I listen to podcasts on the way to and from work. Right now my favorite podcast is the stackoverflow podcast with Joel On Software

They have a summer reading list. Looks interesting.

 
   1. Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams
   2. Don?t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
   3. The Non-Designer?s Design Book
   4. Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering
   5. Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully
   6. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
   7. Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In
   8. How to Win Friends & Influence People

Got an interesting email today

Please consider this position below, they are interviewing 10 people, and selecting 6.
 
The will HIRE OVER THE PHONE MONDAY 5/19!!!!!

Job details:

    * 6 contract positions
    * 2-6 month contracts
    * 3 internal projects that need to be developed rapidly 

    * Exclusive contract opportunities until Monday, 05/19
    * Up to 10 block interviews Monday, 05/19 

    * Prefers candidates to work locally, but will allow partial to 100% telecommuting
    * Will hire off of phone interviews
    * Must have documented experience using Groovy/Grails ?? please reference check all candidates
    * H1Bs with good comm skills are acceptable 

    * If we can??t find enough Groovy/Grails candidates, we will change the focus
      to Ruby on Rails.  We need to make this decision by Thursday morning. 

CJ Liles
Technical Recruiter - Technology Flex
Kforce Professional Staffing

2201 E. Camelback Road, Suite 405

Phoenix, AZ 85016

602-776-1179 (ph), 602-264-6969(fax)

We grow by referrals so please don't keep me a secret!

Cliles@Kforce.com

www.kforce.com

Great People = Great ResultsSM  

 

Join my network http://www.linkedin.com/in/cjliles 

Going to buy a book? I always check AddAll before making a purchase. They seem to always find the best deal. I was at Barnes and Nobel looking at Groovy book. B&N wanted $40+ for the book, but I found it via AddAll for $23.03 with shipping. Ordered. The book was "Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer" by Venkat Subramaniam. Sweet!

I like Grails and Groovy. I do get to use it some in my current gig. Since I'm a consultant, I need to always think about my next gig... How do I find people and projects that are using Grails/Groovy? I know some people are working on a directory (grailscrowd.com) and I know other technologies have nice directories (workingwithrails.com), but I'm also impatient and like to noodle around, hence Grails Fishbowl.

But I recently discovered that linkedIn has a Grails User Group. I'm wondering why can't I just use that. Although I haven't figured out quite how to find the Grails User Group's list of people... but won't linkedIn do a much better job of this than me and my dinky hobby site?

Did anybody get their IntelliJ license after attending 2GX? I went online and did what I was supposed to do - but I haven't heard a peep from JetBrains or 2GX. I intend to start using it for the Grails work that I do. Anybody else had any luck?

Would it be good to have a site that registers people's Grails/Groovy skills? It would be a networking site for finding and locating people who have G/G skills for possible question answering and or finding/helping (full time/consulting) with groovy/grails work or small fun projects.

Does anyone think this would be a good thing? (comment, or send email bob@jadn.com) I presume it would be a non-for-profit free to join kind of thing. And the code and data for the site would be open. That would mean you could host your own Russian version if you wanted to - etc...

Today's the last day of the 2GX Conference. The conference was/is very good. The food has been amazing!! The conference has been like going to 8 Java user group meetings in a row... Two Ninety minute presentations on Thursday, four on Friday, and now the final two today... There is also a "coding jam" type thing to end the conference, which I'm looking forward to. Coming to this conference was a good idea.

I'm going to the Groovy/Grails Experience this week! I'm looking forward to it. I plan to learn a lot. I'm curious about approaches for handling legecy SQL systems. How the plugin system works. Some more detail on creating DSLs. I'm also interested in Eclipse and Maven integration. It will all be goodness.

I find this image amusing...

The second OLPC that I ordered was scheduled to arrive today. I tracked it being put on the truck. I was waiting for the driver to arrive, and then it happended. "Order canceled" showed up on the tracking site. A quick call to FedEx says that Brightstar canceled/recalled the order 2 days ago (1/30/2008). I think I'm going to just give up on this OLPC thing.

