Download the MP3 file: three_dead_trolls_in_a_baggie-every_os_sucks.mp3

And here are the lyrics:

(spoken introduction)

You see, I come from a time in the nineteen-hundred-and-seventies when computers were used for two things – to either go to the moon, or play Pong… nothing in between. Y’see, you didn’t need a fancy operating system to play Pong, and the men who went to the moon–God Bless ‘em–did it with no mouse, and a plain text-only black-and-white screen, and 32 kilobytes of RAM.

But then ’round ’bout the late 70′s, home computers started to do a little more than play Pong… very little more. Like computers started to play non-Pong-like games, and balance checkbooks, and why… you could play Zaxxon on your Apple II, or… write a book! All with a computer that had 32 kilobytes of RAM! It was good enough to go to the moon, it was good enough for you.

It was a golden time. A time before Windows, a time before mouses, a time before the internet and bloatware, and a time… before every OS sucked.

*sigh*

(singing)

Well, way back in the olden times,
my computer worked for me.
I’d laugh and play, all night and day,
on Zork I, II and III.

The Amiga, VIC-20 and the Sinclair II,
The TRS 80 and the Apple II,
they did what they were supposed to do,
wasn’t much… but it was enough.

But then Xerox made a prototype,
Steve Jobs came on the scene,
read “Of Mice and Menus,” Windows, Icons
a trash, and a bitmap screen.

Well Stevie said to Xerox,
“Boys, turn your heads and cough.”
And when no-one was looking,
he ripped their interfaces off.

Stole every feature that he had seen,
put it in a cute box with a tiny little screen,
Mac OS 1 ran that machine,
only cost five thousand bucks.

But it was slow, it was buggy,
so they wrote it again,
And now they’re up to OS 10,
they’ll charge you for the Beta, then charge you again,
but the Mac OS still sucks.

Every OS wastes your time,
from the desktop to the lap,
Everything since Apple Dos,
Just a bunch of crap.

From Microsoft, to Macintosh,
to Lin– line– lin– lie… nux,
Every computer crashes,
’cause every OS sucks.

Well then Microsoft jumped in the game,
copied Apple’s interface, with an OS named,
“Windows 3.1″ – it was twice as lame,
but the stock price rose and rose.

Then Windows 95, then 98,
man solitaire never ran so great,
and every single version came out late,
but I guess that’s the way it goes.

But that bloatware’ll crash and delete your work,
NT, ME, man, none of ‘em work.
Bill Gates may be richer than Captain Kirk,
but the Windows OS blows!

And sucks!

At the same time!

I’d trade it in, yeah right… for what?
It’s top of the line from the Compuhut.
The fridge, stove and toaster, never crash on me,
I should be able to get online, without a PHD.

My phone doesn’t take a week to boot it,
my TV doesn’t crash when I mute it,
I miss ASCII text, and my floppy drive,
I wish VIC-20 was still alive…

But it ain’t the hardware, man.

It’s just that every OS sucks… and blows.

Now there’s lih-nux or lie-nux,
I don’t know how you say it,
or how you install it, or use it, or play it,
or where you download it, or what programs run,
but lih-nux, or lie-nux, don’t look like much fun.

However you say it, it’s getting great press,
though how it survives is anyone’s guess,
If you ask me, it’s a great big mess,
for elitist, nerdy shmucks.

“It’s free!” they say, if you can get it to run,
the Geeks say, “Hey, that’s half the fun!”
Yeah, but I got a girlfriend, and things to get done,
the Linux OS SUCKS.
(I’m sorry to say it, but it does.)

Every OS wastes your time,
from the desktop to the lap,
Everything since the abacus,
Just a bunch of crap.

From Microsoft, to Macintosh,
to lin– line– lin– lie… nux.
Every computer crashes,
’cause every OS sucks.

Every computer crashes… ’cause every OS sucks!

