The Goldfish Chronicles

Add the white chocolate drops at the end: http://blog.generationjava.com/roller/bayard/entry/200701241

I just upgraded to Firefox 3, very nice so far. a) It’s fast, GMail is now quicker than using Outlook or Thunderbird and b) I love that when it asks to remember a password, it does so in such a way that you can wait to confirm that that is the right password. So as my wife would say, color me happy.

Of course after checking that GMail was nice and quick, I checked the personal sites and then went to Amazon.com. Where I was reminded of the new Daily Deal cheap album bit on the Digital Download site. Friday it was $1.99 for a Coldplay album we have, I didn’t look yesterday but today it was a Barenaked Ladies album that my wife doesn’t have, so for the princely sum of $2.99 I bought my first ever mp3s (amazing I know… up til now I’ve always bought CDs because it hadn’t passed the magic price point for me of having an automatic backup disc.

I’ll be looking tomorrow to see what the next daily deal is

An actual fun blog meme, so I’ll take part. ’sup’ is svn update, and ’ss’ is svn status. I use tabbing a lot, and tabbing and history files do not work together, however there’s no reason to suggest the %age breakdown below would be wrong. ‘open’, is an OS X command to do the equivalent of double clicking a file.

124 vi
82 cd
79 ls
47 svn
30 grep
27 ss
20 more
15 mvn
10 sup
9 open

I know… you’re shocked. Just released a set of bugfixes for Simple-JNDI, along with the ability to pass parameters down to DBCP.

Here’s the google group announcement.

Download the release here, and read the release notes here.

Went to a legal session earlier by Larry Rosen. He included a piece on the ethics of the license rather than just the license. We’ve been calling that the intent at Apache recently. Anyway - seemed to be well received. Understand the community, don’t nitpick the license text.

Laptop behaved oddly on the flight down, it decided to start crashing for no reason. Not something I feel like spending money on right now, a new PC laptop, a entertainment centre computer, a Wii and a PS3 are all ahead of it on the to-purchase list.

Also sat and listened to the iPod as usual. Beautiful moment when the plane ascended, things were at an angle and said iPod slipped out of my trouser pocket and started its smooth chrome ride down the plane. That sense of utter helplessness as you watch it going made me laugh. Fortunatley someone grabbed it and it quickly found its way back to me.

I don’t recall what songs I listend to, but one mentioned “roses”. That reminded me of the roses outside my house growing up. That reminds me of the T-junction, the car always parked on the other side in front of the farmer’s field and the loose gravel that was always accumulated like scree by the side of the road. I can’t remember the colour of the electric (or was it waterworks?) box by the field. Shift scene by 500m to the playschool building down the road. 45 degree slabs of concrete, grass overgrowing the concrete and a church nextdoor with an iron fence of some kind - but what colour was the fence? Was it black, or just a dark green? I don’t recall.

It seems that colour is the first thing to go. Odd.

At least it’s one of the first things to go. People also are - Facebook has been educating me in the people who have vanished into the unseen clouds at the edges of my memory. What else is lost in memory. Songs are a nice way to dig into the hidden spaces in your head; as I’ve mentioned before, sunlight is also a nice way to dig in. Sit in a sunbeam, close your eyes, let your expectation of where you actually are change. I wonder what else is.

Heading off to the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) soon. Should be interesting, and hopefully I’ll get online and be able to blog a bit.

I went to my first Amazon fishbowl the other day - these are internal events with singers or authors discussing their works for an hour at lunch. Think brown bag, but with content creators not coders.

This one was with sci-fi author Charles Stross - and despite prevaricating a bit (I had work to do), I ended up going down and enjoyed it immensely. Mr Stross read from his new book, Halting State; a 2nd-person mystery novel, set a few years in the future, and then answered questions. I really enjoyed the reading, and it all ended well when I was one of the winners of a raffle to get a free copy of the book (subsequently signed).

Many thanks to Bjorn at SourceLabs for poking me to go - he’s a big Stross fan and knew about the Amazon event before I did as he was in contact with the author for another event he was doing.

Released yesterday thanks to the nudgings of a user - the 1.0.2 of my ProjectList for JIRA. You can see it at work on the Apache JIRA (who are using a snapshot version between 1.0.1 and 1.0.2 currently). It provides the lists of projects in a more succinct way than the default JIRA portlets can do.

This release sorted categories and took care of errors when there were no project or category descriptions.

Thanks to the nudgings of a user, I’ve released Simple-JNDI 0.11.2. It contains a few changes:

• Maven2 build added
• Removed debug from SJDataSource
• Updated to latest dbcp/pool

Simple-JNDI is an in-memory implementation of JNDI, useful for unit tests and also as a configuration system behind gj-config.