The Goldfish Chronicles

Wife is with her family - taking the youngest along for the ride. Eldest and I are at home on my vacation.

Busy first day - finished putting up shelves, assembled a wheelbarrow and dug the border plus 1% of a new garden. The 1% is a bit depressing - 300 sqft to do and once we’d done all the shopping (shovels, seeds, wheelbarrow etc), assembled the wheelbarrow, and dug a trench for the new border; we had enough time to do a 3 sqft patch that led to eldest being very sad about not being able to keep the worms as pets. Still - it’s a start. Unless I work at night the challenge will be to see how much we can do at the weekend. Aim is to seed the first third at the end of February, so a few weekends to go.

Deployed the new Maven2 based Taglibs site:

Old site screenshot:   http://people.apache.org/~bayard/OldTaglibsSite.png

New site screenshot:  http://people.apache.org/~bayard/NewTaglibsSite.png

Not much change - which is the intent. More of a change for the underlying taglib pages themselves - here’s a sneak peek.

I’ve made more commits (96) to the Apache repository in the last 4 days than I did in any month last year. 129 commits in July 2007 is the last time I hit such ‘heights’, which was when Commons moved out of Jakarta.

So what have I been doing? A few things. Nothing exciting, all the kind of stuff that I like to plod along doing. In Jakarta land I’ve been migrating the taglibs to Maven2. I started it a little under a year ago and lost steam. Tried it again on the 3rd of the year and it went well. So the last couple of days have seen more activity in Taglibs since… *Vader pause*.  Major goals are: 1) Make it easier for newcomers. 2) Make it easier to test by figuring out how to integrate Cactus into a parent pom. 3) Link the energy to the forthcoming JSTL 2.0 release. Major bit I’m dreading is running the JSTL 2.0 TCK.

What else? A bit of gump committing. When you start ripping around with components, you break the gump build. Fun. Also an email to Cactus to start learning about Cactus+Maven2.

Another is the Apache Attic site. I got stuck trying to copy the main Apache setup over. Finally commited it on the 1st in the hope someone else would solve it for me, then with the fresh energy on the 3rd beating up Taglibs I realized my mistake and have a 1 page site sitting in SVN ready to be deployed when enough time has passed for people to yell at it. The Attic is a place to (somewhat) put the projects that have gone inactive. Ironic that while I’m whittling away at that, I’m also providing life to projects that are not too many steps away.

Lastly - resolving the only open bug in the Commons Collections 3.3 release list. Technically the work was done on the 31st, but the commit was done today. Version 3.3 has been ready, for some value of ready, for release for a while but I just don’t have the energy to go through the release process. Not so much the process - that’s just sending an email and waiting for people to find bugs for you. I can’t remember how to do the M2 release steps and am prevaricating.

Was searching to try and find a better set of pictures of a chalkboard/cupboard for the lad to put his toy food in. Nothing seems to show the cupboard open to see if it has shelves or just a big hole. As I searched for”Spencer Locker with Chalkboard”, I ended up quite quickly reading about American school shootings and the copycat effect.

Side note - various gun bits this new year in WA on the news. Reminds me of arguments back in KY about how the UK ban on some guns didn’t stop gun crime. Answer being that it wasn’t meant to stop criminals with guns, but crazies with guns. No idea if that was successful, it seems so but maybe there was also media coverage adjustment as per the article above and you just hear about it less. One would hope that laws on the media respecting the royal family would also apply to respecting their affect on the public health.

An interesting point on one article on UK gun control points out that parliament will have to pass special laws to allow the Olympics to have shooting. That part of things always seemed silly - that our Olympics team had to go abroad (why can’t their guns be kept at shooting clubs under regulation etc), but then again I imagine some claim a sport that glorifies shooting is bad (well… Olympic shooting is hardly that glorious… a boring affair really).

And now for today’s hypocrisy… I’m looking forward to taking my eldest to archery with his grandfather when we’re in the UK That’s traditional…. you’ve got to do archery otherwise you’ve got no right to stick two fingers up at the French (though Wikipedia claims the Agincourt link is an unproved legend, though interestingly the earliest documented use is before Agincourt. Snopes agrees, though they have the legend wrong - it’s not the middle fingered salute but the two fingered salute.).

One of the comments to the In Rainbows album by Radiohead discusses it against their other albums - Kid A, Hail to the Thief, OK Computer. None of them albums that I listen to (I think I have OK Computer, probably not the other two). I think of myself as a Radiohead fan, but that means I like Pop is Dead, Pablo Honey and The Bends.

I got in the same situation for the Manic Street Preachers. Gold against the Soul, Holy Bible and Generation Terrorists were my favourites. The newer stuff I stopped listening to.

My immediate thought on reading the review as that I was feeling old. Then I felt like one of those people who goes to some band’s concert and complains all the time that <insert early and unknown song here> as their greatest - highly irritating people. So maybe I’m being hypocritical. I guess the saving grace is realizing I’m not a Radiohead fan anymore -it was only the $5 offer on Amazon that made me check out the album’s preview.

All of this is waffle. Much of it is down to the first impression. Favourite Radiohead album? Pablo Honey. First Radiohead album I got? Why Pablo Honey. Same applies for many other situations I suspect. Best programming language? Why the one I first learnt, or first did huge amounts in etc. Why? Because there are pathways in my brain that have been imbued with its style. With the Manics my preference is for any of the first three albums - but again they’re the first three I got, and it makes sense that they’d be the most similar to each other.

I think there are two interesting things in this:

The first is when first impressions overrides logic.  My favourite Queen albums? A Kind of Magic (first one I owned) and then Queen II (second one I owned), with over a decade between them. First impressions itself is the important concept - not the fact that you are syncing with a band at a particular range of their career.

The second is that these things get bucketed. Liking 3 Queen albums appears to stop a 4th one pushing its way in - but it didn’t stop me liking the 1st Radiohead album. I’ve catalogued the albums and limited what can go in that space, while allowing other items to go in other spaces.

The third is that 3 seems to be the size of the bucket Bit sad in the “people can think of 3 to 7 things”, I’m on 3.

Probably the most uneventful new year’s eve of my life. Put the kids to bed as usual after a long and rather unhappy (crap oven) cookie baking session. Eldest went to bed a little late due to watching Shrek 2, but was asleep as soon as I’d finished reading the first couple of tiny chapters of The Twits. Squeezed in a bit of coding. Played Civ 4. Oh look it’s 2009.

One of the things I’ve noticed about having basic cable (ie: 15 channels or so) is that you miss a lot of the big hyped media holidays. The few channels we have that do hype things are the ones I tend to surf past the least. So the same applies to christmas - I’m finding these events less of a culturally or socially attached concept and more of a minor (or somewhat noticeable in the case of christmas) event for the family.

A bug was reported back before the snow and the holidays pointing out that custom fields didn’t work in the csv-view plugin I released back in November. I freed up to look at that tonight and have released a 0.2 with that fix in it.

* http://developer.atlassian.com/jira/browse/JOUT-45

* http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRAEXT/CSV+View