Onward….
September 4th, 2009 by HenLooking for the muse to return. In vain currently.
Excellent blog entry back in April from Stephen Colebourne on No Java SE 7 - The ASF perspective. I’ve been there for much of it and found it informative myself to see the history being discussed. As it is… Sun have shown one of the great dangers of IP to a project being locked up in one (for-profit) entity (as MySQL AB had done beforehand) by being bought by Oracle and suddenly all our foundations are crumbly and jellified. I read elsewhere that the Oracle/Sun deal is on hold for four months - hopefully good news for any threatened with layoffs.
Another excellent entry (also in April… my how slow I am at reading) from James Strachan on Scala as the long term replacement for java/javac?. Groovy begetter picks Scala as successor to Java splash across the tabloid blogs near and far. Of course James is one of the greatest “shiny thing!” creators out there, so who knows what he’ll like next year 
Still. A kick in the arse to go read more on Scala.
Atlassian have their JIRA 4.0 release coming out someday and have nudged plugin authors to make sure their plugins work and maybe to think about tying their own release dates. I don’t currently have any pending work on my plugins, but do need to sit down and prod the 4.0 beta to make sure the plugins work. They probably won’t - I seem to relish in finding JIRA APIs that are going to be modified. I also need to work on Apache’s JIRA instance - I merged 3 JIRAs into the main one and there was a tiny bit of custom data mangling that I’ve still not worked out the database fu to fix. That’s blocking the Struts and ActiveMQ ones merging in and ending up on the “one true JIRA(tm)”. It really needs time to focus though… my dim sum life really doesn’t allow for that right now.
Speaking of… dim sum increments and glacial development are a process I’ve been mastering (imo) for the last few years. Add glacial administration and glacial project management to that as well. I seem to specialize in working on things that have no defined end goal, but instead they move a little bit further each increment. Often the increment is a daily event, but only 30minutes. Context switching makes that 30minutes a tricky one to maximise. Still - it’s how various Commons libraries have been released. Need to write up Glacial Development one of these days. My older name, which I probably prefer, is Tortoise Development. Amusing that I’d forgotten about that, come up with Glacial and then remembered. The tortoise doesn’t know where the milestone is, just puts one foot in front of the other and moves forward. Obviously it’s not as simple as that - for example you could end up on a life long death march if you weren’t defining forward as closer to some realizable goal. Still… probably is a life long death march 
Two major code things I want to be working on right now but lack the impetus are Commons Lang 3.0 and migrating Jakarta Taglibs to Tomcat Taglibs (along with the creation of the Extended Taglib and release of a JSTL 1.2 implementation). The Taglibs migration will end my involvement with Jakarta after 8 years (probably 9 by the time I’m done). That’ll be quite the day. Really need to use that to drive me on.
We reinstated our Netflix subscription now that a bunch of movies have built up. So nights currently are spent watching the play on demand and the delivered dvd’s. Fill the time etc. Plus I’ve robbed the open source time kitty of an hour each night to clean the house. At 2:30am in the morning, said kitty is way overdrawn and in need of rescuing.
Apache Licensing/Trademark lists are also being ignored. There are others who can jump in, not a low bus count there thankfully
Waiting on the muse. Reading library books on the bus. Buying Willard Price out of print books to complete the collection that my children probably won’t care about anyway. Looking at explodingdog.com pictures. Wanting to write AA Milne type poems for the kids (not managed to achieve the blend of innocence and maturity that AA Milne manages yet) and create a maze creation bit of software for the eldest. Engaging in retail therapy at REI. Waiting on the… well, let’s be honest. It ain’t a muse. No creative spark in this here realm. Just waiting on the energy to pick up the mop and do some more open source janitorial work. Someday.