Our first podcast!

I’ve decided to jump on the podcasting bandwagon and share my voice with the rest of the world. I used Garage band to record and edit sound bites without any trouble. Hopefully videocasts will also be on the horizon. Enjoy!

Download the Podcast

We are having a boy!

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Originally uploaded by jduty.

Kerry and I had our second trimester ultrasound yesterday and found out we are having a boy! Of course these things are never 100%, but the kid wasn’t shy so we are pretty sure;) Along with that they performed several measurments that showed the baby is doing great!

Second Trimester Ultrasound Pictures

I’m a spoiled little boy…

Just incase anyone doesn’t know, I’m a spoiled little boy. For my birthday Mom and Dad got me an iMac G5 with iSight. This thing is amazing, the power of a G5 with an amazing screen, nice sound system, airport extreme with BlueTooth and iSight all in a slim box. Another nice thing about is the only cords going to or from the box is the power and the keyboard USB wire (which can be removed if you buy a Bluetooth keyboard). Of course, the real motive is the fact that they can now teleconference with us and see their new grandbaby at the push of a button ☺.

Technology Everywhere

Sometimes technology’s ease-of-use amazes me. Kerry had a church orchestra rehearsal this Saturday morning in Saline and I decided to drive her. While she was there I went to one of my favorite coffee shops in Saline to do my Saturday morning ritual (coffee+paper+good book). Normally I’m in and out of this coffee shop pretty fast but today was the first in a long time where I actually got to sit down. Quickly I realized they have free wireless Internet so I pulled out my powerbook and started downloading my NRP podcasts and blogging. I remember being a teenager and getting Internet access one year for Christmas. It took about 10 minutes for your 18 baud modem to connect and there was no DNS. You had to have what was called “The Internet Yellow Pages” that would tell you where to go. Now, maybe 10 years later if you find yourself with 5 extra minutes you can connect in a matter of seconds in a coffee shop through the air.

I’m amazed in my teenage-adult life how far technology has come. However, now that I’m about to be a father I find myself asking, “What technology will be out there when my kid is 10, 15 or 21?” My guess is that the Internet will no longer be something that you connect to but rather something that is integrated in your everyday life. The idea of any information, at anytime, anywhere. You are beginning to see that with the creation of wireless devices, however I still believe they have a ways to go. Of course, I hope that with the creation of all this stuff that we never do away with low-tech activities such as reading a good book, or meeting in person with friends and family. I’ve always been a believer that technology can both bring us closer together and father apart.

13 Week Ultrasounds pictures up!

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Originally uploaded by jduty.

It has taken me long enough, but I finally have the 13 and-a-half week ultrasounds up. This set is really great because they used a much more advanced imaging device so you can really make out body parts. For those of you who need help, the doctor even labeled a few of them with feet and hands. Enjoy!

Go see the pictures!

Thanksgiving in Santa Fe

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Originally uploaded by jduty.

Over Thanksgiving Kerry and I went to visit my parents in their new house at Sante Fe, NM. It was a great trip filled with lots of eating, rest, and my Dad and I can say we actually hiked up a mountain (more out of stupidity than exercise). The house they got is a traditional adobe a little outside of town with an amazing view. Check out the pictures.

Michigan Vs Indiana

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Originally uploaded by jduty.

Today Kerry and I went to my first Michigan game at the Big House. Spending 8 years in marching bands I’ve been in a few stadiums, but the Big House is truly unique. It was absolutely perfect weather and of course Michigan won. As you can tell from the pictures we had great seats and a great time. If you are ever in Ann Arbor and enjoy football, I recommend you attend a game. Coming from Baylor, it was also interesting going to a game that was packed with fans.

Check out more pictures here

Just another night at the Duty’s

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Originally uploaded by jduty.

You would think, having a two story house, that there would be plenty of room for the Duty family. Obviously this photo shows that theory incorrect. Just another night at the Duty’s.

Remote Debugging JBoss in Eclipse

When I’m not thinking about the baby on the way, I’m writing java code for Harris & Baseview. I usually focus on server-side java code using J2EE with jBoss. There are many wars going on in the technology market today, and one of the largest is the IDE war. I’m of the mind developers should be able to use whatever they want, thus the developers will always drive the direction of product development, not the constraints/features of an IDE. For the last year I’ve been using Eclipse for my java development and I’m really falling in love with it. Each release seems to get better and better and its developer community (made up largely of corporate sponsors) are very motivated to keep improving it. One if the things I love the most about it is its remote debugging feature. I usually write code on a Powerbook and I like to run and test the code on a Dual G5 tower in the corner of my cube. Eclipse allows me to remotely debug a JVM on a separate machine, including stepping, tracing and setting breakpoints. I love it. Here are instructions on how to setup JBoss for remote debugging with eclipse. Its that easy!

