K Desktop Environment (KDE) 3.5 Released

The 29th of November was a great day for x.5 releases. After Firefox KDE too has released a new major release. Details can be taken from the release announcement.

My first impression after installing it on my AMD64 notebook with OpenSuse 10 was that it is significantly faster (in terms of starting new programs) than 3.4.x.

Firefox 1.5 released

Mozilla Firefox 1.5 has been released yesterday. It provides many great new features as you can read in the release anouncement.
Both Firefox and Thunderbird have a new home now at http://www.mozilla.com/.

Custom Eclipse Builder

Custom Eclipse Builder: "The Custom Eclipse Builder is a lightweight Ant-based project to build a company/personal customized Eclipse distribution including company/personal relevant plugins, preferences and settings."

Remember The Milk

Remember The Milk: "Never forget the milk (or anything else) again.
Remember The Milk is the easiest and best way to manage your to-do lists online."

Found through this blog entry.

It provides the following, according to their website:
* Features galore: Sharing, publishing, notes... we've got it all.
* Get reminded: Receive reminders via email, instant messenger, and SMS.
* It's free: Hard to believe, we know, but it's true.

MyProgs - find new software, keep your program list online

MyProgs - find new software, keep your program list online: "This site allows you to keep a social list of the programs you use. After you sign up you can add programs to your unique list. You can view anyone else's programs and they can view yours. Extra user-defined data can be added to each program entry to organize and describe the program further such as program descriptions, a link to the program's homepage, and tags. You can use tags to categorize (and thus organize) programs so that you and others using this site will have an easier time finding new and interesting programs.
RSS feeds are available at almost every page which allows you to track new programs using your news aggregator."

This is really a great site!
I just added some of my programs. More to come ...

Log4sh

Log4sh: "Log4sh runs along the same lines as the other excellent logging services from the Apache Software Foundation. It adds to that list the ability to integrate powerful logging capabilities into a shell script."

Jakarta Commons Email 1.0 released

Jakarta Commons Email: Commons-Email aims to provide a API for sending email. It is built on top of the Java Mail API, which it aims to simplify.
There are also some examples which show how simple it is to use.

Eclipse WTP 0.7 / BIRT 1.0.1RC1 released

The long awaited final release of the Eclipse Web Tools Platform 0.7 has been released. You can download it on the download page.
Additionally the Eclipse Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools 1.0.1RC1 have been released too: Download them here.

Abrüsten!!!

"Abrüsten" is the german word for "disarm" which I finally did today and now I can continue my life with the usual freedom I had before ;-).

Orangevolt Ant Tasks

SourceForge.net: Project Info - Orangevolt Ant Tasks: "Orangevolt Ant Tasks (successor of ROXES Ant Tasks) provides 17 custom tasks for the famous Apache Jakarta Ant (http://ant.apache.org/) targeting java application deployment for *nix/windows and macosx. It is licensed under LGPL"

F-Spot

F-Spot: "F-Spot is an application designed to provide personal photo management to the GNOME desktop. Features include import, export, printing and advanced sorting of digital images."

Looks a bit like Adobe Photoshop Album 2.0 or Photoshop Elements 3.0 Organizer which I'm using now to organize my photos. Perhaps it evolves to a good Open Source alternative, which I can use :-).

Andreas Hochsteger @ Blogs Rating

I just got a Google Alert for this page: Andreas Hochsteger @ Blogs Rating.
I didn't know that I was listed there and have already 140 votes. Curently the rating is at 6.41 - let's see if it's getting more, when I'll be writing more again :-).

Starting my Master Thesis

Yesterday I had a very interesting meeting with Gerald Reif about my master thesis. The provisional working title is "Ontology visualizations for the Semantic Web".
This work will be a small piece for the WEESA project (Web Engineering for Semantic Web Applications) which aims to provide semantic information for web pages and integrate this development as part of the web engineering process for XML/XSLT based web applications. WEESA defines a flexible mapping between the application's XML schema and one ore more ontologies for automatic semantic annotation.

