Symphonious

In the comments for my post Ant Is Cool, Erik Hatcher points out that Groovy has ant support (see http://groovy.codehaus.org/Ant+Scripting).  While that's cool and all, I really don't want to add a new language into the mix just to call out to Ant so not a great option for my case, but useful to know.  What is more useful however is knowing that you can embed Groovy in ant scripts using the Groovy ant task (also via the ant script task since 1.5 or 1.6 I think).

In fact about the time that Erik was posting his comment, I was playing around with the Groovy ant task to extract commit messages out of subversion to build change logs (complete with which build the commit was first put into and filtering stuff etc).  With the power of Groovy and the SVNClientAdapter Java classes it all came together quite nicely.

The killer feature of Groovy is definitely the clean integration of existing Java classes.  The biggest problem was making ant's classpath and classloaders play nice.

Scoble pointed to this article by Ben Askins comparing Google's customized homepage and Microsoft's Start.com.  Unfortunately the comparison was overly complex and missed some critical criteria, so I thought I'd do my own.  I'll be using a very simple set of criteria, one criterion in fact.

Does it work?

First up, Google.  As the screen shot below shows, it works.

Now here's how Start.com looks:

A nice clean search engine interface, but unfortunately no customization options.  It seems Microsoft forgot to do any testing using Safari. Oh well. How useful can a start page be if it doesn't work in all the browsers you want to use?

I've been thinking for a while that I should get a cheap car audio system that includes an aux-in jack so that I could use my iPod to play music in my car (FM transmitters are just too unreliable for city driving and I don't have a tape deck, only a CD player). Reading this article though makes me wonder if I can just get a car audio system that's specifically designed for the iPod.

There are a ton of FM transmitters around, a couple of systems that plug into CD changers etc but none that I can find that replace the entire audio unit (since as far as I know mine doesn't include any pluggable options).

Ideally what I want is a car audio unit that just lets me slide my iPod into a slot when I get in the car and it plays music through my car's speakers - no cables required.  If it also charged my iPod while it's there that'd be a bonus.  It appears I'm asking too much at the moment though.

Anyone know of something that does this?