Well. I didn't hear anything from OLPC (I've contacted them numerous times, to no avail.), so on the last day allowed to make purchases (12/31) - I ordered another OLPC. I did file a claim with FedEx, they rejected it saying OLPC must make a claim. I expect the second order to arrive with no problems. I started the dispute process with my CC company for the first OLPC.

I figured I would fill out the FedEx claim form just for fun (for my missing OLPC pc - see below.) So I printed out the claims form PDF. When I called FedEx to get my "claim control number", they were surprised that would be filling out the claim. The FedEx claims lady said 9 out of 10 times the sender submits the claim. She said they usually deny the claim when it is submitted by the recipient. She said even if they do allow the claim, that they will send the refund to the sender unless the sender sends FedEx a letter stating that I should receive the refund. Super.

Well hopefully I will get the call from the OLPC Donor Services manager today or early tomorrow and they are going to take all this pain away.

Otherwise I guess I can call American Express and see what options they offer me....

I called OLPC's "Donor Services" this morning around 8:15 or so. I had advised them that I called already on Friday and that I was looking to hear something like "We will file a claim with FedEx, and your replacement laptop is being sent immediately." Alas, Daisy said that her supervisor will call me later today or early tomorrow. So I will keep my cell phone with me at all times :-)

Where's my OLPC?

The OLPC project got it's own youtube channel... sweet. http://youtube.com/user/OLPCFoundation

There is a OLPC meetup group forming with plans to meetup and discuss modding and hacking the OLPC XO laptop. The group is named MOD the XO Laptop

Woo hoo! I ordered an XO machine!! Sweet!

Mass production of the olpc started today! I find this stuff terribly exciting, for a number of reasons I think school kids can really benefit from a laptop. The hardware inovations are cool. (battery life, screen, simplicity) I strongly believe in open source and enabling technology - olpc is that I can't wait till Nov 12 at 8pm to order one for me (and a needy child.)

One annoying thing about using "ssh" is that it clears the screen when you disconnect. A lot of times I find I want to cut/paste something or just see something that I was just doing remotely. It finally dawned on me today that an easy way to avoid this problem is to just "disconnect" and not "logout". You can disconnect using the key sequence "~." and disconnecting doesn't clear the screen. Small potatoes for nearly everyone on the planet, but man - I find that nice.

Way back in 2003, Crystal and I went on our Honeymoon. We've been pretty busy so I only am posting the photos now...
For our Honeymoon, Crystal and I chose to go to Aruba. We were there for a week starting on Monday May 19, 2003.

Found some Old Old Photos! from way back in 2003

If you develop web applications in Java, watij.com is pretty darn cool. It allows you to write Java code which drive Internet Explorer's interface. This allows you to write Java unit tests that drive the web browser. The JSSH plugin for Firefox allows you to script Firefox as well.

This is a neat library, called IUI for creating web applications (javascript) that resemble the interface of the iphone. Nifty.

I bought 5 DVD Players. I backup DVDs using k9copy on Ubuntu. Mostly I backup titles that my kids watch in the car. The backups play fine in my kids Audiovox two screen DVD player, but the backups didn't play in my 4 year old living room player. So I went to walmart and bought a cheapy Magnavox DVD player, my DVDs still wouldnt play. Go get slightly different model. No dice. So then I buy three DVD players from Target and my disks play fine in the second one that I open. It is this one here. I return all the others. Sheesh....

Jadn.com is now running on Ubuntu, a very friendly version of Linux... We finally moved off Fedora 4, which was getting very old. After trying out Ubuntu on Crystals machine for a few months, I finally decided to try it on the server. Basically it has been a delight.

A new version 1.21 of jbum is out. I implemented my first Groovy feature (I had already added the Groovy console in to jbum for development testing - see the help menu.) The feature is "Order images by filename" which was 20 lines of Groovy. Very cool.

These are pretty funny if you do web technologies. The funniest part is usually the endings.... wait for it... (Press the little triangle on the lower left of each video to watch them in-page)

Java vs Ruby

PHP vs Ruby

Nice little cartoon about usability.

click on the cartoon for a slightly larger version

This is a snapshot of my brother's Desktop. You can see that Peter is quite the artist.

