Saturday, July 23, 2005

Google Suggest for Firefox

This is really cool. If you use Firefox (which you should) and Google - and you like Google Suggest - you'll love this new Firefox extension from Google. Google Suggest for Firefox integrates Suggest into the Firefox search box. The result is really nice.

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Music: Live8, AOL, Yahoo!

If You like music...
  1. AOL has the entire Live8 show online, on-demand. The quality of the streaming video is pretty good. You can select any played song, and just view it within seconds. I couldn't get it to work with Firefox though - only IE.
  2. Yahoo!'s LAUNCHcast service is very nice. Basically, you select your favorite artists and genres, and let the system play songs that much your taste. And when you hear new content, you can rate it - and the system learns your taste better. The best thing about this service - it's free. The second best thing: you get to know new artists.
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Friday, July 01, 2005

Enum Code Generation

Once you start playing with code generation, you can't stop. At least, I can't.

One of the new features in J2SE 5.0 (or 1.5) is enums. I've missed enums for a long time, and I usually used the unsafe "static int" enums when I had to use them. The new version of Java provides real, type-safe, enums - but unfortunately, I can't use it, because I code for an old version of the language.
So I developed my own type-safe enums, based on Joshua Bloch's suggestion from the Effective Java book.

My idea is to describe the enum using XML, and then use XSLT to translate it to Java. The XSLT stylesheet adds all the boilerplate code required by type-safe enums.

One advantage of using XML+XSLT is portability between languages: at work, I build a Java component of a mostly-C++ project. The other engineers in my group have defined their enums in C++, and currently, to communicate with their code, I have to manually update my enum with theirs. If the enum is defined by using XML, we can write another XSLT that translates it to "regular" C++ enums.

I will publish my XML format + XSLT translator here, after I clean it a bit.

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