Of course the other great thing about Eclipse is that its free. That is a benefit especially when JBuilder goes for a measly 5K per seat.

11 Weeks

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Originally uploaded by jduty.

Here is a great picture of the future Duty. The Head is on the upper left.

Find the baby!

By popular demand, here are the 11 week ultrasound pictures. Can you find the baby?

11 Week Ultrasound pictures!

Arms and legs everywhere!

Just got back from today’s ultrasound and I’m totally amazed how much things have grown! Last visit (4 weeks ago) the baby was 7mm long and looked like a grain of rice. This time we saw it moving with arms, legs and a head. As the doctor positioned the device around we could see that the kid was really putting on a circus. At one point I could really make out a hand (being able to identify body parts is really eye-opening). I’ll post pictures tonight.

Baby Technology

Kerry and I have her next OBGYN appointment tomorrow and I really can’t wait. Last time was so much fun seeing the baby (even if it was the size of a grain of rice). Tomorrow Kerry will be 11 weeks and it should be about the size of a peanut (I find it interesting that all the books compare the size of babies to food items). People tell me that we may be able to hear the heart! Got to admit, technology is too cool, especially when it lets us connect to our unborn child.

The cat… or Baby is out of the bag!

That’s right, if you haven’t already heard Kerry and I are having our first baby. As of today she is 10.5 weeks along and doing great. We have already had one OBGYN appointment and will have another this Friday. I’m really excited because we may get to hear the heart! As of our last appointment, which was when she was 7 weeks the baby was 7mm long (looked like a grain of rice). Can’t wait to see him or her again this Friday! Currently her projected due date is May 27, 2006.

A night with Henry Rollins

Went to see Henry Rollins last night with Matt and Sean. Yes, this is the same Henry Rollins from Black Flag and the Rollins Band. He is currently doing his “Spoken Word” tour where he goes around and basically just talks about whatever he wants to talk about. If you have no idea who he is this may sound boring. But trust me, its hilarious. After an almost 3 hour show, my gut hurt from laughing so much. He takes his show around so if you are interested go to www.henryrollins.com.

Going to the Big House!

Kerry and I are really exited, we have just purchased Michigan football tickets. We’ve been meaning to go for several years but just haven’t had the time or money. For outsiders, U of M football is huge. Its always sold out and the tickets can get pretty expensive. Even though they may not be having their greatest year, it will be a good time in the Big House! We will be attending the Indiana game on Nov 12th.

The Needle

Just finished reading Ken Follet’s, “The Needle.” Wow, the best spy book I have ever read. This book takes place shortly before the Normandy Landing in WW2, where the allies are desperately trying to keep secret their initial strike location. A German spy who could ruin it all is frantically trying to get back to his motherland and an entire country races to stop him. I like this book because he writes spies not as techno-geeks with 101 gadgets, but as smart, deceiving agents who knows how to manipulate people to achieve their goals. If you like this genera, I highly suggest you pick this up. Its been out for a while so you may be able to buy it second hand.

The hum of silence….

Its 11:45PM and I’m sitting in a server room in Little Rock, AR watching my server import several years of data. For people who have never experienced a “Server Room” it is an interesting experience. Those IBM commercials where engineers are in those completely white rooms with cool windows, clean floors and perfect walls is a total pipe dream. I’ve spent a good part of my professional life in server rooms that usually reside in the basement of old buildings with un-used steam pipes protruding from the walls and unorganized cables hanging from the ceiling. The weirdest thing about server rooms in the hum. Electronic devices (usually fans and hard drives) produce a humming sound that you usually block out after a few hours. But when you leave after a 12 hour day and get your first bite of silence, suddenly you realize just how much your ears are hurting. It usually takes me a few hours for my ears to stop ringing after I leave. I’m coming on a 14 hour day so I’m guessing my ears will be ringing into the night. No worry, Friday is quickly approaching!

Code in the night…

So its midnight and I’m sitting in a Hampton Inn in Little Rock, AR writing code. I’m officially a child of the technology era. The light at the end of the tunnel is that I’ll be flying home Friday for a little break. Professionally, this past week and weekend has been the most trying I’ve ever had. It will all pay off when we go live (or go up in a big ball of flame). Write more later.

Fun in the Sun

Since August is looking to be a very busy month for me, Kerry and I decided to take a few days for R & R before the flood hits. We are currently taking a 4 day weekend to Charlevoix, MI. If you live in the Michigan area, this is a great place to visit, it has great food, some of the cleanest beaches I have ever seen on Lake Michigan, and some very low-key for a tourist town in summer. I’ll post more after our vacation is over, until then enjoy the pictures at http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonandkerry.

