Recycle old computers

Via this article By Drew Cullen on The Register, here's a link for Computer Aid International, a good way to recycle old PCs and have them put to good use.

London Java Meetup - 7 Mar 2006

Jez has just posted the next meetup, and it's here at Smiths of Smithfield - next tuesday.

Free nerdy books

From Digg.com on this very subject, Free Computer Books, Tutorials & Lecture Notes (about games etc)

Top ten reasons Geeks make good fathers

Again from My Beautiful Wife, a great post I very much liked...

Top ten reasons Geeks make good fathers

London 2.0rc3

From Simon - organised by Sam - for Monday 13th March.
When the location gets confirmed I'll update.

Serenity makes more money from DVD than from box office

Via Digg.com - like slashdot and the register.

http://digg.com/movies/Serenity_makes_more_money_from_DVD_than_from_box_office

...well I always thought that would happen, just like the series did.
...lets keep it going huh? Must order a copy myself, of what leg do I have to stand on?

Guantanamo Film Stars Detained in Luton

Again M.B.W puts me onto the staggering behavior of the government here -

Guantanamo Film Stars Detained in Luton

...One step more worried about democracy every day....

This much I now know

Thanks to My Beautiful Wife , I know understand a bit more about the mechanics of what is happening under UK law at the moment - the gradual erosion and decline, slowly, of civil liberties, as one side fails to play by the rules (how British of us to have it so).

To claw back some of my own polemic, we haven't lost our civil liberties yet - but as a bastion of Democracy, supposedly, every loss is a vital one and the slippery slope we are on has already gone on too long and must be both stopped and reversed.

Lets hope so eh?

Even less free speech

MPs back ban on glorifying terror.

Not that we had any free speech, but there is goes, up in a puff of smoke even more. etc etc.

There is one key test for any legislation: the Nelson Mandela Test.
I didn't come up with this, someone on radio 4 one morning did. It runs like this:

Any law that would have prevented us calling Nelson Mandela a Freedom Fighter is a bad law.
He is, but the state he was in at the time branded him a Terrorist.
Under these laws in this country, I could be locked up for saying so, were that regime still in power.
These laws suck - we are already in a police state, and it is getting worse and worse.

Fantastic

we'll be dancin in the streets...

Well My Beautiful Wife has finally left her stressful job.... now begins a three month countdown to freedom and much less stress and more happiness.
On a day like today, having that happen yesterday is just totally fantastically brilliant.

4 Things Blog Tag

Simon has tagged me for this, so I'll have a go...

And damn but he's tagged some of the people I would, so I'll do my favourite Buddhist blog, lotusinthemud, and Steve over at neveratoss.

Four jobs I've had

Paper Boy.
Shelf Stacker (during my year off).
Technical trainer.
Developer/Programmer/Whatever you call it these days.

Four films I can watch over and over again

Contact.
Shaun of the Dead.
Buffy, the musical episode. Counts in my world.
Alien.

Four places I've lived

Lee Green (London).
Keele (Stoke On Trent).
Streatham Hill (London).
Winchmore Hill (London).

Four TV programmes I love

Firefly.
Stargate.
Scrubs.
Life On Mars.

Four places I've been on holiday

Indonesia & Bali.
Australia (East Coast).
Pisa, Italy.
At home, just chilling out.

Four of my favourite dishes

A good satay stir-fry.
Lasagne. With chips.
Fajhitas.
Marmite on toast.

Four websites I visit daily

E.L.F. (World Of Warcraft guild website).
Life and The World.
Small Values Of Cool.
GMail.

Four places I'd rather be right now

In bed with my babe and no book.
Kicking ass with my guild homies, inc my babe.
Out with my mates, at their houses or a pub, inc. my babe.
In the new house my babe and I are trying to buy, with my babe and a good book/episode of the programmes above.

Homework Project

I've done a homework project recently - the best way I've found to revise/learn toolsets and APIs is to have a project to put them into.

So I've done a simple Noughts-and-Crosses game (tic-tac-toe.... War Game anyone?), and Simon has kindly agreed to host my zip file for me here.

This version uses Swing GUI components to make both an Application and an Applet to run the main game frame. Theres a stab at using MVC patterns in it, and JUnit for everything. It was coded in Eclipse IDE and there's javadocs and, of course, and Ant build file for everything.

More Ant and Hibernate tutorials

From the Ideoplex: Take the First Step set of resources.

To NoUnit or Emma?

An opensource code coverage tool, NoUnit, that I just came across. Not sure how it stacks up against Emma.

More on Hibernate

...hmmm... maybe I should be using del.ic.ios...

The Hibernate Core descriptions.
The Eclipse and Ant tools - invaluable - the page on setting these up is here.

A handy "beginners roadmap" page.

The downloads page, for all of the above.

More on JMock...

The online JavaDocs .
The getting started page, with the basic code outline.
Further tutorials, including Constraints and Expectations.

The geeks will inherit the world....

Transformers...robots in disguise

From my mate Glen at work, a video of a boffin project to make a real ransformer...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dut6jxCiakg

Java Toys

Shiny...

Here's some useful stuff I was reminded of / introduced to in a conversation about Agile java practices recently;

JMock, overlapping with MockObjects; the general mock objects Wiki is here; Here is the MockObjects download page.

WebWork, in the same tool-space as Spring

And Eclipse RCP - the layer on which the Eclipse IDE is really just a set of plug-ins, which you can build all sorts of interesting applications out of.