Bluish Coder

Uptick resurrected

Joel Reymont is resurrecting his Uptick project. Uptick is intended to be a realtime trading platform. It looks like he has decided on Erlang/OTP for the platform to build it on. There is more information on the Uptick mailing list.

GECODE constraint development environment

GECODE version 1.0 has been announced on the Alice mailing list.

GECODE is an open source library for developing constraint-based systems and applications. It is used in the Alice programming language implementation to provide the constraint facilities of that language. Although the source of Alice has been available for awhile, the source for GECODE had not been released. Now it is available and released under a BSD style license.

Blogger Categories

Blogger doesn't support categories so I use del.icio.us for this purpose. Everytime I post I add the categories text at the bottom of the post and when its published I add it to my del.icio.us tags. Up until now I haven't been able to have a list of categories but I've just noticed that del.icio.us has a nifty tagroll so I've added it to my sidebar to act as a categories list.

Polyphasic Sleeping

Is it possible to operate on only 90 minutes of sleep a day? Polyphasic Sleeping involves taking multiple naps per day, of about 30 minutes in length, instead of one long 8 hour sleep period.

The theory is your body adapts to the shorter sleep cycles and ensures REM sleep kicks in earlier. It's the REM period of sleep that is the important part to avoid sleep deprivation. So your 30 minute nap is almost entirely REM sleep. With normal sleep patterns you still only get the same amount of REM sleep and the rest of the sleep time is effectively wasted.

Steve Pavlina tried the polyphasic sleeping idea and blogged about it. It's a very interesting read and he's apparently decided to continue with it indefinitely.

Reading through his blog entries he seemed to find the first week the hardest, dealing with 'foggy thinking', and fatigue. But once over the worst of it his energy levels improved and he added many extra hours to his day. His whole concept of time changed.

Link from Keith Devens pointing to Steve's 'early riser' posts.

Backbase LiveGrid and DataGrid

Backbase have released version 3.1.1 of their rich internet application framework. It contains a large number of 'web 2.0' goodies. The two big ones are live grid and data grid components.

The live grid is a paging component that lets the user just use a scroll bar to lazily load data frmo the server. Only the items displayed in the grid are actually retrieved from the server (plus some for caching purposes). Scrolling with the scrollbar will automatically pull the requested data from the server. This is very similar to the Open Rico live search example and is something that has been requested in the Backbase forums.

The data grid is a table that can contain rich data, including other backbase controls, which can be presented and edited by the user. It is cell based and has many features, including (from the Backbase whats new document):

• Editable fields
• Embedded form controls (text, drop-down, calendar, etc)
• Context menu
• Insert and delete rows and columns
• Row and column headers
• Column sorting
• Column resizing
• Grid resizing
• Multiple selections
• Keyboard navigation

There are many other great enhancements in this backbase release. Use the explorer and read the whats new document for more details.