Bits and Bytes

I have started to see if I can get my 7 and half year old son interested in programming. This has been quite an educational experience for me. I have always had fond memories of myself self-learning GW-BASIC as a kid in the early 80s. So I was on the look-out for a modern way to teach programming for the young minds. I started with the usual suspect of MIT's Scratch project. However for some reason, beyond structured learning through tutorials, my kids were not too attached to the setup there. I was finding that the environment was too abstract in some sense - for example it expects you to be familiar with messaging passing techniques to do any form of mildly interactive programming. Regardless, it is a good starting point. Similar to Scratch, the GUI based programming available with Lego's Mindstorm EV3  got my attention. Unlike Scratch, this can be an expensive venture but the physicality of actually moving parts can help connect young minds with programming concepts. An

It is with dismay that I sometimes find the trend of moving traditional configuration heavy programming models to convention based troubling. Case in point - I've been trying to adopt the newfangled Spring Data based repository framework. It's been working wonders and I got the QueryDSL support and naming convention based query generation going. After creating a bunch of these repositories, I ran into an issue with one of my custom repositories. It was not recognizing that a method in the custom repo is part of the custom side and not to be a candidate method for spring to do its voodoo magic. For some reason Spring thought the method is a property of the entity bound to the repository. After digging through the Spring code base and spending a lot of time, it finally was clear why this was happening: I had made a typo on the repository naming and the "y" was missing from custom RepositoryImpl class. If only Spring was smart enough to tell me that this is what was c

Sometimes users expect text boxes to move focus on to the next element after pressing Enter, similar to most spreadsheets. If you are using GWT and jQuery, here is a little snippet to help you along: public class AutoTabbedTextBox extends TextBox implements KeyUpHandler {     public AutoTabbedTextBox() {         super ();         addKeyUpHandler( this );     }     @Override     public void onKeyUp(KeyUpEvent event) {         // emulate tab on key         if (event.getNativeKeyCode() == KeyCodes. KEY_ENTER )             focusNext(event.getNativeEvent());     }     public native void focusNext(NativeEvent event)/*-{             var inputs = $wnd.$( ':input:visible' );             inputs.eq(inputs.index(event.target) + 1).focus();     }-* / ; }

Just got this on my Mac: Should I report the crash of the Microsoft Error Reporting to Apple??