http://www.headwaysoftware.com/blog/2008/11/software-erosion-findbugs/

Congratulations to JetBrains on releasing IntelliJ IDEA 8 – I have been using their EAP build for a number of days prior to the official release – and am excited with the speed and stability. I know the 7.x releases have taken a bit of a beating for having a slow and bloated feel. Redemption yay! Take a look at the new features.

(upgraded Wordpress; Added Flickr / Last.fm sidebars…)

modularity is a set of Ant tasks to help with the software configuration management of Java projects with a large number of modules. modularity aims to make maintaining ant build files a thing of the past – instead you maintain a set of ‘metadata.xml’ files describing your project’s layout and dependency tree.

I’m currently using modularity for all my pet projects (yes modularity also builds itself!) and I’m also luck enough to be allowed to use it at in NewBay. At work it is used to create the developers IDE workspace, build all software modules and ultimately release software.

Maciej Baranowski, Darragh Curran and Guy Granger all have helped tremendously on its development to date.

The packaging date of the MMS Library on the website says 18th April 2005 – So for anyone using that version of the library be aware of the bug. And heres how to fix it:

MMEncoder:

protected static void encodeUintvar(ByteArrayOutputStream res, int l)
throws Exception {
    //.....
    for (int i = 0; i < buf.length; i++) {
        if ((buf[i] & 0xFF) != 0x80)
            res.write(buf[i]);
    }
}

It should read:

protected static void encodeUintvar(ByteArrayOutputStream res, int l)
throws Exception {
    //.....
    boolean hasWrittenOnce = false;
    for (int i = 0; i < buf.length; i++) {
        if (hasWrittenOnce || (buf[i] & 0xFF) != 0x80) {
            res.write(buf[i]);
            hasWrittenOnce = true;
        }
    }
}

Interesting things to note may be:

• Been busy working on projects in NewBay
• Sony Vaio SZ330 laptop working out really well
• Linux Sony Vaio Webcam driver kindly provided by Sam Revitch
• Playing an online Civ/City building game called travian
• My Valueweb hosting disappeared – not too worried here: saves me paying for it
• GPLHost working out ok for hosting this site, although I was recently impressed at the ease of GoDaddy’s hosting solution
• Bought a treadmill
• Started playing tennis again cautiously
• And finally…. Just added a local wiki entry about my usual set of IntelliJ Key Bindings.

Thank gods for the *very* casual dress software development environment I work in – I’ll get around to having a wardrobe of respectable work clothes… but just not now.

I’ve few images uploaded right now – and few entries in the wiki – it would take a while to get up all my back catalog up. But here is the gallery and here is the wiki.

Also; I do like the navigation embedded into the header above…