Apparently the Super Bowl isn't the only event deserving of new and improved commercials. Tonight's Oscars have had a good crop of innovative commercials. The first set after the opening were pretty good, including one by HP. My favorite so far had to be the Gofer vs Tiger Woods American Express commercial.
When commercial makers finally figure out that the reason we don't watch is because they are not entertaining they will not need to worry about people fast forwarding through them with TiVo.
I am very glad that the commercials are good this year, because the awards have been quite dull. Lord of the Rings: Return of the King is winning everything.
A couple of days ago, I was leaning towards giving up on Orkut. I didn't think the social network thing was for me and I had read some slanderous things about how much it sucked. I joined a couple of groups (or communities) that were mostly tech related. There wasn't much traffic on this groups which was one of the reasons why I thought, eh... it sucks.
Then, a couple of nights ago, I joined the Heinlein group, to which I recieved a couple of messages. And then tonight I joined the West Wing group and had a good time reading the rants and raves of other fans of the show.
I have come to a conclusion. Orkut is not for geeks. We have our own way of communicating with each other. It is called "the internet". We form our own groups and mailing lists and build friends through blogs and email. Communication between groups on the internet is dynamic and new groups spring up when something new comes along. Geeks don't need a site dedicated to community building, we do it already using the internet as our "server". Out of curiousity I checked Google to see who thought Orkut was bad. Every site that Google returned was owned by a geek.
So, Orkut is a server for non geeks to build communities and express themselves. Geeks need not apply.
I was building a CD to take into work, when I happened upon a couple of old projects. These projects are so old, that EJB's were popular and scriptlets were accepted. What amazed me the most about these throw backs was their size. There are not any third party jars in these projects. No, dom4j (at half a MB) or standard taglibs (half a MB) or Struts (half a MB) or log4j (third of a MB)... and don't get me started on Xalan and Xerces.
The code that I wrote is ugly. The code probably would not scale. The code is so unmaintainable that I don't even want to think about refactoring.
I even found the perl script that I wrote to generate classes and xml for CMP EJB's. It was very nifty. This script would generate the Bean, Remote and Home as well as the xml that would go in the web.xml and the ejb-jar.xml. It also created the JSP that would allow you to edit the values of the bean. What a mess. Those were the days. IDEA 3.0 was in EAP (2.0 had just been released). Orion 1.5.4 was top dog among application servers and Windows XP was still a rumor.
Needless to say, I had a good chuckle tonight.
I was building the file structure for a new project today and then moved on to copy jars into a lib directory. One of the jars was velocity.jar. I have used Velocity a couple of times with great success, but I have never made the plunge and used it to replace JSP's. I wish I had used Velocity on my last application. I was using JSTL, which was much better than the Struts taglibs, and built some really hairy dynamic forms with it. You would pass in an object that described the ActionForm and it would create all of the fields needed. I had one JSP that was used for every Create and Update and another that was used for the Read and Delete. CRUD for 10 domain objects were handled by two JSP's. I could probably cut the size of those JSP's in half if I had used Velocity instead.
I spoke with the developer that took my place today, he said he was having trouble figuring out how the JSP's work. He acknowledged that being a rookie developer didn't help, but I am here to say... those are some killer JSP's. The team will probably just create the normal edit and view JSP's for all of the domain objects and get rid of my uber JSP's.
I am pretty sure that JSTL was not the answer to the problem that I had, more than likely I should have used Velocity. There were so many hoops that I had to jump through to get JSTL to play nice and deliver the goods. I kept wishing to be able to call methods from the JSTL and not be stuck with getters, Maps and Lists.
Velocity here I come.
I have wanted to have the filenames of the individual pages named similar to the title so that while reading statistics, I would know what page people were viewing (instead of having to remember that 00043.html was equal to "Turkey Basting" or whatever). So, as of today, all links will now point to yyyy/mm/dd/title_of_entry.html. I also changed the format of the comments section so that it is a bit easier to decifer where a comment begins and ends. Let me know if anything is broken.
