My web hosting company changed something in their configuration which prevented me from posting. To their credit, I sent them an email and all was well within a very short period of time. Sitelutions still gets my vote as a good, low-cost web hosting company.
The last I looked at it (a few months back), Marathon was dead and required a bit too much patience to make work, especially when compared to Abbot. According to the much fresher looking site, a new set of people have taken over Marathon as of June and new releases have started flowing. Time to take another look. Abbot is good, but GUI testing can be hard and any tool that has a chance of making it easier is worth at least a quick looksee. I’ll report back if we make a switch to Marathon.
The very fact that ATHENS 2004 even has a Hyperlink Policy shows that they’re a bit out of touch. I thought that stuff had already made its way through the courts? It’s craziness. They certainly can put (some) restrictions on the use of their trademark, but trying to restrict links is an amusing bit.
If you saw the amusing GridBag cartoon from a few days back and are wondering how you can actually get your layouts to work, take a look at this Javalobby thread. Great stuff packed in there. I’ve had good luck with both FormLayout and ExplicitLayout, and this thread pointed me to Explicit TableLayout which uses ExplicitLayout to conveniently create table-like layouts.
This has been on blogdex for a few days, so I finall decided to check out: gapingvoid: how to be creative. I’m linking to it already without even having finished reading it. It’s an excellent essay on unleashing your inner creative spirit. Very good observations…
I came across Nice a few months ago, but continued on my way. I’m not one to get into fringe languages and Nice seemed a bit academic. Xoltar’s Groovy features in Nice made me look again at the Nice site, and there are some interesting features there. Multiple return values is something that is sorely missing from Java, and I’d like to see that in Groovy. Syntax for optional method parameters would be a bonus, and I don’t think that’s something in Groovy yet either.
A little friendly competition never hurt anyone. Nice even has an Eclipse plugin as well, so it looks like the Nice 1.0 package may actually be worth considering for high-level programming needs.
alt.lang.jre: Feeling Groovy is a good introduction to the Groovy language. Now if only the Eclipse plugin was a little farther along. Groovy does indeed reduce the coding effort, but without completion things can be pretty painful.
The Eclipse Project Draft 3.1 Plan was posted on July 29th. The first milestone is due Friday the 13th, but the release isn’t scheduled until 2Q2005. Here we come, Java 5!
The trailer for TEAM AMERICA is the second trailer in a row (following the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy) that I’ve seen blowing up the Earth. Always a scary trend 
