Sundries of Anything

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Is this really a good idea?  E.g. if one wants to set up a singleton for a database connection it could be worthwile to have constructor parameters like DNS.  I understand the design of traits not having parameters, but I don't understand why singletons may not have any class parameters. Any idea?

Scala is a object-oriented language, and as such it has a concept of class.  One important difference to Java is, that classes in Scala can have parameters.  E.g.:

    class Complex(real: double, imaginary: double) {
        def re() = real
        def im() = imaginary
    }

This complex class takes two arguments, which are the real and imaginary part of the complex.  These arguments must be passed when creating an instance of class Complex, as follows: new Complex(1.5, 2.3). The class contains two methods, called re and im, which give access to these two parts [taken form Scala tutorial].

Are these class parameters similar to constructor parameters in Java?

Just came back from the LWA workshop yesterday, and found out that there is a set of
pictures on Flickr (thanks to brunkhor): http://flickr.com/photos/34981199@N00/sets/72157594321365068/ It was really nice to meet so many friendly people and discussing arising
aspects on (web-based) knowledge management and some recent progresses in
learning. And well, it was of course really good to have some drinks with
Normen and Chrsitine again? :-)

Some days ago I came back from the KI06 conference in Bremen - the weather at my return was very sunny and the highways were free... :-) However, my car caught a lot of flies and I had to clean it again. So, I stood at the car wash and watched all the guys mounting their "germany flags" again on their cleaned cars. Germany is quite funny these days because the world cup made lot of people crazy: it's not that bad, but it looks funny that "we" now have discovered the german flag on cars for expressing our happiness and proud regarding the soccer world cup in our land.

Whatever, I remembered a chat with Immanuel Normann after the match "Netherlands - Cote d'Ivoire" talking about Lisp and all the stuff on programming languages. Finally, I recommended the book "Hackers and Painters" by Paul Graham, which is a good-old-fashioned Lisp programmer but interestingly also a studied painter. I think he made some million dollars with selling the first-ever web-shop builder to Yahoo! (of course it was written in Lisp, but nobody should know...) and then got famous for his books "ANSI CommonLisp" and "On Lisp".

When I started to use my Mac the first time I was really inspired by my supervisor, Michael Kohlhase, already using a Mac for couple of years. Besides a lot of other stuff, he has that wicked 'cube-switching-desktop'-thing installed and that looks pretty cool to me. Finally after a little google session I found it: Desktop Manager. Unfortunately with this tool installed some default keyboard shut-cuts I already got used to, e.g. switching tabs in Firefox, didn't work anymore. But one of the biggest drawbacks to me was using the commond-tab short-cut didn't switch to the desktop of the application I chose. So I decided to give up using Desktop Manager.

Lately --- to be honest I don't why --- I started to google again for a virtual desktop manager and found the next generation of Desktop Manager: VirtueDesktop.

This gimmick is much more configurable and a lot of features have been added compared to Desktop Manager, e.g. now desktops are automatically switched to the chosen application. What I also like very much, already the default installation was fine for me. So actually you do not have to spent much time on setting this tool up, just start using it. Anyway, what the heck else shall I say, go ahead and check it  out by yourself ...