seanwillson.com

no, not another book review. i finally broke down and called peter over at mag 1 instruments today to inquire into the status of my 12.5” portaball i ordered 14 months ago. i’ve had a few conversations with him earlier this year about possible ship dates all of which came and went. he said that the earliest he can get it to me now will be the end of august. seems that high quality large mirror blanks are in short supply after the war given all of the government orders. since zambuto optical company has no glass, mag 1 has no scopes (large aperture), which means sean has no astronomy except with his itsy binoculars. i’m not ready throw in the towel yet, i’ll wait it out. these scopes are truly amazing pieces of work and from what everyone says are well worth any wait. well at least i have le tour!

last week started out ok, not fantastic, just ok. i hit most of my workouts and ate pretty well. i’ve started this week a bit more on track than last. amy and i had great upper body workouts yesterday and this morning we pulled our butts out of bet and did cardio with the roosters. if it’s decent weather tonight i’d like to get in a 15-20 mile ride as well. my meals yesterday were good, not 6 bfl meals, but 3 solid meals with some coffee to boot. today i’ve had 3 solid meals thus far and plan to continue the streak. it takes a while for me to get going on any program but once i’m motivated and moving it’s not that hard to keep going.

amy and i went for a ride this weekend. during one of the climbs, while i was really pushing it, i heard this loud twwwwaaannnngggg noise and knew right away that i bused a spoke. being a big rider i know that sound all to well. once i got to the top i got off the bike and started to feel the spokes eventually finding the broken one. the tire was now wobbling pretty bad, it was doing it slightly before it broke but it wasn’t hindering my riding at all. since it was hitting the brake pads half way through each revolution i had to unhook my rear brakes so i could ride home without wearing the brake pads out. about $15 later i had my tire repaired after visiting my bike shop.


i really need to pick up a prs-5 work stand and maybe someday get my own truing stand. hummm, someone has a birthday coming up soon i think.

yes, i’m alive and kicking. sorry i haven’t update the site in a while. i’ve been busy at work, went to michigan to see my family, and have been trying to get back on track with my fitness. i’m on day 3 of being back on the bfl wagon. i think i finally have the mental hurdles out of the way, now it’s on to the physical ones. once i get going i usually can keep going, but when i stop, i really come to a screeching halt.


i’ve been trying to get some bike riding in. i biked a few days last week and once this weekend. i’m getting motivated more and more, especially with the tour de france starting soon. i plan on getting a personal century ride in by the end of the summer.


i’m the proud owner of a few new geek toys. we purchased a replay tv to keep up with shows we don’t have time to watch. if you have a replay you have to check out dvarchive, it’s a very cool replay archiving and control application written in java for just about every platform. we also picked up a hp laserjet 1300 printer so amy can print reports for school and because we don’t have a home printer for miscellaneous stuff. it’s not color i know, that’s a strategic decision. we wanted the epson 2200 but the black & white plain document printing on that machine is very slow and not that good looking, graphics amazing, black & white no. anyhow, we plan on picking that up later this year or next year. finally, i’m planning on picking up the airport extreme base station to add 802.11g and a print server to my network this weekend. i was originally planning on using a 3 port print server i bought but the cost differential is negligible and i don’t gain as much with the plain print server. i’ll let you know how integrating the airport into our all pc home network goes. remember, my ultimate goal is to get a mac next yet, thus my desire to buy the airport.

well the second day was better than the first. the sessions had a bit more meat, not much, a bit. it seems like every conference that i attend is more marketing than practical information that is usable by most developers. even with the different development or “black diamond” tracks you still get 90% marketing 10% meat. here are a few sessions and tidbits that i found interesting.

