Last week I released an open source project: ArgKit. It’s the synthesis of some work that I’ve been doing in the last couple of years and I’m very pleased with it. I’ve released early (ish) on this one, so there is more work to come in the same vein, time and attention allowing. One thing that ArgKit’s website misses is some background on “what is argumentation?” so I thought I’d just blog something about Dungine - the only tool in the toolkit at the moment, based on an email I sent to a friend recently (thanks for the question Steve).

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Last week I spent a day interviewing candidates for a programmer position. One of the candidates discussed things that he looked for in an organisation. Two things in particular struck me: He wanted to work in an organisation that, if he was making good progress, didn’t slow him down and that, if he asked a stupid question, didn’t call him stupid. The first question revealed the candidates lack of experience (not a problem in this case btw) but the second one is very important to a career in software engineering.

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Cargo cults are a delightful new concept to me, from the excellent and thought provoking blog entry, internal code re-use considered dangerous, which in turn was a link from another blog entry, is your code worthless? which in turn was a link from theserverside.com.  Now that’s provenance baby.  Too much information?

A Dutch colleague introduced me to plasmasturm.org a while ago - an excellent software engineering resource. I hadnt noticed it before* but today I was most tickled by a quote he has on his code page:

A friend of mine in a compiler writing class produced a compiler with one error message ‘you lied to me when you told me this was a program’

see plasmasturm.org/code.

* Maybe I did notice it before and didnt get it. Since I first looked at that site I’ve done some work with the RACC, JACC and JavaCC compiler compilers (of the two Java compiler compilers, I prefer JavaCC).

I fell in love with this styleshout web template and decided to hack it into a WordPress theme. Someone else had done it before, but their license was a little too restrictive for my liking. It took a few hours but was well worth it. It’s not widget friendly yet, but it will do for now.

This was almost my first encounter with PHP and definately my first encounter with the WordPress codebase but the task turned out to be fairly straightforward. The files in the WordPress themes were intuitively named and the code was easy to read. The only problem I had was tracing the location of some of the core functions that are used in the theme, but this is quite normal for this sort of application I feel.

This might save someone else a little bother. I’ve been building Java Swing demo’s in the last few months and one thing that has slowed me down is building a status bar. A status bar is the strip at the bottom of a window that contains useful information about the status of an application. As an example, here is the status bar for my skype client:

There is no standard swing control (container) to do this so you must roll your own. Searching for “java status bar” didnt get me very far. Initially I just used a JLabel, but this is too simple. I really wanted something with multiple recessed panels (as in the skype example). I considered using an unfloatable JToolBar but I dropped this idea because a toolbar’s default background doesnt look like a status bar and because its not easy to make the recessed panels this way. Finally I realised that the best way to build my status bar is to nest JPanels. (more…)