The Man Who Loved Only Numbers

I enjoyed reading Mark's infinite hotel posting today. I've recently finished reading "The Man Who Loved Only Numbers", a biography (actually more of an oral history) of the mathematician Paul Erdös. Erdös is famous in mathematical circles for both his genius and his productivity. So much so that a low Erdös Number is a badge … Continue reading The Man Who Loved Only Numbers →

The Hardiman

Flipping through New Scientist again this week I came across a short piece describing the WL-16 robotic walking chair, which is apparently all the rage in robotics at the moment. You can read more about it here, but the WL-16 isn't a particularly exciting robot in my book: the first version suffers from the "Dalek … Continue reading The Hardiman →

Creating and influencing social networks

My favourite magazine, New Scientist has two interesting social networking related stories this week. The first, "Intelligent tags are breaking the ice" describes the nTag (a "a complete event communications system for forward-thinking business and social gatherings" according to the marketing blurb"). It's basically a simple PDA type device that stores your personal data, including … Continue reading Creating and influencing social networks →

Mr Men Mastermind

Over the past few weeks I've become a Mr Men expert. Ethan has gotten seriously hooked on them recently and so I've spent a good chunk of my paternity leave reading, re-reading, and re-re-reading them. We also bought him a Mr Men DVD (cheap deal in Fopp; although only series 2 frustratingly) so in-between reading … Continue reading Mr Men Mastermind →

Java Web Start and Signing Jars

In response to a feature request from L. M. Orchard I've just spent a couple of hours packaging up the FOAF-a-Matic Mark 2 as a Java Web Start application. Actually creating the requisite JNLP file was straight-forward; the specification is clear and the format simple. I very quickly had the application launching from a web … Continue reading Java Web Start and Signing Jars →

Her Name is Martha

Martha Louise Dodds to be precise, and she was born at 1.58pm this afternoon weighing 7lb 12oz. Mother and baby are both doing really well, and Martha already seems deeply interested in her new environment. So much so that she's preferred having a good look around rather than sleeping. I snapped the following photo when … Continue reading Her Name is Martha →

FOAF-a-Matic Mark 2 beta-2

It's now been 10 months since I released the first beta of the FOAF-a-Matic Mark 2. An embarrassingly long time indeed, so I thought it was high time that I produced a second beta for you all to play with. I've not been working on this solidly for 10 months and when you take a … Continue reading FOAF-a-Matic Mark 2 beta-2 →

Entity Management in XML applications

I'm very pleased to say that my latest tutorial for IBM developerWorks is now up on their site: Enity Management in XML applications It covers the XML catalog specification and using the Apache XML Resolver classes to add catalog support to your XML applications. Why would you do that? Read the tutorial and find out...

MusicBrainz Java API beta-1

I've just uploaded the beta-1 of my shiny new Java API onto the MusicBrainz RDF web service. If you're not familiar with MusicBrainz, it's similar to CDDB: it stores lists of artists, albums and tracks that can be used to add metadata to your music collection. Aaron Swartz wrote a nice article on it a … Continue reading MusicBrainz Java API beta-1 →

JBoss Documentation Wiki

A while ago I bemoaned the fact that there wasn't an independent JBoss documentation project. I was pleasantly surprised to discover via a comment left under that posting that there is now such as beast: JBoss Documentation Wiki There's even some initial content in there. If this gets some serious attention from you Java bloggers … Continue reading JBoss Documentation Wiki →