My part will be to do a comparative evaluation of existing ontology editors and visualization tools which allow easy selection of classes and properties of different ontologies and makes the absolute URI available for the WEESA mapping definition. One tool will then be chosen and extended to the provide needed functionality.

Depending on the effort it takes to implement the missing features of the chosen tool it might be possible to implement a prototype of the mapping editor too.

Personally I'll try to cover some more things which I am interested at too:
* Version control of all artifacts concerning the master thesis (notes, emails, documentation, source code, ...) using Subversion and experimenting with decentral version control using SVK for offline development.
* Project automation using Cruise Control or a similar tool.
* Unit Testing using JUnit and related frameworks.

All three concerns are described in the excellent books of the Pragmatic Bookshelf which I read recently:
* Pragmatic Version Control using Subversion
* Pragmatic Unit Testing: in Java using JUnit
* Pragmatic Project Automation: How to Build, Deploy, and Monitor Java Applications

Stay tuned for further updates ...

Joda Time - Java date and time API

Joda Time - Java date and time API - Home: "Joda-Time provides a quality replacement for the Java date and time classes. The design allows for multiple calendar systems, while still providing a simple API. The 'default' calendar is the ISO8601 standard which is used by XML. The Gregorian, Julian, Buddhist and Coptic systems are also included, and we welcome further additions. Supporting classes include time zone, duration, format and parsing."

Production-ready release 1.0 with Apache License 2.0 has just been released!

Got GMail account

Yesterday I got this lucky mail from google, starting with the following message:

Hi there,

Thanks for signing up to be updated on the latest Gmail happenings. We hope it's been worth the wait, because we're excited to finally offer you an invitation to open a free Gmail account! Just click on this link to create your new account:


After a long time waiting I got one finally, thanks!

mSpace - Exploring The Semantic Web | mSpace

mSpace - Exploring The Semantic Web | mSpace: "mSpace is an interaction model designed to allow a user to navigate in a meaningful manner the multi-dimensional space that an ontology can provide. mSpace offers potentially useful slices through this space by selection of ontological categories.

mSpace is fully generalised and as such, with a little definition, can be used to explore any knowledge base (without the requirement of ontologies!)."

Trac

Edgewall Software: Trac: "Trac is an enhanced wiki and issue tracking system for software development projects."

Particularly interesting is, that it integrates a bug tracking system with Subversion.

MindRaider - Semantic Web Outliner

MindRaider - Semantic Web Outliner: "MindRaider is Semantic Web outliner. It aims to connect the tradition of outline editors with emerging technologies. MindRaider mission is to organize not only the content of your hard drive but also your cognitive base and social relationships in a way that enables quick navigation, concise representation and inferencing."

That's a really interesting piece of software for organizing your mind!

the open source team work management software

teamwork - the open source team work management software: "Teamwork is a software application specifically for team work management. If your company works in teams then this is the application for you, as you can manage large volumes of information and operate effectively with your team members on complex projects. Teamwork will improve worklife quality, helping production cycle information flow management, via stage coordination and allocating tasks to everyone involved. As an application, Teamwork combines document management, groupware and project management features in a new perspective."

It really looks promising to me, especially when looking at the screenshots.

In the army now ...

Perhaps you recognized, that I didn't post anything since end of September. The reason is, that I finally have to do my military service which started on October 4th 2004 and "erases" 8 months of my life :-(.

The base training was in Weitra and took 5 weeks. It was a bit hard for me - not because the training was so tough (it was more like Baby sitting ;-) but because I could see my family only on the weekend.

About 5 weeks later I have been relocated back to Vienna, taking driving lessons to become a military truck driver.(you see, here in Austria the recruits get jobs which have nothing to do with their skills). This time it wasn't like Baby sitting at all. It took me 3 days to get the permission to sleep at home, just because the topkick of the barracks was such an a**h***.

Another 5 weeks later I managed to get my driving license and have been relocated to my final destination in an office. Here I don't have much to do and the office hours are really pleasant ;-).

Now things have setteled down a bit and I find enough time again for things like starting my master thesis, playing with Cocoon-, Java- and XML-related things and of course some reading.

Stay tuned for more regular posts ...