Having that said… there is one thing I don’t like there… it’s SVN ;-) Of course I knew that I can’t be running from SVN all my life and that I’d end up using it someday in some company… As some may know, I’m a big Git (or mercurial) fan, thus – I kinda see what SVN is doring wrong. At XSolve we have this weekly-event called “Fridays at XSolve”, where one can present in a short 30min session, something he’s been interested in lately etc. It’s a really cool idea, that allows ideas do spread throughout the company – the HR team seems to really care to keep this atmosthere in the company… :-) This Friday I was given the honour and joy to be presenting Git – as we’ve been talking about it a few times during my first week here. Below is the presentation I’ve used:

You can download the presentation or the sources for the presentation here as they are also a simple (I’ve made one about Guava that’s a little more interesting from the TeX viewpoint) example of the LaTeX beamer – which apparently is also an favourite tool of some team members… :-) I’ve also talked a moment after the event with an v. good (so it seems) developer who knew really a lot about many different SCMs – we mentioned “cherry picking” which is really interesting but I don’t know much about it yet. If you don’t know much about Git – take a look at the above presentation, or better, start out your new (better) life with git by visiting these links:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8 Linusa Torvalds on Git vs CVS/SVN
• http://whygitisbetterthanx.com – why git is better than any other SCM ;-) A biased site obviously ;-)
• http://git.or.cz/course/svn.html – side-by-side with SVN
• http://git-scm.com – Git homepage

The presentation worked quite well I guess – some team members who knew about Git/SVN/Mecurial/Bzr etc, where adding their bits of knowledge which really made the presentation a lot more than just a bunch of boring slides… ;-) All in all it was all of those: fun, interesting and yet another occasion for me to train presenting stuff (I’m still bad at it, but well… life is study, right? :-)) I’m really happy to have the opportunity to be working in such a environment – I’ll post whatever is inseresting on this blog (if I have the time to do so :<), so keep an eye ot for some Java/GWT posts… :-)

Hi there, below is the (horribly trashy and chaotic – as it was hacked up in about 2/3 hours) source for my Google Gmail Contextual Gadget.

It extends Gmail by parsing all links passed in an email, and if an github commit link is found it displays the diff for this commit. With coloring etc – just as github would. It’s really fairly easy to get this kind of things going, and if your working with Google Apps (using gmail in your domain etc) you can use this, and many more gadgets (though I didn’t find much of them really useful – that’s why I’ve written this one).

The source can be downloaded, and fixed (which I hopefuly will have time to do! As it’s a mess, let’s say, “proof of concept”): http://github.com/ktoso/GitHubDiff (It’s on the MIT license).

Read the full story to see instalation instructions as well as documentation links…

HOW TO INSTALL:
It can be installed by your own into gmail, if you’re running on Google Apps -just by creating an new Application on the Market and then adding it to your Account. If you’d like me to polish and publish this to the Google Enterprise Market – you’d have to fund me the publish fee, 100$… ;-)

DOCUMENTATION:
Contextual Gadgets: http://code.google.com/apis/gmail/gadgets/contextual/

jQuery – getJSON: http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.getJSON/
GitHub API – http://develop.github.com/p/commits.html

LICENSE:
The source is MIT licensed, feel free to use it as a base for your own projects etc. It’s nothing particularly well written etc ;-)

Enjoy github in your gmail – two amazing webapps in one… :-)

So the long awaited GeeCON 2010 has come to an end yesterday. Of course I was there, and had quite an amazing time there yet again. Here’s, as usually, a small review/roundup of al the three days GeeCON lasted. It’s been really fun, as I was not only attending all the sessions but hanging around with some of the speakers – that was the most fun and interesting part I think.

