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This week has been nothing short of a rollercoaster! The week started with Spring 3.1 debuting, chock full of new features. From the release announcement,

Yeah, so this is stuck in my head. Sigh. It's really catchy... the first twenty or thirty times.

I do a few things to every OS X installation to make them more useful. Most of the things I mention below are things you can do to OS X itself, some are third party applications that are generally useful. I hope they help you, but really I'm listing them here so I don't have to rediscover this stuff again next time I'm doing a fresh OS X installation. ;-) My hope is that these are general, generic and useful enough to be applicable for everybody, not just software developers with a penchant for photography like myself.

Devoxx is a huge conference that redefines "community." I like the conference - a true paradise - it has a lot more soul than JavaOne and represents a really nice sampling of what's what out there, not just what Oracle's working on. So, it was with great pleasure that I went, despite being pretty sick. I stopped by the doctor's on my way out of town and loaded up in antibiotics then began the 20-hour door-to-door journey from Los Angeles, United States to Antwerp, Belgium.

What a ridiculous blur of insanely fun travel and technology.

SpringOne2GX 2011 is upon us! I'm in a terminal at San Francisco Airport ("SFO," for those of us in the live-on-plains biz) waiting for my flight to Chicago. This year's going to be ridiculous. Honestly, I can't wait.

I recently had somebody ask me what the best content for getting started with Neo4J is. Naturally, my answer was to grab Spring Data Graph and don't look back. But that's not entirely fair. Admittedly, you might be better served by simply learning Neo4J and then layering in the Spring Data support to reduce a lot of the tedium. So, without further ado, here's a list of great content that I put together for people who are looking to learn Neo4j and Spring Data Graph (which works with Neo4j.).

I love the characterization of Python in this post from InfoQ:

One of the most importants about a framework is that it is pluggable, that it is extensible. This is very much a core promise of a good framework, and separates it from mere libraries. Most of the Spring frameworks are exposed as libraries and component models. These are the two levels most people interact with Spring: they reuse the numerous and powerful libraries as-is, or - when the libraries aren't able to read your mind, Spring provides some surface-level API against which to write pluggable code for certain responsibilities. For example, Spring Integration comes with batteries included, many, many batteries, actually. In this case, the batteries I refer to are the integration technologies supported in terms of the various modules that are provided: web services, databases, message brokers (JMS, AMQP), file systems (FTP, FTPS, SFTP, and regular filesystem mounts), etc., etc. The same is true of Spring Batch and indeed of all the other Spring frameworks. If the batteries included aren't quite what you want, and you'd like to plug in your own logic, the 80% cases are accounted for in terms of the component models that the projects expose.

Hey sports fans! What a crazy few weeks! September started off with a bang as I found myself in sunny Las Vegas for VMWorld 2011. I really enjoyed the time there to connect with my ops- and system-centric brethren. What a great crowd, and the excitement surrounding the exodus to the cloud was palatable. People are excited about vFabric, and about connecting their applications with a truly integrated stack, RabbitMQ, GemFire, tcServer, etc., and they're doubly excited that they have in the Spring portfolion a unified programming model for all of these technologies. So, exciting stuff, definitely. If you missed all the excitement, don't fret: lots of was recorded and made available here!

Happiness is having RabbitMQ and PostgreSQL in the output of my vmc services invocation ;-)

Tim Fox retweeted this tweet from Hacker News's Hacker News Bot that linked lists had apparently been patented and responded as aptly as I could've: WTF.