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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

Over at O’Reilly Chuck Toporek complains that iSync didn’t support the bluetooth phone he purchased. I think he’s pointing the blame in the wrong place. iSync supports the standard syncing protocol SyncML so it will work with any phone or device that also supports that standard which apparently Chuck’s phone doesn’t. So while I sympathize with Chuck for having bought what is for him a dud phone, I think it’s a bit much to expect Apple to do all the leg work to support every device under the Sun.