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New user? Thursday, March 7, 2002
Power for my PowerBook
My AC adaptor is flaky, so sometimes I have to futz with it before it'll actually be providing power. To make things worse, my battery is on it's last legs... (it would tell you it's just a flesh wound) I'm lucky to get 20 minutes battery life on it.
Got into work this morning, and plugged in my PowerBook as usual. Unfortunately, now my AC adaptor is completely screwed. And, my battery was drained. PowerBook is dead. Won't boot.
So unfortunately that means I have to replace them. I was hoping to wait a month before I did it but looks like that won't happen. :-(
EJB is indeed lame
101 complaints? It might take me as long to read this as the EJB spec itself! (hundreds of pages long)
Bad Managers: EJB's 101 Damnations
Haven't read this yet, but I wanted to point to it before I got all distracted by the fun WebObjects work I'm doing today. ;-)
U.S. troops detail fierce fighting
CNN.com: U.S. troops detail fierce fighting in Afghan campaign
I'm reminded of the movie, Starship Troopers (official site). They underestimated their enemies, too.
I remember seeing a documentary on PBS about the Soviet-Afghan war (which went on for nearly 20 years)... it's not as if the Soviets were pushovers. They faced the same problem as we do now... fighting warriors who know how to fight in those mountains and caves.
Lovely.
80!
CP: 80 per cent of TV sets tuned in to Canada-U.S. final
EIGHTY percent? Holy shit, that's staggering. As the article suggests, it shows how important that game was to Canadians. Our national pride was on the line, 100%. (Americans: trust me on that.)
Wednesday, March 6, 2002
The Java Extension Mechanism??
Sun: The Java Extension Mechanism
Can someone please explain this to me in a sentence or two of english (even geek english) instead of Sunglish?
Update... Peter notes that the tutorial at the bottom of that page is pretty helpful. Indeed! I wish they had put that at the top of the page instead of the bottom. I got half way through the page and my eyes started to glaze over. (mind you it was just before lunch so maybe i was low on sugar ;-)) Thanks Peter!
RE: The Java Extension Mechanism??
Awesome... Bill expands on the Java Extensions tutorial with some very crucial information. I think I've actually seen that situation before but didn't understand it. :-|
Thanks for the info!
Tuesday, March 5, 2002
AspectJ with WO
Christian Pekeler has written a great tutorial for using AspectJ with WebObjects. I mentioned AspectJ here on Jan 10, 2001, but never did get the chance to play with it like I hoped. Christian has really armed me with what I need to know to get up to speed with it, and I'm grateful for it. :-)
Stepwise: Aspect-Oriented Programming with WebObjects
Christian is also a project admin for the WOUnitTest project on SourceForge.
Flash MX Overview
WebMonkey: Flash MX Overview
By the way, in case you're wondering why it's called Flash MX... they actually named it after my new son, who we originally named Matthias Xavier. A few days later we changed our minds and named him Xavier Matthias instead, but Macromedia had already sent all their files to the printers so it was too late to change.
Pretty cool, huh? ;-)
Soar Like an Eagle
Wow. Ashcroft is a spooky fella. Greg points to a very amusing story about his... singing, fear of tabby cats, and being anointed with cooking oil.
Whatever flips your bic, Johnnie boy.
J2EE and .NET Interop w/o Web Services
TheServerSide: J2EE and .NET Interoperability without Web Services?
Damian Mehers asks "who needs Web Services" now that Ja.NET (a Java framework) makes it possible for Java code to talk to .NET code. Ja.NET speaks the .NET remoting (binary) wire protocol.
That's pretty short sighted. It hardly deserves repeating, but there is more to the world than Java and .NET. And more to the world than entprise application servers and commercial software. Besides that, I think it's pretty cool that Java can now talk to .NET in that way. I wish vendors would come up with RMI classes for non-Java systems. Web Services are great, but variety is even better.
bbum on OSX profiles
Yesterday, Bill Bumgarner wrote a great rant, in full bbum style about Apple's installer, crazy classic user thinking, and how to set up your OS X machine so it's easy to back up and restore your profile on any machine.
This is what I love about Bill. He's a natural-born-blogger. Bill does this all the time, these long, informative rants. If you've ever met Bill, been subscribed to a mailing list he's on, or attended the same session as him at WWDC, you know what I mean. No one does it like bbum.
Bill really cares about this stuff. An example: on September 13, 2001 I got an email from Bill (whose office is/was in Manhattan):
"[Jim: I wrote this on the train on the way into NYC tuesday morning. Never got the chance to send it before the city-- and CodeFab's internet connectivity with it-- exploded. Can you post this to -newbies (if it is still relevant)? We are all OK, btw.... thanks.]"
The message was a 300 word (short by Bill's standards but given the situation pretty incredible) response to a question on the webobjects-newbies mailing list. Incredible.
Teen hero's pain
Toronto Sun: Teen hero's pain
What a tragic but courageous story. I hope the community can lift them from their grief and get them back on their feet.
