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.