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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.