Friday night was a great night out with friends, catching up on life and enjoying a great meal.  One of the highlights was this micro remote control helicopter called the Havoc Heli.  It was so much fun to fly around.  Needless to say, within minutes of playing with it, we had created various challenges to accomplish.  I used to love R/C cars and airplanes growing up.  This brought back some good memories.  It amazes me how much fun you can have with this little toy.  I think I want one.

Typing was one of the most valuable classes I took while growing up.  I will never forget my 7th grade typing teacher, Mrs. Moman.  She taught me how to type the right way on a huge typewriter where whiteout was your option for backspacing.  We had computers for word processing at the time, but we were forced to use the old typewriters.  This was for the best, since I probably would have taken the backspace key for granted.  The pastor of the church we attend posts some great stuff on his blog and tonight he posted a typing website called 10 fast fingers.  You should check it out and brush up on your typing skills.

Small is personal, transparent, and usually relevant.  I enjoy reading about small companies.  I like to see how they got started, what product they created and who they engage as an audience.  Small is the local pizza place that still tastes better than the national chain.  It’s the software company that answers their own support emails instead of outsourcing it to someone else.  People like to feel like they are a part of something, especially something that makes their life better.  As a small company, you can present that opportunity.  You support them, and you can allow your customers to support you.  Open the lines of communication, in and out of your company, surrounding the experience users have with the product or service you offer.  This helps shape the small brand.

It’s been about 6 months now since our development team picked up the Wicket framework. So far, so good! It’s been enjoyable to code using this framework, and it has certainly been a productivity booster.  It’s really helped to streamline our processes for our applications and helps to keep our look and feel consistent.

Some of the things I love about wicket are as follows:

• Component Based
• Separation of code and markup
• Minimal XML, Java handles the configuration
• The community is active and helpful
• The core framework focuses on needs, and extensions fulfill specific cases

Some of the things I dislike:

• There are many extensions, too many it seems.  It would be great if wicket could filter this down, possibly to a more focused extensions package.
• The separation of code and markup takes some getting used to in terms of using dynamic javascript (I am used to managing these within a page, or with includes [ie: php and ruby])

Overall, if you are a Java shop looking to build web applications at a faster pace, keeping things organized and having fun writing Java, this is an excellent framework to adopt.

More to come on this framework.

I ran across this site today and I am glad I did. Refresh the Triangle seems right up my alley in terms of development and design, and it’s local. It’s also sponsored by companies from around the Triangle. This is great and something I always love finding out about. Hopefully I can make it over to this from time to time. It looks like it is hosted on the last Thursday of every month.  This is something that looks to be growing, and certainly worth checking out

The latest Startup Weekend was held in Atlanta. They ended up creating http://www.skribit.com. It’s simple, to the point, and may actually have some value to bloggers with a large readership. Add this as a plugin to a few of the major RSS readers and filter spam-like suggestions and it could be great. My prediction is that this one will get bought. Someone with a little cash in their pocket will see this, and grab it up. Good job to the Atlanta team and to the guy with the original idea, Paul Stamatiou.

Startup Weekend sounds like a great experience to me. Simply put, gather together with a group of people with an entrepreneurial spirit and mindset, pool together all of your skills, and build something with purpose in a single weekend. I think Andrew Hyde is on to something here, essentially a startup crash course where everyone walks away a winner. I think the Triangle has a wealth of talent, and this is an opportunity to meet some great people. Of course, my view could change after participating in one. We will see if that is possible in a couple of weeks here…

Paul Graham recently wrote an excellent article on the Future of Web Startups. Two points I want to highlight is the “Straight Pipe” where people will change the way we build businesses and companies and the execution of great ideas. I love the idea of an organization and community where entrepreneurs could gain the tools and resources they need to get up and running. Not that those communities aren’t already out there, you just have to sift through the information carefully. I will be curious to see where people like Paul Graham take this idea, considering he is already helping to head up Y Combinator. As for ideas, you can be sure many people get the same idea over and over. It’s just a matter of execution and usefulness. Does your product fill a need and does it fill that need well?

I picked up “The Dip” by Seth Godin a few months ago and had a chance to sit down and read it a few weekends ago. What an excellent book! It’s short and to the point with some wonderful insight into how we approach choices in life. He equates it to “knowing when to stick, and knowing when to quit”. He further dives into being the “Best in the World” at what you choose to pursue, and ties the idea previously mentioned to what sets us apart from excellence and mediocrity.

I agree with much of what he says and would add my own point that the most valuable asset in our lives is time. The odd thing about time is that nobody knows how much they are given, but what they are given, we should manage wisely. Thus, choosing “when to stick and when to quit” is certainly a thought to consider in all of our life’s endeavors.

We provide custom XSL outputs for some of our clients at work. One of the custom outputs started failing when we patched our version of Java. The culprit, make sure your <fo:table-header> tags have content in them. If they are empty, remove the tag altogether.