Well I’ve got latex installed – not at all easily I might add, but it’s up and running now. So I learn a tiny bit about the basics of Latex and start trying to focus my learning on the area I’m most interested in – writing play scripts. So I head off to CTAN (thanks to David Starkoff for pointing that one out) and find the “dramatist” package which appears to do everything I want. Download, install and everything looks good. Then I try to read the documentation…. Sigh. Apart from the use of narrative style which just makes everything exceptionally wordy, it doesn’t include a single example. No, here’s a pathetically simple script just so you can get your head around how to use this package, not even a ridiculously complex script to show off what the package can really do. Nothing, nada, zip. So now I have to learn the intricate details of Latex before I can do anything at all useful instead of just learning as I go along. So if anyone happens to have an example of a play script in latex (using any package) I’d love to get my hands on it…

Interesting article over at O’Reilly about the available Latex editors for OS X. It’s tempted me enough to have a play around. Well actually, the O’Reilly article gave me the knowledge to get started, this article gave me the reasons to do it. Since I’m getting into playwrighting I need to set up an efficient way of getting ideas down and being able to typeset them properly. I’ve currently got a Word template set up but Word X doesn’t seem to handle templates like it should and the layout is something of my own concoction rather than a standard layout. Hopefully I’ll be able to find a latex system to use and just go with that. Besides, you’re just not a true geek until you know latex….

Preparations for this year’s MarchFest are moving into full swing. MarchFest is a festival of music, art and and entertainment held every year at Kangaroo Point Uniting Church. We usually get a pretty sensational turnout of local Brisbane talent from a wide range of musical tastes, ranging from choirs and pipe organists during the afternoon in the church, to jazz, blues and rock and roll on the main stage and rocking on into night with punk, rock and alternative. So mark those calendars early, it’s always a good day. In the meantime, I’d better get to finishing the website for this year…

Okay, this is just scary. “SubEthaEdit virgin” – oh boy… Don’t worry Ted, what scares me most is that I understand perfectly. Sadly, I just don’t get enough SubEthaEditin’ in my life – maybe we need to start a SubEthaEdit brothel…..

Rick Jelliffe proffers his advice on how to write fast Java desktop applications. It’s poor advice. He calls his approach “defensive programming”, though I really don’t see much that’s defensive about it. Defensive programming is about adding in code to handle unexpected cases and recover from errors. Rick’s advice is an attempt at optimizing code before you’ve even written it and determined that it’s not fast enough. It’s worth noting that I write Java desktop applications, I don’t do much server side work and I certainly don’t write small applets, so Rick’s complaint that everyone assumes your a server side developer doesn’t apply here. It also doesn’t apply too much in real life – fast code is fast code. In desktop development you get more “time off” or more code that’s not on the critical path because you only need to go as fast as the user. On the server side you need to process pretty much everything as fast as you can because there’s always more requests to get started on if there’s a hold up with this request.

Someone complained that this blog didn’t look right in IE on windows so I thought I may as well redesign it. The fact that that certain someone is good looking might have helped… So might have the fact that it didn’t look right in Safari either… and the fact that it caused IE 5.2 on OS X to crash… Mostly because she was good looking…. Anyway, there’s been a bit of a redesign, hopefully it should work in all browsers this time. The slight change to the color scheme is quite nice as well. If you do see any problems, give me a yell.

