Blogging the days...

We'll it's been an interesting day today. I've been following the Software Engineering II lessons this semester and today we've hit an interesting subject. Loosely coupling elements using the Mediator design pattern but with a twist. Namely putting some artificial intelligence in it using Prolog (with the help of a library developed at my University and the one in Cesena called tuProlog ) and using it's knowledge base to wire things. I haven't really thought about this thing but it does look like it offers very interesting opportunities especially in the field of Software Agents . The other interesting thing is that I've stumbled over the Windows Workflow Foundation video on Channel9 and my immediate thought was BPEL! We had this conference done by IBM and it showed it's SOA vision that had BPEL as one of its founding blocks so I wondered did MS copied IBM or what? Then it comes out that BPEL is the brainchild of both MS and IBM, how weird is that? Any

I've spotted this list of top 20 geek novels that currently shows these novels: 1. The HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- Douglas Adams 85% (102) 2. Nineteen Eighty-Four -- George Orwell 79% (92) 3. Brave New World -- Aldous Huxley 69% (77) 4. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? -- Philip Dick 64% (67) 5. Neuromancer -- William Gibson 59% (66) 6. Dune -- Frank Herbert 53% (54) 7. I, Robot -- Isaac Asimov 52% (54) 8. Foundation -- Isaac Asimov 47% (47) 9. The Colour of Magic -- Terry Pratchett 46% (46) 10. Microserfs -- Douglas Coupland 43% (44) 11. Snow Crash -- Neal Stephenson 37% (37) 12. Watchmen -- Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons 38% (37) 13. Cryptonomicon -- Neal Stephenson 36% (36) 14. Consider Phlebas -- Iain M Banks 34% (35) 15. Stranger in a Strange Land -- Robert Heinlein 33% (33) 16. The Man in the High Castle -- Philip K Dick 34% (32) 17. American Gods -- Neil Gaiman 31% (29) 18. The Diamond Age -- Neal Stephenson 27% (27) 19. The Illuminatus!

I've been testing maven 2 lately and it's my intention to have my jspArt project built completely with maven 2. Unfortunately I have to report that it's still not very well documented, plugins are non-existent or filled with bugs and all in all a bit immature environment (perhaps I'm a bit too harsh). None the less it's a great application and it's totally worth the time invested in it.

Here's a nice news. Sun has announced that'll ship and support PostgreSql with Solaris. This is probably a good thing, and I hope that means we'll see quality JDBC 4.0 drivers ahead of other db's. As both Java and .Net have generics now, I can't wait to see how they'll try to take advantage in their database middleware and these new language constructs. I think that Pg will gain some better diagnostics thanks to DTrace but since I'm mostly a windows user, what I'd like to see is the addition of performance counters to the windows port (it's a really sweet feature of SQLServer).