I am within a month or so of completing the third edition of my book. This book will always be available as a free PDF from my web site and as an instant-print book. I would very much appreciate technical feedback on the manuscript which can be downloaded from my open content page: www.markwatson.com/opencontent/ A direct download link is: www.markwatson.com/opencontent/JavaAI3rd.pdf Thanks in advance!

I enjoyed his talk because we share many of the same values and ideas: work relatively few hours per week but make them count, invest in your own future, etc. For much of my career I worked at a large corporation (SAIC) but usually just worked 32 hours per week (anything above 30 hours qualified me for full benefits). For giving up 20% of my pay for not working Mondays, I had time to write, spend more time with family and friends, and simply enjoyed life more. David's company uses a 32 hour work week and he said that they have not lost productivity. I also liked what he said about figuring out what things really make a difference to society and your career and work hard on those rather than spending too much effort on things that don't matter very much. Good advice, but not so easy to do. I live in a beautiful but remote area so my current career is basically competing with other telecommuters, many of them who live in countries with a much lower cost of living. Getting the mo...

Something for people who love to use LaTex (all 17 of us): PracTex RSS feed . I very much enjoy writing and using LaTex makes the whole process even more fun. I just discovered PracTex this morning (thank you Google Reader "suggestions" :-)

Prevaler is a great alternative to using a relational database if you need persistence and your application's data easily fits in memory. I wrote a large web app (similar to SharePoint) about 6 years ago using Prevaler and at one point it ran almost three years without restarting (until the server that it was running on needed maintenance). Prevayler is solid stuff. Space4J works on the same concept but takes advantage of the Java 1.6 concurrency APIs. Space4J is a new project and I have only had time to look through the source code and examples, but it definitely looks like a possible substitute for Prevayler on future projects. I think that Space4J might perhaps take more advantage of generics (e.g., the interface Space and implementing classes could be "generic-ized" for type safety and elimination of unchecked exceptions).

I am happy to see that the Apache POI project's new POI 3.5.1 beta 1 is supporting some OpenOffice.org document formats. I have been using POI for years to access the contents of Microsoft Office documents from Java applications. It is great to have one library that supports most document types that I need to work with. POI is also usable with JRuby or with RUBY using the POI-Ruby sub-project (requires compiling POI with gjc and then using SWIG). BTW, I have a Ruby library that I wrote about 4 years ago on my Open Source web page for working with OpenOffice.org, Word, and AbiWord documents if you want something simple and hackable.

With some reluctance, I am going to toss out what I think is a great business idea that is too large and resource intensive for me to pursue myself: develop the infrastructure and business models for a network graph (not a hierarchy) of "trust providers" similar to issuers like Thawte of SSL certificates, but for semantic web data. First, I want to describe the problem to be solved: assuming the existence of RDF/RDFS/OWL data on the web, how do you know what is correct and what is faked for whatever nefarious reasons? What is the provenance of the data? Even human readers have a difficult time separating out real information from rumors, errors, and outright lies on the web. Proposed solution: organizations "sign" data with a certificate for either a fee or other motivation. Using the current technology, RDF triples would be reified with one or more "trust tokens" (also implemented as RDF) from known signers who vouch for the provenance and accuracy of dat...

I usually use Rails but Merb is also a good alternative (more flexible, thread safe, and probably about twice as fast). Anyway, for Ruby enthusiasts who read my blog and will be attending MerbCamp let me know so we can meet up.

I am fairly much "in like" with Rails: I have been using it for personal and customer projects for almost 3 years. If Ruby had good runtime performance, I would be happy with Ruby and Rails for most of my development. Because Ruby is such a terse language, it is very easy to read and understand the code and (few) configuration files that Rails generates for you and it is easy to write custom models, controllers, and views - mostly because Ruby is such a fun language to work with. I just took another good look at Trails this morning, and for building CRUD web applications it is starting to look very good because of the great runtime performance of both Java and the Tomcat/Jetty/Hibernate, etc. software stack. Unfortunately even with annotations for POJOs that make dealing with persistence much easier, Java is not a concise language and I find it less fun to browse generated code and customize generated applications. Not the fault of Trails: Java is a language that is optimized...

The authors have done a great job at creating a virtual encyclopedia that documents packages for generating graphics. (Amazon link) I am using LaTex for most of my writing projects and this book provided me with a fast start for generating UML diagrams, 2D and 3D graphics, formulas, Chess/Go/Backgammon boards and move lists, a very wide range of engineering diagrams, music scores, etc., etc. This is a large book (almost 1000 pages) but the layout and well organized examples from the book (which are easy to try out) make the whole book feel accessible and lots of fun to work with.

I have been brushing up on my Java skills this year. For 2 years I did mostly Ruby and Common Lisp development. I think that Lisp is a great research language but not so great for deployments and long term maintainability. Ruby is a great prototyping language and for small web portal projects Rails is my favorite tool. However, I keep coming back to Java because of the tools/libraries and the robust deployment software options. So, I have carefully read through both Effective Java (2nd edition) and Java Generics recently to brush up on my Java skills. As a result, I completely refactored one of my medium size projects to use generics and collection classes exclusively - no arrays. Since arrays must contain reifiable types they play poorly with generics. There are some obvious cases where not using primitive types leads to excessive object creation and boxing/unboxing. That said, I expect Java compilers, Hotspot, and the JVM in general to keep getting better and this may be a non-issu...