Over the last month or so I've been getting my feet wet with a new job, new team mates, and new technology - with the majority of my time getting my head around OSGi and our custom OSGi orientated build tool. Now that I've settled in and starting to

For the last month or so I've been able to sit myself at INBOX:0 quite consistently and have been experimenting with various ways of keeping it that way - I think I've got a decent working setup now which takes advantage of a change in GMail's URL ha

At tonight's JavaCom meeting I gave a short lightening talk on OSGi - I was caught a little unprepared and hadn't realized the meeting was tonight so it was a bit rushed together - still the presentation went well - I still need to work more on slowi

Apple has finally released Java 6 for OSX: About Java for Mac OS X 10.5 Update 1 This Java for Mac OS X 10.5 Update 1 adds Java SE 6 version 1.6.0_05 to your Mac. This update does not replace the existing installation of J2SE 5.0 or change the defau

I recently hit an interesting bug in the TestNG plugin for IntelliJ IDEA. The bug was triggered by a null being set on a Properties instance, and after a hour or so working out what was going on I managed to reproduce the problem with the following

Last week I picked up an Alpine IDA-X001 "built for iPod" head unit for the car. Previously I'd been using a mixed variation of FM transmitters, tape adapters, or simply driving with headphones - the later sounds the best, but I find it seriously imp

For a while now I've been a major fan of Damien Guard's Envy Code R programming font, and have been using preview 6 as my primary coding font for ages. I was lucky enough to get sent a preview version of PR7 which I've been using for most of the day

Four weeks ago I gave notice at Bulletin and start working with the guys at SecureMX tomorrow. I've been meaning to write something on this for the last four weeks or so but never really managed to get there. In a quite timely blog post Ted Leung wro

Started looking at the new beta releases of Virtual Box (recently purchased by Sun Microsystems) and decided to give OpenSolaris a bash. So far this is looking very sweet - easy to use, fast to run - and best of all - free (I'm talking about Virtual

Ooo nice - it must be Apple Release Week - a new Java SE6 preview release - which can now be set as the primary VM. New features in this preview: AppleScript is a supported javax.script scripting language New API in com.apple.eawt.App

So Sony Ericson just released their first Windows Mobile 6 based device. Read all about it over on Mobile Burn. It's a sweet looking device, and I doubt I'll ever get my hands on one. mobile

Scott Ferguson just blogged about Resin 3.1.5's new test friendly embeddable version: One of the things we've been working on for the Resin 3.1.5 is an embeddable version of Resin, primarily intended to simplify unit testing for Resin users. Th

After some minor prodding in ##wicket on irc.freenode.org, Daniel Kaplan just posted a short tutorial on writing a Wicket based Facebook applications - and when I say short, I mean really short - 4 classes and less than a printed page. Whilst the fac

For the last few weeks I've been working part time on a small project using Apache Maven as its build tool and this time round I'm finding Maven doesn't suck as much I thought the first time I encountered it. Sure this is a small project, but Maven s

After reading all the rants about Maven vs Ant and the Maven Sucks/Doesn't Suck posts of late (JavaLobby, Howard Lewis Ship, Don Brown and others) I'm wondering why everyone seems to suggest using Ivy, yet no one ever mentions the Maven Ant Tasks sub

For awhile I've been wanting to explore migrating our build platform from Apache Ant to Apache Maven and taking advantage of dependency management, the release plugin, and a standardized build process. One problem I always seem to hit whenever I star

Thank you Mr Jobs. Just installed and am now running IntelliJ IDEA under Java 6 - no visible problems on startup yet... Apple has recently released a new developer preview of Java SE 6 for Leopard via the Apple Developer Connection (ADC) site at

A new release of the Wicket Forge plugin for IntelliJ IDEA was released and it's added some kick arse new features for navigating between your markup and your code (and the components embedded on each). I recorded a quick and nasty screen-cast to sho

If this isn't a clear reason for using agile based methodologies then I don't know what is: The Department of Building and Housing has been criticised by Parliament's finance and expenditure select committee for cancelling a project to register li

I just noticed via Eelco's blog that the new Scala book from Artima is out: This book is the authoritative tutorial on the Scala programming language, co-written by the language's designer, Martin Odersky. While mostly complete, the book is still

Just seen on Undernet #java: prived: hi. Is there a new java called wicked java or something? ^talios^: prived: you mean wicket? the web framework prived: tnx prived: ^talios^: have a project. Client wants wiket. "Sure I know it, sir!" - rea

So there I was, setting up a nice new TeamCity based build server running Java 6 and start adding in projects, watching them build, and smiling. Until I came to project X which died with the following errors: DeadLockConnection is not abstract and

Earlier in the week an interesting thread about the recent Mintshot debacle came up on the NZ 2.0 mailing list about how the world at large has moved on from PHP and that those staying with PHP without bothering to explore or check out some of the ne

A nice move by Archives New Zealand: A bigger slice of New Zealand's history is now available online following the launch of Archives New Zealand new audio visual website. The site www.audiovisual.archives.govt.nz features over 100 film clips sour

Via my vanity blog search on the surname Derricutt I found that the Six Pixels of Separation podcast recently played my brothers song Symmetry on a recent episode, and after seeing the topic of conversation and taking a listen I found it was actually