Epesh is just MEAN! You tease us with glorious news without posting a link or proof! I am... I am... I am at a loss for words! You could have at least told us about the new features or when we may get a taste. But no!
New IDEA, new Orion... this is almost like Christmas. I get such joy when I see Orion/2.0.1 initialized and I can't wait for Orion/2.0.3 initialized to show up on my console.
I am dreaming of Orion returning to the thrown as King of Application Servers.
The developers of SnipSnap removed the RSS Aggregator from SnipSnap long ago and there have been several attempts at creating macros to replace that functionality. I found Joe's implementation last year and was very impressed. It needed an update so that it would cache the feed for 30 minutes before requesting the rss feed again (asking /. for their feed more than once every 30 minutes ticks them off). The way I implemented it, it would check a timestamp and then update the cache if the updated time was more than 30 minutes.
That fix has always bugged me because it means that if you hit the page and the feed hasn't been updated, you have to wait. So, tonight I implemented a Timer that updates the cache for you every 30 minutes so you always recieving a responsive page. I also updated it so that it would work with the latest Radeox version.
So, Joe, if you get this, please send me an email at carl at sixty4bit.com so I can send you my updates.
Charles seems to really like rodents. Other than the occasional rat on toast for breakfast, he often uses Squirrel servers for his day to day data storage needs. This of course brings to mind cute little rodents running around with note pads scribbling down whatever you tell them while delivering your choice of beverage.
My coworkers have been subtley hinting that I should give up on my jokes... Maybe they are right. However one coworker insists that JSTL should be called Jistle which just reminds me of a pistol. Not good...
One of my coworkers wanted to know how opensource developers communicate. How is distributed development accomplished. My answer was simply: Mailing Lists. But I have a feeling that they are soon to be replaced by blogs and wikis, especially in the corporate environment.
I think wikis are really starting to play a big role in how communication is maintained, not to mention blogs. I really do think that corporate blogging is going to become a primary way that developers keep each other up to date.
The question that always comes up is "Why?" Why is a wiki better than email? Emails get lost. Emails end up being client side. If I say something to Becky in an email, then noone else benefits from that email except for Becky. However if I blog about the answer, six months later when someone else has the same question, they will have something to search against to get answers.
Granted, a forum provides this same mechanism, however it is hard to determine who the real experts are in a forum. If Adam continues to answer most of the questions, then Adam is going to be seen as the expert. However if we were all blogging, and linking to each other, then the more people that point to your site or reference what you say will show that you are the expert. Not because you answered the most questions on the forum, but because you have posted the most answers to your blog to hard problems that no one is really asking about.
You will blog about AOP. I will blog about the pain it is to get a development network. Scott will blog about "expecting Java developers to know SQL should be expected" :)
After the blogs start popping up, the aggregators will show and that is when the fun begins. You will be notified when I have updated my site and you will read about whatever it is that is on my mind today or at this moment. I might have a problem and you can answer it from your blog, which will automatically update my blog as well.
Here are a couple of good wiki examples:
The original wiki: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiWikiWeb
Erik Thauvin's Wiki: http://www.thauvin.net/wiki/
OpenSymphony Wiki: http://wiki.opensymphony.com/space/start
SnipSnap: http://snipsnap.org
Confluence Wiki: http://confluence.atlassian.com
Blogs
Martin Fowler's Bliki (both blog and wiki)
Erik Hatcher's Blog
Erik Thauvin's Blog
Matt Raible's Blog
The Fishbowl (Charles)
Roller Blog
Nu Cardboard
rebelutionary
Russell Beattie
My dad is home from the hospital! I am now back home in Maryland. I wish I could have stayed, but I have to pay bills. The past week gave me time to think about a wide range of topics. I have a couple of topics that I would like to discuss in the future, and some thoughts that I would like to get out.
Strategic thinking. Lifestyles. Relationships. Aging.
Woooo those are some heavy topics. I doubt I will do any of them justice.
Dad is going home tomorrow. He is looking alot better but is tired after a little bit of exercise. I will be here for one more day, and then I have to go back home.
