Today - the 31st of January - is my birthday. I celebrated it by sharing a wonderful meal of Pancit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancit ) with my girl last night, and then finally going to see Russel Peters last night at the Improv at the invitation of my good friend Venkatesh. That was probably the hardest I've laughed in a month. My brother from another mother Mario took me out drinking last night afterwards, and the fact that I don't remember much of it attests to how well we did!
I'm catching up on some of my reading (more on that later). I was reading the December issue of WIRED. I don't envy Ray Ozzie his situation. He's the new chief software architect at Microsoft (taking over Bill's job). Questions need to be asked about whether Microsoft's viability is certain. Ozzie is himself a wunderkind that Bill Gates hs called the "one of the top five programmers in the universe". Certainly,the proof is in the pudding. He invented Lotus Notes based on the research and learning environment Plato (see this good article ), which he tinkered with during his college years. As an aside, I note that the WIRED article attributes Price Waterhouse's purchase of Notes as a turning point for Ozzie and his work one that eventually made it attractive to IBM, which then bought Lotus two years later. My mother worked at Price Waterhouse during that time, and I remember her having this incredible workgroup software on her laptop. It was only later that I'd understand how powerful it was. Now, Ozzie isn't just changing the face of office workgroups, he's chaning the landscape of the computer desktop in general, and he's got to do it through Windows and Office.
I just posted another blog entry on Artima.com, called "Modeling to Avoid Hacking Your Model in ORM Mapping Format," and naturally would appreciate any feedback. The entry is available here. The entry is a discussion on modeling, and its advantages, using either UML or ER. A solution using Maven is provided to provide a work flow using ER modeling.
I've had the dubious pleasure of doing some web programming in the last week (actually, 4 days) and I've had quite a few different requirements which, frankly, I was surprised to find weren't eally me by the framework I was using (Spring MVC). Instead, I came upon a sle of single-focused, quality components out there that I think ever Java web developer should have in his or her arsenal. These component usually work across frameworks and are Servlet agnostic. They seem to be reasonably well documented. While I promise I will go into great depth about them in a future post, I want to at least list them here right now i the hopes that they save some people some trouble.
SeaDragon, an application from Microsoft that extracts the "Deep Zoom" component from Silver Light and enables it on an iPhone, has been released to the Apple Application Store (Wonders never cease!) because the Apple iPhone has a fantastic GPU.
Anyone else noticing the extreme slowness of Java applications on Ubuntu 8.10? I upgraded and was expecting that the seminal Java 6u10 (strike that! 11! ) would do better than this.
