Posts of blog

WordReference Java Library

2011-08-07T11:13:41.416Z

Check it out: https://bitbucket.org/dfa/wr

It features also a command line client.

Dollar 1-0-alpha2

2010-07-18T09:56:01.132Z

A new version of dollar is out. Major changes:

defined a contract: copy, iterator, equals and hashCode
copy() for ListWrapper, SetWrapper and MapWrapper always returns a new object
improved generics usage
improved internal design (e.g. OCP violations)
removed TODO exceptions
countless bugfixes

Javadoc is still missing, maybe you can contribute it? :-)

Dollar 1.0-alpha1 is out

2010-06-30T10:19:36.512Z

After spending a week fixing bugs I've decided to tag revision 2b48f56e7c75 as 1.0-alpha1.

Furthermore all wrappers now are well tested using JUnit Theories. You may find useful the ObjectTester class.

My new laptop: Asus UL30A

2010-03-31T11:58:41.140Z

PROs

looooong battery life, about 10 hours
light (1.5 Kg)
very small power supply, compared to my old one
easy to use keyboard
4 GB DDR3 ram
wifi N with a very good antenna
cool palm rest

CONs

glossy display
too many sticks :-(
noisy and slow hard disk (Update: I've just replaced it with Intel X-25V, zero noise)

First Dollar review

2010-06-01T16:54:18.271Z

"An experimental Java API that shows how much you can bend the Java syntax to suit your personal taste. Through inspiration by this project I’ve come to some unique ways to make my code more expressive – without using funny signs. Thanks to Davide Angelocola for his unique approach."

-- http://schneide.wordpress.com/2010/05/30/blog-harvest-may-2010/

Learning JSR 299

2010-03-19T18:24:14.663Z

Since I'm taking a break from my master thesis, IA and JavaScript these days I'm studying JSR-299, the Java Contexts and Dependency Injection. CDI is the new Java standard for dependency injection and contextual lifecycle management that I was excited some time .

During this learn process I've done some experiments with Weld, the reference implementation of JSR 299. Today I've published two experiments on bitbucket.org, feel free to use it as you want :-)

The first project targets Java SE, using an unofficial/unportable SE extension (see also this post):

@ApplicationScoped

public class RandomNumberGenerator {

private Random random = new Random(System.currentTimeMillis());

@Produces

@RandomInt

@Named

public int getRandomInteger() {

return random.nextInt(100);

}

Please note the new main, it is very elegant:

@ApplicationScoped

public class Consumer {

@Inject

@RandomInt

int random;

@Inject

@Parameters

List parameters; // the String[] args for your main

// listen for container event "Initialized"

public void main(@Observes ContainerInitialized event) {

System.out.println("I'm a random number " + random);

}

Whereas the second project is a simple MVC framework based on JSR-311 (with Jersey as implementation) and, of course, weld-servlet.

Social coding: first steps

2009-10-09T17:44:53.030Z

I've been using Mercurial, a distributed revision control tool, for a few months now and it has changed the way I work since it is practical, simple, discoverable and well documented.

In the past I was managing a server of my own, with manual backups on Amazon S3, but it was very time consuming: bitbucket comes to the rescue acting as mercurial hosting service as well as backup service. It integrates a wiki, a simple but effective bug management tool and some "social network" features like follow and patch queue.

pure Javascript Poisson Process Simulator

2010-02-06T14:10:12.034Z

One of my last courses for my master degree in Computer Science is about the Poisson Process and Markov's Chains. As my passion for programming devolves I've implemented two Poisson Process simulators using flot (and thus jQuery) and LambdaScript, a functional Javascript library that I'm slowly evolving:

In the case you care clone the mercurial repository at bitbucket.

2010: the year of HTML5?

2010-02-02T09:22:29.205Z

Today Google send us a very informative mail about their plans for 2010:

"In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers."

Also Apple said that they will support HTML5 in place of flash. Recently, Microsoft has

been engaging more and more with the HTML 5 community.