Day 0 – VeryBerry

After an long 8hour trip by train, we (I was with two friends this time) finally arrived in Poznań. We stayed at the VeryBerry hostel and I’d really like to recomend it to anyone who’d like to stay in Poznań, the prices are low but the service is top notch and the rooms really new and neat :-) After some minor coding, we went to sleep and got read for…

Day 1 – GeeCON University: Gradle Training & JUGs @ Poznań

Gradle Training with Hans Dockter

I was quite interested in Gradle since I’ve seen it in action at SFI (JavaCamp #3 had the same presentation) so I was really happy to be “trained” on it by Gradle inc CEO – Hans Dockter. Apparently they are using it a little (main stuff is still in maven) at SoftwareMind. The training sadly didn’t include as much coding as I’d wish it would, but as Hans said, there’s too much of us (it was the most popular training) and we had 1 day instead of 2 which usually this training would last. The topics where well distrubuted and now all trainees have a really good basic knowlage to start out with gradle. I’m hoping to do this in my soon projects, some ant task usage from within Gradle will be required to build GWT/Vaadin stuff, but hey – the integration is really awesome.

Another fun part was getting home from the University (it’s really awesome by the way) as we took one cab with Hans Dockter and Oliver Gierke (who talked about his Hades project on the 2nd day). We chatted a little in German and dropped them of at their Hotel. Next stop… JUGs meeting~!

JUGs @ Poznań (more info)

This was an short (2h) meeting of the PolishJUG and PoznańJUG. Here we met the rest of my PolishJUG pals, such as Marcin Gadamer and Miroslav Kopecky. And also Geertjan from NetBeans as he was presenting NBPlatform to the JUGs. It was a quite fun session as there was both Chris Aniszyk from Eclipse (and also an OSGi expert) and Geertjan Wielenga with NetBeans Platform – both of which are nice platforms to develop on. The final talk was by Ed Burns in which he presented how the UI enviroment was evolving during the last years and how desktop vs web is now batteling for the users attention. All three would eventually present their talks at the first day of GeeCON – Geertjan dropped in as Ikai Lan replacement as he got really sick and couldn’t do his speech (in case you’re wondering why he’s not listed in the speakers section).

Later we went to a nice Pub called Fuego where we had some interesting conversations with all the speakers and members the Polish and Poznań JUGs… Let’s move on to day 1, shall we..?

Day 2 – GeeCON & Geeky Pool Party

Thorbiörn Fritzon
The Future of Java

The first (and also sponsored ;-)) presentation was done really professional and was mostly about assuring all present programmers that oracle does care about the java community and will continue (even more than sun) to evolve java. Well, this might me be true, but the presentation, while really amazing from the visual side, didn’t really involve more facts than the statement about Java Oracle has released a while ago.

Holly Cummins
Apache Aries: Enterprise OSGi in Action

I hoped to really grasp the whole OSGi concept after this presentation and partially I did. Holly did kind of introduce OSGi to us and tried to show it in action – which sadly didn’t go to well (loosing the war you need to deploy can be quite an problem… ;-)). One thing that Oliver didn’t agree on is that she said that Class loading is the best thing about OSGi, yet as Oliver and some others tweeted – it’s just an enabeler for Services to exist.

Craig L Russell
Easy to Use Highly Available Java Database Access

This was a presentation about the MySQL’s Cluster storage engine. It was interesting to see how such technologies are in fact used from the code – it’s quite easy actually – almost like using an normal MySQL instance. There are some limitations of course – as the lack of relations etc. but if you’d need HA and Fault Tolerance it’s definitely one way you could go.

Some of the talk was about ClusterJ which is an slightly more advanced way to interact with your Cluster from Java… More about it can be read here

Christian Tzolov
Rapid Server Side Java Development Using Spring Roo

Though I didn’t attend this one, I included it in this review in order to say this: Roo ownz (any command line tool that really helps at dev time ownz) :-) I’ve seen some of it in action some time ago, and it’s really helping while developing what you’d call “plain java apps”, without the goodness of Grails generate stuff… If you still haven’t seen it in action: take a look, its definitely worth it. (It’s an development time only tool that like the grails command line app, can really speed up your development time with setting up basic Domain Objects, Persistence etc…)

Eugene Ciurana
The High Availability Non-Stop, Fault-Tolerant Services Tutorial

A very good talk about scalability and availability. Eugene explained to us what the typical bottlenecks could be and how we can cope with them, by scaling up or out – (at last someone clearly defined those two to me). Some of his real live examples where really interesting as one company that switched to an cluster to store their data and not OracleDB what would cost them A LOT… All in all, it was quite educational but sadly – it’s something I won’t be seeing in my upcoming years as “novice developer”.

