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).