Is this the year of HTML5? I don't know but I'm already in charge reading Dive Into HTML5 in my free spare time.

strtotime for Java5

2010-01-13T00:22:08.938Z

About five months ago I've answered this question on stackoverflow. Then I've created a project on bitbucket. Feel free to browse the source, send patches, write documentation, and please contribute whatever you can do make it better for everyone.

Examples

import static com.humaorie.strtotime.strtotime.*;
Date now = strtotime("now");
Date yesterday = strtotime("yesterday");
Date dayBeforeYesterday = strtotime("2 days");

Toscana web albums

2009-09-28T11:09:32.795Z

I've just published two new web albums of my holydays in Toscana (Pienza, Montepulciano):

http://picasaweb.google.com/davide.angelocola/Toscana#

http://picasaweb.google.com/davide.angelocola/Toscana2#

RhinoRunner

2009-12-27T00:08:41.005Z

During my thesis work I'm slowly creating a very small functional JavaScript library. I write a lot of JavaScript these days and I write many bugs too. I want a nice integration with my IDE of choices for running unit tests for JS (no, HTML with tests inside is not a viable solution for me):

Leveraring JUnit's API I created a very simple RhinoRunner. It is very simple to use, yet not perfect:

import org.junit.runner.RunWith;

@RunWith(RhinoRunner.class)

@JavaScriptSourceFile("src/test/javascript/LambdaScriptTest.js")

public class LambdaScriptTest {

}

Iterable news;

2009-11-30T23:55:57.615Z

I'm very excited about these news JSRs:

Java EE 6 profiles
Servlet 3.0
Bean Validation (especially for JPA/JSF)
CDI (Context and Dependency Injection)
JPA 2
JSF 2
no EAR archive (JEE 6 WAR is the new EAR)

and about these new versions (in preview as time of writing) of my Java toolchain:

Netbeans 6.8
maven 3.0
Glassfish v3 (JBoss AS 6 too)

java6

2009-04-19T15:30:48.560Z

Latest cool additions you maybe not aware of:

http builtin server in JSE
new java plugin
new deploy via javascript
desktop API
scripting API
JDBC 4
derby 10.5 and memory db

Squares

2009-11-24T14:31:28.927Z

Today I need a way to quickly generate the n-th square, iteratively. I'm wondering about several naive approaches, all involving at least one multiplication. Maybe we can try an alternative approach based on these results:

1 = 1 (the square of 1)

1 + 3 = 4 (the square of 2)

1 + 3 + 5 = 4 + 5 = 9 (the square of 3)

1 + 3 + 5 + 7 = 9 + 7 = 16 (the square of 4)

It is clear now that the sum of the first n odd itegers is n². The proof is left to thes an exercise for the reader. I used this simple observation to write an iterator that uses no multiplications, only additions:

public class SquaresIterator implements Iterator, Iterable {

   private int square = 0;

   private int nextOdd = 1;

   @Override

   public boolean hasNext() {

   return true;

   }

   @Override

   public Integer next() {

   square += nextOdd;

   nextOdd += 2;

   return square;

   }

   @Override

   public void remove() {

   throw new UnsupportedOperationException("Not supported.");

   }

   @Override

   public Iterator iterator() {

   return this;

   }

}

the testcase:

for (int square : new SquaresIterator()) {
   System.out.println(square);
}

print:

1
4
9
16
25
36
49
64
81
100
121

my CV on stackoverflow

2009-10-29T10:32:29.130Z

"Unlike traditional resumes, a Stack Overflow CV gives hiring managers insight into a developer’s real work and skills instead of just a list of acronyms."

Another cool service from the guys of stackoverflow: careers. In the case you care here is my CV.

Migration to bitbucket.org complete

2009-11-11T18:03:35.082Z

I've just terminated migration to bitbucket.org.

I lost some perl scripts and boehm gc sample programs during migration but I hope to restore them somehow. However most of the publishable code that I produced since 2004 is there, ready to be cloned :-)

PHP's strtotime() reimplemented in Java

2009-08-13T00:09:25.671Z

I've implemented strtotime in Java (in about 15 minutes) in order to answer this question at stackoverflow.com.

