Jeff Longland

Want to know what I do to relax at the end of the day? Surf the Wikipedia! So I started out looking at their page on Design Patterns. Then I noticed a related page link to Pedagogical Patterns. Which quickly lead me to The Pedagogical Patterns Project. A Computer Science / Software Architecture practice applied to teaching – excellent! The examples would be even better if formatted like the ELI 7 Things You Should Know About… series – perfect for instructors on the go.

I’ve been absent from this blog for a couple of weeks – got a lot on the go and a lot on my mind… but I’ll save that for another post when there’s enough time for me to comprehend it to put it into words. Today I want to yammer a bit about another favourite tool.

I’ve been using Netbeans as my IDE of choice for a few years aside from a few exploratory tours of JCreator, JBuilder, Eclipse, etc. All in all, Netbeans suits me best. It may not suit you best, but for what I need to do – it’s great. And with some of the slick features coming up in Netbeans 5.5, I suspect the Netbeans userbase will continue to swell. Want to see why?

• Point-and-click Subversion support
  
• J2EE Wizards
• UML Modelling

Check out the rest of Roumen’s blog for more demos and other interesting tidbits. Geertjan’s blog also has some nifty pieces about Netbeans & Wicket.

So after seeing Brian’s inspiring workstation, I decided to get out and explore if there was any wireless coverage down by the river. And what I learned is that life down by the river is ruthless. Eat or be eaten. Oh, and yes, the wireless works. So I’m merrily rattling away on the laptop, handling a few emails, and enjoying lunch. Well, apparently Mr. Mink was about to have a tasty lunch too. At first I thought it was a squirrel running past me, but it was actually a mink carrying a bunny – and not in a friendly way. Maybe not the serene setting I was expecting… but that’s life I suppose.