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Mount Irvine Wall is located just 3 minutes from Mount Irvine Beach facilities by boat. This wall dive has a maximum depth of 15 m and is actually a group of rocky outcroppings extending out to sea.

It is considered an easy dive, suitable for beginners, but also good for all levels as there are plenty of smaller, interesting creatures such as scorpion fish, juvenile spotted drums, lobsters, octopus, queen angel fish, frogfish, parrot fish, pipe fish, batfish and seahorses.

The coral covering the wall is composed mainly of small yellow tube sponges, branching vase sponges, black ball sponges, encrusting gorgonians, small black sea rods, porous sea rods, stinging bush hydroids and large quantities of social feather dusters.

I found a very interesting series of articles about alternate languages for the JRE on IBM developerWorks.

The following languages were discussed:

• Jython
• Groovy
• JRuby
• Nice
• Rhino
• NetRexx

While Jython, JRuby, Rhino and NetRexx are ports of existing languages to the JRE, Groovy and Nice are complete new language based entirely on the Java programming APIs.

Groovy blends some of the most useful features of Ruby, Python, and Smalltalk. But still conserves a core syntax based on the Java language.

Groovy supports the following features:

• Dynamic types
• Closures
• Regex syntax similar to Perl
• Native syntax for Lists and Maps
• Operator Overloading to simplify working with datatypes Collections and Maps
• Polymorphic iteration and Autoboxing
• Providing a shell interpreter
• Compiles straight to Java bytecode and works cleanly with all existing Java objects and libraries

All in all Groovy is exactly like Java should have been.

It’s nice (pun intended) to see how the JRE supports more and more alternate languages. The only language I still miss is JPerl. To by-pass the time waiting for it, I’ll play with Inline::Java and PLJava.

The Little Rockley Bay is a long stretch of darkish volcanic sand fringed by coconut trees and bordered by the old coast road which is now bypassed by the Claude Noel Highway between Scarborough and Crown Point.

The eastern section of the bay, adjacent to Rockley Bay and alongside Lambeau - where I was staying during my time on Tobago- is protected by a reef and provides good swimming.

Further down towards Crown Point, Little Rockley Bay beach is exposed to the full force of the Atlantic Ocean and the trade winds. The pounding surf means that the beach remains largely empty but it is arguably the best walking and jogging beach in Tobago. I went jogging there almost every morning during my stay.

The Tobago Forest Reserve located in the central ranges is the oldest protected rainforest in the western hemisphere. Thanks to the British scientist Stephen Hales, on April 13, 1776, 14’000 acres of central Tobago were designated a protected Crown Reserve.

Hales began researching the relationship between rainfall and trees during the plantation era. He needed 10 years to convince Tobago’s planters that if they continued to cut down the forest, the island would soon be incapable of supporting any plantations.

A rainforest trip is a must for every Tobago visitor. Make sure to hire a guide, as you’ll see a lot more and will get interesting information about the flora and fauna. I can really recommend our guide, Peter Cox.

Dutchman’s Reef is easily accessed from either the shore at Mount Irvine beach or from a boat. Along the reef’s edge, you can see two very old cannons that were once part of the Dutch East India Company fleet that ran aground in the 17th century. They can be difficult to recognise because of heavy coral encrustation.

If you are very lucky, you can see hawksbill turtles which normally feed on the smaller barrel sponges. I saw two of them while diving at Dutchman’s Reef, but they were way too fast to photograph them. When you see how sedate they are ashore, you would never guess how spry they are under water.

Two pictures from my trip to Tobago in February and March 2006:

• An old house in Scarborough, the capital of Tobago.
• Termites at Englishman’s Bay. Englishman’s Bay is about 10 kilometers away from Scarborough, just in case you thought those termites are the reason for the bad state of the house.

In mid-April, Eiffel Software announced a changed in its release cycle by having two EiffelStudio releases per year (one in mid-May and one in mid-November). This would really start this Fall (i.e Fall in the northern hemisphere) since for this Spring, it was decided to have a release by mid-June. I’m happy to report that we have been on time and released EiffelStudio 6.0 on June 19th.

For more information see Manu’s Eiffel blog.

The Sisters lie about a mile off Bloody Bay on the Carribean coast of Tobago. Underwater these rocky outcrops plunge to over 40 metres and periodically attract some exciting species such as scalloped hammerhead sharks. Unfortunately I didn’t have the opportunity to dive there.

This book is an unparalleled sneak-peek of what’s coming in the widely-anticipated Perl 6. It uncovers groundbreaking new developments in Parrot – the interpreter engine that will execute code written in the new Perl 6 language and the most revolutionary change in the language itself – Apocalypse 12 on objects. It also includes expanded coverage of Apocalypse 5 (regular expressions) and Apocalypse 6 (subroutines).

“Perl 6 and Parrot Essentials” is now open source. A limited preview of the second edition is also available via Google Book Search.

View from Fort Bennet down to the rocks which gave the beautiful village of Black Rock on Tobago its name.

Pigeon Point is Tobago’s most famous beach and the scenery is smashing indeed. The beach can boast of powdery white sand and leaning coconut palms.

But as beautiful Pigeon Point is, it is also one of the few places on Tobago to suffer from development and commercialization. It was the first beach to charge an entry fee, and regularly increases rents for beach vendors. Pigeon Point tends to be very crowded, especially if there is a cruise liner in the port of Scarborough.

A crab eating some coconut meat at Englishman’s Bay, Tobago.

For a software architecture course at university, two colleagues and I implemented snippet support for EiffelStudio.

I see our implementation as a proof of concept that showed it is quite easy to support snippets in the EiffelStudio editor. But I think the snippets support is to primitive to be really useful. If I find some time, I’d like to implement snippet support simliar to NetBeans, Emacs and/or Gedit.

Go to the project page for more information about snippets in EiffelStudio. If you want to know more about snippets in general, see Wikipedia.

Close-up of a star coral (Montastrea) at Flying Reef, one of the greatest dive sites in Tobago.

I updated my fileserver from Edgy to Feisty this week. Instead of doing the usual search and replace in /etc/apt/sources.list, I chose to do it the Ubuntu-way:

sudo aptitude install update-manager-core
sudo do-release-upgrade

It worked flawlessly.

The Batteaux Bay is a small secluded beach in the grounds of the Blue Waters Inn in Speyside, Tobago. From Battaeux Bay you have a very nice view of Goat Island and Little Tobago.

I was playing with Camping lately and thought I’d share some of the links I found with you:

• Camping Wiki
• Mosquito
• Blog on Camping
• Wild and crazy metaprogramming
• Camping at the mailbox
• Camping and DBI
• Basic Authentication

The triple-tiered Argyle Falls are on the Argyle River, just west of Roxborough on the southeastern coast of Tobago. It’s a really nice place to chill after an exhausting rain forest tour. Those pictures where taken by me in February 2006.

The name of this website is borrowed from the Zulu (isiZulu) language:

ikhono [i:ˈkʰɔ:no]: agility, skill, dexterity

It also sets the theme, as I will be mostly writing about agile software development, computer science in general, my ongoing projects, music and other things of my interest.