EDIT

I've also published it in a public repository at bitbucket.

Duck typing... in Java

2009-10-11T21:53:21.592Z

A quick hack in Java, it comes handy when supporting old Java code (pre Java 5, where Closeable is missing):

public static void universalClose(Object o) {

try {

o.getClass().getMethod("close", null).invoke(o, null);

} catch (Exception e) {

throw new IllegalArgumentException("no close() method");

}

testcase:

public static void main(String[] args) {

Socket socket = new Socket();

universalClose(socket);

}

My life on the clouds...

2009-09-28T13:14:46.696Z

Since early 2008 I progressively moved my projects, photos, etc into dedicated web based applications. I first migrated my emails accounts to gmail, using it as mail hub then I moved:

contacts on google contacts
calendar on google calendard (synced with my samsung omnia)
bookmarks on delicious
photos on picasaweb (upgraded to 10 Gb account)
(some) documents, spreadsheets, presentations on google docs
backups, my maven repository among other stuff on Amazon S3

Today I'm starting to migrate my mercurial repositories to bitbucket. My projects are the last bit of data that I was managing locally, using apache httpd + hg webdir, and copying them at regular intervals to S3.

My life goes on the clouds!

Pro JavaScript Design Patterns Review

2009-09-01T14:16:21.630Z

Lately I'm involved in a project using Javascript as main programming language, with Java on GAE as server side. Javascript is not a toy language as I said for years: it has evolved in a very nice and higly productive language for programming The Web. Today I finished reading my latest programming book: "Pro JavaScript Design Pattern". It is a very good book, with great examples. It is a must reading if you are a JavaScript programmer with no prior knowledge about design patterns and it is a very good book for those who knowns design patterns but not some advanced idioms in JavaScript (like me).

PROs

all major JavaScript idioms are well explained, such as prototypal and classic inheritance and scopes; a killer feature
great examples
several design patterns are described: Singleton, Factory, Bridge, Composite, Facade, Adapter, Decorator, Flyweight, Proxy, Observer, Command and Chain of Responsability

CONs

no diagrams, very few images
code formatting could be better

Logitech Illuminated Keyboard

2009-08-14T13:24:32.568Z

The Best Keyboard Ever (check also The Best Pointing Device Ever)

I can't rave enough about this minimalistic but cool keyboard. From the moment I took it out of the package (before the lunch), this keyboard screamed quality. The keyboard I replaced was a low cost keyboard that I use since 2004 (after my first notebook).

This keyboard is very thin with a very minimalistic design. The touch is soft and easy, I'm loving it!

PROS

Very nice key layout with numpad
4-levels of illumination
Extremely thin (9 mm)
Stylish looks
Quality construction
3 year warranty

CONS

Expensive (but the cost is worthy)
No USB ports
I bought it from logitech.com: no option for US layout, only UK (anyway it is better than Italian layout)

Best Pointing Device Ever

2009-04-20T21:28:14.668Z

That is not a cut-and-paste error... these are my Logitech Trackman: one for my notebook, one for my desktop and one as "backup". I'm using this devices since 2003... no complaints!

Just one interesting note. Wikipedia says:

Trackballs are also preferred by many professional gamers, who value their consistency highly. A trackball requires no mousepad and enables the player to aim swiftly (in first person shooters).

I've joined!

2009-05-03T15:23:35.975Z

Userfly.com: instantaneuos web usability studies

2009-05-20T07:57:01.841Z

"userfly.com provides by recording user visits and letting you play them back to see every mouse movement, click, and form interaction. Conducting a user study doesn't have to be expensive or a logistic nightmare. With userfly.com you can perform simple and cheap user testing with your real users."

This is the kind of web that I like. Awesome. Check out the video!

I passed 6th grade sed ed

2009-06-06T18:05:50.777Z

Created by Sex Toys.org