Star Wars, Java style

Matt Quail, author of the hilarious Swing spoof Totally Gridbag, takes on George Lucas with his new masterpiece Revenge of the <T>. You must see this.

And, if you haven't seen it yet, the genius Star Wars Gangsta Rap.

Firefox growth strong and steady

I love trend graphs like this one below, ever since I started reading about technology adoption (see Kuhn, Christensen, and Moore). And who doesn't love to cheer for an underdog like Firefox?


(Source: adot's notblog*. Click for larger image.)

Hello in 60 Seconds

Ever see that crappy movie Gone in 60 Seconds, where Nicholas Cage can supposedly steal a car in sixty seconds, but you never actually see him do it? It's all Hollywood camera tricks!

Well, I don't steal cars and couldn't get Angelina Jolie to co-star, but my movie actually shows you how you can write "Hello, World!" in Java in less than sixty seconds, from start to finish, using IntelliJ IDEA. No sneaky camera tricks, either! See it here.

By the way, if you'd like to learn all those handy keyboard shortcuts I use in the screencast, check out the default keymap from IDEA's documentation at JetBrains.

JetBrains at the Tipping Point

I noticed a huge 200% increase in web traffic at the JetBrains web site. What could explain it? Is JetBrains on the verge of something great, or am I just an overzealous employee? You be the judge! I made a screencast of my analysis here.

Wouldn't you know it, by the time I published this, the graph at Alexa has already changed. However, those are real graphs I show in the screencast. See the last 28 days of JetBrains and Eclipse.

In the screencast, I mention IntelliJ IDEA and Eclipse a lot. In case you're not familiar with them, IDEA is an integrated development environment (IDE) for programming in Java, and Eclipse is an open-source plugin platform that happens to sport a Java IDE of its own. The article I mention by Sergey Dmitriev can be found here.

The idea to do a screencast was inspired by Jon Udell's cool Wikipedia screencast.