WOW, just a few days ago (September 19) it was worldwide spread and famous emoticons' birthday (Sep 19, 1982)! The signs we're seeing and using a lot these days :-) Yes! They have their own invention story and history and Scott E. Fahlman has been knwon as the inventer. Here you can see what Scott himself has told about those old days...
It was months ago when I got into this site for the first time and read the interesting story on how Mike Jones made his great efforts to discover exactly the first time emoticons have been started to get used.
Here is the historical message from Scott on a conversation thread on how one can expose and transfer his/her emotions in the messages/emails (extracted from old archives)! Really brilliant and interesting piece of IT history ;-)
Armond
Well, another cool piece of software from Atlassian. After serveral months of working on Confluence, a great J2EE-based knowledge sharing and management tool, the first alpha is finally out today! Actually this will be a non-public alpha for just testing purposes and we have lot to go... But can't wait to see the first reactions and feedbacks :-)
Confluence is indeed a brilliant success story for Opensymphony WebWork2, XWork, SiteMesh and the other great frameworks we've used heavily.
Armond
It was actually many years ago when I got into the first editors and IDEs which supported RegExp as a language to enhance their Find/Replace features. Well, I was rarely using them to do that complex searchings within a text file or even a full directory structure (names and so).
But time has changed! Now I have some great applications fitting in RegExp playground. Recently I had to do some text processings at two of my personal projects to extract and convert some texts from one text format to another. A bunch of conversion/extraction rules... One of the options I had was a fully grammar based structured text processing engine like Chaperon but on my tests, it was simply failing as the text goes even a bit out of the defined grammar which was exactly my case. On the other hand, Chaperon 's main goal (which is quite great at it) is to process and convert a fully structured text to XML (so not simple text). Obviously this was not the case for RegExp, since the worst case was so that some of the expressions (actually my matching rules) didn't match any out-of-grammar texts so didn't do any conversion too which was okay for me. It didn't stop or break the whole conversion process so a big positive to RegExp for this great flexibility :-)
The implementation I chose was Apache ORO, one of the best and most complete ones in java. I'm highly satisfied with it! Really easy API to work with and it does the job well. All I did, was to define a list of my matching rules (expressions) as well as their corresponding replacements (e.g. Find blabla and output it as newnew) in a text file. Then having a main class to read and interpret the text file, construct the needed rule classes and put them in a pool to be processing by ORO engine one by one. All wonderful and simple, yet powerful... Will definitely use RegExp's more in my future projects, whenever they fit :-)
Armond
It was a very long time ago when I gave the digital album generators out there my first try. Later I got into JAlbum, a java based album generator.
Well, they didn't have a real usage for me then and actually nothing so huge to organize and keep as an album. But later when more and more developments achieved on digital photography world, more people got into it and the digital real-world picture archives started to grow! I was not an exception :-) By then, I've got a small archive of my pictures, growing more and more each day and needless to say that going to get out of control. Specially after getting my first digital camera, it was going to increase even more speedy!
It was the time to go back and re-evaluate all I'd downloaded long time ago and perhaps give the new versions a try if there were any. There were some almost-good softwares but the major drawbacks to mention were, not having enough flexibility for customizations, good scripting language, support and not being free (really didn't mean to pay for it!).
Once again I downloaded the latest version of JAlbum and gave it a try. WOW! How fair it fit my needs :-) Not a so big download (if you have an updated JVM already installed on your computer) and brilliant piece of software which does well what it is designed for.
And some of the key factors I really like about JAlbum :
Well, just a while ago I decided to implement my own skin to fit the best to my needs. With a little effort I had it there which was a great customization result and hybrid of some other good skins (best-of-breed). I've called it BluPlusPlus and you can freely download at http://members.fortunecity.com/techguy/JAlbumSkin.html and give it a try.
Armond
First I wanna thank my good friend Mike to setup this blog for me. Great job man!
Finally I have my own blog after a long time and happy to share my ideas and thoughts with other great guys out there :-)
Well, as a brief introduction, I've been born in December 1978 and going to be a decade I'm in software. Currently I'm mostly a java developer/consultant which I've started it at 1997. Spending quite a lot of time to explore the new technologies and like them!
As for my non-technical part of my life, I've recently become interested in photography too ;-) and got my Canon Powershot G3 just a while ago and I'm having quite great times with it. I love it! Nice digital camera!
Okay, more on next post...
Cheers,
Armond