April 29, 2002
What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic

What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic, by David Goldberg.

But remember, in Business computing, all you really need to know about floating point is to never use it. Quite seriously.

Posted by Simon Brunning at 06:05 PM
Java Tools For Extreme Programming

(Book review at Slashdot.)

This looks interesting. I've not practiced Extreme Programming (XP) myself, but I'd like to work up the courage to have a go.

Actually, I'm not in a position to make this decision. If my team don't practice XP, then I can't.

For more about XP, see the Extreme Programming Roadmap at the original Wiki Wiki Web. This is also home to the Portland Pattern Repository. Be warned - you can lose days here!

But even without XP, this looks useful. It has sections on Ant,JUnit, Cactus and HttpUnit, all of which would be useful even outside the context of an XP project.

Posted by Simon Brunning at 05:47 PM
Python.NET

It looks as though Mark Hammond's Python.NET isn't dead after all. Bravo, Mark!

Posted by Simon Brunning at 05:33 PM
Eclipse coming on nicely.

The latest (R5) drop of Eclipse is really nice.

It's the tool I use for 95% of my Java development work, along with a bit of jEdit (which has some nice plug-ins).

The auto-completion works really well, and the refactorings are fantastic. The template stuff is also really good.

A Python plug-in for Eclipse would be wonderful, but I don't hear of one in the works.

Posted by Simon Brunning at 05:08 PM
A bit of a harsh review.

I've been to the Nazrul 2 a few times, and I've always had a fine meal, but CurryPages' review section shows that not everyone was so happy.

Still, not a patch on my local - the Halal.

Posted by Simon Brunning at 04:57 PM
Python on the iSeries

Per Gummedal has updated his iSeries port of Python to version 2.2.1. Get it here.

I've been working on PC based Java stuff for a while now, so I haven't been keeping an eye on Per's work, but it looks to have come on a long way.

I'm still not sure that it can beat a Jython/JTOpen toolkit combination for functionality, though.

Posted by Simon Brunning at 01:30 PM
AWT Table component.

I've got the go ahead to use T. Studer's AWT Table component in a work project.

Looks pretty good so far, but I can't work out how to grab mouse-click events on the rows and column headings.

Posted by Simon Brunning at 10:36 AM
French Intellectuals in Afghanistan

You probably came across the French Intellectuals in Afghanistan thing last year. The guy who wrote it, Michael Kelly, has a website with loads of other funny stuff. Well worth a look.

Posted by Simon Brunning at 09:25 AM