This year I plan to write and produce a musical stage production. I’ve already got an excellent choreographer and an award winning composer so things are starting to fall into place. I’d really love to find a talented director and they are so central to tying everything together and it’s really not my field. Soul Purpose will probably form the basis for the band, but we’ll most likely acquire a few extra players to fill out the sound a bit and particularly to provide some more orchestral instruments to produce that great theatre sound – not to mention making things easier for the vocalists. In terms of a story, I’ve got a few ideas floating around my head at the moment, and have just gone out and bought a little notepad I plan to carry everywhere to note down any ideas that pop into my head. Lately there seems to be a lot of ideas running through my head which is good to have back. About 10 years ago I used to constantly have ideas for computer programs to write running through my head but that died out and I’ve been idealess for quite some time. Now the ideas are back but this time targeted towards performing arts which is a little surprising since it’s typically been my sisters that have been the writers of the family. I seem to be doing okay at it myself though – the Mafia murder mystery dinner I wrote a few months back went really well and that involved writing about 30 000 words of character descriptions for the 50 people that showed up (a sell out btw). Anyway, things are in the early planning stages at the moment but it looks like we may do a small production, possibly a cabaret style thing, late April or early June and then swing into a full musical production in the second half of the year (by then the script should be finished). So if you’re in or around Brisbane Australia and want to get involved with any phase of a musical production, from writing the script, to building sets, directing, producing, cast, crew and right through to marketing drop me a line. I’m sure I’ll be blogging about these developments a fair bit as the year progresses.

chromatic talks about the overuse of patterns and design in software development. This highlights a problem the software industry seems to have – it just doesn’t understand moderation. It’s not only design that suffers from excessiveness, it’s processes too. Some people get so caught up in explicitly defining and then following a process that they spend more time on the process than actually getting things done. Worse still are the people who get so caught up in the process that they forget to check that it actually achieves the right thing. Of course, none of that should be taken to mean that all processes are bad, but in needs to be taken in moderation. This attitude that extreme programming takes of “if doing a bit of this is good, lets turn the dial all the way up to 11” is really crazy. Too much of anything is bad for you. You need unit tests and they need to cover your code well, but you don’t need 100% test coverage or you’ll just spend way too much time writing tests (not that extreme programming actually advocates 100% test coverage). Pair programming is another great idea that can be taken too far. There is a lot of code where it really helps to bounce ideas off of other people for, but there’s a lot of fairly mundane code that you should be able to write without help and still get it right first time. In those cases it’s a waste to have two people doing mundane work, you should just split up and work individually until you hit a problem that benefits from pair programming. Again, moderation. Anyway, with a thunderstorm coming I think I’ll blog in moderation and sign off now.

I really have to mention for the benefit of my non-apache friends, Planet Apache. It’s an aggregation of blogs by Apache committers and contains a lot of really interesting stuff both from the world of Apache and from outside it. It’s open to all apache committers but is still ramping up with new people adding their blogs so we’ll see how well the noise to signal ratio survives, but at the moment, the signal is really very good.

This is a fantastic suggestion from Warren Ellis. Friend of a friend systems should be integrated with instant messaging to become the central hub of your internet community experience. It needs to go a step further than that though – it should integrate with iSync, Outlook, your PDA etc, so that it really becomes the central hub of all your communications devices. It should include the functionality that Address Book now has (on OS X) with it’s bluetooth phone integration. I’d also put the focus on business networking and customer relations more than dating as well. A system that integrates with all your communications mediums, tracks the communication with customers or business partners and allows you to easily view and search that information. That’s a pretty nice tech support/help desk setup. Ignoring some of it’s tracking capabilities scales it back to be a nice business contact tool, and with the friend of a friend thing coming through it still serves as a dating tool for those who really want that. Mostly though, I think I just want another cool toy to play with – the bluetooth phone I recently acquired is just so much fun to play with.

As Iain points out, MS have a new toolbar, and it’s not particularly original. I’m not so concerned about it being similar though, it has the same function so it makes sense that it would have the same kind of look. What really concerns me is the fact that a browser vendor has to release a toolbar plugin for their own browser to add new features instead of just adding it to the browser directly. Guess it provides another prominent link to various MS websites…

“jbob” comments about how Java and Linux are a good fit for each other, and that better access to the internals of linux would make it even better. I definitely agree that Java and Linux are a good fit, but they are a good fit only because Java provides a platform independant abstraction. Providing access to the internals of linux from Java would remove the biggest advantage Java has over C/C++ because the code would no longer be portable. Ways to make Java programs look and act like either GNOME or KDE apps would be great (particularly if it’s done through the Swing L&F mechanism so it looks right on which ever desktop system you choose), but getting into the internals of Linux – just write it in C and get access to anything you want. One last thing: