jEdit text editor

	Published	Actual
Wargrave	07:51	07:51
London Paddington	08:29	08:33

Since 2001 I have been using a text editor called jEdit, at the time I was supposed to use Borland JBuilder on my work RedHat machine, however this combination had stability issues so jEdit was the alternative that I found. The large number of plug-ins allowed me to turn jEdit into an IDE which could build using ANT, run Java apps and also debug them. I used this for many years in production environments and for my university dissertation, the subject of which I aimed to turn into a jEdit plug-in

Now that I do a lot of package development (Palantir, Documentum, LiveCycle, fileNet) I have to use Eclipse, this is because most of their dev tools are Eclipse based, sometimes it’s just easier to comply that trying to bend another IDE to fit. I do still have jEdit installed for use as my primary text editor though as there are some features in there that I’ve never found anywhere else and jEdit just makes doing some things quicker. The one plug-in I particularly like is Code2HTML, this will take a buffer and turn its entire contents into formatted and colourised HTML, here is a HelloWorld example:

package examples;

public class HelloWorld {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println("Hello World");
    }
}

The other plug-in I would be lost without is MarkDown, the use of which will be the subject of my next post…

WordWhacker v0.1

	Published	Actual
Birmingham New Street	07:10	07:10
London Euston	08:30	08:32

Recently I was talking to a friend about his company, at the moment they are on a recruitment drive and my friend wanted an innovative way to convey the benefits of working there, one of the key things he wants is for employees to be happy working for him. This got me thinking, is there a way to prove that my friend's company embodies happiness?

The first thing I did was to look at the etymology of the companies name but couldn’t find anything in there that suggests happiness. Next I looked into anagrams of the name, as there are no Ps I couldn’t make happy, there were also letters for words like, laugh, fun and spirit. My next attempt was v0.1 of the WordWhacker…

v0.1

The final solution I tried was to take the alphabetically positional value of each character and sum them together, e.g. a=1, b=2, c=3… z=26, so taking my friends company name I obtained a total value of 221, now I tried to see if this equated to any positive words. Happiness = 107, I was 114 short of my target, I needed another word. I tried a few combinations, Eternal Happiness, close only 39 off, Creative Happiness, closer still 31 off, Boundless Creativity, bust 22 too big, Perpetual Happiness… bingo 221.

With much enthusiasm and geeky pride I delivered my findings

Me:  'XXX = 221, Perpetual Happiness = 221, therefore XXX = Perpetual Happiness' 
Him: 'BRILLIANT'
     'are these based on ASCII codes?'
Me:  'it's simply taking a=1, b=2, c=3 for each word'
Him: 'oh (hides disappointment)'

That was it, all he could say was ‘oh (hides disappointment)’. This had an effect, I knew the effect it would have and I’m sure he did also; I was spurred on to make it better

Me:  'you knew what that'd do grar, I'm now thinking I need to do it in Ascii to make it uber cool'

Introduction

	Published	Actual
Birmingham New Street	07:10	07:10
London Euston	08:30	08:29

My current project means I spend a lot of time on the train between Birmingham New Street and London Euston, a journey of 1h 20m according to the times published. Since February, when I started this project, I have been toying with the idea of keeping a blog where the articles are written during these train journeys, the articles could be about technology, my interests or just ideas that I am having at the time. This is, obviously, the first post therefore I will keep it brief.

I work for an IT consultancy which means the work that I have done has been varied, prior to that I worked in a research organisation creating mobile applications using GPS, GPRS and J2ME all to run on a PDA - this was 10 years ago so many years before the current trend for mobile applications. During my time at the consultancy I have worked mostly with Palantir, Documentum, FileNet and LiveCycle. Outside work I have recently taken up walking again after a few years absence, I have also just taken on an allotment with my partner.

Finally, the table at the top of the page will appear at the top of every page recording the start and end stations, the published start and end times and the actual start and end times - whether start and end times appear depends on me remembering to look at the station clocks as the train leaves/arrives.