Michael Melhem's Weblog

Christmas Punk

Last night I attended the annual Christmas performance by English punk band "Peter and the Test Tube Babies", interesting experience. No Christmas carols here.

This year, I will be spending Christmas and New Year in Catania. A beautiful little Italian city on the Mediterranean.

Merry Christmas all!

On FIlm

I have decided to use this space to mention a couple of films I have seen recently.

The Forgotten is a cross between "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and "Signs". I went into the film not knowing what to expect, but was rather pleasantly surprised. Not having any expectations probably contributed to an overall positive experience. As a dark thriller, its might not be everybody's cup of tea. If you have every enjoyed an episode of the X-files, you would probably like this film.

The Heart Elsewhere (pic above) is a great Italian film. Set in Rome and Bologna in the 1920s, its a comedy and yet at the same time, a heartbreaking story of romance and love lost. From my perspective its worth seeing if only for the beautiful actress Vanessa Incontrada.

Open Slather

Here is a selection of open source libraries we have been playing with recently. Someone out there may find these useful..

Digester is a great tool for mapping an incoming XML SAX stream into Java object/s, based on certain user defined rules. These rules allow one to instantiate and populate objects depending on the content of the SAX stream.

Xstream is library to serialize objects to XML and back again, so its useful for persisting objects for example.

Velocity is a Java-based template engine, allowing one to call Java methods from within XML templates. In some quarters its seen as an alternative to Java Server Pages (JSPs) or PHP.

Quartzscheduler an open source scheduling system written in java. Allowing for easy cross platform scheduling. No need to tie ones self down to Unix Cron or Windows scheduler.

Jarapac is a "transport-independent client- and server-side framework for DCE/RPC in Java" Its great for invoking MSRPC from non windows platforms. I have posted about earlier.

Koders is a source code search engine. Check out
Java commons IO for even more goodies.

Kill Bill

Not a Windows fan, don't know what to get for that Pop culture junkie ? Lost for ideas? How about this Kill Bill t-shirt, guaranteed generate many hours of snickering amusement. Order here .

Italian Film Festival - Frankfurt.

The annual Italian film festival is on once again on in Frankfurt.The festival will be showing at the Frankfurt Film Museum between 3rd and 12th. December 2004. I am a fan. See you there.