Fernando Meyer

I just updated my MBP to the latest Apple’s OS 10 ( leopard ) the system is good, few eye-candies updates, although was a bit disappointing don’t see java6 around ( they removed the early beta version from ADC as well, so, don’t waste your time looking for it).

Apple, I don’t care about java6 for now you can delay it until you make it good. BUT… man when you delivery something with your OperatingSystem make sure that this thing works, I got really angry with a BUGGED java5 version, the exactly version is

java version “1.5.0_13″
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.5.0_13-b05-237)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.5.0_13-119, mixed mode, sharing)

This bug looks like its deep inside Apple’s windowing toolkit implementation as you can see in the following stack trace

Exception in thread “AWT-EventQueue-0″ java.lang.NullPointerException
at apple.awt.CGraphicsEnvironment.displayChanged(CGraphicsEnvironment.java:65)
Invalid memory access of location 00000000 eip=00000000
at apple.awt.CToolkit$4.run(CToolkit.java:1259)
at java.awt.event.InvocationEvent.dispatch(InvocationEvent.java:209)
at java.awt.EventQueue.dispatchEvent(EventQueue.java:461)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpOneEventForHierarchy(EventDispatchThread.j

ava:269)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEventsForHierarchy(EventDispatchThread.java:190)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(EventDispatchThread.java:184)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(EventDispatchThread.java

A guy from GWT dev list submitted a bug report to Apple: Problem ID 5563333 - “CGraphicsEnvironment NullPointerException breaks continually on OsX 10.5″, so engineers and QA move your asses and get this thing done, because you are affecting my work and some more guys around the world.

JBoss Drools 4.0 has just been released. We are really proud of what we have done here. We believe that we now have the best and most powerful declarative rule language, bar none; commercial or open source. The Rule Flow is excellent and I really enjoyed updating the Conway’s Game of Life to Rule Flow; sub Rule Flows and milestone support will be coming in a point release soon. The BRMS has long been requested and we put a lot of effort into the ajax based design. The Eclipse improvements for the debug points and guided editor should help reduce learning curves, opening us to new audiences. Of course performance is now much better, especially for complex rules and the new Sequential Mode should be very popular with decision services.
Enjoy
The Drools Team
Mark Proctor, Michael Neale, Edson Tirelli, Kris Verlaenen, Fernando Meyer
http://blog.athico.com

My books from amazon arrived (with nice gifts from New York redhaters) yesterday. I spend about 2 hours reading some random pages and I can drop some lines about:

The IA book, I studied with the same book at university. so I just ordered to get the new 2002 version, but the mother… nice seller sent me the outdated 95’s version.
Principles of the Business Rule Approach, this book is a nice introduction to business rules, it explains all concepts in the natural way, some step-by-step topics are very interesting to figure out the more complicated rules concepts.
Jess in Action - that’s another book which you must have in your library, but don’t seize at it (try drools instead)
Expert Systems: Principles and Programming - That’s certainly the most advanced book I’ve ordered, so I must dive/read/assimilate more to write a good review.

I think that’s a good start.

Open source JBoss Rules gains speed

http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/07/16/jboss-rules_1.html

JBoss also extends business rules engine to nonprogrammers, adds MVEL language support

Essencial Drools blog reading

http://markproctor.blogspot.com/2007/07/essential-drools-blog-reading.html

I just did a post into Mark Proctor’s Blog covering a short tutorial about BRMS (Business Rules Management System).

http://markproctor.blogspot.com/2007/07/discount-insurance-brokers-example-for.html

Check this out.

I grab this url from a stashed place in the web http://worrydream.com/AlligatorEggs/ it’s a nice puzzle
alligator game.

This game represents the untyped lambda calculus. A hungry alligator is a lambda abstraction, an old alligator is parentheses, and eggs are variables. The eating rule corresponds to beta-reduction. The color rule corresponds to (over-cautious) alpha-conversion. The old age rule says that if a pair of parentheses contains a single term, the parentheses can be removed.
I’m sure that after 4.0 drools release I’m going to implement this game as a drools DRL.

I just ordered these four books in amazon store, and will do some reviews as soon as possible probably I’ll be busy for a while

Expert Systems: Principles and Programming, Fourth Edition: Principles and Programming (Hardcover)

Jess in Action: Java Rule-Based Systems (In Action series) [ILLUSTRATED] (Paperback)

Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (2nd Edition) (Hardcover)

Principles of the Business Rule Approach (Paperback)

What if a debugger could allow you to simply step BACKWARDS? Instead of all that hassle with guessing where to put breakpoints and the fear of typing “continue” one too many times… What if you could simply go backwards to see what went wrong? This is the essence of the “Omniscient Debugger” — it remembers everything that happened during the run of a program, and allows the programmer to “step backwards in time” to see what happened at any point of the program. All variable values, all objects, all method calls, all exceptions are recorded and the programmer can now look at anything that happened at any time

HomePage: http://www.lambdacs.com/debugger/debugger.html

Article: http://www.lambdacs.com/debugger/Article.html

Video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3897010229726822034&q=engedu+debugging

Some days you aren’t so receptive to dumb comments.

He: Duhh, why don’t you select the advanced setup checkbox?

Me: Because it just asks me, would you like to create a fucking icon at desktop? Is that too advanced for you?

How do people become professional programmers? Many people go the “traditional” path through a computer science or software engineering education and from there into professional programming work. Others become professional programmers by accident. A person writes a small program to help at work, and their workmates say, “Oh great, you can write programs! You’re our programmer now!”

This article explains what’s a real professional software developer, the real meaning of “Professional”

http://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/software_professionalism.html