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.