Zemanta is a blogging aid that reads what your writing and then fetches matching material to add into your blog.

What it is suppossed to do :

• Search for images based on the blog content
• Search for links related to the blog content
• Search for articles also concerning the material your writing about.
  

You can then peruse the material it has found if you want to and ultimately add it to your blog if you think it is worth it.

This should all enhance your blog content and enrich it with media that otherwise can be a bit of a hassle to retrieve.

As an example, the image and related links for this post were found by Zemanta.

Related articles

• Blogging Discovery Tool Zemanta Adds A Slew of New Features [via Zemanta]
• Zemanta - A content suggestion engine for blogging [via Zemanta]

I have been adding all sorts of apps to the Mac recently and I'd really like to keep tabs on what I've been up to.

• MenuMeters 1.3 - a set of CPU, memory, disk, and network monitoring tools. Having looked at this it really is groovy. All that info just goes into the Menu Bar and there's no need to have the Activity Monitor open anymore.

Tags: mac, apps, utils, good

First post on Mac-Mini

I have downloaded Qumana as a desktop client web logging tool and am in the process of giving it a whirl. I think it will take a bit of getting used to and in the mean time I shall continue the search.

I have also finally created a del.icio.us account and started adding semantic tags to web resources there. Check it out at Mal2006.

Working with Jira and a Task List

I am using Jira and MyLife Organized

The procedure I follow to ensure that all important information is captured is as follows:

• Jira - add a comment on a task
• Jira - add a Work Log entry if there is a recordable quantity done


• MyLife Organized - add any follow-up tasks etc. to the lists.

This procedure captures the work done in Jira and saves searching project tasks individually to see what the next actions are. Your daily tasks are in MyLife Organized.

I started using MyLife Organized when I came across David Allen's Getting Things Done™ methodology; speaks for itself when it comes to 'what is it'. Seems to be working well at the moment.
There is a good resource of related applications here.

DHTML Tooltip effect on blog

I am using some DHTML to generate a tooltip effect over any HTML element on the page. To do this I have used a technique described at Dynamic Drive.

Briefly, all you have to do now is add the following inside any link or page element that will contain a tooltip:

onMouseover="ddrivetip('JavaScriptKit.com JavaScript tutorials','yellow', 300)"
onMouseout="hideddrivetip()"

The key here is the function ddrivetip(); you should understand how it works:

ddrivetip('TEXT_TO_DISPLAY', 'OPTIONAL_BACKGROUND_COLOR', OPTIONAL_TIP_WIDTH)

The last two parameters are optional, and not specifying them causes the script to default to the settings within your CSS file.

Pass your mouse over the word DHTML to see what it does. Or try the code snippets above.

Unfortunately, the content of the inlined text is not read by the Blogger search tool so you won't get results in your searches for content in the Tooltips. It should just be used to get basic info about something across, saving the user a few clicks.

Worth checking out

This is a list of things worth revisitiing as I browse the web.

Item	Description
Easyclipse	A pre-packaged Eclipse with loads of plugins already installed.

Substance in NetBeans Swing not so with Eclipses SWT

You can do loads with the substance look and feel jar, which runs on top of Swing. Append it to your classpath and start playing around with laf and other custom command-line directives. This article makes a good start at showing what can be done.

Unfortunately, Eclipse cannot be made to do this because there is no literal "LAF" in Eclipse to change, as Eclipse does not use Swing, and LAF is a component of the window toolkit Swing. There are two ways to change colors / fonts / etc., the equivalent of LAF, in Eclipse:

• via Eclipse preferences


• or the host OS's display settings. Menu bar option Window -> Preferences -> General -> Appearance -> Color and Fonts can be used to individually tweak colors & fonts to each individual's likings.

The Eclipse options can be ported from installation to installation of Eclipse because preferences can be saved outside the IDE in a serialized file. These individual preferences for color, font, etc. do not need to be used, and can instead default to the OS's requested defaults. The OS display settings, when changed, apply to Eclipse automatically. This is because Eclipse is based on the native windowing toolkit SWT, and therefore respects / obeys the OS's requests for how it should display the IDE. This is opposed to Netbeans using Swing, a non-native windowing toolkit, that does not honor the requests of the OS on how the windowed application (Netbeans) should display. Therefore the proprietary display configuration, LAF, controls Netbeans.

Representing Monetary values in Java.

Using float to represent a monetary value is a bad idea because the floating point number is not the true number but the closest approximation. So you will get rounding errors this way. BigDecimal is what you should use for monetary calculations, all very well explained here.

There is also a currency class which can be investigated further too.

New web framework

Click is a new web framework with Spring Integration.

Hashing a file in three lines

Try this as a quick way to hash files.

Why is Tomcat called Tomcat is one of those questions which is answered for us here along with the burning question why Java is called Java.

Web Testing in Java

Good question asked here about the lack of integrated Web Testing available out the box in modern IDE's. He did mention some of the candidates including :-

• Cactus


• HttpUnit


• Cargo


• HostedQA


• Selenium

A useful alternative was suggested by A. Slominski:-

Very good workaround is to use embedded servlet container (like tomcat) and create new JUnit test runner that starts embedded tomcat before tests and shuts it down when test are finished - it is very fast, no WARing, and you can set breakpoints both in server and application code …