Daniel E. Markle's Blog

Quotes have been displayed on my Google home page for a few months, but today one was shown which really caught my attention.

You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.
    - Jack London

Perhaps it was not what the author intended, but it made me consider the past few years. I have seen, heard, and even manufactured many great ideas; most of which have gone nowhere due to a lack of time and/or effort to pursue their completion. This quote is a good reminder and motivator to push harder.

After the Harrisburg Java User's Group meeting tonight, two items in particular came up in the post-presentation discussions which I am mentioning here mainly for my own reference, but will likely be valuable to anyone reading this doing Java programming.

The Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition 5.0 Trouble-Shooting and Diagnostic Guide is a comprehensive guide to the tools that are available as part of JDK5 to analyze Java programs. Interestingly many of these tools do not exist on Windows, but they are in OS X as well as the mentioned Linux and Solaris.

Available as part of the stock Java 5 standard libraries, the JSR 166 Concurrency Utilities allow the building of many common concurrency models without the complication of doing such programming from scratch. Concurrent programming is becoming important as more cores become increasingly dominant in modern computers.

A date chooser is a frequent element needed when building Swing applications. I have been using JCalendar widgets for my needs. They have an excellent selection of widgets to fit most needs, including separate month and year choosers for cases where you don't need whole dates (like credit card months and years) licensed under the LGPL open source license.

These work well with Netbeans. Make a JCalendar library using the Library Manager, then add the library to your Swing widgets palette. Use Tools, Palette Manager, Swing/AWT Components, then click on Add from Library to allow drag and drop of these widgets in Matisse.