My friend Ryan is actually a fairly prolific singer songwriter and he has finally gotten all of his current songs up online at last.fm. That means you can listen to all of his songs - in their entirety for free. He has two albums worth of sports songs and then an album of more traditional music.
He has also been signed by Heavy.com to create more sports songs and videos - so you can expect a third album of sports songs to be compiled as the year goes by.
My friend Ryan, a prolific Sports Song writer also has a more sensitive side and records a bunch of acoustic songs that deal with more personal issues than sports. He just signed up today on a site called thesixtyone.com. The site is pretty cool and lets you discover all sorts of new music. It's kind of like a digg for unsigned bands.
Anyway Ryan has put up 3 songs there so far (it is all he can put up while he is an unknown there) but, as his songs get voted on and he moves up in levels he can add more music.
So, now you can hear Ryan's non sports stuff at his page on thesixtyone or his sports songs on his blog at Ryan Parker Sports
Late last year I had to work on a project that can read from or write to Excel spreadsheets. The project was web based and used Coldfusion 7 so, naturally, I used the Java POI library for the Excel integration. It worked like a champ until I opened a word document in Open Office and then saved it as an Excel spreadsheet.
The code I had previously written for the same spreadsheet suddenly barfed. I haven't had a chance to figure out what is different with the sheet after Open Office saves it but, for the time being, just consider this a word of warning - Open Office's Excel format is a touch different than that used by MS Office.
The document will still open and look the same in MS Office - but POI seems to think there are extra cells with actual content in them after Open Office has touched it.
Consider yourself warned
I am working on a project that just begs for a dockable window interface and, fortunately, there is a pretty nice open source solution to that exact problem called "Dock Panel Suite"
It is really easy to get up and running and, in less than 4 hours, we had converted our entire MDI application into a dockable MDI application (ala Visual Studio). It's really quite nice. A nice bonus is that it is still actively maintained.
The only real drawback is a dearth of documentation. However, the sample app does help get you rolling.
