My father had a heart attack. All signs suggest that it was a minor one. Monday, the doctors are going to send a camera up an artery and take a peek at his heart to see what type of damage was done.
Right now I am a bit numb to this whole thing. I have asked a couple of times if he wants me to go visit, and I keep getting told that I don't need to go. I have never been a real leader, make the hard decisions and just do it kinda person.
So... while my father lays in bed, sick, I will contemplate why the hell I can't decide to go see him. I don't think I should have to have him say "Yeah, Carl, I need you to come up here." Of course, if my little sister wasn't already on her way up there, he may have said just that.
I spoke with my father about an hour ago. He sounded tired, but was making jokes. The results of the tests are not back yet, so we are in a wait and see pattern.
My little brother called me this morning at 4:30am. Apparently, my Dad woke up with chest pains and they called an ambulence. Dad is in the hosipital... He is calm and talking. This is going to be an interesting day.
I have been bothered by a coworker's comments regarding a presentation I have been writing. He said:
This slide seems awfully biased. It’s obvious that your favorite is CVS. Is this what you were shooting for?
I honestly don't know anymore. I am finding that I am comfortable with certain tools, they kinda feel like home. So, I resist learning a new tool simply to avoid the discomfort of having to learn something new. I have been known to go around saying, "This is the best" or "That is the best" when in fact that is only my opinion, and it may be a little bit closed minded at that.
I fell in love with Linux as an idea. Free is good. However, you will not find that I use it at home. For any server I am ever responsible for, you will find Linux or Solaris if it is a Sun box, but never Windows. Mainly because setting up a Windows server is a pain and maintaining it is even more of a pain. Of course much of that is changing with the advent of Remote Desktop and its cousins.
I am lost. I have lost the youthful enthusiasm of my 20's and have gotten into a rut. I have been singing this song for so long, I forgot why I was singing in the first place. I fell in love with it because it was free, but is that a good enough reason to continue using it now?
Now, I remember that I also love the fact that free things, open source code, is rapidly available. I don't have to download a license to use it. I don't have to wait for the check to clear to get a key to open the door. If I have a problem with it, I can look at the code and make a change. If the change that needs to be made is over my head or to complex, then I can contact the developer directly.
There have been numerous occasions where I have helped a project get better through suggestions or actually supplying code. And that gives me comfort.
So I started this post, without really knowing why I open source was the way to go. I have now reminded myself that I am indeed walking in the right direction. The path before me looks very exciting and I can't wait to see the scenery during my walk.
Charles posted a nice link to this great tutorial on building your site's layout. I will be using this technique on future projects.
I downloaded RC1 today, and what a sigh of relief that was. The last couple of EAP downloads have been real stinkers. Build 1108 was so bad I started to worry if everyone at JetBrains had lost their brains. Usually, IDEA has terrific user interfaces for building source path and classpath... but from the start, the 4.0 pathing strategy just seemed like a losing proposition. A glimmer of hope showed up in build 977 where JetBrains really started to change the way you specified paths. It has come a long way since then and all I can say now is: There is hope.
There was a definate progression over the last month to make things a little more main stream. Seperated configuration dialogs for project and the tool itself are gone. That started almost a month ago. They added the tab grouping so long ago, I can't remember which build it was added. Generics support has been there for a while as well as an enhanced plugin manager. And lets not forget the UI builder. The changes that have been made are subtle, but significant. Version 4 almost feels like home again, and that says alot.
So tonight I have been browsing the web from my new Tungsten C. It has been very enlightening. The only site that displayed correctly was Google. All of the blogs that I have visited so far have looked like crap... Including my own :)
I made a nice little aggregator to use from a Palm. It looks like crap from a desktop browser, but it is very readable from the Palm. Check it out here. I gave Feedster a try first, but it didn't really work that well either. These smaller devices are going to take over the world. It is only a matter of time.
Someone said that small devices wouldn't really take off until you could easily post to the web with one. (I think it was Russell) Posting this entry from the Palm hasn't been all that bad... but I am sure it could have been easier.
The wife and kiddies went to New York City this weekend for a dance competition and training. So, on my way home from work on Friday, I stopped by the video store to pick up some movies that have been on my "Watch List". I picked up The Italian Job, Underworld and American Wedding.
The Italian Job was great. Good plot line, nice twists and of course beautiful scenery. If you haven't seen The Italian Job, you should.
Underworld was an obvious first film for the director. There were a few discrepancies and a couple of unexplained items, but they were all very small. This action packed, fast paced movie was a winner for a rookie director, hopefully they will let him have another try.
American Wedding was a nice fluffy teenage romp through a wedding. The expected "misunderstanding" jokes were present along with the typical vulgarities. This was a good movie, but I hope it is the last American Pie movie.
I have a client who's primary asset is knowledge. They share what they know with their customers. This is done primarily through whitepapers and documents. They have all of these people whose sole job is to sit and think deep thoughts and come up with the answers to questions that people don't know they want to ask.
There is currently a project that is being built to search all of the different document types and put them in one place. I asked, why not just buy a Google box? The project manager rolled his eyes and explained that he wished he could do it, but the powers that be seem to think they need a custom solution. They will never be able to build a better google. I must not fully understand the requirements.
Then I read this blog entry and realized, all of the tools needed for this client to get their job done already exists. They are already there. SnipSnap, Confluence, JSPWiki, etc. they are already there, just like the damned Google box.
I have a voice. People are starting to listen to me. But this client only sees success after it has already been successful for them. They are unwilling to venture into the unknown. If I could only get one small section to give one of these products a try, I think it would change my client forever.
I have to put together a presentation on persistance layers. It needs to cover the how and why as well as the who. I have finally convinced my client that Struts is a good thing, so why do people miss the fact that a persistance layer is a good thing as well? Oh well.
This is a hard question to answer: Which one is the best? Well, first you have to know what is out there: Hibernate, Jaxor, iBatis, and Torque are just a couple of good ones. EJB's are out there as well, so they have to be covered too. This is going to be a fun presentation to put together, I will post a link when I am done.
I was at a friend's house today, and he told me two of the things that you have to have to be successful are "Communication and Perserverance". I think I will tack onto that Persistence.
Just finished a new site based on MovableType. I am using MT and PHP together in some pretty funky ways to get the desired effect. I need to be able to update parts of some pages without having to rebuild the entire site, but also need the content management that MT provides for the end user that is not savy with vi :)
It is always fun to finish a project but I am sure that there will be minor tweaks and twiddles over the next couple of weeks. Those are usually annoying because sometimes the tweak isn't all that minor.
Anyway... I am excited now because I can spend some time on MadCMS. I hope to take it from a mere exercise in how to use Jaxor to something that people can actually use. It is usable now... but you would have to have very simple needs.
I have been doing more development over the last couple of months and I have tried to use Test Driven Development to write code. I have found that you don't get anywhere fast using TDD. However, TDD is a GREAT way to learn a new framework. It makes it easy to learn an API and how things work. In my professional life, I use tests to ensure that I have killed a bug, or if something has some whacky / intricate business logic, I may use tests to ensure I get it right. A great example of this was validation of an ActionForm that had a couple of if this is filled in, then check for something else type of logics in it. Testing something like that through the browser would be very time consuming and easy to miss something. This is where unit tests shine.
I agree with a couple of points that Paul makes. Why would you want to spend a load of time on unit tests that often change. I was wondering if maybe Paul and I are not using TDD correctly. Maybe our OOP is faulty, and therefor causing our TDD to take longer than it should or be more involved than it should be. Being a slight rookie at development I tend to lean towards me doing something wrong.