• java server faces (jsf) — think a mature version of struts. had we had this framework when i was working on the web stuff at parlano then 60% of the code would have been useless. sometimes something good does come out of sun, this is one of the specifications and products to watch.
• representations state transfer (rest) — just that, a session to rest in … ZZZzzzzz
• macos x and java — sales pitch (though a good one) that i’ve heard before. some interesting things to note: in the 1.3.1 jdk that apple released, it was written in carbon and for the 1842 classes that sun wrote apple had to write 900 classes to integrate it into the operating system. for the 1.4.1 jdk released from apple, sun wrote 2991classes (can we say code bloat) but since apple wrote it in cocoa they only had to write 300 classes to integrate it. they also hinted at being able to embedd apple core audio and safari in java applications now. any apple heads able to confirm this? sounds cool to me. they then had a demo of a java collaboration application from marratech that was pretty slick. it supposedly allowed you to enable word, excel, pdf, etc in a conferencing application that was 100% java. it runs on windows, linux, solaris, and os x. they supposedly are using the apple core audio libraries as well. they admitted that the audio on from the mac’s was far superiour to that on the other platforms using java. anyhow, i found this interesting because we had grand ideas like these with mindalign as well. oh the dreams … anyhow, the demo was cool and slicker than i though it was going to be.
• jax-rpc — they key from this talk is to look at jsr 196. seems they are adding a pluggable security / authentication api into the application servers officially instead of the hacks you have to do now.
• ejb 2.1 & 3.0 architecture — there are some cool things coming in these releases (2.1 will be a part of j2ee 1.4 in q4 and 3.0 is entering request stage now so think q4 2004). 2.1 is termed the web services release enabling you to easily expose your ejb’s as web services. they are also adding a timer service for those time based business events and call backs that you need to be persisted and transactional. they are also adding pluggable messaging providers for message driven beans, that and message destination linking. should facilitate the cleaning up of a lot of hacked code. finally, they let everyone know that the theme of the 3.0 ejb spec as well as the j2ee 1.5 spec is “ease of development”. basically they are going to try and step back and clean up a lot of the useless coding burdons they put on developers and try to make their lives easier. this includes intelligent defaulting, metadata (jsr 175), utility and factory classes, and cleaning up deployment descriptors. they succinctly described this as “deployment descriptors must die”.

there are a few remaining good sesions today and then some good bof’s. as i said earlier today was a decent day. tomorrow is chalk full of sessions from 8:30am- 6:00pm with no keynote to sleep through. well i’ve been monopolizing this sun long enough i guess. i’m sitting on the expo floor typing this between sessions. till tomorrow then …

my laptop isn’t cooperating with the wireless networks here at java one or in my hotel. for some reason i’m able to get a signal but i’ve been unable to get an ip address or connect with it. as a result i won’t updating my site as often as i’d like. i hate windows nt, i have to reboot every time i change any networking configuration and since i takes about 10 minutes to boot into nt it’s rather painful trying to get the wireless working.


today at java one has been rather slow so far. it’s more of an pavillion day designed to get everyone in, registered, and walking around to see the vendors. the sesssions don’t start until 2:15 today. i attended a few of the intra day “visionary” sessions but those were way to high level for me. there are a number of good sessions lined up for this afternoon all the way till late late tonight. we’ll see how long i last and if the late night birds of a feather (bof) are worth attending. i’ll post later tonight or tomorrow with more meat.


i was rather disappointed with the discounted devices this year. they normally have a nice discount for conference attendees at java one on a gadget. each year it’s something different like a palm or a zaurus. this year it’s one of two nokia phones that i’ve read nothing but bad reviews about. specifically the nokia 6800 and the 3650. the circular dial on the 3650 is impossible to use and the interface is way to camera focused and unresponsive. all of the default menus are related to the camera with the tiny buttons bringing up the menus that you actually care about. also when i push a button there is a noticable lag/delay before it performs the selected function. it’s actually a laberous task using this phone. not worth the discount of $200 off the already high $499 sticker price. i bet they’re giving these phones away in 6 months. the 6800 is equally as cumbersome and the keyboard, while a cool idea, actually detracts from the looks of the phone. it’s way too thick in my opinion and the keys don’t feel comfortable positioned on the sides of the screen. my hands don’t natually flow over the small qwerty keyboard like they do on a computer. to top it all off neither of the phones has bluetooth or any other wireless support. too many negatives for that price tag. oh well, maybe next time …

i’m leaving tomorrow morning for java one san francisco. i’ll be out there all week attending the conference with my fellow java geeks. i may or may not have a wireless connection at the conference. if i do i’ll post my thoughts about the conference and other useless bits. if i don’t, well then don’t expect anything to appear here till next sunday. i wish amy were coming but she starts school this week. alone in california, what is a geek to do?