Thanks to Marc Chung for the Google+ invite. The web UI is very slick and I know I am going to have fun with g+. Anyone on Google+, let me know if you want to be in my Artificial Intelligence, Clojure, and/or Ruby groups.

My currently largest customer uses the commercial version of Isomorphic's Smart GWT and I have spent a few evenings working on one of my own projects (that I will probably open source when it is done) that uses the free LGPL version. 7/9/2011 edit: I ended up re-writing this in straight-up GWT. I should also mention that I have signed a consulting agreement with Isomorphic (svn commit rights :-) but I have not had time in my schedule to do any work for them yet. SmartGWT uses Google's Java to Javascript compiler but instead of using the standard GWT UI components it uses Isomorphic's SmartClient Javascript library (suitably wrapped for extending GWT). The commercial version's sweet spot is reasonably easy integration with server side data sources like relational databases, JSON web services, etc. The free LGPL version provides an example of a client side data source that you can hook up with custom code to web services that you write yourself. For my for-fun side pr...

I worked through part of the "Real World Haskell" book a few years ago, but settled on mostly using Clojure as a functional language, with some Scala also. I bought "Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!" this week and I have been enjoying the gentle approach to learning the language. Miran Lipovača did a good job writing this book. ("Real World Haskell" is also excellent.) One thing that occurred to me is that since Clojure and Scala borrow so many good ideas from Haskell that learning some Haskell before diving into either Clojure or Scala might be a good idea.

The Sindice project has transitioned from a university and consortium project of DERI to a commercial company. Check out the SPARQL endpoint web form - very impressive. During lunch I tried using the Sindice Java client library and it was easy to use but does not for some reason support direct SPARQL queries.

I love both of my jobs (programming and writing) as long as I don't overdo it and take a lot of time off for other activities like hiking, kayaking, playing musical instruments, and cooking. I have another "down time" activity that is both fun and relaxing for me: studying things that help me with my jobs. For example, when I first adopted Ruby as my primary scripting language and also started developing using Rails, I spent a lot of time reading through the C implementation of Ruby, the Ruby libraries, and the Rails source code. I find this kind of study relaxing because there are no deliverables and things learned studying the implementation of tools I use really pays off in increased productivity and learning new programming idioms and techniques. I used to base a lot of my work on the Tomcat server and ten years ago I made a real effort to understand its implementation. When I was very young I worked as a systems programmer and kept source listings of interesting pa...