Something about Java

Posted on August 19, 2009 by Kymair

Spring being acquired by VMWare

Here’s Rod Johnson’s blog post explaining this. Link  To be honest I can hardly imagine a combination of such two different companies. However as Rod himself points out, Cloud computing and similar things are breaking the barrier between tranditional hardware and software industry. You can have a picture that one day in the future simply by clicking one key your enterprise application can be deployed to a newly created virtual machine automatically with everything settled down, the integration between application and surrounding enviroment gets even closer.

Anyway at my perspective, I’m afraid in the coming days SpringSource may put more resource on its own brand application server and integration with VMWare. Will the development process of Spring framework itself and related sub projects slow down? Very likely.

iBatis 3 comes to beta

http://ibatis.apache.org/index.html Finally here comes a milestone upgration of this famous framework. It is my first and also the only persistence framework I’ve used within my short Java career. Several exciting changes are out there including full Java 5 support, annotations and Schema migration system. I’m still not very clear about the details at this stage, but per the literal with iBatis 3 I can now make my application more typesafe, write less verbose XML configurations, reduce the effort on mapping between database table and iBatis entity when design and migrate. Surely I’ll try it out in my application shortly.

I’m a big fan of Java

Now I have several idols in Java community,

Josh Bloch, Best and core Author of official Java libararies, author of “Effective Java”, Chief Java Architect of .. Google!

Bob Lee, Author of lightweight dependency injection framework Guice

I’ve gained so much from Josh’s book.. It is definitely the most impressive Java book I ever know. And I decide to use Guice in place of Spring. Now I know more on why we need compile-time typesafe, why GWT devotes on writing javascript from Java, why Google’s product is so so extensible, flexiable and robust..

All of this makes me a more enthusiast of Google..and a big fan of JAVA!

I’ll be spending my time on Google web toolkit and Google Guice, and start reading Thinking in Java again:)

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I’m lovin’ Douban!

Posted on August 14, 2009 by Kymair

Is there an alternative website like Douban out there especially in America? Maybe yes, but I can say it is a fewest domestic start-up can actually do better than those born in the States.

I’ve spent quite a lot of time on Douban in these couple of days. It can actually easily make people addicted to marking items. But to be honest, being able to mark the item to ‘I’ve read the book/I’ve watched the movie’ has been a significant factor to force me read and watch more. Sounds a little unreasonable, huh? However it makes you feel unbelievable great when you find the list becomes longer and longer.

If not located in China, Douban may have the opportunity to be even bigger. As I know it has spent much resource on filtering content which may be not accpeted by government, someone left due to this, but we all can see the immutable situation.

It’ll be a pleasure to see you on Douban too. Of course my account names kymair, add me as friend and let me know who you are.

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What I’ve done to my WordPress

Posted on July 14, 2009 by Kymair

Just for my own reference in future. And I’ll be very happy if it gives you some help too.

  1. Change permalink settings. This is really important if you’d like to see more results on Google. Generally speaking, search engine doesn’t like dynamic pages, so it’ll be much better if you switch your post’s URL from http://www.kymair.com/?p=123 to http://www.kymair.com/archives/123. By default there’re 4 options for you to choose from. I prefer the above approach as it’s short. Another popular one is http://www.kymair.com/postname, it is also nice as you can figure out what the post talks about from the URL, but sometimes I’m tired of giving my post a name connected by so many ‘-’.
  2. Turn off revision. It is totally useless to me and most people. The blog has only one author, I don’t see the necessary to trace this history. Which makes me sick most is it’ll increase my post id every time I edit. This results in me not being able to tell how many posts actually there in a straightforward way by just reading the number. I install a plug-in named ‘Disable Revisions’ to disable the feature;
  3. Install Easy Picasa. It is a simple but handy plug-in written by a Chinese(Nice!). Flickr is supposed to be better as picture sharing site, but due to some well known reason its service is quite unstable in my country. Google Picasaweb actually does support external link, but requires some tricks. You should provide extra height and weigh parameter within the URL to make it available, thanks to Easy Picasa, it does everything for you quietly. Simply input your Google account name, select a picture, and you’ll be fine. This is important to us as our hosting’s bandwidth is limited, also Google’s servers all over the world make our pictures safe and fast to retrieve;
  4. Put WordPress into a separate folder instead of web root. This can be done within several simple steps. By doing this your web folder can be much more clean and easy to manage.
  5. Start blogging and keep going everyday! I’ve already started to feel my expression becomes better after finishing several English posts. How good can I be after a whole year if one post per day?

