Nuno Sousa's Corner

It isn't new, other have already said it, but today I found another demonstration of the Power of the Community. A Community of motivated people created many successful software projects, like the GNU/Linux project. When the idea for a new project appears and a community builds up around it, the project at such a pace that commercial companies would say it is impossible. In fact, when the community that is developing an application that they will use it, magic happens. Today I was browsing through the web when I came across this set of videos on YouTube. It is about the Jokosher project. What is the Jokosher project? Well, I'll quote its home page: Jokosher is a simple yet powerful multi-track studio. With it you can create and record music, podcasts and more, all from an integrated simple environment. It may not sound that great, but this application was built like every application should. And is moving at a quick pace because of the community that surrounds it. But back,

Have you ever had to do real work with Dates and Times in Java? Well, I had to and still have to. For Data and Time handling the Java API includes the Date and Calendar classes, but these classes leave a lot to desire. For instance: there is no class that represents a Date without Time information, or a class that represents Time without Date. Even worst, there is no class to support Durations. Until know what I did was to create the classes that I missed. For instance: I created a Duration class that represents Durations. It is weird to have to do these things, but it is a fact of life if you want to use Java Standard APIs. But there is hope for the rest of us that really want a new and better API. JSR-310 Date and Time API is planed for Java 7 and should address these issues. They will finally create a simpler API, with all the missing parts like Durations, Date without Time and Time without Date, and so on... The problem is we are still at least a year away from Java 7 and we ne

My grandfather has left this earth and went into the great adventure. He will always be in my heart and I'll never forget him. I know he is watching over us and he expects us to continue without his presence. I'll do my best to make him proud...

I've been a little off-line lately due to some personal problems It involves the health and life of someone that is dear to me. This leaves me without any will our power to actually write anything. But at least I'll leave here a link to a series of articles on the story of the ARM processors, the Symbian and Linux use on Mobile Phones. And of course, the latest release from Apple the iPhone. Read on if you want to know a little about history, since my will to write is somewhere else...

I had this subject on my backlog for quite some time. You see, I started my days as a professional Java Developer doing Swing coding. At that time Swing was OK, a little slow, but OK. Today I believe Swing is as fast and any other GUI Toolkit for Java with the advantage of being extremely flexible. But I don't want to get into a GUI Toolkit debate here because I think there is nothing to debate: you weight the factors for the project, choose a toolkit and live with it. In the last couple of days I stumbled upon two very interesting Java Specification Requests (JSR) related to Swing The first and oldest one is the JSR 295 - Beans Binding . The second one is the JSR 296 - Swing Application Framework . I already heard about the first one a year ago and I actually thought it was dead, but there has been some progress. These JSRs fill some of the Gaps I always believed Swing had. I'll give you some details. The Beans Binding JSR finally turns Java Beans into something really useful.

Today I made some progress on my Thesis: I was able to write three more pages in just one hour. At this rate It will take me another sixty hours to finish it. Hmm.... that still seems a huge number... On another note it seems that the number three has been pursuing me all day and will continue to. Let's have a look: I passed by three police Radars on my way to Work; the promise made by the high level management of providing us with full details on a sensitive subject within three weeks saw its deadline today (no, as usual they failed one more promise; why am I so stupid to think otherwise?); I found three major errors in the source code I was changing at work (don't worry, the errors are still there, since there is no time to correct them); I passed another three police radars on my way to the University; I have written three pages of my Thesis;... What will be next? Three Speeding Tickets when I get home?