An ancient bronze artifact scooped out of a shipwreck in 1900 by sponge divers and kept at the Athens National Archaeological Museum has been analyzed by a team of Greek and British scientists and has been established that it is the world's oldest Astronomy computer. With over 30 bronze wheels and more than a thousand greek characters, the device "could calculate the position of certain stars, at least the Sun and Moon, and perhaps predict astronomical phenomena". The scientists have just recently managed to decipher over 95% of the inscriptions, and the new findings will be presented in November at an international congress.

Being a parent isn't always easy, because kids still don't quite get what's really wrong or what is just a simple prank. I have a 3 and a half year old son, and boy, does he make me go mad sometimes...

But there are sometimes when you can't do anything but laugh at the imagination and quick replies they have for questions you ask them. This is a true story. His kindergarden teacher told my wife that she made the kids draw boats as part of an excercise. When she went to check on my son, she saw that he had painted the whole piece of paper blue, so she asked "Where is the boat?" to which my son promptly replied "oh, the boat sank and all people died".

Is this normal for a 3 year old son? Should I start saving money for the shrinks?

Google has just released the beta version of the Google Web Toolkit (GWT). The GWT is a Java-based toolkit that lets you create AJAX-enabled pages using Java. The main idea of the toolkit is that once you create your app following the GWT API, you will then compile your Java classes into Javascript and HTML, so you can deploy your application in any web server (it doesn't require Java to run your application, since everything is converted).

GWT provides a new, fresh and different concept to the Java web toolkits realm by providing a Java to Javascript compiler, however you might be able to see some similarities with other Java frameworks, and even with some non-java frameworks, like Ruby On Rails. For example, in order to create a new project, GWT provides you with some scripts that you use to create the basic directory structure and templates. The Widgets (UI components) look somewhat like Swing or Wicket components, and the hosted mode looks like how RoR does its development. Still, the whole Java-to-Javascript concept seems new to me, and it looks like you can do some really good-looking ajaxy-feeling sites with it. GWT provides back-end interaction via RPC mechanisms too, because not everything can be done on the client-side.

I will definitely keep an eye on this framework, since I think that it will provide much needed RAD features for Java web development.