Just like what it says on its homepage, WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. In the new version 2.8, I can get everything done simply with few mouse clicks completely without the need of SSH or FTP. Latest plug-in and core update can always be push to my dashboard. What a magic! Hope some day I can create or devote into something being described as ‘State-of-the-art’ as well! I’m so loving this word.

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Do I really need a Blackberry

Posted on July 13, 2009 by Kymair

In these days I keep thinking whether I need a Blackberry. In case it becomes a waste of money again, I decide to list the pros and cons here and let it be here for a while, it helps me to finally make the decision whether I should take the purchase.

My target version is 8300, its difference with 8800 series is the 2M camera but lack of built-in GPS. Though I’ve got a digital camera already, I really get no time to bring it with me. With the mobile phone’s camera I believe there can be more moments within my daily life I can capture and then easily post to my blog as nice illustrations.

Well here we go.

Pros:

  1. With Blackberry’s well-known pushmail, I can get latest RSS update and email pushing to me;
  2. I can query Wikipedia and Google everywhere, anytime;
  3. It has such a cool QWERTY keyboard which makes typing on it a real pleasure;
  4. With BerryFettion, I can save SMS fees. Also it makes me possible to closely keep in touch with my friend via Gtalk and MSN;
  5. It looks much more fasion than my odd Nokia 1112;
  6. By syncing with Google Calendar, my life can be scheduled efficiently;

Cons:

  1. There’re so many unread items in my Google Reader.  It took me too much time to finish them. Actually I can download RSS contents to my iPod touch and go. I do not have many non-working emails to process while I have too many working emails which seems only can be processed with Outlook;
  2. There’s offline Wikipedia app which brings full copy of Wiki contents, it requires no internet access, also very fast. I barely need query Wiki or Google when I’m not programming;
  3. How often do I need to type on my mobile phone except sending SMS? Writing blogs on it will not be abstracted anyway;
  4. The only person I send SMS to is my girlfriend, almost. Nearly most of my gtalk contacts are my working colleagues which I meet and talk directly everyday;
  5. Yes Blackberry looks really smart and cool, it’s Obama and also many other superstars’ chosen device. But how much does good-looking weight? (Not a real pro, huh)
  6. My current life cannot be simpler. I almost have no meetings to attend and have no frequent social activities. I go to and fro between home and company everyday by bike, no subway/bus time at all! I use computer at work and play computer after work. Toilet time is taken by a handy book or iPod touch!

A little summary can be following:

Given that I’ve already got a really powerful iPod touch, the most important feature a Blackberry can offer is internet connection at any time. It is also why I regret that I didn’t get a iPhone instead. But what do I want from internet anyway? Leave alone the time for dinner, sleep and even bike riding, I’m always online. Probably the first thing first I should focus at this stage is how to reduce my online time but not the opposite.

Another fact I can tell from above is that I need more communication, not only with my girlfriend, but also my old classmates and friends. Having my feeling penned up will not make things better. There’re definitely more people I can talk and share with.

The most obvious reason for me not to buy Blackberry is still that ‘I don’t have perseverance” thing. I happen to figure out that I tend to hold up doing something until everything is clear in my head. Like I’m not able to write program until every single detail gets clarified. Looks like I don’t have the ability to divide the complexity which is one of the most famous and important approach in computer programming.

JUST DO IT – Maybe I should get a banner hanging there with this simple motto printed on it.

While the conclusion would be, buying a Blackberry for my girl instead:) Or, a iPhone?

Posted in Thought | 1 Comment

Google Chrome OS

Posted on July 10, 2009 by Kymair

The biggest news in IT industry of these days is definitely Google building a operation system called ‘Chrome OS’ which will be released later this year and shipped with Netbook as default OS next year.

I won’t talk about the details as the blogosphere now is full of comments and opinions. Which I’m concerned about is, given a netbook with Chrome OS built-in, will it meet my daily needs? Or how good can it be?

Basically, I barely use computer when there’s no internet connection. I’ve got iPod touch to read books, Xbox360 to play video games, so as everyone can imagine, browser indeed takes the most important role. Watching movie is probably another major task to be done on computer, especially in China. But we can see that since the video sites being popular, more people start to watch movie and TV shows online. And I believe as the connection speed gets faster, video sites sign contracts with movie/television company, it won’t be long till we can enjoy high quality videos in the browser directly. Actualy I personally think Youtube videos’ current average quality is quite impressive, leave alone those special provided HD ones. So Chrome OS probably really cater for almost everything I need. It can change our life, make it even easier. From browser to OS, Google is on the way to dominate the IT world.

