stillhacking

After a week away, I'm back. It feels funny to not write any code for a full week. I had my notebook with me and limited Internet access during the week but time and energy kept me from coding. We took the week away to finish up a long term project. The project, which was the major renovation of a house that's been in my wife's family for many years, never had a specific time line but it feels good to be done. While we put a lot of time and energy into this multi -year project it was truly a labor of love. Because I enjoy programming so much, on some levels I liken it to software projects I have been a part of over the years which take on a life of their own. When we complete or reach major milestones on such projects we should take time to reflect on our efforts. I took a good bit of time before we left to come home and on the six hour ride back to do just that. It's not all that unlikely that I'll take on a similar effort in the future and I am confide...

A couple of weekends ago we decided it was well past time to get rid of some old computer hardware. I don't consider myself an environmental nut but I must admit I was bothered by the fact that I could pay $3 and dump as much electronic equipment as I wanted in my local landfill. I was previously under the impression that this was against local, state, and federal law but then I am sometimes guilty of listening to media folks who don't know the difference between Memorial Day and Veterans Day (so check your facts). The bottom line this hardware was taking up room and we were allowed to dump it. So after pondering this for a week or so and being a long time Linux fan, I made some time to check out a few of the smaller Linux distros. I must say as I write this I am still not sure there is one I would recommend to anyone who has an old 200Mhz computer with 64MB of RAM on it but Vector Linux is installing as I write (I did not say I got rid of everything). Anyway I was surpri...

So where's binding in Java at? Don't 'ya just hate that? I'm not sure if using bad grammer even makes a point anymore because so many of us don't recognize even obvious butchering of our language (not that I couldn't benefit from a refersher at this point in my life). I guess I could have said "what's up with binding in Java these days?" Lately I have been doing my Java programming in Eclipse and NetBeans after loving and using JBuilder just about since it was released (although I have heard I won't be able to do without the Eclipse-based JBuilder which I can never remember is code-named Peleton). I understand that NetBeans 6.0 will have binding but I'm not sure what that will look like and after attending Java One and reading about binding, I think I'm clueless. If you're doing some type of binding now and you're not using the stuff from SwingLabs (assuming you can still find it) or JGoodies , I'd like to know what...

For some reason we all have days (sometimes a few days in a row) when it seems like people all around us have taken a break from thinking. I'm not even talking about the critical thinking I'd like think is not as rare as it seems. Well I've had more than my share of days lately during which I've encountered little to no customer service, witnessed worse than average driving, and heard news reports that seemed to involve little to no thinking during what if any preparation occured. This past weekend we made a trip to the local Wal-mart. When we saw this minivan with a trailer attached parked like it was, I had to take a picture. Notice how the driver strategically chose one of the few spaces which has a tree directly in front of it so that the van itself fits nicely in the space and the trailer takes up right at half of the lane designed for driving between spaces. You can probably guess bad driving in parking lots is one of my pet peaves (also spelled peeve). If y...

We'll it's time to get (back) at it. Like many of you I have probably started a blog a half dozen times or so and left it for one reason or another. Perhaps I'll keep at it for a while this time. Among the reaons for doing so there is programming. There's a lot going on in the programming world (at least in mine) these days (not that this is unusual) but it seems there's much to discuss. If not discuss, at least write about so that when I forgot what I learned it does not take quite as long to relearn it.