[@379]
A true underdog story…

We went to see Dodgeball on Saturday afternoon. Brainless, but funny.

Patched, again. JReleaseInfo 1.2.0 was released with my second patch. Nice. The Pulse Erik's Pulse has been published. Quirkz I reported a bug in Quartz 1.4.x. No response yet.

[@852]
CC Share

Clevercactus (Diego's company) has formally announced the first public beta release of Clevercactus Share.

I've been using it for a while now. It rocks.

[@580]
Riddick

We went to see The Chronicles of Riddick yesterday. I'm not a big fan of Vin Diesel, but he keeps on making good action-packed movies. I guess he's growing on me.

[@695]
Development Tools Someone a while back posted a list of the development tools they use on a regular basis. I figured I would do the same. Here goes nothing…

• Ant
• BeanShell
• Cavaj
• Eclipse
• FindBugs
• IDEA
• JProfiler
• Jalopy
• PMD
• SlickEdit
• SmartCVS
• UltraEdit
• WinCVS
• WinRAR
• XMLSpy

[@635]
Version Numbers How comes there are so many companies that do not list the current version of their software offering? I'm so freaking tired of having to hunt down for version numbers. Stop wasting my time, and list the version numbers at the top of all product pages. Even better, create a feed for updates so I can subscribe to it.

[@696]
OSS Java So now than Sun said open source Java will happen at some undetermined point in time, everybody is doing the happy-joy-joy dance. How quickly you forget? Don't you remember when Sun said it would have Java standardized? Way to go, Sun. Keep on dangling that carrot… [@680]
Hitched! Matt is getting married. Congrats! His parents must be ecstatic. He's finally moving out. [@652]
IDEA vs. Eclipse I've read/heard it a thousand times, Eclipse is faster than IDEA, and it still makes me laugh. They both are slow as molasses at times. [@554]
Jtest I'm playing with Parasoft Jtest. I find it quite interesting that they are using Eclipse as a framework. At least it makes for familiar ground. The verdict so far: good. It's extremely slow, but it does generate useful tests and reports. Amazon Tag Library I wonder if there is a need for a tag library, like the Google TagLib, but for the Amazon API. Arjun has suggested it. I don't really know how much work it would be, but if there is some interest… Let me know. Amazon Talking about Amazon. I had an interesting chat with someone working there yesterday. I found out a bit about the technology behind the scene, and how they handle 600 hits per second. Fascinating stuff.

[@012]
The Day After… We went to see The Day After Tomorrow yesterday with Vik's sister. It was quite refreshing, and surprisingly low-key for a big budget movie. I've read about people complaining it was too preachy and eco-friendly for them. I didn't get that feeling at all.  

[@662]

Pulsed Out

The Pulse will no longer be included in the JDJ Newsletter. Here's what I received this morning:

Hello, Erik,

After we'd put the newsletter together as usual, and after I'd sent you the link, at the very end of the day yesterday our CEO changed the newsletter content. He wishes to try out white papers in the space that Erik's Pulse has been occupying.

We'll maybe return and request running your column again at a future time, but right now it would probably be best to count us out for the next little while, as we give our CEO's white paper feature some time to see if it's effective.

Thanks, in the meantime, for a fabulous feature. Hope we'll keep on working together, even if it turns out to be on something different from the "Pulse" idea, in the future.

Regards, Lin

--
Lin Goetz
Online Editor, SYS-CON Media

Of course, the Pulse will continue in the Javalobby Newsletter.

[@557]
JReleaseInfo Patch #2

I've submitted another patch to the JReleaseInfo Project.