The Goldfish Chronicles

There’s a new movie coming out, The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising, and the trailers look terrible. It’s based on the 5 long Dark Is Rising series by Susan Cooper - my favourite books from childhood before I got lost in the world of scifi/fantasy. I re-read the ones I have when I was back in the UK last year, and I need to go ahead and buy the missing ones one of these days.

The film however looks like one of these classic “Yeah, but the movie going public won’t like that… jazz it up a bit… how about if he’s American… and he has these major powers like fire and ice and telekinesis… and we can’t have some old guy as the Merlin character, let’s use Lovejoy. Oh.. and he’s not an Old One… he’s an immortal warrior. Reading imdb, I also see: “Max (Gregory Smith), Will’s older brother — a benign character in the book — is now an agent of the Dark who accompanies Will on his quest with the secret purpose of thwarting him”. Gah.

The single one redeeming feature is Christopher Ecclestone as the Rider (though I thought the book had a Dark rider and a White rider on the side of evil so that might be yet another are for complaint).

*sigh*

Tonight I went with a pretty simple yet lovely recipe from cooks.com. Not the healthiest of meals - I went through a lot of butter, but Carrie and I both loved it. Nathan on the other hand drank his juice and refused to eat anything. Boy barely eats sometimes.

Tried something new tonight, an apple crumble in which a) I used real apples and not a lazy tin, and b) I replaced 40% of the flour with oats. The apple was a hit, though my soul cries out for Bramleys (or at least Cox’s) and not Granny Smiths. No more tins of apple + bad ingredients (sucralose/high fructose) for me. The oats were good, but made the crumble strangely chewy and unsatisfying.

Reading around, it seems English apples don’t grow well in Washington as it’s too warm (or in the other apple centres of Spain and S. France). West Virginia surprisingly is the place to go to hunt some down, and I also saw a blog that had found Bramley’s in Atlanta. It’s a bit odd that it’s too warm here in Washington, the weather seems very similar to the UK. Maybe when they say Washington, they mean the core of the state (east of the rockies), I think someone said that’s where apple growing country was. Perhaps on the Seattle coast I’ll be able to find some apples and get to feel nostalgic.

When two people at work separately recommend a book, I tend to listen. So it was with Altered Carbon, a future-based detective story, with the major twist being that it is in a world where bodies are sleeves and people slip between them, and back themselves up, at will.

I mostly read while walking to work, and when catching the bus/walking home, and it was a battle to stop myself trying to read this when I got home. Very good book - not quite a Neuromancer or Cryptonomicon; but definitely up there with Snow Crash. The wikipedia entry suggests that a movie will be out in 2009 - though cynicism makes me suspect this is only a vaguely likely.

Looks like I’ll be ordering the sequel, Broken Angels, sometime soon.

A colleague of mine has written an article for The Server Side on what the current state of play is for Java WS. Should you use Axis2 or CXF, or stick with the devil you know - ie) Axis1?

Axis, Axis2 and CXF: Surveying the WS Landscape

I guess Bjorn also needs to update it to include the new Spring WS

I’ve taken the plunge this year and I’m going to be speaking at ApacheCon 2007 in Atlanta. It’s at 3pm on the 15th of November and is called “How to make Friends and Influence Projects“. At the time the title seemed witty, though I’ve already renamed it to “How to Make Patches and Influence Projects” in my head (and probably on the slides too).

The synposis is:


Committers get all the attention on a project, but there is a huge amount that non-committers can do even without that elusive commit karma. In this session we cover various strategies that can be applied to make a difference to an open source project, either to bring a dormant project back to life or to prove yourself the ideal committer.


It’s a mix of tactics and approaches on how to contribute effectively to open source projects, whether all you have time for is to report a bug, or whether you want to see a release happen. There’s nothing very Apache related about it, hopefully it’ll be of interest to those who don’t want to know about Apache James, WS vs REST and HTTP Server.

Mostly I’m worried about using a mic and standing on stage. I’ve never used a mic before, and I’ve never looked down on people while talking, it’s always been at the same height.

The last time I did any speaking it was a disaster (it was an exercise in a PR class). Prior to that it had gone well in JUGs. I think because I have to be excited about the topic, it’s not something that can be turned on and off for me. This is a subject I believe strongly in, so I’m looking forward to it. There’s no reason why a contributor can’t put forward a quality patch to a project they barely know.

So register with the early bird program in the next week and a bit and save some cash

As I’ve been grumbling about this since JavaOne, I’m making sure I point out that the Spring Batch source hit the SVN repository on the 15th of August. There have been a steady stream of commits since then from dsyer, aarendsen and lucasward.

My apologies for the tardiness in my reporting that; I’ve been away for the last month and somewhat off the net. Being late is in theme though

I can report that the current ‘mvn clean install’ happily passes, which is always a very nice start.