A Mother's Letter

Dear Son,

        Just a few lines to let you know that I am still alive. I am writing this slowly because I know you can't read fast. You won't know the house when you come home, we've moved.

        About your father, he has got a lovely new job. He has 500 men under him, he cuts grass at the cemetery. Your sister Mary had a baby this morning. I haven't found out yet whether it's a boy or a girl, so I don't know if you're an aunt or an uncle.

        I went to the doctor's on Thursday and your father came with me. The doctor put a small tube in my mouth and told me not to talk for 10 minutes. Your father offered to buy it from him.

        Your uncle Patrick drowned last week in a vat of Irish whiskey at the Dublin brewery. Some of his workmates tried to save him but he fought them off bravely. They cremated him and it took 3 days to put the fire out.

        It only rained twice this week, first for 3 days then for 4 days. We had a letter from the undertaker. He said that if the last payment on your grandmother's plot wasn't paid in 7 days, up she comes.

Your loving mother

P.S. I was going to send you 5 pounds, but I have already sealed the envelope.

Microsoft First Keynote in JavaOne

Interesting to know that Microsoft will have a general session for the first time in JavaOne, hope this will break the ice between Java and .NET.

I won't definitely miss the session ;-)

More details are here.

Don't copy if you can't paste!

A popular motivational speaker was entertaining his audience.
He Said: "The best years of my life were spent in the arms of a woman who wasn't my wife!" The audience was in silence and shock. The speaker added: "And that woman was my mother!"
Laughter and applause.

A week later, a top manager trained by the motivational speaker tried to crack this very effective joke at home. He was a bit foggy after a drink. He said loudly to his wife who was preparing dinner, "The greatest years of my life were spent in the arms of a woman who was not my wife!"

The wife went; "ah!" with shock and rage. Standing there for 20 seconds trying to recall the second half of the joke, the manager finally blurted out "....and I can't remember who she was!"

By the time the manager regained his consciousness, he was on a hospital bed nursing burns from boiling water.

Moral of the story:
Don't copy if you can't paste!

Who said fitness isn't fun?

After 10 years, the only thing I strongly recall from the study of the physiology of the respiratory system, is that people are classified into two groups: athlete and non-athlete. It was so repeated whenever a function of that system is discussed.

However, even if you know, it doesn't mean you will comply. Sedentary lifestyle is one of the main points I personally suffered from, and doing exercise outdoors or indoors isn't much fun.

That was till someone brought a game to play to one of the company's social activities; there is no joystick, you ARE the control of the game; if you want to move forward, you actually have to bend forward, and so on.

One day later, I was configuring the game at home, and I was amazed by how the remote control works, it is like no other: when you actually move the remote to the right, it is like PC mouse that works on-air!

One week later, I am very pleased that you can play Yoga, Balance Games, and Aerobics till you are physically tired, not because you spend too much time staring at the monitor and playing with the traditional joystick.

, I love you!

HtmlUnit 2.5 is out

It is a pleasure to announce the new release of HtmlUnit, the GUI-Less java browser, which adds to the continuous improvements there.

The main enhancements of this release:

• Improved JavaScript support, particularly full support for MooTools, adding to already supported Google Web Toolkit, jQuery, Mochikit and Sarissa
• Repackaged Rhino classes to allow the use of HtmlUnit and a regular Rhino version in the same project
• Support all HTML elements
• Experimental WebClient.waitForBackgroundJavaScript() and WebClient.waitForBackgroundJavaScriptStartingBefore() for simple, fast and deterministic AJAX testing
• Reworked handling of background JavaScript tasks using Java 5 executors
• And as usual, various bug fixes

You can download it here, enjoy!

Java on Google App Engine

Exciting news: Google just announced the Java support for App Engine (in addition to Python), now you can host it in Google servers.

Java support is not very complete, but it is a good time to start building your applications.

You can read more information at App Engine Blog.

HtmlUnit 2.4 is out

Happy New Year everyone!

The new release of the GUI-Less java browser is available, which allows high-level manipulation of web pages, such as filling forms, clicking links, accessing attributes and values of specific elements within the pages, you do not have to create lower-level requests of TCP/IP or HTTP, but just getPage(url), find a hyperlink, click() and you have all the HTML, JavaScript, and Ajax are automatically processed.

The most common use of HtmlUnit is test automation of web pages (even with complex JavaScript libraries, such as jQuery or Google Web Toolkit), but sometimes it can be used for web scraping, or downloading website content.

The main enhancements in this release:

• Improved JavaScript support, now all jQuery and Mochikit tests pass, adding to already supported GWT and Sarissa
• Native ActiveX support
• Initial applet handling
• Internet Explorer conditional comments
• As usual, various bug fixes, three were reported by GWT users
  

You can find more information in the official website, the development team is looking forward to getting your feedback.