Handy FireFox plugin.... Download Status Bar (useful if you download stuff and get tired of the Downloads window)

My sister got married!!! WHOO HOO!!! GO SCOTTY AND DEE. I posted some photos.... (also mentioned on the kids page)

There is an interesting article on eweek, Python Slithers into Systems, which talks about what ITA does (I work @ ita.)

A good mock interaction, The S stands for Simple, that helps explain why I shy away from web services (It is too complicated and it hurts my gentle head.)

Is this an Amiga Emulator? Your talking crazy talk!

I just started playing with Groovy. It's pretty cool. Bought the Groovy in Action book, and I'm still working my way through it.

Mackie is almost 1 year old!!! Some photos of Mackie test driving his first cupcake

My father sent me some shots of the snow around their house

Nice....

For Christmas this year, I made Crystal a photobook from the pages on the kids web site. She loved it. I printed the book, Liam and Max Herrmann 2006, at lulu.com

I used a program I wrote to generate the pdf. If you want to know more about how I did it, shoot me an email.

I went to a nejug.org talk on Javascript. Mostly review for me, but covered a few interesting points and had some fun quotes. I like this one the best,

...Waldemar Horwat...lead Javascript developer... [at] Netscape... considered Javascript to be just another syntax for Common Lisp

Some phone camera shots taken at my office and on the ride home

I took some shots with my new phone in December. Its a Motorola V325i which is verizon wireless most basic phone. I used the open source program bitpim to extract the photos (and thus avoid paying the carrier a toll).

If you use Linux with Thunderbird (anybody left?), then you must install the moztraybiff plugin... it rules. It shows a little new mail icon in you tool tray. Something that thunderbird really should have built in (and I think does when it runs on windows.)

I like the phrase "snake-dancing simpletons" ... from The Dilbert Blog, Statistically speaking, any hacker who is skilled enough to rig the elections will also be smart enough to select politicians that believe in . . . oh, let's say for example, science. Compare that to the current method where big money interests buy political ads that confuse snake-dancing simpletons until they vote for the guy who scares them the least. Then during the period between the election and the impending Rapture, that traditionally elected President will get busy protecting the lives of stem cells while finding creative ways to blow the living crap out of anything that has the audacity to grow up and turn brownish.

Updated Jblog.sf.net... Added ability to use a local file as the "blog image"... handy for posting little snippets, and for when posting images off the desktop... needs a little more tweaking to be really useful.

If you develop web applications, go install the new firebug beta....

Intersting quote,

The faithful do resist the bogus certainties of religion??when they come from any religion but their own. Every Christian knows what it is like to find the claims of Muslims to be deeply suspect. Everyone who is not a Mormon knows at a glance that Mormonism is an obscenely stupid system of beliefs. Everyone has rejected an infinite number of spurious claims about God. The atheist simply rejects one more.

Synergy ROCKS!! Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It's intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s).

If you develop web applications, Selenium IDE - a open source firefox plugin - rules. It lets you record and playback sessions with firefox. Excellent for testing a web application or performing some routine web browser task. Very cool!

My father continues to work on his Farm House located on his Christmas Tree Farm.

Should we be teaching religion in school? Should the Church of the Flying Spagetti Monster's belief's be covered? Something to think about?

ITA Software ranked as #27 in Deloitte's New England Technology Fast 50. Sweet.

I made some progress on the basement this month. I took some photos of the Basement progress. NOTE: I made this photo page using a new version of jbum, if you have any problems viewing the page, let me know! Thanks!

I love this place. I sent a request for an extra battery for my laptop this morning. In about 10 minutes, I got a reply from the IT department that asked where I sat so they could bring it to me. When I went down their to pick it up, they apologized to me for not bringing it to me directly. ITA is oriented towards making developers comfortable and productive. Wow. Anyway, I have code to write...

ITA is in the news, ITA Software signs deal with Air Canada I work @ ITA. Nifty. [ More bizjournals.com ]

A friend of mine works at www.heliumknowledge.com. I think the site is an interesting start. Trying to solve the information discovery or findability problem, but from a different angle. (The Q and A angle.) I'm interested in what other people think about this site.

if you really want to see Microsoft scramble to patch a hole in its software, don't look to vulnerabilities that impact countless Internet Explorer users or give intruders control of thousands of Windows machines. Just crack Redmond's DRM. Read about Microsoft's Quickest Patch Ever

What would you do with 700 million dollars? How about create a Linux distribution? Interesting article Really Free Software

Playing with uploading video to video.google.com (since youtube's upload api doesnt seem to exist.) This is the same video that I uploaded to youtube.

