Methods

It's summer and of course, some wasps found a new home in my garden tool shed. I'm not actually hostile towards these insects, since they are a natural pest control, but since I need to access that shed occasionally and don't want to get stung while doing so, they need to go.

So the discussion started in the family, on what would be the best method to accomplish this. The safest choice would of course be calling the pest exterminator, but thats a bit expensive. I'd certainly do it for a large nest, but for small, fist-sized ones, there should be a do it yourself way for removing them.

Do you know this problem? You buy a piece of computer hardware and you get a driver CD in a sleeve. You buy a computer magazine and you get a bonus CD in sleeve. You buy washing powder and you get a free movie DVD as special advertising stunt (in a sleeve, of course). After some time, all those loose discs tend to pile up in some drawer of your desk and it becomes a nightmare, finding the one again, you are looking for.

Every Desktop application pretty much needs a GUI. No problem so far. The trouble starts however, when components have to be arranged visually in a container. The preferred method for doing this is in Java, is to use a layoutmanager instead of specifying absolute pixel coordinates for component placement.

Some things sound trivial to do, but on closer look turn out to be a formidable brainteaser. One of them is writing modular Java programs, where the core program can be extended using plugins. Such a design might be desirable, when extra program functionality is either to be licensed separately, to be contributed by third party, or generally "to be decided later".