http://visnet.ch/smartbuildings Better Software for Tomorrow's Buildings Wed, 03 Feb 2010 06:41:21 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Dear readers, This is to let you know that I have now moved this blog permanently to a new home. You can now find me on the Computers and Buildings blog. Related posts:Welcome to the Computing & Smart Buildings blog http://visnet.ch/smartbuildings/blog-moved/ MathML is a W3C recommendation for putting math directly on the web. That is, your MathML compliant browser should render the math correctly, and you should not have to generate small gifs from your LaTeX equations any longer. Here I show you how to configure your Wordpress blog to correctly ... http://visnet.ch/smartbuildings/how-to-include-mathml-in-a-wordpress-blog/ On a recent episode of The Java Posse they mentioned a project I had never heard about before: project GreenFire. From the project's website: GreenFire efficient manages and controls heating control of houses and saves energy. GreenFire is based on Java EE 5 (is tested with Glassfish v2), Scripting, RMI and Shoal. ... http://visnet.ch/smartbuildings/project-greenfire-mentioned-on-java-posse/ EJB injection in Web Services does not work with JBoss (yet), so when you want to use an EJB from your @WebService annotated POJO you have no choice but to look it up yourself. This can get a little tricky, because each J2EE container can use its own JNDI naming convention ... http://visnet.ch/smartbuildings/looking-up-an-ejb-from-a-web-service-under-jboss-4x/ Automating buildings costs money. Lots, lots of money. The return on investment (ROI) is usually very low, and it takes a long, long time (on the order of 5 to 10 years) for such an investment to pay for itself. To make matters worse, people who rent the home or apartment ... http://visnet.ch/smartbuildings/7-numbers-why-building-automation-can-save-the-world/ There's a nice little article about green energy homes over at Greenprofs.com. The author makes a nice point that home owners have many options when it comes to choosing carbon-neutral energy sources: he mentions solar, wind and even hydroelectric power. I cannot help but submit, respectfully, that this article completely ... http://visnet.ch/smartbuildings/enjoying-a-no-energy-home/ Back in 2005, when I was writing Java software for an embedded home automation controller, we ran into a little unforeseen problem. The embedded virtual machine we were using implemented only the Java 1.3 API, and so did not offer any logging facilities (which only Java 1.4 started having). We ended ... http://visnet.ch/smartbuildings/5-java-logging-frameworks-for-building-automation-software/ According to Eric Evans, the author of Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software, one of your first goals as domain analyst is to define what he calls an Ubiquitous Language, i.e., a common vocabulary that your technical team and your business sponsor will agree on, and ... http://visnet.ch/smartbuildings/when-i-hear-the-word-entity-i-reach-for-my-thesaurus/ I've read Thomas Friedman's "Hot, Flat and Crowded", and firmly believe this book belongs on the shelf of anyone involved in making buildings more energy-effective. Mr Friedman's previous bestseller, "The World is Flat", discussed the changes to our world that enabled more and more people to participate in a global economy. ... http://visnet.ch/smartbuildings/book-review-hot-flat-and-crowded/ Wikipedia defines polyphasic sleep as the practice of sleeping multiple times in a 24-hour period. Proponents of this practice argue that it results in a much reduced total sleep requirement, sometimes as little as two hours total sleep per day. This concept immediately caught my interest when I heard about it, ... http://visnet.ch/smartbuildings/polyphasic-sleep/