further rather splendidly hirsute pictures

We are looking for a VP Development to oversee the technical wing of Trampoline. The role reports to the CEO and will involve extensive work with VP Sales (to be appointed). The VP Development will establish Trampoline’s software as a secure technology suitable for enterprise adoption and conduct high-level technical liaison with customers and partners. [...]

The BBC is reporting Music site Last.fm bought by CBS for a tidy old sum of £140m. Not bad for five year’s work. Founder Martin Stiksel said it was an “exciting opportunity”….. no kidding!
Congratulations all round guys. Last.fm is a great service that we all use here in the office every day, and we’re looking [...]

I’ve just released a new version of springy, the JRuby-based alternative to Spring’s XML configuration format. It now has a “serialise-to-xml”-feature which allows you to write your whole config to a nicely formatted Spring XML file. Why would you want to do that ? In our case we’ve created a Ruby-based configuration framework modeled after [...]

SONAR brings statistical natural language processing and social network analysis to the problem of browsing and filtering large archives. We permit users to see who is talking to who, how much and about what. There are applications in areas including expertise discovery, compliance, forensics, search and alerting.
We are a small company, with large ambition. We [...]

I’m a big fan of SVN, and I know it’s in very common use throughout the development community, so I thought I’d give a shout out to an interesting project that extracts some fascinating SVN stats and draws lots of pretty pictures - StatSVN
We’ve now added a StatSVN task to our build scripts, and the [...]

i came across a problem with our java unit testing package, TestNG : our IHookable implementation, which sets up transaction contexts for test methods, wasn’t being given details of Exceptions which occurred during the running of the test methods
downloading the source for TestNG, it turned out to be an easy fix, a one-liner. i submitted [...]

Apologies to everyone who tried to leave a comment on this weblog: commenting has been broken for quite a while, but we’ve only realised just now. It was due to a bug in the otherwise excellent web publishing system Symphony. I’ve spent an hour trying to figure out why all comments got detected as spam. [...]

The term “XML sit-ups” is often used by Rails developers to make fun of the XML-loving Java crowd. When I first heard it, I was slightly annoyed - there’re many valid use cases for XML. However, using it as a scripting language is clearly not one of them. The build system Ant fell into this [...]

Applets aren’t always evil
Applets are hated by users and developers alike. The infamous grey box combined with slow startup times caused them to disappear almost completely from most web developers’ toolboxes. They are now widely regarded as a failed and overhyped attempt to deliver a desktop-like user experience in browsers, eclipsed by more lightweight alternatives [...]