Tom Pierce's Blog

Let the geek times roll.

VisiBone's Online Color Lab - March 25, 2004

I'm sure that most people who are web savvy developers have experienced the greatness that is VisiBone's online color lab. Not being particularly front-end studly, this is new to me. I like to be able to pick the complementary colors by looking at the pretty hex wheel thingy. Mmmm... colors.
http://radio.weblogs.com/0116883/2004/03/25.html#a668

Mozilla Rhino saves my sanity - March 25, 2004

Ever had to write alot of JavaScript Better yet, ever inherit alot of JavaScript and not have time to fully understand what it does Best - have you ever inherited alot of JavaScript that you don't have time to understand and have to quickly figure out how to extend it Well, I HAVE! Currently I'm on a project that is built on top of a framework that contains a non-trivial amount of JavaScript. Normally this would be OK, but I have to actually extend the framework a.
http://radio.weblogs.com/0116883/2004/03/25.html#a667

Groovy : a powerful dynamically typed language for the JVM - March 23, 2004

"Groovy is a new agile dynamic language for the JVM combining lots of great features from languages like Python, Ruby and Smalltalk and making them available to the Java developers using a Java-like syntax." Have you seen Groovy yet I hadn't. It actually looks pretty cool. I think it's a pretty darned good idea to make the Java platform available in a lighter weight language. Not sold Just check out Groovy Markup and how easily you can create a little Swing...
http://groovy.codehaus.org/

Gosling's "Weekend Hack" - March 23, 2004

After a longish pause of over a month, James Gosling got back to blogging this week...but first, as Java gurus do, he threw together from scratch an RSS feed reader - called JNN, for "Juicy News Network." Cool! And released under the BSD license, too. There's even a WebStart version!
http://sys-con.com/story/?storyid=44134&DE=1

Check Syntax in Dr. Scheme - March 19, 2004

Another cool thing about the Dr. Scheme programming environment is the "Check Syntax" feature. After you have written some code in the editor pane, you can hit the "Check Syntax" button to make sure you've written valid Scheme. The syntax checker just checks, well, syntax. It doesn't catch some of the runtime errors that can happen like calling functions that don't exist. But that's not its purpose. The amazingly cool thing about using "Check Syntax" is what happens...
http://radio.weblogs.com/0116883/2004/03/19.html#a664

Status bar won't stay on in IE Here's the fix. - March 17, 2004

I finally grew so annoyed with the lack of status bar in IE, I decided to Google for it. (My love for Google grows with every search, but that's another story...) Check this out to solve the disappearing IE status bar problem. Be sure to follow the link in her post to see the actual fix.
http://radio.weblogs.com/0116883/2004/03/17.html#a663

Good JSTL Reference - March 16, 2004

I just stumbled upon a pretty good article on the JSTL (JavaServer Pages Standard Tag Library) that can be used as a quick reference. The article provides a quick overview of JSTL 1.0 and how to use the expression language and tags.
http://radio.weblogs.com/0116883/2004/03/16.html#a662

(Untitled) - March 16, 2004

Open Source and Outsourcing. I'm at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco. I'm in Steve Korn's talk on Outsourcing and Open Source. Steve works for EDS and has some context on how outsourced IT services vendors are using open source. One interesting note from his introduction: they use Jabber internally and apparently with great success. Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog Note to self: Time to check out the latest on Jabber. Self: Because EDS is using it (or..
http://radio.weblogs.com/0116883/2004/03/16.html#a661

(Untitled) - March 15, 2004

Why Learn Lisp Sunday, March 14, 2004 "Why le .... Why Learn Lisp Sunday, March 14, 2004 Bill Clementson's Blog Great list of quotations about why you should learn Lisp. I love Kent Pitman's quote about "...Please don't assume Lisp is only useful for..."
http://radio.weblogs.com/0116883/2004/03/15.html#a660

PLT Scheme - March 12, 2004

I may be in love. Let's get into it. I decided that I would bite of Scheme this year. That decision was based on 1) not being ready to kiss Lisp goodbye 2) being a little lazy (not much syntactic difference between Lisp and Scheme). The decision was made clearer by Bill Clementson's blog thread "What is the best Open Source Lisp" - especially part 2. This is where Bill says that PLT Scheme is the best OSS Lisp environment. So, I went out and downloaded the latest copy of.
http://radio.weblogs.com/0116883/2004/03/12.html#a659