BrokenRobot

Quick Link: OnJava article detailing best practices for using Ant.

Posted by Brian at 1:57 PM | Permalink

This interesting little article takes a look at collecting and graphing SNMP data using RRDTool. Unlike many articles, it actually focuses on the mechanics of using RRDtool itself, versus one of the front-ends like Cricket. Very useful for some stuff I'm working on.

Posted by Brian at 1:45 PM | Permalink

Bringing Java into Perl, from perl.com, takes a look at the Inline::Java module which uses some deep camel magic to let you call native Java code from within Perl. Scary stuff, you can use Java classes just like you would Perl classes, call code from jar files, and generally do anything you normally would in pure Java.

Posted by Brian at 12:09 PM | Permalink

ACM Queue (from the Association for Computing Machinery) presents "A Conversation with Peter Ford", chief architect for Microsoft's MSN Messenger instant messaging product. Some very interesting insights into the future of IM (at least from Microsoft's perspective).

Posted by Brian at 11:24 AM | Permalink

I've never been a big adopter of "web standards" (ie. XHTML, CSS, etc.), mainly because I'm not a big web developer these days. When I have to create a web page, it's almost always for myself and I normally take the quickest possible route to a solution. This usually involves tables and other circa-2000 markup tricks, rather than stylesheets and the like. I accept that this is bad. The terrific A List Apart site takes a shot at rebuilding Slashdot (perhaps the posterchild for ignoring web standards in favor of "just making it work") using 100% standards-compliant markup. Their article, Retooling Slashdot with Web Standards may just make me take a crack at rebuilding my sites using modern web technology.

Posted by Brian at 11:00 AM | Permalink