The Learning Journey

An impressive quote from Gartner:

“Open source software is a catalyst that will restructure the industry, producing higher-quality software at lower cost…it will revolutionize software markets by moving revenue streams to services and support and away from license fees - Gartner 2005″

Source: Simulabs

Great news off of Matt's blog.
It looks like he's dedicating more time to Appfuse and Spring Live (not official yet)

Just hope no changes to Appfuse license

Update: Matt said that Appfuse would stay free.

After struggling with some old Clipper database files (.dbf) for hours trying to find a suitable client to query the data, I accidentally found that the people at OpenOffice have done a great job including a special SDBC driver (Star Database Connectivity) that connects to those old files (Along with other JDBC, MySQL, ADO Datasources).

Although I'm still trying to find a way to generate the SQL script, yet, with the SDBC connectivity, it's not that bad after all.

Thanks OpenOffice

It looks like there's a relation between application developers and classical music composers
I've haven't any info to tie up both, but after listening to some of my old favorites, it's becoming clearer.

• Many composers have had compositions that resembles the number of decently developed apps in ones life.
• A musical composition resembles a software project with a team of one developer (with all its inspiration, enthusiasm, knowledge journey, agony and rewards).
• Looks like the number of paths a composer can take is similar to the numerous decisions a developer usually faces.
• Developers loves music with its patterns and resemblance to mathematics

I now fully agree, as one of my professors (and must be many others) said - software development is the closest you can get to artistic creations

I've been looking for a decent tool for HTML Data Mining, (aka web-based data mining, aka screen scraping) with no real success.
I wanted to extract data from some 350+ HTML files and upload them into a DB.

Sounded like a thing that a sourceforge application would do… BUT, after spending a couple of days around, looks like a solution based on an article (Web Based Data Mining) by IBM folks is the closest that I can get.

The code is a bit outdated (2001) but the main theme remains the same:

- Tidy up the HTML (JTidy).
- Parse the HTML/XHTML Content to get a DOM.
- Parse the XSL containing the XSL template (with XPath).
- Apply the Tranformation (using javax.xml transformer).
- Write the output to a file (XML?).
- upload data from file to DB.

I'm still trying to get it to work, but, I'm having good progress.

I also tried using Butterfly XML Editor but couldn't manage to make it apply XSL transformations.

I finally was able to avoid the temptation of NOT writing to this blog
Spending too many hours staring at a monitor and working my fingers around a keyboard for a an approaching release has made it more difficult just to WANT to be around any form of technology

But, here I am again.
I've been wanting to write on so many things, I'll try to remember some in the coming couple of days.