Ed Burns
JSF 2.0, Myth and Reality

As Ed is one of co-spec lead for the JSF 2.0 (and also “worked on a wide variety of client and server side web technologies since 1994, including NCSA Mosaic, Mozilla, the Sun Java Plugin, Jakarta Tomcat and, most recently JavaServer Faces.”) we were all really interested in his talk. He addmited what they did wrong with JSF 1.x and showed how most of the problems where adressed in the 2.0 release. Is was a quite nice talk, but sadly (and with some maven problems ;-))

Matthias Wessendorf
Practical Comet and JSF

I’ve been really interested in ServerSidePush for a long time, so this was an really fun presentation to watch. There were some implementations and Java Libraries shown. If interested, take a look at Atmosphere on java.net or the Dojo implementation which I’ve been reading about lately. (another nice link) All in all, it’s not quite there yet, and will sometimes have to fall back to polling. Hopefully websockets from HTML5 could be a nice thing to use comet in all the future browsers.

Vaclav Pech
Get ‘em before they get you

Geertjan introduced me to Vaclav Pech sometime during GeeCON and also I’ve been following him on twiiter quite for a while, and I must say the stuff he coded is really impressive – and all his presentations were well prepared and fun :-) That said, let’s move on to this particular session.

A sponsored talk, but nonetheless quite interesting, as Vaclav showed us how to even better utilize all the features that IntelliJ IDEA has. Most of the tools where known to me, but some where new or interesting (it’s quite simple to write your own inspections btw!) The parallel session was Ed Burns with his “Rockstar Programmer” book-talk, Vaclav noticed that Ed’s talk probably has the people who need to become such programmers, while this one has people who already are… ;-) Following that idea, Vaclav went bughunting with us and all the various IDEA tools – it was a nice presentation, with a good link between the audience and him :-)

Geeky Pool Party

In the evening all Geeks where invited to the Black Pool (Pool Club) where one had an occasion to talk with fellow developers and speakers. We had a nice talk with James Williams – not only (but mostly ;-)) about development but also how education works in Poland etc etc… Later I joined the GeeCON and Sun teams at the Pool and played a little with Łukasz (not sure of the name, sorry!?) who recognized me as the “guy from JavaCamps with Shadowman on the laptop” :-) //That said, Shadowman FTW! :-)

Day 3 – GeeCON & GeekTrain back to Cracow

Oliver Gierke
Easing JPA DAO development with Hades

Hades is an really nice way to speed up your DAO development, read more about it here: Synyx Hades. I’ve bee riding a cab with Oliver before and already heard how good of a programmer he seems to be, the presentation just confirmed this. Hades is really well thought out and intuitive to use. Most of the time, all you have to do is write an DAO Interface, that you then use to access your data… Yeah, just an interface – no implementation needed – all the implementing is done by hades. It looks at the interface and tries to guess what an method should be doing, most common prefixes as findBySomething or findAll or other get’s are supported and generic. When you need an custom implementation, you can easily do this as well, and it’s possible to reuse named queries… Really nice, and the upcomming version will be JPA2.0 compatible :-) Big kudos to the Hades team…

The sources used in the presentation can be found on github: http://github.com/olivergierke/hades-geecon

Vaclav Pech
Unleash your processor(s)

A really nice intro into paralelisation – NOT multi threading. Vaclav presented such abstractions as Actors, Agents, Fork/Join and Dataflows… Of course most of this was shown in Groovy as Vaclav is involved in the development of GPars. It’s been quite insightful and now I also know what this AKKA thing is that some people are so fascinated about. Also some Scala and Cloujure examples where really fun to investigate – scala in fact is in many ways so very much elegant and ideal for such sollutions – though Groovy GPars also has me convinced. The withPool 4 {…} is a nice feat for example, and thats just the tip of the iceberg.

