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Troy

We went to see Troy over the weekend.

JAR Version Magic

Eugene posted some interesting comments on including version information directly in a JAR's manifest. “I did not know that.” — Very nice, though somewhat limiting.

Wasabi Chips

Do you like Wasabi? And I don't mean the badly dubbed movie we recently watched.

Do you like Tim's Cascade chips?

I just picked up a small bag of the limited edition at the grocery store. This stuff is the bomb. If it wasn't for the high-carbs, it would probably be my snack of choice.

GUI Designer

I needed to quickly build a simple Serial Number generation application for one of the projects I'm currently working on. Since I pretty much suck at doing UIs, I decided to give the IDEA GUI Designer a try.

As a prototyping tool, it simply rocks. I wouldn't want to do very complex UIs with it, but for the simple stuff, it's pretty straight forward.

In many ways it reminds me of the CodeWarrior GUI thingy, but more powerful. More complex to use though. I did haveP to read the tutorial and had to hunt for the ant integration instructions.

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JReleaseInfo Patch I've submitted a patch to the JReleaseInfo Project. If you have a need for a nice ant solution to manage your version/build numbers, you oughta give JReleaseInfo a try.

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Van Helsing

We went to see it over the weekend. We both really liked it. We saw a preview for The Chronicles of Riddick, which looks a 1000 times better than Pitch Black.

Sounds like this summer is going to be good for movies, so far we've earmarked:

• I, Robot
• Troy
• King Arthur
• Spiderman 2
• The Day After Tomorrow
• Hero
• The Bourne Supremacy
• Catwoman

and I'm sure there will be more.

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Kill Bill v2 We went to see Kill Bill v2 on Saturday afternoon. Bleh. XCode & Panther I finally managed to install 10.3 on our iMac DV. I got new set of Panther disks a while back, but never got around to it. We'll probably try it on Vik's G4-upgraded iMac next. I also installed Xcode 1.2 which seems very nice. I quickly built a few sample Java projects and was pleasantly surprised. When I have chance I'll try converting a few of my old CodeWarrior projects. I really loathed ProjectBuilder, but I can definitely see myself using Xcode for Mac-centric projects.

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Hellboy

We went to see Hellboy last weekend. Lots of laughs, but not enough action for my taste. We're planning on seeing Kill Bill v2 next.

jvmstat

Have you tried jvmstat? You really should.

visualgc (pictured) is quickly becoming one of my must-have tool.

Install4J Rocks

I've been putting together an installer for a new project. Normally I would use InstallAnywhere. Since I needed to install a daemon/service, I decided to give Install4J a try instead.

I have to admit that I'm seriously impressed. Install4J's UI is very straight forward, no fluff.

Somehow I always end up having to write plugins for IA. The whole process is quite laborious and tedious. On the other hand, Install4J's API is a breeze. Simple and to the point.

I did have to create a few custom screens. Swing is really not my forte, but I managed (with a little help from Diego — Thanks!)

I also found a small issue under OS X, which was fixed by Hannes right away.

What else can you ask for? Oh yeah… It's a lot cheaper too.

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Amcrap Part Deux

In case you wondered, Vicki's train was delayed by… get this… 5 1/2 hours last Friday night. Apparently they got stuck behind a freight train somewhere down the line.

If something like that happened in France, people would undoubtedly revolt and bring back the pitch forks. Geez.

Busy

I've been pretty busy as of late. My linkblog updates have been spotty. Sorry about that.

The Punisher

We went to see it on Saturday. We both liked it. Incidentally it was my first theater movie of 2004. We also want to catch Hell Boy and Kill Bill v2.