Dad was moved into a two person room yesterday and we were able to visit for an extended about of time. He was looking better and had a bunch of questions to ask the docs and nurses. He was getting back to his old self.
He has some tightness in his chest and he often feels like he is choking. The nurses kept telling him it was because of the IV that was in his Jugular Vein. Not to mention, there is this huge bandage that goes up the center of his chest and ends right below his Adam's Apple. I imagine that it is worse than a tight t-shirt.
The docs and nurses said that most of the pain and discomfort were going to come from the tubes that are in his chest. One tube is in his side, and goes up the inside of rib cage up nest to his lungs. The other two go in at his stomach and run up under the rib cage up to near his heart. All three of these tubes are for drainage of liquids that may be building up in his body. If everything is going ok, he should have them removed some time today. Other wise they may stay in until tomorrow. These monster tubes have holes running along the side that allows all of the juices to escape out of the body. This keeps preasure from building up in the chest and allows the heart to get used to its new surroundings.
Everyone we have spoken with has been very encouraging and said that Dad will feel soooo much better. The heart doesn't have to work so hard anymore and it gets more blood to the rest of the body, which gives the body oxygen. Oxygen == energy so he will be feeling spry and ready to go. I think there are some good changes coming soon...
My elder little sister arrived today with her husband and child. The gang is all here in Michigan. Dad went into surgery at about 1pm and came out of surgery around 4pm. That was MUCH quicker than we were expecting. Everything they told us was that it would take about 4-6 hours, they did it in just under 3. Not bad for a triple bypass. Everything went according to plan and the doctors were very positive about the surgery.
We all (me, two sisters and brother) went up to see him, and got the briefing on what all the tubes were and how the rest of the evening would progress. The nurse said we could come back in about an hour and see how he was doing. We decided it would be best to go get a bite to eat and then check in right before they closed the doors to visitors for the night. Good food, good conversation and a trip back to the hospital.
Dad was still asleep, but the drugs were wearing off and he was starting to wake up. I don't know if it was just because he had a tube in his throat (not to mention another couple hundred thousand coming from other places) or if it was just the effects of the anastetics (please forgive my horrid spelling) wearing off, but Dad was kinda jerking from time to time. We all held it together until we got to the hall way. I don't know how the breakdown went with the others, but I was toast. I fought the tears and the sobs and couldn't fight anymore when we got to the elevator. I had been holding it in all day, and I couldn't stop it this time. The other three were crying too, so we held each other and then left for home. Thank god the elevator took a while to get there otherwise everyone would have seen us all boo-hooing.
I have a good cry coming to me sometime in the near future. It will prolly hit right before I go to sleep... or right after I finish writing this, who knows. Either way, I need to go downstairs and be with my family. Little bro is off with his girlfriend, he needed time away from us (I encouraged him to go). The rest of us are just here, dealing in our own way.
I will keep the site updated as things progress. I am due to leave on Thursday morning, but there are some things that need to be taken care of before I leave, so I may stay until Sunday night or Monday morning. Just going to play it by ear.
Well, I will be getting on an airplane to go see my Dad in about an hour and a half. We got the call an hour ago that he has a blockage to his heart and they have to go in and do a bypass. They should do the surgery either today or tomorrow. I may not post again until after I get home. Michigan, here I come.
Well, the Super Bowl is over. The Panthers lost to the Patriots by a field goal. A real heartbreaker. But... The commercials were pretty good.
I particularly liked the 7-Up commercial where the people were trying to dunk on the back of the van. You could see the jokes coming, but they were still funny. I may have been influenced by my son who was nearly pissing his pants.
My second favorite was the Dale Earnhart Jr. Budweiser commercial. I hate it when that happens. The donkey Budweiser commercial was also pretty good.
My favorite commercial overall was the Mohammed Ali IBM Linux commercial. My son looked at me and said, "I don't get it." I replied that the commercial was aimed at me. I had a huge grin on my face. IBM is really doing a good job pushing Linux out to the rest of the world. They are doing the marketing job that no one else is doing. The really great part is that they are succeeding.