I’ll be away this week from June 1-5 attending the Sun JavaOne Conference in beautiful San Francisco. I plan to expand my knowledge of advanced J2EE/SOA topics as well as pick up some introductory courses on new technologies. If you want to meet up to discuss any of my recent articles, the conference, or how [...]

JavaRanch uses a Java program to pick the weekly winners for book promotions.  It previously used a serious of classes that went the URLs, parsed the data, went to more URLs, picked some random winners and then output them to a file.  These contortions were done because the old software was hard to change.  With [...]

I stopped watching the webcast (see part 2) about two hours in.  While WolframAlpha may go down over the weekend, it is up now for experimenting.  In part 1, I worried about my first impression: What is interesting to me is that it gives you the answer, but not the source. For calculations, there isn’t [...]