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After the NetBeans Certified Platform Training in Kraków (2010)

Ktoso — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 13:55:32 +0000

Amazing days and awesome people

It’s been some amazing days for me during (and before) the NBPTraining. As you probably know already – I’ve been the “one-man-army” behind the organization and basically everything around this training. I got lots of help from various people, such as Dr Jarosław Wąs (from KN Glider) – it wouldn’t have been possible to make this training such an success without his great and very active support. And of course – the PolishJUG, which I’m a proud member of! :-) But one thing I have to admit, Bureaucracy is a horrible thing and really made some things (needlessly…) difficult – thank goodness in the end, we had everything well organized – as Geertjan put it on dZone:

[...] There are also some illustrative pics to share, to give an impression of the group (really large), the trainers (really busy), and the organization (really good) [...]

Day 0: Welcome Dinner

What’s so worth mentioning about the guys just coming here anyway? Well it was a quite trip for some, especially Geertian, who had to come by train which took him about 27hours instead of just coming by car from Prague. All because of Eyjafjoell‘s eruption last week… And Toni and Geertjan were in Oslo at that time, doing a Training for an company (btw nice interview with Gunnar Reinseth) – so we were worried if they’ll be able to come to Poland due to all the flights being cancelled… Anton was lucky and but Geertjan’s original flight got cancelled… Well, he had quite an interesting journey as he called it himself :-) Later when Karol joined us and soon we all went to eat some pierogi and chat a little :-)

Days 1 & 2: The Training

Thanks to dr Wąs everything went smooth and without any problems… Even though some other students also wanted to use the room we had reserved – due to the chaos caused by the tragic plane accident and them wanting to make up for the classes they’ve lost last weekend due to the burial ceremonies… I’m really glad we managed to get the training rolling with absolutely no problems – we were really prepared for everything, along with backup projectors etc ;-)

If you’re not very familiar with the Java World – please note, that the training was NOT about NetBeans IDE. Yeah, we did use NetBeans IDE (there’s some nice little helpers/wizards), but that’s absolutely not a must – NBP is pure Java (just a bunch of jar’s) and XML – so you can use anything you want to code stuff based on NetBeans RCP. That said, the training was about real coding stuff such as patters used in the RCP, use-cases and “ how do I code such a feature to scale well?”.

The agenda was the basic NetBeans Platform Training as outlined on http://edu.netbeans.org/courses/nbplatform-certified-training/ that’s a good thing, as only a few students actually have used the NetBeans RCP (or even ANY RCP) in their lives. The level of participants was quite diverse, some saw loose coupling in action for the first time in their lives, and others were already planing some advanced use-cases foe the things we were learning. The sources and videos for most of the examples are also hosted on netbeans.edu.pl, so if you want to know what you’ve missed, feel free to download/watch them (if interested in FullHD versions, contact me per email). The Lookup and Nodes/Explorer Views were the most interesting features of the platform I guess. Of course having an full blown app with menus etc out of the box is also nice, but not a “life changer” if it weren’t for those mechanisms. Sadly we didn’t talk about the Lexer API (for parsing languages) but I personally talked with the guys a little about it – and why schielmann was dropped etc… A really fun and interesting insider talk :-) I simply love such conversations…

After the training Geertjan gave away a copy of his book (“Rich Client Programming”), to the person who asked the best, most interesting questions during the course. Of course it was then signed by all the trainers. Sadly I don’t have a picture of the books’ winner, nonetheless – congratulations! After the training I also asked the guys to sign my copy of the book, hurray for signature collectors ;-)

Anyone interested in some of the response I got concerning the training? After the training plenty of you mailed me and thanked via forums etc, here’s a few responses:

przyznaje, na prawde baaaardzo fajne szkolenie

Faktycznie – świetna robota. Wielkie dzięki ;)

Tru. Gj.

[...] nie udalo mi sie zjawic a slyszalem ze bylo super ;/

[...] bedzie problemem jesli przyjde jutro na to szkolenie NetBeans’a? Bo slyszalam ze duzo ciekawych i przydatnych dla mnie rzeczy jest wiec chcialabym sobie posluchac :)

Big big thanks to all of you, I’m happy you enjoined the training. You may want to check out Geertjan’s take on it on dZone.

See you next time!

I hope you all enjoined the training – we certainly did. I’ve got some opinions from happy participants, so I guess everyone liked it as much as those did.

If you have anything (opinions, sources or even complaints) feel free to contact me: kmalawski@project13.pl or just leave a comment here :-) Also, when you get your NetBeans Certified Engineer and would like some more promotion for your open source project – let me know and we’ll add a link to it at netbeans.edu.pl!

Some students have already have started their projects based on the NetBeans Platform – so what are you waiting for?! ;-)

What’s next for me?

Well, I’m going to GeeCON, to learn about Gradle, and tap into facts and myths about JSF and other things (the list of good topics is really long so I wont list them all here, just have a look on your own). The agenda mostly caught up my attecion and I’m really happy to be going there. What’s new for me + conferences is that I don’t have to go alone anymore. I’m going with a friend (some years older) and potentialy another girl – as she won the Google trip to GeeCON… ;-) I’m also really happy to be able to meet Adam Dudczak, thanks to whom the whole NBPT idea got ignited in me and the NetBeans Guys :-) Of course we’ll meet up with all the PolishJUG members, (Adrian Nowak, Radosław Holewa, Marcin Gadamer and Kuba Dżon) and Miroslav will be comming too – lot’s and lot’s of programming-friends :-) Seems like Toni and Geertjan will also be comming, yay! Yeah, so that’ll be 3 days in May… but that’s not the end of my Java related stuff in May:

Later in May I’ll be on an Spring Source Training. It’s only the “short introductory one”, and I’m well aware that it won’t make me an spring-guru, but an insider insight about Spring, Roo or Grails is also a good thing to have.

