I traditionally write a summary of what I learned and experienced at each technical conference I attend. I do this in order to help both my sponsors and I to take stock of how much value was created by attending a training event. I find this a good practice and give credit to my previous employer Nanyang Polytechnic for instilling this culture in me. This year, I decided to do this as a blog post as well and hopefully, provide others an opportunity to decide if KScope15 should be on your training calendar next year.

The objective of this post is to describe how to create XSL-FO Layouts with little or no costs! These can then be used for custom PDF documents printing in Oracle Application Express (APEX).

Let's get started...

The much anticipated Kscope 2013 conference will be starting soon in June this year. I felt it would be befitting to share my first-time experience at this event especially with anyone still procrastinating about signing up. This is after all, what Kscope is all about - sharing knowledge!

I was very excited to receive my copy of Spring Roo in Action. This is a fairly recent MEAP offering from Manning and is scheduled to be ready by the end of this year (2011). A 500-page quick-start guide, and IMHO, the missing manual for anyone interested in learning agile and rapid prototyping using Spring Roo.

I was very excited to get my hands on a copy of Mahout in Action. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are my most favourite subjects in Computer Science. Back during my school days, AI and ML were primarily used in research, and sometimes banks use them for fraud detection. I am glad that it is gradually being adopted in mainstream businesses with the help of easy to use frameworks like Mahout, backed by commodity distributing platforms like Hadoop.

There are many compelling reasons to get a copy of Powershell in Action (2nd Edition) but I will cover the important few. This is a great book currently in the MEAP process at Manning, and I believe, is pretty much near completion.

More like a "note to self", but I'm sure others might find useful. Here's a list of excludes to include that will prevent Eclipse artifacts from synchronizing on your Subversion server.

• .project
• .classpath
• .settings (added on 17-Jan-11)
• .springBeans (added on 14-Dec-10)
• target (and/or bin)

This post follows my earlier review of the first six chapters of "Location Aware Applications". I recently received an update containing two new chapters covering topics on connectivity issues and how to monetize your LBS applications.

The Manning Early Access Program, or MEAP, is a program that allows you to purchase an electronic copy of a book even before it is published. This allows readers to participate in the development of the book's content. You will of course receive the final version of the book when it goes gold. I recently got my hands on a copy of the MEAP book, Location Aware Applications. At the time of this post, only 50% of the book has been completed. So here are my early impression of this upcoming title.