Welcome to SolamenteNiel!

Interesting SpringSource webinar called Model Centric Design and Development for Spring: "This session will describe the integration of Skyway Software and SpringSource and how developers can use Skyway Builder to modify/customize existing Spring applications quickly and accurately. After a brief architectural review of Skyway’s and Spring’s tools, attendees will learn how to access Spring apps in Skyway Builder (using Eclipse), apply Skyway facets/natures, and autowire for Spring to redeploy the app to the same (or new) infrastructure."

I took the time to write on the wall of the Facebook Java and J2EE groups, so I thought I would include the message on my blog too. Here's what I wrote:

"I'm the Community Manager for Skyway Software, and we're looking for java developers that would be interested in participating in a new community for a free and open source product called Skyway Builder. In order to drive awareness and encourage participation in the Skyway Community, we are hosting a development contest related to Skyway Builder CE. Skyway Builder is an Eclipse-based tool that implements a DSL and modelling environment for building web applications and services based on Java and the Spring Framework. First prize is $25,000 for either the best web application built with Skyway Builder CE or the best extension to Skyway Builder CE (extensions are built as Eclipse plug-ins). This is an ideal contest for JEE developers because you're already familiar with the JEE architecture. Experience with the Spring framework is not required. If you're interested, please go to www.skywaycup.org for more information."

Jack Kennedy, a colleague of mine at Skyway Software, blogged about “Thoughts on Modeling, DSL’s, and Tooling”. Here's a snippet:

There is a lot of talk now about Domain Specific Languages and their use to simplify the delivery of software. There are many reasons why DSL’s are getting attention, but the primary driver is simply that the world is full of generic languages which are being used to solve increasingly specific problems… over and over again. A part of this movement stems from a strange dichotomy that has arisen over decades now in the Software Modeling space. The basic idea is that for some, the software model is a way of communicating and documenting business requirements. For this set of people, the model is most useful for abstracting out the most fundamental pieces of the business requirements. Since the business abstraction is focused at the business concepts, it is not well suited for generating software.....MORE

 

For obvious reasons I embarked on the process of converting my music collection from CD's to MP3 many years ago. I thought I had my collection in pretty good order, but as I acquired more music I realized that my collection was in disarray. I couldn't really enjoy my music until it was all sorted out a bit more. In particular I needed to standardize on a file naming scheme, clean up the mp3 metadata (tags) on my collection, and add the album art. I have found two indispensible tools for helping me with this: MusicBrainz and MediaMonkey.

MusicBrainz is an online service that provides an open source database of music information. The Picard client will scan your mp3 files and clean up the meta tags and rename the files according to your own pattern. The default pattern seems decent enought, so I stuck with it. If Picard can't identify the song from the existing tags or filename, it will scan the mp3 file and compare it to known mp3 signatures on the MusicBrainz service. If the song can still not be indentified, it will allow you to search the database via the browser to select the song. It's pretty cool tool.

With most of my mp3 files properly tagged, I wanted to include the appropriate album art in my mp3 files. I'm sure there are a variety of tools for doing the job, but MediaMonkey fit the bill for me. It's integrated with Amazon, and I presume it uses their database for getting mp3 data and album art. I'm still not completely done with this part of the process, but it's going well.

Once I finish adding the album art, my next goal is to equalize the volume on my mp3 collection. I don't want to have to run to my volume control between songs because the mp3 volume levels are different. Apparently MediaMonkey has this function, but MP3Gain seems to have a pretty good track record for doing this.