Have the courage to take your own thoughts seriously, for they will shape you.
-- Albert Einstein

ummm... Cywgin good

Ok, Dvorak Is the last straw... I am finally going to try youtube.com. Here is small video of the Bean. When he was about 1 year old, I was giving him raspberry's and he responds. Ignore the sound of the cloths dryer in the background.

Happy 2nd Birthday Bean!!! I can't believe he's two years old already!

I fixed the RSS dates (after using http://feedvalidator.org/ to find out my rss feed had issues.)

I've just started trying out the FireFox 2.0 Beta 1 and I love it. How did I live without spell checking??? (It does the red squiggly line when you misspell)

Not too long ago I added rss feeds to jbum (the software that powers this blog), but I manged to botch it up a few days later.

Well, RSS should be working again. I've been noodling with a different client (since RSSOWL has problems on Linux - thats SWT for ya.) My rss client of choice is now liferea it is very good.

Note: the main rss feed is now http://jadn.com/~bob/all.rss

Google keeps and hosts videos of Google Tech Talks made at their campus. Cool...

My parents are involved in a Rotary Club back home, so I was suprised to hear that Muslim fundamentalists don't like Rotary Clubs. But once you read the story (or I listened to it as a podcast on my way into work), you can understand how the situation arose. The Rotarian Menace

This Linux logo rocks... from a story about Apple Hates Grandmothers... or basically about how proprietary sucks.

I added categories to JBlog (The software I wrote to generate this site.) Some testing is still in order, but it should also be generating rss feeds for each category. I want to stick my site into a planet site, and I really need categories for this.

JavaOne 2006 conference slides and audio are online - Woo Hoo!

Lots of geeky internet types are moving from Mac's to Linux (including one famous guy who has a mac tatoo, Cory Doctorow.) This guy, Mark, posted some advice about Linux programs that correspond to Mac ones. Even though I'm a die hard linux guy, I found his post, Essentials, 2006 edition, recommended a program or two that I need to check out...

Well the winds of chance of changed, and now I'm heading off to work for www.ITASoftware.com. They apparently do lots of stuff with Linux/Lisp/Java . So I should fit right in. I found an article, Carl de Marcken: Inside Orbitz, which seems to give some real details of how the business works there.

At lunch today, I was on my Microsoft is evil shtick, someone suggested I go Apple. I explained that, to me, Apple is just like a mini-Microsoft. But a blog post by Mark Pilgrim, When the bough breaks, does a much better job of explaining why I don't embrace Apple.

When people hear Free and/or Expensive - they usually think of money, but I usually relate them to freedom and time. I use Linux not because it costs nothing, but because it gives me freedom (to make any changes I want.) I don't avoid commercial software because it costs money, I avoid it because it doesn't do what I want and it costs me more to work around it's annoyances. (Google Toolbar spellcheck rules.)

I installed the Google Toolbar, , because it was on http://blog.russnelson.com's site. And I know Russ is both smart and very savvy. So I thought I'd try it out. I love the fact that it gives you spell checking in Web Forms!! Since I can barely spell, its hugely helpful!! Give it a spin yourself.

I've been using the RSSOwl program for a few months now. I really like it - it helps me stay on top of whats going on. I track these sites myrss.html and the same list in opml format.

An interesting advertisement http://www.bobscube.com/ and a good use of flash.

Another thing I hate is these online photo services who let you upload high res photos, then only let you share them in a online photo album as low res photos. Shutterfly bad!

I find Ben Stein interesting. He wrote a short article about getting ahead, How to Succeed in Hollywood -- and Anywhere Else. He is pushing his book, but an enjoyable article none the less.

I do the occasional JavaScript development. I was surprised this weekend when debugging some JavaScript to find that FireBug, already an excellent FireFox development tool, now includes a JavaScript debugger. Wow! Works great!