Joonas Lehtinen
Vaadin – Rich Web Applications in Server-side Java without Plug-ins or JavaScript

I’ve been trying out vaadin lately and it’s quite nice. Above all, it’s “a GWT that looks good”. The presentation was lead quite profesionally but all in all didn’t really show any “meat” od the framework. One thing I’m concerned about is the (as Hans Dockter likes to call it) “Frameworkitis“, I’m kind of afraid that it might be hard to force Vaadin to do things that the projectant’s didn’t think about… I’m hoping to continue to code my simple rss reader with an vaadin front end – and also I’d like to add some simple JAX-RS powered REST access to it…

James Williams
Game Programming with Groovy

We’ve had a nice talk with James during day1′s pool party. He’s been using Grails lately and is working in the US. His talk was ment to be a more fun/geeky one, and showed simple groovy apps/games, one involving JavaLibrary usage to access the Wiimote sensors. Thus, the code was mostly “looking like java” and not much groovyish was in there.

Charles Nutter
Duby: a Fast, Ruby-like Language for the JVM

I just the last part of this talk, as James didn’t take all the time he had so I went over to look at “this Duby thing”. The best quote I’ve head from GeeCON comes from this talk, it went something like this:

Obviously I’ve been looking at the JVMs source a whole lot. [...] So what’s the neatest feature we all would like in Java…? MultiLineStrings, for christ’s sake!!! [...] And I’ve been looking thought the Java’s sources and there is one single damn if statement, that basically says: “If string, dont allow multiple lines”. And I was like “… You ****!!! For all those years…!! Argh!!!”

Vaclav Pech
Groovy actors and concurrent dataflow with GPars

It was basically the same (well, with more code examples) presentation as the one I’ve seen before, so I switched and went to see Adam Warski and the Checkers Framework.

I also had a small talk after this with Łukasz who recognized me from the JavaCamps and has been presenting on the 1st JC on his Swing/JNLP usage at his work. Sadly I wasn’t into Griffon since then so I couldn’t really give him more tips about it more than that it looks really promising from looking at the examples.

Adam Warski
Static analysis using JSR308 annotations

The checkers framework is a new thing to Java and it basically allows to annotate Types, in a current point in time. Your method can require an @Hashed String and would not compile if passing it an normal String it opens up quite some interesting interactions, some of which Adam has implemented in his TypeState checker which is checking the status of collections if it is safe to read from some place in the code or not – by setting the collections @annotation to certain States (like “you haven’t called isReady, do please dont read from me!”). It’s an interesting way to detect errors in your code before execution time.

Bruno Bossola
Object Oriented for nonbelievers

One of the most fun talks on GeeCON. It was about how we somehow strayed away from what OO used to be, ObjectOriented Design. Nowadays people start out not by building an ObjectModel of their Domain but look for frameworks to use… His talk was there to bring us back to the basics what OO should be about and showed some patterns in use (simple, yet effective). One particulary fun quote from this talk is the last sentence:

Why am I calling this talk “for nonbelievers”? Well… You all agree with me that OODesign is important, but tommorrow you’ll go back to choosing from all those fun frameworks anyways! ;-)

Mark Struberg
JSR-299 Context and Dependency Injection

An very important topic as DI gonna be standarized now… Sadly Mark’s voice was quite monotone and we were all powered out at the time… The presentation as such, was very well prepared and later there was some source shown – that’s how I like it.

End of GeeCON 2010

After some “bye bye” with crew members and speakers, we went to our hostel and back to Cracow – it was a fun event, hope to come back next year. What would I like to be different? Well, more awesome speakers – Scott Davis would be really cool, I’ve seen his talks on JDD09 and they really changed how I think and code. He opened my mind to “Java the Platform” and Groovy and all the other awesome languages. Such speakers would be more than welcome anytime! Oh, and more “hands on”!

