So, to start, I simply wanted to get a window to popup with a Tic Tac Toe grid in it.

Creating the Frame

Having previous Swing experience, I'm no stranger to getting a JFrame up and running really quickly. However, to get the frame centered used to be a bit more complicated than it is now. Since Java 1.4, there's a new JFrame method "setLocationRelativeTo" which takes another component, or null. If the given component is null, the frame is centered in regards to the screen.

This makes creating a window very easy now.

Previously

I've been looking at starting some game development. I know, I'm a software engineer who's spent pretty much all of his career programming for the web environment. That doesn't mean I haven't always had a desire to do game programming. It's been a sad hobby of mine since I started programming Java.

I know Blogger is so much prettier than DokuWiki, but I really don't like their tools. Perhaps it's because I'm a programmer and honestly I feel more comfortable in jEdit or Eclipse than I do in Microsoft word, but I like writing stuff using syntaxes. If I want something indented, I'll indent it. Or if I want something bold, adding two *'s around my bolded text is just as easy as clicking a button.

A colleague recently asked for my help regarding some data he had entered into a local MySql database. He needed to update some 60k records and had 4 separate CSV files containing the raw data. He wrote a (bad) perl script which was taking too long to convert these CSV files into simple update statements - he later fixed his script to make it execute a lot quicker.

His update statement was something like:

UPDATE table_name SET column1 = 'csv_value_4' WHERE column2 = 'csv_value_3' AND column3 = 'csv_value_1';

A quick search on google will land you plenty of results regarding this topic.

A lot of people use Wiki's for their documentation and I wish we could where I work ( I'll get them yet).

Here's one thing that I think many people miss about the whole Wiki idea, and it's something soooo very basic, you're going to laugh.
It's such a basic feature of EVERY Wiki that I think sometimes people forget.

Wiki's are designed to be modified by a group of people, and they are designed to be modified by that group of people OVER TIME.

The company I currently work for uses Maven as their build tool, and it's been quite a while since I've actually used Ant.

Which is sad! Ant is an awesome tool.

I'll be honest, I haven't really delved into Maven enough to say I have the knowledge of it as I do Ant so I don't know if everything that is available in Ant, is available with Maven.