Some time ago I came across an interesting article on Apache’s wiki entitled (Apache Wiki: The Elements Of Ant Style. It’s a very thourough overview of good practices for writing clean, readable, reusable and efficient Ant build files.

Today, through magpiebrain, I read on OnJava another very interesting and concise article giving 15 Ant best practices. It’s much shorter than the previous article on Apache’s wiki, but still, with those 15 practices you’ll manage to improve some messy build scripts. Believe me !

Voici un nouveau tableau que j’ai réalisé à la gouache. Il s’agit de trois petits macareux, que j’ai peints pour offrir en guise de cadeau de Noël pour ma mère… Encore une chance qu’elle n’a pas internet chez elle, sinon, elle pourrait découvrir la surprise avant l’heure !

LOAF is taking the community by storm. I do firmly believe it gonna rock the world. Social software is the way to go : the next revolution. But as far as I know there were no LOAF implementation in Groovy, a promising programming language.

So let’s see how simple it is to write a LOAF implementation using Groovy:

class LOAF {
    static main(args) {
        def loaf = new LOAF()
    }
}

I’m a beginner in Groovy, so use at your own risk. Play with it, it’s free as in beer !

Well, sometimes, we happend to make some fun stuff at work. Don’t we ? Currently, we’re developping a RAD tool for creating applications using a framework we’ve been developping for some time already. It’s a classical Swing app. We decided to create a contextual help system : Each time a component is selected in the GUI (whether it be a tabbed pane or a node in a JTree), we show the corresponding help page in another frame that the user may show or hide as he wishes when he needs some help. I use a JEditorPane with an HTMLEditorKit to show those HTML help pages.

It’s soon Halloween ! If you’re making a party at home, like my girl friend and me, you’ll want to frighten your friends a little bit. Some make-up, some fancy closes, some pumpkins, etc… and some… hhoorrriibblleee soooouuunnnndddsss !

I found on the net some nice wave sounds like evil laugthers, screams, ghosts noises, etc. Stéphanie wanted to make a Windows Media Player playlist with those sounds. Cool… But as a Java Geek, I decided to make something better ! That’s why I decided to write a little Halloween jukebox.

A bit more than a year ago, I wrote some utility classes related to file encodings/charsets. Those classes got integrated to IntelliJ IDEA. Those classes are useful for knowing the encoding of a byte array, or a file, or an input stream. You’ll be able to know whether your file is encoded using UTF-8, or whether it used ISO-8859-1, or windows’ specific windows-1252.

Unfortunately, inside IntelliJ IDEA, it is not currently possible to know the charset of the files edited. I filed a feature request in june. Unfortunately, this feature has not yet been implemented.

Today, through Java blogs, I came across Joel Spolsky’s post regarding The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets. I have to recommend anybody curious about i18n issues to read this very good introduction. I wish I had read that before, two years ago, when I had to deal with different file encodings ;-)

This article remind me of one of my old home projects, back in the summer 2002. I was developing (and I’m still doing so) with IntelliJ IDEA at work, and I had messed up with some critical XML files because I was playing with the default encoding used by IntelliJ in the preferences panel… I was so ashamed that I decided to file some feature requests about automatic charset recognition for my beloved Java IDE. And even better, I coded some java classes that I gave Maxim Shafirov. And my code was finally integrated (perhaps modified to suit their needs) into IDEA 3.0.

Inspiré par Titouan Lamazou, j’ai immité le geste du peintre en barbouillant une feuille de Canson, je vous laisse admirer le résultat.

Les taons sont vraiment de sales bêbêtes. Et le problème le plus embêtant, c’est que je suis allergique à leurs piqûres. Alors en Alsace, sur le terrain en pleine campagne où se déroulaient les expériences scientifiques de ma petite-amie, il y en avait à revendre de ces insectes ! Et je me suis fait piquer deux fois : une fois à chaque main. En quelques heures mes mains ont littéralement doublé de volume. A tel point que lors de notre excursion à Europapark en Allemagne, j’ai dû me faire bander les mains par un infirmier du point Croix Rouge.

J’ai décidé il y a quelques semaines de me remettre à la peinture, d’abord en faisant quelques toiles à la gouache, pour passer bientôt à la peinture à l’huile. En guise de cadeau à ma bien-aimée, j’ai décidé de peindre les falaises d’Etretat, que nous avions eu le plaisir d’admirer à la Toussaint 2002.

Voici donc le résultat de cette première tentative de peinture :