How To Be Good

I just finished reading “How to Be Good” by Nick Hornby (the author of “About A Boy” and “High Fidelity”). Like his other books, this one takes place in the heart of London. Kathy is a Doctor with a husband and 2 kids, but over the past few years her marriage has decayed as her husband has become more and more angry and cynical. When things seem to reach bottom, the husband meets a spiritual leader and is “reborn”. This rebirth involves taking in the homeless, giving away all their personal items, and basically taking the charity to its extreme. “How to be Good” seems to address the question, “What is Charity and when does it truly start and personal gratification and definition stop.” “And can those two overlap?” Is it truly charity if you are doing it to add meaning to your life? Hornby’s style of writing is light, witty and funny and I recommend it to anyone looking for an enjoyable read. I really enjoyed “High Fidelity”, and this is a great addendum to his collection.

JavaOne, and things

Its Saturday and I’m sitting in a coffee shop down the street from my house watching it rain. Kerry is in Boston this week visiting some friends so I’m bacheloring it up (an by that, I mean playing on my laptop). Work is going good, but very busy. We are getting ready to release our product, which is exciting, but like all projects in the world, it is coming down to the last wire. I’m really excited because I think we are going to show our market something they have never seen before, which was our goal from the beginning.

Other than work I’ve just been playing around. I attended JavaOne in San Franciscoa few weeks ago and had a ball. Anyone who says Java is dead just doesn’t know what they are talking about. You’d be amazed the places it is popping up, servers, wireless, embedded apps. Lockheed Martin (airplane and missile people) were showing an un-manned aircraft whose internal controls ran Java (Realtime VM of course). I’m excited about Java 1.5 and I can’t wait to start using it.

One big topic at JavaOne was EJB 3.0, which several vendors have released. Basically, it takes a lot of the overhead out of using EJB, thanks to Java 1.5 annotations. You can take a regular java class, and by tagging it with annotations, turn it into a EJB. The container you are deploying in takes care of doing everything else. Of course xdoclet has been doing this for a while. Same thing with Entity Beans, which is nice because some of the mapping files for those can get pretty bad. The funny thing, is that when we saw Hibernate a few years ago, some people said this should be the next ejb3, well, it pretty much is. POJO based mapping.

Other cool technologies were Groovy (java scripting) and JXTA

JXTA is a java P2P framework where you can map an application on top of any network topology. I think this technology is very important because of the way the industry is going. As rich-clients become more and more intense, the client-server model becomes un-manageable. Customers no longer want to interface with the system, they want the system to interface with them. A good example is a stock program. As a client, I don’t want to poll the server for changes, I want the server to notify me in real-time about changes. This becomes more complex as you throw NAT firewalls and try doing this over a WAN. JXTA was created to overcome this problem. So take a look at it, if you don’t your competitors will!

Three years ago yesterday Kerry and I were married. I can’t believe it’s been 3 years, doesn’t seem that long at all. I look back and it is amazing how much we have grown together these last few years and how she has not only become my wife and life partner, but my best friend. Who knows what the future will bring, but I know I’ll have Kerry with me to face it.

Kerry got me an iPod Shuffle and I love it. I already have an iPod which I also love but I’m always afraid to take it running or to the gym. The shuffle is perfect for it. No moving parts, weighs less than a Bic lighter, its perfect. If you are looking for something to use and don’t feel comfortable taking a $300 iPod banging around, iPod Shuffle is perfect. And with the new PodCast feature, I can listen to NPR while pumping iron.

Spurs beat Pistons

San Antonio Spurs are the champs beating the Detroit Pistons in game 7. Being from Dallas,TX I would have liked to see the Mavericks win, but I’ll take the Spurs also(both from Texas). Since I’m going to be surrounded by Poston fans tomorrow, I’ll be sure to be a proud, vocal Texan.

“Survivor” by Chuck Palahniuk

Last night I finished reading “Survivor” by Chuck Palahniuk. First off, Palahniuk is very dark so if that sort of thing bothers you, this is not for you. This book is about a man who has spent most of his life in a religious suicide cult. The book really doesn’t go too much into his life while he was there, but deals more with his struggle after he leaves for the outside world (part of his dilemma is after he leaves they commit suicide). As dark as this sounds Palahniuk has actually made this a pretty funny book with great characters. As you get further into the book you realize that this could be a satire on today’s main-stream media and organized popular religion way of life. I really enjoyed this book and would recommend it to anyone who enjoys dark humor and does not get offended easily by satire (especially when directed towards Christianity). If you can look past that, you will be on the floor laughing.

