As discussed earlier I’ve been flat out with many things over the last few months. A combination of that and the team I work with having moved to Eclipse has meant that I’ve not kept my Sourceforge project nbCheckstyle up to date. However a couple of days ago I got a series of patches sent to me from Shawn Bisgrove which upgraded my old (and really shameful) code to run under Netbeans 3.

It has been quite a while since I’ve posted, mainly for good reasons as things are flat out with my company at the moment. One of the things that I’ve been up to is learning to use a few tools which are now saving me bags of time. I had previously used xdoclet to generate EJB interfaces etc through ant.. Over the last few months several of the new projects have been struts based, again xdoclet has come to the rescue and allowed me to forget about swathes of configuration files.

I’ve been doing some work which requires me to have local copies of dtd files due to limited connectivity. I’ve been using the Saxon XSLT processor as part of this work and been struggling to get catalog managers working correctly. Richard Dallaway has an excellent document DTDs and XML Catalogs which provides many helpful clues as to how to proceed with getting the catalog system up and running for parsing and xsl-t.

My evaluation of Jira is now complete and we have bought a copy for the project I am working on at the moment. It is a great issue tracker and has been very easy to integrate into our application. If you are involved in a commercial project that needs a strong issue tracking mechanism then for 1000USD it really isn’t worth trying to write the functionality yourself. It is easy to plug in your own authentication mechanisms (we had an existing EJB authenticator), but I do have one word of warning.

Fired up my browser yesterday morning for the first time in a couple of days and found that the plugin is now able to update itself. I got a message in the toolbar telling me that an update was available and a few minutes later I was running the latest plugin version. All in all a very nice system when I’m running standalone, I’m not sure how happy I’d be if a major step was taken (to JRE 1.

I’ve been playing catchup with RSS technology recently. Whilst playing around with feed generation/consupmption I found NewsMonster aggregation tool. It integrates into the Mozilla sidebar mechanism, when asked to aggregate channels it launches a Java process via Web-Start (although this is in the process of being replaced) to pull down article summaries etc. With current events its very useful to be able to get the sets of headlines from multiple news sites at once.

Getting punch working on a Zaurus As threatened earlier I’m writing up my experiences on how to get a midp applicaiton called Punch up and running on the Zaurus. If you haven’t seen Punch before its well worth a look, it is a time management application that simply allows you to “punch” in and out of projects. At the end of a week you can get elapsed hours on the projects you are working on.

It Works - update I lied - looks like blogger doesn’t like opera for functions like delete!

It Works I’ve been asked if the zaurus works with the blogger site. Well the proof is in the posting! Seriously though, it does work but the two thumb keyboard means that its a little painful.

Gadget Time My Palm V has finally become unusable - the internal rechargable battery seems to have a life of less than a day, so I’ve been hunting for a replacement. After a lot of research I’ve ended up getting a Sharp Zaurus 5500 along with a Socket low power CF card. I spent a long time lusting after the Sony/Ericsson P800 but the lack of any 802.11b card or flat rate affordable GPRS bundles in the uk finally put me off.