into the sky, trailing cornmeal out the sides of his mouth
Mayan
[When the world was created] a pillar of the sky was set up . . . that was the white tree of abundance in the north. Then the black tree of abundance was set up [in the west]. . . . Then the yellow tree of abundance was set up [in the south]. Then the [great] green [ceiba] tree of abundance was set up in the center [of the world]
Linda Schele discovered that the World Tree is a literal depiction of the heavens as well as an abstract symbol. Her investigations, vividly recounted in Maya Cosmos, led her to the conclusion that the Milky Way is the World Tree. The Maya long count was initiated on or about August 13 in 3114 BC, the date of Creation. At dawn in mid-August, the Milky Way stands erect, running through the zenith from north to south. It becomes the axis of the heavens, the raised up sky.
NavajoIn yet another stellar creation myth the Milky Way symbolizes the white corn meal sprinkled by First Woman as she says her morning prayers. It therefore serves as a visual reminder to pray to the dawn, which the Navajo view as a source of life (Griffin-Pierce 1992b:124). In the stellar creation myth recorded by Newcomb (1967:78-88), First Man and First Woman arrange the stars after first shooting two crooked fire arrows into the sky to form a ladder. Coyote then creates the Milky Way by flinging into the air the star dust that remains on their blanket. This great arc provides a pathway for the spirits traveling between heaven and earth, each little star being one footprint. At this point, First Woman proclaimed: “Now all the laws our people will need are printed in the sky where everyone can see them. One man of each generation must learn these laws so he may interpret them to the others and, when he is growing old, he must pass this knowledge to a younger man who will then be the teacher. The commands written in the stars must be obeyed forever!”
Java Web Frameworks roundup
At work, I am involved with the Web Framework Committee. We review frameworks to see which are a good fit for our environment. Here is a roundup of interesting web sites on that topic. For you Java propeller-head types, what are you using and why?
Update: I was assigned to look at
java logging frameworks. Basically, its still log4j.
RIA (Rich Internet Client) Frameworks:
*
MABON - Mabon offers a convenient way to hook in a specially designed lifecycle that's ideal for AJAX-enabled components that have to fetch data directly from a backing bean
Welcome to ScaryFangirl.comApparently it was Horatio Hornblower Appreciation Week and nobody told me.
Sun Grid Compute UtilitySun is changing the very nature of computing by delivering access to enterprise compute power over the Internet with its Sun Grid Compute Utility. Sun Grid provides an easy and affordable access to an enormous computing resource for the predictable and all-inclusive price of $1/CPU-hr.