Stop talking about Star Wars!

The third and final Star Wars prequal opened last night and no, I haven’t seen it. I’m a fan of Star Wars, but not of crowded movie theaters. So I figured I would wait to see it until this or next weekend. Spoilers are everywhere! I can’t event listen to NPR without hearing about the movie. So, to everyone who has seen it, please give us a change to enjoy the movie before ruining it. Not all of us can stand in line until 3am on a Wednesday and sleep in the next day!

All in good time…

Its been a while since I last wrote. Things have been good. Last weekend Kerry and I took a trip to Dallas to see my brother graduate from TCU and to meet my cousin’s 6 month old baby girl, Nicole. She is an awesome baby! Very well behaved and with a great personality. Of course I can’t tell you how many times Kerry and I got the question, “So when is your baby coming?” All in good time. Hopefully pictures are coming.

Groovy Scripting Language is groovy

Most people know professionally I mostly do java/J2EE server programming. At my current job, we are writing a server that needs to have pluggable functionality. Different clients may want different things based on their current process. I began to think this is a great job for a scripting language. However, we still want to maintain platform independence (great selling point). So I started looking for a java scripting languages. Groovy caught my eye mostly for its ability to be called inside and outside of compiled java code and the fact they will be JSR. After playing around with it I really like it and I think it will be a great fit for what we are trying to do. The language is filled with dynamic features like closures, regex, sql, xml and blocks. Plus you can actually extend it into a language that could be published to clients (much like Adobe CS does with their scripting plugins). So now when a client requests a specific feature for their site, we could just write a groovy script and upload it to the server, no code forking or special releases. I think that is very powerful. Below is my first groovy script, the famous and very complicated, Hello World (and I print out any command line args).

// my hello world stuff
println "Hello, World"
for ( arg in this.args )
{
        println "Argument: $arg"
}

One of the cools things about Groovy is that it supports Closure and blocks, so I could do the above for loop like this

this.args.each { arg -> println "Argument ${arg} " }

Arg is just a java List, which I’m able to traverse in some pretty cool ways now.

If you use java code, you should really check out Groovy.

Lady Bears National Champs!!!!!

Most people know that Kerry and I went to Baylor University for our undergrads. Well, last night the Lady Bears basketball team won the National Championships! And they just didn’t beat, they dominated Michigan State the entire game! The courtside band was there and hearing some of the tunes brought back memories. I have to admit, I really miss Baylor and the people there.

Go to Baylor Bears Sports for more information on the game.

Dune

Whenever Kerry and I go to Texas, I we usually go to this used book store chain called “Half-Priced Books.” The last time we were there I picked up “Dune” by Brian Herbert. I finished it last night and I have to say I really enjoyed it. Herbert builds a sci-fi world not really based on magic but on politics and survival. The story has multiple plot lines that seem to come together at the end, bringing answers to questions that may have arisen earlier in the novel. I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys reading science fiction or fantasy. Its also refreshing to find a novel in that genre that’s less than 500 pages long (most seem to be over a thousand).

Kinsey, the movie

This last weekend Kerry and I saw the movie “Kinsey”. This is a drama about the works of Alfred Kinsey, an educated Zooologist who late in life changes his research interests to human sexual behavior. If you ever had anything to do with psychology, you’ve heard of his two text books: “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” and “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female.”

Going into this movie Kerry was much more education on the works of Kinsey than I was, being that she has a masters in social work. The movie starts out at full speed with very graphic language about sex and approaches it an almost an uncomfortable analytical view, which is what you have to do as a scientist studying something. I thought Liam Neeson did an excellent job portraying the type of character Dr. Kinsey must have been. His co-star, Laura Linney, also did an excellent job playing Mrs. Kinsey.

All-in-all I really liked this movie and would recommend it. However, I wouldn’t go see this movie with anyone you do not feel comfortable talking to about sex, because it will spark conversation.

Fun in the snow

Last weekend Kerry and I went showshoeing , yes this is a real thing. Anyone remember the cartoons where people strap tennis racquets to their feet and walk around on the snow? Well they really do that here. Kerry found a place that would rent us both shoes and poles for the weekend and several parks in the area have trails for such a thing. I personally had a lot of fun and I think Kerry did also. They are surprisingly easy to walk in and give you a lot of traction on the snow. The poles, which are nothing more that ski poles, were also very helpful. It had just snowed over 6 inches that week which provided for some great scenery. Both Kerry and I took pictures so hopefully I’ll have them up soon.