Archive for March, 2006

Writing Revising

Wednesday, March 1st, 2006

Recently I’ve been working on improving my writing skills: reading articles, books and recommendations from all over the web. It’s essential for me to be able to communicate the ideas freely in a written form as writing is the only pipe between me and most of my friends. Apart of it, I simply like to write and doing it in a right and easy way brings much more excitement than desperate attempts to put thoughts into order. But this is a whole different story…

Today I stumbled across the Hints for Revising by Brian Marick which are a good collection of advices on how to make your writing clear, well-structured and deeply pleasurable. I suggest running through this article briefly even if you aren’t going to become the next Shakespear. Personally, I found several interesting tips and got the proof of that my post-writing reading technique works and works pretty well on behalf of the greatest minds out there. Oh, and I’m not the author of it of course. It’s just that I didn’t see it mentioned anywhere before, but regularily used it to revise my own creations.

Java 6 Mustang Beta Impressions

Wednesday, March 1st, 2006

Eric Bruno gives us his initial impressions about the latest feature-packed Java 6 Mustang beta release. I kind of agree that the list is particulary tasty and promissing. But I know that I’m not going to use it any soon. Why?

Well, it’s simple. Take our application — BlogBridge — as an example. It has a number of users even with Java 1.4 installed, we have to support them as they represent a significant segment of our user base. We don’t want to take any more maintenance load for having it run on 1.4, 1.5 and now 1.6. You might ask, what maintenance headaches? You might wonder, it all should be compatible!

Yes, it SHOULD, but unfortunately it’s NOT.

I’m not so pessimistic as I might appear from above. It’s just that I can’t taste its wonders fully yet what makes me a little bit worried.

In any case, nice release, guys!