Open Wonderland

Just wanted to take a few minutes to blog about the virtual world I learned about yesterday through the FLOSS weekly podcast, Open Wonderland. I am not a gamer and I have never spent more then 5 minutes of my day thinking about games or gaming technology. On the other hand, having worked for a virtual company for several years, I find myself intrigued with the possibility of being able to create virtual 3D work environments. As I am told you can do in the popular online game Second Life, you can create an avatar and maps for your workday encounters. It seems very real and there are dynamics that can only be captured by recreating this type of environment or meeting in person. The latter can be rather expensive and time consuming.

I spent 30 minutes yesterday evening and was able to get a small environment setup using Open Wonderland. This will definitely stay on the list of things to investigate. One idea would be to create an AMI with the Open Wonderland server pre-installed and ready to use. Then by executing a command a virtual workplace could be brought online. The attendees would receive a link to the workplace which would launch a Java Webstart application to provide them with entrance.

Several things I haven't looked into yet, sound, land-line connections, and video chat.

Java Date Parsing down to the millisecond

Today I ran into a problem where a String needed to be converted into a java.util.Date. The String looked like this:

    String date = "16MAR2010:09:08:27.126000";

So the code to parse the date was originally written like this:

String date = "16MAR2010:09:08:27.126000";

SimpleDateFormat format = new SimpleDateFormat("ddMMMyyyy:HH:mm:ss.SSSSSS");
Date value = format.parse(date);

System.out.println(value);

The problem was that the value printed out was several minutes ahead, 9:10 instead of 8:27. The problem turns out to be that the date parsing format does not allow more then 3 values of "S" in the milliseconds placeholder.

Solution
Strip off the last 3 zeros and change the parse pattern to

SimpleDateFormat format = new SimpleDateFormat("ddMMMyyyy:HH:mm:ss.SSS");

Syntax Highlighter for Bloggers

Just so I don't forget and I can easily find it again I decided I would make a blog entry on where to find Alex Gorbatchev syntax highlighter. Adding the appropriate CSS and javascript references to the HEAD of my blog on blogspot allows me to use the simple syntax of this library anytime I need to show a code snippet in my blog. Thanks Alex!!

Syntax Library

A good example of using this library on blogspot can be found here

Blogger Instructions

The basics is to click on Edit Posts > Layout > Edit HTML and add the following to the header section.

Skillcaster uses GWT

For those folks that missed my talk last night on Skillcaster here is the video that I was going to show. One of the things covered last night was why GWT was chosen to build Skillcaster. The video does a nice job of explaining some of the interesting parts of GWT and does it in a way that is more interesting them me yammering at the front of a room.



I went over the application and then technologies used to build the tool.

• GWT - Rich UI Framwork


• Guice - Server side injection


• Gin - Client side injection (Javascript)


• gwt-dispatcher - Command pattern RPC


• gwt-presenter - MVP framwork


• gwt-log - logging framework


• gwt-pectin - binding framework

I will be working on getting the project moved to Google Code soon and I will send out links for everyone that may be interested in learning more or contributing to the development of Skillcaster.