Ant -- a multi platform Java build tool

Do we need another build tool? Make is never ideal. Ant is interesting, especially because it is part of the Apache Jarkata project. Two interesting points from the Ant project --

• The Ant 2 effort -- Read the collected user requirement documentation -- Simplicity and Understandabiilty are the two main goals of Ant 1 and 2 (Extensibiity is the third).
• From the Ant in Anger tutorial paper -- Limitation of Ant: It is not meant to be a nice language for humans : XML isn't a nice representation of information for humans.
  While we cannot escape the use of XML as a definition file format for most software tools now, don't forget that it is used more for the fact that there are tools (parsers etc) that make processing XML easy. It is not easy on the people creating or reading them.

Christmas

Christmas

What does Christmas means to me? It means that I can take some time off, put away the work/biz/mgmt hats for a week or two, and do some catch up on hands on technology and reading.

80 minutes/700mb CD-R blanks

The stores are now selling almost all 80 minutes/700 mb CD-R blanks now, instead of thestandard 74 minutes/650mb blanks. I just discovered that my 2 years old Mitsumi 4801 drive cannot burn CDR with the larger capacity. Luckily a visit to their website found new firmware. I downloaded and updated the firmware on the drive. Now it can burn the larger capacity blanks. Note: The firmware update requires real DOS. I always install DOS on a system first, then Win 2000, so it is easy for me. Otherwise you will have to make a DOS boot diskette first. Do you even have any diskettes?

Weighting

My eye glasses are 0.4 oz, my watch is 1.4 oz, my phone is 3.5 oz, two potato chips weight just about 0.1 oz.... We have a postage metering machine.

Christmas Cards

Sat 8th. Finished writing all my Christmas cards. Back to organizing my Music CD. After a long search, I found a reasonable storage system for (large amount of) CDs from Boltz. These stainless steel, very high tech looking, storage shelves do the job, if you like the high tech look.

Specifying downloaded filenames for cgi

came across this today -- if a website presents a file for download dynamically,some browser will use the end of the URL as the download file name. However, you may be able to set a HTTP header as follows:

Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="filename.ext"

and see if the browser will use the named filename instead.