Well, I used Ruby on Rails - and some JavaScript including using the Prototype library to layer on a commenting system on to my blog. It's pretty simple (so be nice.) It's kinda of neat that the page itself is still static html, the comment system is layered on as an AJAX application.

Classmates.com and linkedin.com are interesting social network sites. But I hate when they try to hold you hostage. For example, I wanted to email someone in LinkedIn and I get this....

Contact SOME PERSON directly through InMail?? To send an InMail now, upgrade your account or purchase individual InMail credits.

Intersting article on rails, What's the secret sauce in Ruby on Rails?

Finally a public TCPMonitoring utility.... I can't even remember how many of those I'v written over the years.... why didnt I opensource any of mine? I think they were small hacks.... Yea, I know eclipse/wtp has one built in - but I like small little utilities that have source code - so I can go in an beat it when needed....

If you know what Linux is, then you should check out this awesome user testimonial. Game on.

A strange but interesting article It Doesn't Take an Einstein to Realize Why Microsoft Is Headed Down and Google Is Headed Up

The tiobe site, http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index, shows how popular different programming languages are. Although I mostly do Java (21.316%), I'm learning both Ruby (0.456%) and C# (3.271%).

My good friend Greg asked me about an RSS feed for my page, so I added one. It is the feed.rss link near the top of the page.

RSS is most often used with a news reader. Since I wanted to test out my new feed.rss, I tried to find a decent free RSS client. I tried google's reader and I thought it sucked. Then I found RSSOwl and it rules! It's built on the eclipse engine so I'm not too surprised.

I added a smattering of kids photos to the kids page

Finally, the JavaOne 2005 presentations are completely online (slides and audio.) I've only ever been to one JavaOne, but sometimes I would like to attend a presentation (via the web), finally I can. This rules!

I now work for Miva.com as a senior architect (cloud-dweller). They do search and advertising stuff. I added the search box on blog home page Ads on the side of this page to toy with search/advertising stuff.

What exactly does Miva do? Well, from Miva's investor relations (Miva is a public company) here is a description;

MIVA's new media platform facilitates performance marketing for partners (publishers), advertisers and consumers (end-users). Our primary focus is on providing our partners with a complete set of innovative solutions enabling the acquisition, retention and monetization of their online audiences. For our advertisers, we provide solutions to manage, optimize and measure return on investment from keyword-targeted and context-related performance marketing programs. We generate traffic and leads to our advertisers through our network of publisher partners. Our integrated e-commerce merchant solutions allow online stores to capitalize on leads by offering robust online storefront, shopping cart, shipping, and payment capabilities.

I designed the process for withdrawing money from an ATM. I created a class diagram, sequence diagram and an activity diagram. (I assumed the card holder only ever has 1 account.) Pretty cool.

I just got a Garman C320 for my wife (Happy Valentines day honey!) I've been in cars that have GPS systems before, but I was never the driver. And I was never familiar with the display. After having tinkered with my wife's for a few hours, and then used it in the car - I was blown away. It's just amazing to have all that additional information available. Its like having a symbolic debugger for your travel. After only using it twice, I feel naked when driving without one. The C320 was almost $400. Amazing.

I'm an advocate of open source software. My rational is simple. I want whats best for everybody and I think the best thing for everybody is open source. Closed source has advantages primarily for the proceducer of software (developers). Open source gives advantages to the users. Since there are usually many more users than developers, typically the common good is for the software's source to be freely available. Thus open source software is in the commmon good. Open source enables freedom. The freedom to change, modify, and redistribute. Even though most users (and most developers) never do drop down and make changes to open source software, we all benefit from the developers who do. In the same way all citizens have certain rights and even if they don't all exercize them, everyone benfits from everyone having those rights.

Two new entries on the Kids page, Max is arriving in the "Year of the Dog" and we cleared out the cameras of all of our fall shots.

