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Humour =) Swear Jar

OK, ya… so I ain’t afraid to admit that I’m an IDEA fanboy. So what do you think I did when I saw my new colleague whips out his Eclipse in his first day at work? That’s right–I tried to convert him. Any time you try to change someone’s habit, you got to be really really careful though. The wrong approach could make for an uneasy relationship down the road. My observations revealed to me it was doable. It wasn’t easy but I was convinced that if he would give it an honest trial then he would never go back to that crappy Eclipse. Boy I was right!

So I met him recently (we’re both with different employers now) that he told me he has officially been “converted.” While I’m not surprised, but that news brought a smile to my face which, then, leads me to think that there’s a lot more Eclipse-converts than we know. So where are you all at?

From my limited time using jQuery (a month now), I really came to enjoy this compact and powerful javascript library. I stumbled onto this while I was checking out Seam’s Wiki source. [Sidetrack–speaking of Seam’s Wiki, it’s now the web application that powers Hibernate blog–nice!] The only problem that I had with it was that it didn’t automatically bind event handlers to some selection of elements after the page is loaded. So I was looking for answers–and it came with the Live Query plugin, developed by Brandon Aaron. This is a really useful tool when you need to dynamically add and remove parts of a page dynamically by just updating the DOM via append(). I thought I maybe read somewhere that this plugin is in the road map to be part of the core of jQuery–good idea.

I don’t buy many IT books as I used to these days but my best purchase this year by far (actually it’s my only purchase along with Java Concurrency in Practice) is CSS Mastery. And no, I don’t know the author or have any affiliations with the publisher. CSS and web design standards were topics that I lack knowledge prior to my encounter with the book. It also helped that I had a strict deadline to “prettify” a web application with CSS so I had to put a lot of what I learned into practice. This book made it all possible for me to get my work done and some more.  So if anyone is starting out on CSS and needs a book may want to give this book a try. Also get the errata from the book’s web site.

Do most coders that use open-source software ever take it for what it truly is? That the code is opened for them to see? I wonder how many people leverage the power of open-source software during development? Do you ever find yourself opening up the source for Spring or Hibernate or even JSF when you encounter problems that deal directly with them? My feeling is that most probably don’t. In my experience, I’d found that having the source code for the tools that I rely on for my projects to be essential. There were many times when I can’t find how to use a particular feature that I then turn to the source and use Find Usages in IDEA. Then, it usually doesn’t take very long to find out the solution. Or if the open-source project is any good, there’s got to test cases for you to look at–that’s the gold mine. Generally you need to have an idea about what the framework does before you actually try to delve into the source otherwise you could get lost pretty easily. Although once you get the hang it, you rarely find yourself stuck on a problem for long. Do most people just rely on the project documentation, books, tutorials, etc? What a waste it seems.