porting swing to swt: a tutorial, and the Tiger is out

Must check out when I have the time (In a couple of days? Early next week? Maybe). Looks interesting, both items via Erik. First, a tutorial from IBM DeveloperWorks on porting Swing apps to SWT. Would be a good way to update on my first impressions.

And, in other Java-related news, (I saw this a couple of days ago, but was reminded again today) a pre-release of Tiger (J2SE 1.5) is now available for testing, very quietly (here's the download page). From the looks of it the installation is still a pain, particularly when juggling multiple JDKs in a single machine (The other day I tried out JBuilder Foundation for a moment and it decided to set itself as the default JDK. Reminds me of the days when media apps like Windows Media, Quicktime and Realplayer used to take control of the registry entries for media formats without asking). Hopefully Sun plans to fix these problems at some point.

comment spam filtering - it's all about the IPs

Sam describes his new comment spam filtering system. Quote:

Then it struck me: from an ip address I have never seen before. Light bulb.

Hit and run. Strangers. People who never have been here before. These people are unlikely to be seen again.

And if they don't come back, it is not possible to have a two way conversation, is it?

So I set to work. I wrote a script to scan my Apache logs for everybody who has ever visited my weblog within the last week. Bots, aggregators, and an occasional carbon based life form, I make no distinction.

Then I add in everybody who has left a comment in the last ninety days. And not just ip addresses, but also urls.

All these people are welcome to comment freely.

Very, very cool idea! Use the logs to establish an implicit community effect, a kind of automatic self-updating whitelist. It leaves me thinking "and where else can this be applied?". Mmm...

rethinking weblogging

[via Danny] Bruce Ecker: rethinking weblogging (and everything else). Great piece. Hard to summarize. Go read it! :)