By the way, did you notice that the netbeans.edu.pl is running on Grails? I’ll release it’s sources when they’re polished enough~! Viva la free software.

Geertjan, Toni, Konrad (me), Karol

Oh, and for those asking: Sadly I didn’t own an PolishJUG T-Shirt at the time of the training, so I took the most Java related I had – from Java Developers Day. Also a quite nice conference… :-)

jQuery tricks 1: automatic-wslider

Ktoso — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 22:19:12 +0000

This time I’ll post some actual code. A client wanted me to write an “image slider”. You’ve probably seen lot’s of them online – and a whole lot of them is in flash – why? There is no need to involve flash in such a trivial task, and jQuery is more than up to the job :-) I used jQuery with the wslide plugin, it’s simple and quite neat. But it does not slide on it’s own. But thanks to it’s simplicity I was able add the functionality I needed in just a few lines of clean code. I used the timer plugin to “click” on the slider at some interval and voila – the birth of an automatic jquery image slider. Anyways, here’s thecode:

var canDo = true;
/** plugin @author: http://www.webinventif.fr/wslide-plugin/ */
$(document).ready(function(){
$('#slidermenu, #slider, .cube').mouseover(function(){
canDo = false;
}).mouseout(function(){
canDo = true;
});
$('#slider').wslide({
width: 900,
height: 200,
pos: 1,
fade: true,
horiz: true,
autolink: 'slidermenu',
speed:300
});
$.timer(5000, function (timer) {
if(canDo){
if($('#slidermenu a:last').hasClass('wactive')){
$('#slidermenu a:first').click();
}else{
$('#slidermenu .wactive').next().click();
}
}
});
});

FDM – Not Libre but still a better way of selling music

Ktoso — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 00:50:55 +0000

A week ago a friend of mine told me about an interesting idea by FDM (Fabryka Dźwięku z Muz – pl. ‘Factory of Sounds from Muses’ (it’s kinda hard to translate)). FDM is a small music label, supporting new and fresh artists (indie, could be a good word here I guess). As such, it’s not at all “mainstream” (polish mainstream would be… stachursky 2009 or……. doda?), in other words “soulless”. But, mainstream sells well, and indie does not, and that’s nothing new, but for FDM it was a really painful experience, thus they started an action called “Muzyka bez Ceny” (pl. “Music without a price”).

New Century Classics - Natural Process

Here’s how it works. The price of the CD is 0PLN. The shipping costs are 4PLN. They ship it by cheapest mail avaiable, that is around 2PLN, so basically do they earn just shabby 2PLN for one CD sold? Now that’s not working business model is it? The trick here is, that the customer pays 4 + X PLN, where X is an amount of money he thinks the CD is worth. I really LOVE the idea, and also the band New Century Classics which I found through FDM. So i bought their CD for about 20PLN (around 5$), as i thought the CD would be low value, maybe even home-burned… I got the CD yesterday and… I was shocked, It’s so well released that I can only compare it to Hotel by Moby or Minutes to Midnight by Linkin Park. It’s a neat stiff paper and stylish box. I would have never thought that a small indie company would release someones first album with this much style etc. (Photos attached below). Now i feel that i should have paid even more for this CD, the value is really there, as is the sound – it’s got soul and feeling.

New Century Classics

All that said… FDM does not support Creative Commons etc, which is really sad, yet their move “pay as much as you want” is a great thing and really motivates to support bands. I really love the fact of getting a REAL CD and not only a download link when i PAY for something.

And now back to reality… I am aware that there are not a whole lot of people, who happily pay for stuff thay can get for free such as paying for stuff on Creative Commons or GPL. In this, I guess, I represent a minority that is really happy to pay bands such as Celestial Aeon Project, Steven Dunston or even the polish Accomplice Affair for their amazing (and free as in freedom) music. I’d be even more happy donating to them if there was a possibility to get their CDs, such as was the case with FDMs. That said, I will continue to suppoer Free/Libre Artists and hope more and more of them to understand that real fans, are willing to pay for content (and there are lot’s of case studies profing that!) , if only it makes sense.

AWK and multiple lines from shell command

Ktoso — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 15:11:16 +0000

Let’s say you want to read the ps output inside an AWK script, it’s not so simple since system returns an exit code and not the string you want – it’s being sent to stdout, here is a simple trick to read multiple lines from a shell command inside awk:
awk 'BEGIN{while ("ps aux" | getline){ print "test " $1 " test"}}' /dev/null | more

Beauty: Ólafur Arnalds – Ljósið

Ktoso — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 10:29:59 +0000

Ólafur Arnalds – Ljósið (Official Music Video) from Erased Tapes on Vimeo.

Yet another amazing freedom using initiative. Let’s quote the homepage first:

In April 2009, Iceland’s neo-classical export Ólafur Arnalds created the 7-song series ‘Found Songs’ –
recording a song a day for 7 days and instantly making each track available via Twitter. With artwork contributions
from fans via Flickr, this modern release awakens memories of a tradition that seemed lost in the digital age we live in.

The music and video are just amazing… Low-quality audio files can be downloaded on the website, for HQ you’d have to pay – fair deal i guess as the LQ is quite ok. Sadly it’s not on creative commons, but the basic idea seems to be there nevertheless.