Well, last night I registered for the NL-JUG‘s J-Spring. So those who want to come to the NL-JUG’s J-Spring too should start registering soon!
Let me know if you are planning to attend, perhaps we can have a drink/talk @ J-Spring. And yes, I’m an official member of the NL-JUG too. 
Nothing new to those using Linux or Windows. But for the Mac OSX developers there is some great news. Finally there seems to be a solution on its way. Thanks to some changes in OSX it is impossible right now to run AWT code within a SWT based application from within the Eclipse JDT. Something going awfuly wrong with deadlocks and all between the AWT and SWT event handling threads. It has been one of the strongest arguments against using an Apple system for Java development.
Credits to Wayne Beaton’s blog entry for mentioning this excellent news. I wouldn’t have known otherwise. It seems that it is useful to put in radar reports when you come across something ugly in OSX. The Apple devs won’t prioritize an issue when few reports come in on it. So if sh#t hits the fan when devving an Apple app. Report!!
Now if someone could convince Mr. Beaton to actually get a Mac, that would be great. Perhaps some of his Eclipse enthousiasm will rubb onto his Apple system usage. Eclipse is great, but Eclipse on a Mac, is even better. 
(Because even an Eclipse/SWT UI remains butt ugly on Windows.)
A few days back I posted about my session proposal to the NL-JUG‘s J-Spring. Three proposols came in for a Maven 2 session. And it seems I failed the cut. Too bad for me.
I will definatly attend the J-Spring though. It’s an excellent place to see some old friends again and catch a few presenations. There will probably be a Maven 2 session, since it matches very nicely with the overall theme of this J-Spring. So I will probably sit in on that one to see if I missed any details on the subject. And I’ll have a few unanswered questions handy as well if I’m in the mood.
Also I’d recommend every dutch Java developer to join the NL-JUG. Great way to meet and greet, make new contacts, learn stuff and if you’re on a job hunt, get a few job offerings.
A Couple of Dutch Rants – Amsterdam Java Meetup (30th of June) and SpringOne
A colleague of mine went to the previous meet-up. And he said it was worth it.
So I’ll guess I’ll have to look into this now. From what I’ve read the early birds get free beer. (Not like in “free speech”.) Esspecially since Alarmnummer is convinced we’ve never spoken IRL. Guess I’ll have to prove him wrong then.
Anyways, what’s this meet-up about? It’s sort of a flash mob idea. Set a time, set a place and then just show up and make the bartender happy. It’s a social event and with Java as a shared interest. Should be interresting.
Keep an eye on Olaf Arendsen’s A Couple of Dutch Rants weblog for more info. He has planned the meet-up on june 30th at 6pm, only the location is not yet set.
This year I’ve made a topic proposal to the NL-JUG for the upcoming J-Spring conference. I suggested to do a piece about Maven 2. Would be great if I get selected. I’ve heard unconfirmed rumours that someone important of the Maven project might be attending. Would be great to actually be checked out by someone related to the topic at hand.
Anyways, I also have heard the NL-JUG will be deciding this week about the speaker slots. All I can do now is wait and sit tight. The conference is called J-Spring and is at the 15th of june. Normally the conference is in the spring, but this year it is a bit later because the JavaOne is also on another date this year. I’ll definatly be on the J-Spring 2006, let’s just hope it’ll be on stage too. The NL-JUG is the dutch Java User Group. They’re the ppl who snatched the James Gosling JUG slot at the JavaOne this year.
My employer is setting up a comptence center for Java. All the ussuall stuff you can expect. But the plus side is that I might be able to combine my studies with some work related stuff.
Now only to think up a way to sell it to my employer that any research done for my education will remain under my copyright. It would really suck if I think up something nice and my employer walking away with it taking the credit for it. Perhaps I should GPL it and then give it to my employer, that way I allways remain the owner of the original work and my employer is free do with it what they want under the condition that my name remains attached to any derived works.
Damn, where to start?
In my own enthousiasm I’ve promised my employer to write a sort of introduction to Maven. Problem is that the maven site has improved a whole lot since the last time I checked.
This means I will be pasting a sh#tload of URL’s in the document. But then it won’t be that good of a read.
The best part is that most of the work on the document will be done in afterhours. But they pay compensation.
My bank offers a web based application to access my account. With this I should be able to order money transfers and all kinds of things you normally do with a bank account.
BUT, since OSX Tiger 10.4 it doesn’t work anymore. I did some debugging last night and it appears to be someting related to liveconnect and Java. They’re application uses a Java Applet to do some extra encryption over an SSL connection. The Applet itself is, as you can guess, obfuscated, so linking the debugger isn’t all informative yet.
Perhaps I should do some manual deobfuscating first, but that’s to much work I think. 
If anybody is reading this and has some thoughts on this subject. Please by all means post a comment. It sucks that I have to use Opera browser on my mac to connect to my bank. Since Opera on the mac uses the 1.3 version of Java instead of 1.4 like all other browsers available on a mac, it seems to work.
I allready found out that in a java 1.4 revision there was a fix for some vulnerability with live connect. Sigh!!
Anyway live connect is a mechanism with which javascript on your page can communicate with the java applet through method calls en vice versa.
After a couple of months working on a project going from bad to worst it’s a relieve to finally be on a new assigment. The project I’m in is about building a logistic planning application. It involves planning manpower, material and tracks. Oh did I mention that making the plan for one year takes 200 people nine (!!) months to complete. Talk about a complex process. 
Anyway, I’ll be doing all kinds og GUI related work based on Eclipse 3.0.1 RCP (Rich Client Platform). Never done that before… This will look good on my resume.
oreilly.com — Online Catalog: Java 5.0 Tiger: A Developer’s Notebook
Recently I bought this book. It’s an excellent read. Do note that you have have some experience writing software in Java releases prior to Java 5.0.
The book introduces the new language features in a code oriented approach. This results in a very quick and solid introduction into the new language features of Java 5.0. Don’t forget about the other new features of Java 5.0 though.