Glen Stampoultzis complains (rightfully) about the Windows XP look and feel. It fits in a lot better than his example makes out for our usage – not sure if that’s just because we never use JFileChooser (use java.awt.FileChooser instead, JFileChooser is awful in every L&F) or if it’s some particular setting somewhere. Anyway, if you’d like to pick up a whole bunch of fixes for the Windows L&F (both XP and non-XP), take a look at WinLaf.

I’ve reclaimed top spot on the google ranking! Ha! Take that Adrian Sutton! (If you have no idea what I’m talking about see the front page and this entry.)

It seems WhereIs Australia is getting a face lift and much needed usability improvements. Gone are the six clicks to get your directions and cryptic instructions, now it’s replaced with a simple, enter start and end destination (on the one page no less – AND you don’t have to pick the street type from a drop down anymore) and bang you’ve got your results. No more “Did you really mean exactly what you just typed in or were you only joking” page.

I just had a phone call that went something like: Receptionist: Hello, Paddington medical centre Me: Hi, I’d like to make dental appointment with John McKenny. Receptionist: A dental appointment? Me: Yes. Receptionist: I’m sorry but John McKenny is a natropath who used to work here. We don’t have any dentists. Me: Hmmm, I think Medibank Private have stuffed up their records somehow then. I think it’s probably best if I don’t let Mr McKenny near my teeth.

Apparently, the ASF took delivery of a few new machines today. I just can’t get the image of Sam Ruby sitting around ASF head office and suddenly there’s a knock on the door and he finds a pile of orphaned servers wrapped in a blanket. Then again, I always was weird…

It appears the war of the Adrian Sutton’s is hotting up on Google. (Hint for those that just read the RSS feeds: take a look at the main page) The once unstoppable Professor Adrian Sutton who ruled supreme as number one search result for “Adrian Sutton” has dropped significantly down to third place, though he now has two entries in the top five with his surprise appearance in some meeting minutes.

I have come to the conclusion that URL escaping is evil and must be banished from the face of the earth. I’ve got no idea how it manages to work at all – every implementation seems to be different and the support for different character sets is a major hit and miss affair. Take for instance the string: © Adrian Sutton It looks like a pretty simple string and all. It should be encoded as: %C2%A9%20Adrian%20Sutton assuming UTF-8 character encoding (and I literally mean assuming since there’s no possible way to know for sure).

Wow, what a fantastic day. MarchFest was yesterday and for those who didn’t make it, you missed a sensational day. While there’s always a few things that go wrong when you put on a big production like MarchFest is, things went exceptionally smoothly and all the reports coming back have been really positive. It was particularly good to see the number of people who offered to help out and did so with such talent and energy.

Nick Chalko talks about setting onsubmit dynamically. The solution he received from Alan Gutierrez which is good, but overly complicated. Since I work for a company that just so happens to do some amazingly funky stuff with JavaScript, here’s some fun you can have with it. Firstly, lets take the original solution: <form name=&#39;CDiceComponent_0&#39; id=&#39;findApplication&#39; action=&#39;/cdiceWebApp/custom/component/bridge.jsp&#39; method=&#39;post&#39;> <script> document.findApplication.onsubmit = function() {return checkForm();} </script> and simplify it to: <form name=&#39;CDiceComponent_0&#39; id=&#39;findApplication&#39; action=&#39;/cdiceWebApp/custom/component/bridge.

The vote to start the motion of HttpClient out of jakarta-commons to become a fully fledged Jakarta sub-project has been declared passed. I’ve just done up an initial draft of the proposal that will need to be put to the Jakarta PMC to approve the move (they noted that it was coming and that it was most likely to pass at the meeting they just recently had). This is the first bit of Apache “politics” I’ve been involved in so I’ll be interested in the feedback.

I discovered something really quite annoying today. The JDBC drivers for MySQL have been re-licensed from LGPL to GPL (happened quite a while back actually). Now while it’s their code and they can do with it as they please, that’s really, really annoying. I’ll be moving all my development away from MySQL in the future. Here’s the problem. I came up with a really cool new feature for a product I’m working on which involves interacting with a variety of databases and inevitably someone will want to use it with MySQL.

Crazy Apple Rumors updated the look of their site today in what would have to be one of the most disastrous site overhauls I’ve seen. The all new forums were instantly filled with a whole bunch of people complaining about the new look of the site. Fortunately, Crazy Apple Rumors being as it is, the conversation rapidly turned to the joys of having Masako (the CARS web designer and rumored to be most attractive and feminine) poke you with a fork – apparently she does that kind of thing a lot.