The company Quark usually knowed by his product QuarkXpress has launched the website I Love Design.

This site pretends to be a place to group a designers and shows his job and with one thing in common, the love for the design. There are many famous designers like David Carson, Peter Saville or Chip Kidd. Is a great oportunity to see their work and share yours with the comunity, you have to register with a single and simple step, set your name, mail address, location… and the you can share your works, comment others and see exclusive interviews.

Share your work!

As other tuesdays in 2008, Apple has launched a new release of its products. Now it’s time to the laptops, with an update in the two branches.

The economic branch, Macbook, has been updated with an increase of the clock from 2,1 to 2,4 Ghz with the new Intel architecture called Penryn, the HD has been updated too, from 120 to 250Gb.

The new Macbook Pro has as most important or significant update the multi-touch trackpad like the Macbook Air, the clock processor hasn’t been updated but the architecture has, and it represents an increase of the performance in a 74%. The HD increases the size like his little brother but in this case from 200 to 300Gb.

From minid and other blogs, the 403 day has began.

It’s an iniciative to go against Internet Explorer, in 4th March all the users will get a 403 error code if they try to access your site with Internet Explorer.

There are different methods to do this:

• Modify your .htaccess file in your server. Download
• Install the WordPress plugin. Download

And more you can find in the official web.

I’m supporting the iniciative, so if you try to access this blog in 4th March with Internet Explorer you will get a 403 error

Sun Certified Programmer for Java 5 is an official certification of Sun Microsystems which probes that you know Java version 5.

There are different certifications as the following graphic shows:

As you see, SCJP is the fisrt of the certifications and is needed for them, so you must do it first of all the rest.

I’m going to do this exam, when I don’t know but I’ve just purchased the official book on eBay like this and I hope to get the enough time to read it, I suppose I will know a lot of things but not much as I’m thinking because programming with an IDE has the advantage of earn time but in the other hand you forget the basics of the language because the autocompletion of the code and in addition, the use of the frameworks masks the real code of java and helps us to write more complex applications avoiding the basics.

I think is important to me to obtain the certification, first to reinforce my Java knowledge and improve my coding, then I don’t have to demostrate I’m a Java Programmer in any technical interview, and this certification will open the doors of the others.

What will be the next certification? Maybe the Sun Certified Web Component Developer or the Sun Certified Developer for Java Web Services, but I will think about it after getting the SCJP.

I’m creating just now a new account of Technorati to get in touch with the other blogs and increase the visits here. Hope this works
Technorati Profile

Most of the j2ee projects uses the Hibernate framework to persists the database.

A part from the plugins I said before, there are some tips and tricks you must know to improve your development, manage the persisted objects and get the desired data.

I recommend the reading of these two articles:

• My favorite hibernate interview questions with answers
• Hibernate users FAQ

I’ve just arrived at home and I saw a package over the table and guess what, there are my moo cards!

The result is as I expected, the quality print is excellent like the position, that is exactly as I wanted but I have only one complaint about the degree of the logo, it’s a bit poor if you see it closer but no matters for the rest of people.

You can see them on my flickr but I’m going to show you some of the pictures I have taken during the opening.

The lowest iPod’s family, iPod Shuffle cuts its price from $79 to $49 and becomes the cheapest iPod of the Apple’s history. In addittion Apple has presented a new model of 2Gb with a price of $69.

I was waiting for a new MacBook Pro but seems we must wait for it a little bit. This price cut means the other models will drop its prices too? As I said before there are a few rumours pointing to a price cut of iPod Touch and iPhone, then what happened today is a confirmation? or a dismiss? We will know next tuesday.

Eclipse is the most IDE used in a java development team. In my current job we use Eclipse 3.1, yes I know isn’t the last version but is the version supports all the plugins we use without any testing.

When a new developer comes to the project he must install some plugins to work with it and develop like others, these plugins are:

• Spring IDE: We use Spring, so this plugins is very useful to navigate through the beans configuration. By setting a project like a Spring Project you can access from your configuration file to your Java classes bean.
• Hibernate Tools: which can generate hbm (hibernate mapping) files through a configuration file that contains the connection information and another file that you can tell what tables and fields you want to map.
• Hibernate Synchronizer: You can generate the Java classes to access and/ or modify your data. Combined with Hibernate Tools you can easily generate your persistence layer in a few minutes.
• CheckStyle: If you want a readable application in a more or less numerous development team, you must define a simple rules to follow when a developer is programming a class. A part from the nomenclature of the application’s architecture a developer must follow some basics to let the other team members read the code easily.

The benefits to use a plugins is basically short the development time and help the newcomers to integrate in the development team.

Another improvement you can do/teach to you team is give them a list of the main and useful shortcuts available in Eclipse, there are some I use during the day:

• Ctrl + Shift + O: Organize imports. Adds or removes unused imports to Java classes.
• Ctrl + Shift + T: Open type. Shows a new windows where you can type the name of the class, exactly or an approximation of it and you’ll get the class or classes in real time that contains the workspace or jar.
• Ctrl + Shift + R: Open resource. Same as the above but doesn’t search in jars, it’s recommended for files, not for classes.
• Ctrl + W: Close the active window. Nothing to add.
• Alt + Shift + R: Rename a file and updates the references.
• F3 or Ctrl + click on the class or variable or constant. Opens the declaration.
• Ctrl + /: Comment the current line. If you select multiple lines, these lines will be commented.
• Ctrl + H: Search.

Another improvement do you use? Recommendations?

This weekend I have installed Leopard on my MacBook, as I have said before, I have been waiting for 10.5.2 update to install it and after 24 hours after installing I have to say it’s a stable operating system.

The installation took me 30 minutes to finish and the first boot was a bit slow but I think it’s normal, then the first thing I did is to update the leopard to 10.5.2, works fine here and then I had the Leopard 10.5.2 OTB (out the box).

The first boot told me if I wanted my external drive as a Time Machine drive but I said no because I have a poor free size, so I’ll wait to free some space to try Time Machine. When all goes fine was time to install some apps, the most important or the apps I recommend are:

• Onyx: Repair permissions, improve the health of operating systems used periodically. Visit here.
• Growl: Notifications of all the events in the apps installed. Visit here.

What I like of Leopard is the new stacks, I have all my apps or movies in the dock and I can explore them when I want. With Quick Look is so easy to show your photos or make a presentation. Spaces, I have to say I come from Linux and always had more than one desktop, bring it to Leopard are perfect for me!

What I don’t like are a little bugs Leopard still have and specially the software that are trying to adapt the code to the “new” OS, like GrowlMail or Azureus, I have to say that GrowlMail isn’t compatible with Leopard but I got some crashes from these two apps. What I’m really worried about, is from the crashes of Mail, when sync with my imap server I got two crashes but seems fine now and I don’t get it anymore.

For now it’s all I can say, after 24 hours I think is a poor analysis but enough for the small time I have tried.