Last week, Andy came down in order to pay a visit to the Chelsea flower show. He’s a member of the RHS, so we were able to head down on the Wednesday, which is one of the RHS-only days. We were hoping that it might be slightly less crowded than the general public days, but it was pretty packed full of folks. Given a bit of patience around the edges of the gardens it was still possible to get some decent positions for taking photos of the displays.
Read on to view the gallery…
The financial industry does seem to be loath to share the fruits of their efforts. There doesn’t seem to be a lot around. And certainly not much that is regularly updated. Maybe everyone is worried about sharing trade secrets, but the rules for calculations are well established and I’m guessing that everyone must be writing their own implementations or buying in over-priced modules.
As a developer of financial systems, I’m constantly disappointed by how difficult it is to perform precise decimal arithmetic in Java. It’s fairly common knowledge that the use of double is not much use for financial calculations. As a quick example, take a look at the following piece of code.
public static void main(String arg[]) {
BigDecimal bd = new BigDecimal("58.99").add(new BigDecimal("0.99"));
System.out.println("BigDecimal result: " + bd);
double d = 58.99 + 0.99;
System.out.println("Double result: " + d);
}You would have thought both results should be the same. However, you end up with:
BigDecimal result: 59.98
Double result: 59.980000000000004The following image shows what I have just been listening to, as determined by last.fm. Hopefully it’s not showing anything too embarrassing.
I already mentioned my foray into MySpace in search of new music to listen to. As a result of that I ended up setting myself up on last.fm. This is another social networking site oriented around the music you listen to. To get anything out of it, you will need to install their client software. This is a little app that checks what you are listening to in iTunes and uploads your playlist to the site. Based on this, it will provide statistics about your musical taste and let you know who your neighbours are each week, based on how similar their tastes are to your own. They also provide handy little things like generating images periodically that you can put on other sites, showing what you have just been listening to. You may not actually want to share such information, and from what I can gather, users do become rather careful about what they listen to, in order that they look as cool as possible. All those tunes that you are embarassed about liking get published out for all the world to see.
According to the BEA documentation, the WebLogic Scripting Tool is a command-line scripting interface that system administrators and operators use to monitor and manage WebLogic Server instances and domains. It allows you to write scripts in Jython that are able to connect to a running WebLogic domain and make modifications to the configuration with no need to restart anything. It can also be used for creating and modifying a domain in its offline mode. It comes as standard with WebLogic 9.2 and a version is available for 8.1. It is recommended and supported by BEA for automating WebLogic server administration. I am currently developing WLST scripts to improve the development and deployment process. Continue reading
It seems that not a week goes by without some news story relating to the world of social networking. Whether it be Friends Reunited, MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, LinkedIn or one of many other sites. Usually the news is something to do with internet predators grooming innocent children. And there have been enough news stories about how bands like the Arctic Monkeys made it through the internet. Or those stories about how Sandi Thom became successful by gathering a following on her MySpace page and then performing gigs in her Tooting basement because she couldn’t be bothered to tour. Continue reading
My dad passed away on April 1st 2005. At the time he had been working on a book, aimed at introducing the Java programming language as part of a university course. The project had taken a long time and was never quite finished, but near the beginning of 2005, he has finished his last chapter. Having dug around on his iBook, I found the most recent Word document in which he had been preparing the book. Reading it through, it was obvious that it would need a good bit of work before it could be publishable. Continue reading