Jim Roepcke's weblog have browser, will travel (est. 1999)

Vote now!

The voting deadline for the Java Developer Journal's Reader Awards is today. In the "Best Application Server" category, WebObjects is very close to 1st place, but needs a few more votes to make it over the top.

If you like WebObjects, please vote for it!

Don't know much about WebObjects? Here's a very cool QuickTime movie called "WebObjects Overview", sent to me by the person at Apple Enterprise Training that taught me WO.

The movie isn't available publicly yet, but I have permission to redistribute it. Soon it will be available from Apple's web site -- see it before everyone else!

It’s over

Well they did it. Dr. Nadolski removed my right wisdom tooth (the one on the left in the picture). It wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be, but I suspect the freezing hasn't entirely gone away yet, so the best is yet to come.

According to my wife, the receptionist said the procedure should have been done at the hospital, once they saw how bad the situation was.

Anyway, in a few days everything should be close to normal again.

Damn wisdom

Ouch. I have impacted wisdom teeth. They have to be removed by an oral surgeon -- my dentist says it will be done today or tomorrow.

They're gonna have to drug me up real good 'cause they won't do it under general. I'm scared!

DP4

This message was written in IE5 for MacOS X DP4.

Beetling around town

Today I flew my kite at Clover Point in Victoria. The wind was at near the top of the wind-range for my kite, so it wasn't possible to "stall" the kite to do any slack-line maneuvers (not that I know any yet, but I'd love to practice) but it was a great time nonetheless!

My friends Alex Wadsworth and Sandy (forgot your last name, sorry!) were also flying their kites.

One maneuver I got to practice lots was the cartwheel, which is how you get your kite back "on its feet" after you crash it, without having to run down field to the kite yourself.

Not all is well, however -- my bottom right wisdom tooth is at war with me. I'm going to make an appointment with a dentist first thing tomorrow morning to have it looked at. I've been eating very cold foods today to try to keep my tooth/gums frozen back there.

Beetle

I bought a Beetle yesterday. No, not a VW Beetle, a Flying Wings Beetle. It's a stunt-kite. My first stunt-kite. Here's a review of the Beetle.

WOt’s going on?

May 26, 2000:

Last Saturday I said I'd talk about how the WebObjects pricing change has affected me personally. Since then, I've been having so much fun developing wicked shit in WO that I just haven't had time to write here!

Here's the scoop. For the last few months I've mostly been doing pure-Java projects for my client. They use WO for their BIG cornerstone apps, but these were lesser apps that they wanted to distribute to their clients, who didn't have their own WO app server licenses. To save the money on WO deployments, they avoided WO for these types of projects.

Remember, unlimited WO app server licenses used to cost up to $50K US! That's all changed. The highest end deployment license, with a developer tool seat now costs a mere $699 US. Which, in my client's case, means it's essentially free.

How? The app I was working on when WWDC started last week was going to take me 3 weeks to get from the drawing board to an alpha state, where we could actually "boot up" the app and start playing with it.

A lot of that time was going to be spent writing reams of boring Java code that handled saving and loading object models to/from disk, and making it possible to sync live business objects with their saved version, in either direction.

Mid-WWDC-week, we decided to screw the pure-java route, and implement this thing with WO! Here's why...

1. Enterprise Objects Framework (EOF) would take care of all the persistence problems for me for free. All I have to write is the business logic. The data can be saved out to any RDBMS (or flat file or whatever) without a single line of code changing in my code.

Hell, I could put each table on a different vendor's server on a different continent if I wanted to, and it wouldn't change my code. But I digress...

2. Pure Java or otherwise, I was going to have to create some kind of UI to let people manage this live object model. Doing the UI in WO is a lot easier and faster than any other way... I won't go into why, now. This is getting long enough as is!

3. As a result of the above points, it was going to cut the amount of time needed for an alpha down to 1/2 of the previous estimate! A week and a half of my engineering time (saved in the pre-alpha phase alone) will pay for double the the WO licenses they'll need for their initial handful of clients, and get the working product out to clients quicker than ever expected. Time is money, and in this business, there's no time to waste.

Basically, WO is paying for itself in saved engineering time and opportunity cost, many many times over. WO is now free. The cost of WO is so insignificant it doesn't even compare to a man day of effort.

My world has changed.

Update: Here's a QuickTime movie, "WebObjects Overview" from my WO instructor in Apple iServices' Training department. Eventually this will be available on Apple's site, along with three other good (and longer, more detailed) movies. 2.4 MB

The link is now pointing to Apple's Training Theater web site which links to all the movies. They're well worth reading!

WebObjects pricing already affecting business decisions

It's been less than a week since the WebObjects pricing was reduced, but the decision has already impacted business in the WO community, and me personally. I'll talk about my personal experience over the last week, next time I write here. I'm so excited!

New Monitor

On Boxing Day last year, I bought a new monitor. A 19" Samsung SyncMaster 950p. I love it!

For a long long time I've had two video cards in my machine, Matrox Millenium G200s (PCI, 8MB each). The 2nd monitor I had connected was a 17" Daytek. (Before I had the 19", I had an ADI 15" as the secondary monitor) It's been really flaky for well over a year, with various guns cutting out sporadically, requiring me to pound on the top of the monitor case to get the colour back to normal.

Over the last week or so, that 17" monitor got worse and worse to the point where it was really hurting my eyes. Since I do a lot of development, bad monitors are bad business.

So, yesterday, I picked up another SyncMaster 950p. I'm in pixel heaven! Both are running at 1280x1024 @ 85Hz with 32-bit colour. I could run them each at 1600x1200, but I'm happy with this resolution.

I'm really enjoying working with these monitors. I feel more productive already, after only a day.

Before buying a 21" monitor, consider 2 17" or 2 19" monitors instead (assuming your computer can run multiple monitors - most modern computers can now). Way more total screen space than a single 21" monitor, and if one of them should happen to die, you still have a monitor left.

A couple cool links

The US Army is outlawing fancy PowerPoint presentations... and the world is a safer place because of it!

Are you pondering what I'm pondering? (via Flutterby)