GeekTrain back to Cracow, and an surprise meeting :-)

In the train we met some fellow programmer who recognized our GeeCON stuff and most of the trip we where talking about the conference and our studies/work… It was a fun ending for a fun conference… ;-) See you next year!

http://github.com/barthez/mysql.integra.dbfiller – an simple Python app that is able to generate SQL code with inserts that we need to fill up our database for load testing. It’s doing an simple simulation of people checking in and out from various activities at some job and calculates when who should cone and do their shift… My friend Bartek is by far more into python, and has coded most of this app (just check the impact charts ;-)), so much of the kudos for this goes to him.

Noticed an gigantic hardware problem our student groups server… Some didn’t believe me in the beginning… This week we went to see how much of the harddrives “went bye bye” in real life, as there was nothing that could be done remotely. I’ve been battling with the read-only / filesystem some evenings before, and concluded that it’s not just a small hdd failure – it had to be something BIG… And boy, BIG it was… Something between all the drives and the rest of the server seems to have died. My best guess is the SCSI controller… It’s not really worth it to replace the parts as the server was very very old, well, let’s hope we get some (anything) machine to finally run our tests on. SCSI Controllers on fire…

netbeans.edu.pl – was written by me in Grails. I have yet to release the sources, but will do so for sure – after I polish them a little, because they’ve been written under immense time pressure etc. It’s a quite nice framework, but obviously it’s an overkill for such an simple site as netbeans.edu.pl… It was quite fun to write my own taglib for the twitter integration and also I’ve also used the GoogleData API to serve images directly from Picasa Web Albums… Of course there are PHP lib’s that could do this, but it just seemed “nicer” to me to write this in Groovy…

After the NBPTraining me and two friends started developing an simple Traveling Salesman Visualization using the NetBeans Platform – solving the problem with Genetic Algorithms. We’ve decided to use prefuse for the graph visualization stuff… Let’s hope it was a good decision – of course I know that it’s not being developed since a long time, and the API isn’t even Generic, but it looks quite nice and the workflow with grapghs is really neat – the “actions” stuff… I’ll be trying to write our own renderer for this program so keep your fingers crossed – hope it’s turn out well. Sadly, were presenting an pre-alpha of this program on Wednesday and I won’t be able to come to the uni as at that time I’ll be taking the Gradle Training at GeeCON. :-)

Inspired by both koziołek’s post about vaadin + spring and the nice tutorial that Darek Zoń has been writing lately I decided to take another look at Vaadin. I’d describe it best as… “GWT that looks and feels good right from the start”… ;-) The sources of what might become an simple rss reader app can be found on github: RssR – vaadin rss reader. I’ve had some experience with GWT while trying to create an online crossword solving system, but I have to admit – it’s not really near it’s final stages… And I somehow dont have the willpower to go back to it at this moment – while starting out with it I hoped that I could easily just drop my existing crossword stuff into GWT and add some simple frontend – turned out that this isn’t so easy. Ah well. Vaadin on the other side looks much nicer for some “real, even if generic, webapp”, so I chose to try implementing an simple rssreader based on it. Loging in and basic hibernate setup (not finished yet) is already in place. Oh, and I’m also using maven on this one. If you’re interested in it, or are just abour ti start an Vaadin project, check out the sources and maby they’ll help you out figuring out what all this is about :-) It’s able to run on jetty by calling mvn jetty:run-war :-) (lol just found an google code project about exactly the same stuff only written in pure spring http://code.google.com/p/rsser Kudos to the coder! :-))

Oh and just an minor mention about Google Guava, I’ve been looking at it’s API lately and it’s quite nice I think. It’s not as magic filled as op4j, but this might be just the good thing about it. As I had to do an presentation to pass an class about presentations at school, I’ve done this super simple presentation about a very basic subset of Guava’s features. While doing it I’ve learned how to use the LaTeX Beamer class, and yup, it’s really very nice indeed! Notice the coloured Java syntax? Nice trick, ain’t it :-)

Oh, and while doing all this I also created an very simple website www.kemerling.pl. The graphics where done by another friend of mine. It was quite hell to get all this to display properly (the while part, with bazylion transparent layers… ;-)), but I hope it looks all right :-)