My coworker says the real power in EJB3/Hibernate is in the associations. Just mapping an object to the database is good, but mapping an object graph is better. So I expanded Person to have a collection of Subscription. Like so,

@Entity(access = AccessType.FIELD) public class Person implements Serializable { @Id String email; String name; @OneToMany(mappedBy = "email", cascade = CascadeType.ALL) List subscriptions; } So then I had to create another class, Subscription.... @Entity(access = AccessType.FIELD) public class Subscription { @Id(generate = GeneratorType.AUTO) public Integer id; public String email; public String subject; }

Pretty simple. At first I didn't have the Cascade property on Person.subscriptions, so I was having to load/save them myself (yuckie). After adding the Cascade my life got easy again, woo hoo! I then split the simple driver (from previous blog entry) into two classes, a SessionFactoryFascade (for setting up connections to hibernate), and a FileLoader which reads a bunch of Person's and adds a bunch of Subscriptions. The I wrote Dumper to query the database and print the results. Nice.

At work we are tied to WebSphere and thus jdk1.4. So for the past 2 years I haven't ventured out into the land of Java5 or EJB3. Well, I have a small project that I wanted to do here at home, so I decided to try out both Java5 and EJB3. After two hours of tinkering, I wrote a class named Person;

@Entity(access = AccessType.FIELD) public class Person implements Serializable { @Id String email; String name; }

Then I wrote a simple driver, and Wow! I'm reading/writing my POJO into the database without writting any SQL (not even to create the table!) Sweet!!

I attended a NEGeeks dinner on Wednesday. It was cool to meet up with some other geeks and trade stories. I did learn one important thing. Never, if dared, agree to drink the contents of an upside down frisbee filled with beer. I turns out 5.5 cans of beer can be poured into such a vessel. Good to know!

The new fedora logo is cool. Its got the 'f' for fedora, and the infinity symbol for freedom forever. Swell.

We are expecting our second child in March. Do you guess boy or girl?

This site, http://reddit.com/, is a cool geek site. It has user rated links to other interesting bits of geek news.

Seems like Sun is starting to get it. Back in 96, when I worked at Sun, I thought it was pretty simple. When Unix wins, Sun wins. So doing everything possible to promote Unix was good for Sun. Including open sourcing all products (from Schwart's blog) Seems they finally agree with me.. although did they leave out java?

Posted some photos of our trip to Disney on the kids page

Released 1.7 of jbum! Mostly this added the menu item "File/Order images by exif date". This takes your photos and arranges them by the date stored in the photo. This is really handy when you use more than one digital camera on a trip or multiple people use their cameras (say a birthday party) and you want to merge the results into one story.

The Bean turned one last weekend. One of my little projects was to do the artwork for a CD in the party favors. check it out

Updated the Bean's page with photos from our Family Vacation to Florida.

Some people visit their parents and enjoy the relaxing warmth of home. My fathers idea of warmth and comfort means asking me to help go out to the tree farm and burn some trees... In these photos, you can see that the warmth part was pretty covered!

If you know Javascript, then check out greasemonkey. It lets you modify webpages by injected javascript into every loaded page. It's crack

UPDATE 05/17, there's now a story on wired about greasemonkey

I wonder if I will be like this when the bean is older...

I updated the Bean's Page with some pictures of him and his pals

My home town, Rome New York, has an Amtrack Train station. My father snapped some photos at the dedication today... go pop!

I updated the bean's page with photos from Maine and St Patrick's day...

Let us realize that the privilege to work is a gift, that power to work is a blessing, that love of work is success. -David O. McKay

Well, after getting the top replaced... I had the new car for three days and then I got into a fender bender. Oops... It was just after a big snow storm and the roads were a little slippery.... Ah well, accidents happen.... I should soon have it all fixed up....

Woo Hoo, we get a new car... Here are some pics. Here is a pdf document showing exactly what I ordered. Happy Driving!

While visiting my parents, I took a trip up to my fathers Christmas tree farm to pick out a tree for Christmas. I took some pics.

A sometimes funny page, joy of tech had a funny anti microsoft image today... They have a new image every day....

Updated Liam's page with some shots of him at 5 and 6 weeks...

I updated my photo to web program, jbum.sf.net, fixed some more bugs, made it easier to use... enjoy!!

My father is getting city water... He sent me some photos of the water works. I like the heavy equipment... cool stuff..

An excellent essay... How Will Companies Ever Make Money Off Open-Source?

More farm house Rehab 5

I now have a son... see my son's page over here