Another point is, if we do choose Chrome OS as our primary platform, we can only choose to use Google products anyway. I’m not saying there’s any visible restriction, but for example if you want to edit a document you have to do it on Google Docs, there’s even no obvious competitor. If netbook with Chrome OS become really popular, you’ll find Google becoming the next ruler. It gets more serious thinking that it knows nearly everything of me, keeps nearly most of my online data. What can we do if Google turns evil? Well as a Google fan, I personally never think there would be a day, but who knows.

I’m looking forward to see Chrome OS’s initial release. Maybe I can get it running on my Eee PC. It is supposed to be much more faster and convenient than Windows Xp. Anyway, the network enviroment in China is still far away from satisfaction. Late but expensive 3G network, huge gap between southern Telecom and northern Netcom, only a few Wifi covered areas, GFW… Everything will be fine, I believe.

Posted in IT | 10 Comments

My favorite Firefox Extensions

Posted on July 6, 2009 by Kymair

Firefox users love talking about their favorite extensions, occasionally I write down mine too. The interesting thing is, the list keeps evolving all the time. Some of them tent to be must-have has disappeared for a long time(Like TabMix Plus), while some of them I thought were totally useless are now the major reason for me to keep using Firefox instead of switching to Chrome(FireGesture! I have to say).

Alright here comes the list:

1. FireGestures: Yes there’s no mouse gesture feature within Chrome!  Actually I mainly use it to close tab, sometimes to navigate back and forward as well if there’s no correspond key on my mouse. To be honest, the most important function I need from TabMix Plus is ‘Double click to close tab’ . (Of course its single window mode is excellent, however seems the Firefox itself now is already of single window by default);

2. TwitterFox: Twitter is the next big thing, it is so so so hot now. However you can’t spend too much time on it when you are working. And definitely you don’t want the others (boss) notice the huge window of twitter client, so twhirl is out. TwitterFox is awesome, especially there’s ‘Retweet’ function built-in after some version. Talking about tweeting, sometimes I use Ubiquity, it’s more straightforward and can be done with only keyboard;

3. Easy DragToGo: When I am browsing, I tend to only use mouse if there’s no need to input. That’s why I use FireGesture, and that’s why I open the link in new tab with a drag-to-go instead of pressing Control key;

4. Download Statusbar: I bet I’m not the only one who hates the default download manager of Firefox. Why it has to be represented in a whole new window anyway? Luckily we get this awesome extension which will make you feel comfortable. I do think it’s the feature Firefox should copy from Chrome as built-in function;

5. Weave: brought to you by Mozilla Labs. It can sync your bookmark/history/form.. between your computers(or even your mobile browser. I haven’t seen Firefox Mobile yet). History now becomes more important than bookmark since the invention of ‘Awesome Bar’. But  remember, don’t store too many history records, it will slow your Firefox significantly;

6. Delicious: No much to talk. Yahoo does have acquired some first class web service such as Flickr and Delicious;

7. Greasmonkey: Sometimes you’ll need this monkey. For me, there’re two frequently used scripts. The first one is called ‘Google Reader Absolutely Compact’ which can save lots of space within Reader by stripping logos, links, etc. The second one can re-activate ‘Suggestion’ in Google.cn. Poor Google:( Bad CCAV!

8. FireBug: If you need use Firebug, it won’t be necessary to let me buzz any longer;

9. Ubiquity: It’s really convenient sometimes. I don’t use it much myself, most time I won’t notice its existence;

10. Google Tools Bar: Is this a extension or not? I’m lovin’ it anyway! The bar offers me shortcuts to Google services, a straightforward way to check the sites’ PR, and also some other cool features such as keyword highlight. You won’t miss Google bookmark if you’re not a Delicious user as well.

Actually some of them are barely used, I just want to make it to 10.

Have to say Firefox 3.5 is way faster. It’s back on the trace now. Chrome, Opera, Safari? No, thanks.

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Where Wonder Begins

Posted on July 5, 2009 by Kymair

I’m starving, while there’s impossible to go outside to have dinner. TV said 22 provinces within this country had been suffering from flood since this summer. Is this year gonna be extraordinary again? I’m afraid so, though not in a good way.

The name of the blog ‘Where Wonder Begins’ is named after the South Korea girl group Wonder Girls’ first album. Anyway after everything was set up I found that the album is actually called ‘The Wonder Begins’, whatever.

The hosting service is HawkHost, I took the advice from Webhostingtalk and chose them. Till now everything works fine. The server’s response is quite acceptable, support reacts fast. I kinda hope kymair.com can live here for a really long time.

For some reasons, I decide to make here English only. That’s the best way to make my english expression better. I’ll try to write everything interesting or meaningful, instead of buzzing about my life.

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