Hmm… back to coding! Gotta improve the NBP Traveling Salesman now :-)

PS: It seems that this blog has been added to www.dworld.pl/blogEntry/blog/113! Whoa that’s really really awesome and I’m really really grateful to be aggregated together with Poland’s most active Java bloggers :-) I don’t know whom I should thank for adding me there, so I’ll thank that the whole community and Grzegorz Duda as dworlds author :-)

"Carmen" at Cracow's Opera

Today we were with my girlfriend to see Bizet’s “Carmen” at the Cracow Opera – celebrating one of your special days. The opera didn’t move me as much as Rigoletto did, but it still was a great spectacle in 4 acts. One has to say that the scene was heavily and very creatively used, as seen on the above picture. Music and singing were also top class. I did miss some more powerfull or dramatic pieces – that’s not really something Carmen has to offer – but that’s just my personal opinion – Kasia enjoyed it very much :-)

If anyone is considering going somewhere more “cultural” anytime soon, I’d really recommend some Opera – it’s an amazing form of expression.

Zen points directly to the human heart,
see into your nature and become Buddha.
- Hakuin Ekaku (1685–1768)

For those who don’t know about zen coding (where have you been guys?) here’s a little sample:

Instead of writing:
<form class="form-comment" id="comment">
<fieldset>
<input id="myid" name="name" type="" />
<input onclick="hideMe()" type="" />
</fieldset>
</form>

You write

form.form-comment#comment>fieldset>input#myid[name=name]>input[onclick=hideMe()]

and hit [TAB].

To understand zen, you must understand yourself. (yet I also strongly suggest watching this video)

Links:
http://confluence.jetbrains.net/display/IDEADEV/Maia+EAP – IntelliJ IDEA Early Access Program
http://code.google.com/p/zen-coding/ – zen coding website

Yeah it’s simple, rough anc certainly not the next Katedra… ;-) But as a person that totaly sux at graphics I’m quite happy with it, take a look and let me know what you think.

Oh and some other animations by my classmates are avaiable on this youtube playlist, feel free to check it out -- some are really nice.

I’m coding this project to get used to some of the basic JEE stuff, such as Hibernate for example (it is quite amazing and very elegant – especially HQL), and to have a good time while coding in Java…

The source is avaiable under the AGPLv3 on github: http://github.com/ktoso/gwt-crossword
At some places it is still a mess so please keep in mind that it’s still under initial development (and I’m having a tough time at the uni and can’t code gwt-crossword everyday :\), that aside, feel free to take a look on the source!

Yeah! It’s time for another great JUG meeting. I’ll have to go quite far this time, as it’ll be in Poznań and that’s about 7h by train from Cracow… but at the very moment I saw who was going to be there, that is: Geertjan Wielenga (whose blog I’ve been reading for a long long time and also Romuen Strobl’s pal from the Netbeans team) and Tony Epple, I just knew I can’t miss such a 2-day crash course about NetBeans Platform. I’m mostly interested in EE stuff and didn’t really look all so much into SE apps (just the few while I was very fresh to Java) and this’ll be a great opportunity to see the NBP in action and explained by the pr0s!

It would seem that I’m not the only person who’s excited about this JUG Meeting as during only one day, already 42 out of 45 possible attendands got registered! I already got my Hotel booked and tommorow I’ll buy the train tickets. Oh, and one more great thing  this trip. My girlfriend will some with me so after I code some stuff we’ll check out Poznań – some people told ma that it’s a really nice city. :-)

More information can be found here: (in polish) http://www.jug.poznan.pl/2010/01/bezplatne-szkolenie-netbeans-platform/ or here: http://www.jug.poznan.pl/materialy-ze-spotkan/netbeans-platform-training-2010/ (in english)

—EDIT—

Sadly I wasn’t able to go to this meeting since there were no free places left for students from outside Poznan. I guess thats understandable since they are Poznań JUG, so they want to teach Poznań students more than Cracows students ;-) As sad as that has been for me, something even better came out of it! What? Well, just wait a month or two and I’ll let you know JavaGeeks!