Train trip postponed to March 12!

Rats, foiled by snow. Ah well, it'll be nicer weather anyway. And we are still going.

Other travels coming up: heading to Georgia for great Grandpa Garnett's 95th birthday at the end of March. Going to DC for a Nats game with the kids in either April or May.

A Man's A Man For A' That

1795
Type: Song
Tune: For a' that.

Is there for honest Poverty
That hings his head, an' a' that;
The coward slave-we pass him by,
We dare be poor for a' that!
For a' that, an' a' that.
Our toils obscure an' a' that,
The rank is but the guinea's stamp,
The Man's the gowd for a' that.

What though on hamely fare we dine,
Wear hoddin grey, an' a that;
Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine;
A Man's a Man for a' that:
For a' that, and a' that,
Their tinsel show, an' a' that;
The honest man, tho' e'er sae poor,
Is king o' men for a' that.

Ye see yon birkie, ca'd a lord,
Wha struts, an' stares, an' a' that;
Tho' hundreds worship at his word,
He's but a coof for a' that:
For a' that, an' a' that,
His ribband, star, an' a' that:
The man o' independent mind
He looks an' laughs at a' that.

A prince can mak a belted knight,
A marquis, duke, an' a' that;
But an honest man's abon his might,
Gude faith, he maunna fa' that!
For a' that, an' a' that,
Their dignities an' a' that;
The pith o' sense, an' pride o' worth,
Are higher rank than a' that.

Then let us pray that come it may,
(As come it will for a' that,)
That Sense and Worth, o'er a' the earth,
Shall bear the gree, an' a' that.
For a' that, an' a' that,
It's coming yet for a' that,
That Man to Man, the world o'er,
Shall brothers be for a' that.

Testing the rails

My daughter and I will be trying a weekend experiment where we catch the Amtrak Cardinal in Prince West Virginia on a Friday night and ride to Chicago. There, we’ll simply waste a few hours hunting White Castle hamburgers, seeing the Sears (Willis) tower “lose your lunch perch” and finally hop back on board for a return trip with some deep dish pizza. Why? To get to the other side, of course.

I originally had an idea to walk out of our house in Blacksburg, Virginia and see how far we could get over a long weekend. In the dead of winter. It seemed like a simple plan, or not even a plan, just a gesture from a seed planted by authors like Edward Abbey, Muir, even Henry Miller. Go. Wander about. Open one’s eyes. See what one sees and maybe tell others one’s experiences. Well, not to be overly romantic about it, but it is a simple romantic idea. Maybe just because it isn’t done. We drive places to do things, you see. We are Americans.

But that idea is going to have to wait for another weekend. We’re going to do it and I relate it here just because it lead to the idea of hopping a train to Chicago and coming back for kicks and no other reason. We can’t do our simple walk out just because we lost our 4 day weekend in March when it was feasible. So we’ll drive to Prince, West Virginia (we are Americans, you see, we drive) and catch a train. Not a bad compromise given that when I talked to Aran (daughter) about a walk out it went: around the corner, down Airport Rd. to the Blacksburg Transit stop, to my office where we catch the regular commuter bus to Roanoke, to a Greyhound bus there, to Charlottesville, to the train and on to Chicago, or however far we thought we could make it. Deep breath.

Would it be cheating to walk out the same way and then catch a plane in Roanoke? “Next plane leaving for…?” Or does that land you in jail these days? I might just have to find that out. How far can you get from your front door in two days with no car and no plan?

Another time.

For now, Chicago and the rails. I have had one out of five good experiences on Amtrak, as an adult. I had a wonderful trip as a child, but from my Mother’s memories, I’m not sure that was actually a good trip. We want desperately for Amtrak to be better this time- I feel almost like I can wish them into being more like European train service. Just to be somewhat on time, instead of 4 hours late with my last trip. For meal service to be more than a $6 micro waved stale cheeseburger. For more atmosphere than clunking over freight tracks at half speed.

So we’re going to test the rails, for now.

In Memoriam Mae Noblitt - A R Ammons

When you want something holistic to put life in perspective as things get rough. And you have a scientific bent. Go to A R Ammons.

In Memoriam Mae Noblitt

This is just a place:
we go around, distanced,
yearly in a star's

atmosphere, turning
daily into and out of
direct light and

slanting through the
quadrant seasons: deep
space begins at our

heels, nearly rousing
us loose: we look up
or out so high, sight's

silk almost draws us away:
this is just a place:
currents worry themselves

coiled and free in airs
and oceans: water picks
up mineral shadow and

plasm into billions of
designs, frames: trees,
grains, bacteria: but

is love a reality we
made here ourselves--
and grief--did we design

that--or do these,
like currents, whine
in and out among us merely

as we arrive and go:
this is just a place:
the reality we agree with,

that agrees with us,
outbounding this, arrives
to touch, joining with

us from far away:
our home which defines
us is elsewhere but not

so far away we have
forgotten it:
this is just a place.

A. R. Ammons

DOSTOEVSKI SAID MAN

DOSTOEVSKI SAID MAN

1.
Dostoevski said man
is unhappy because he doesn't know

he is happy. What I am is
so real it dies on my tongue.

2.
If I loved you I
would say no if you loved

me you would not let me
say it.

3.
Everything you say is cruel
and bitter glory in my mouth.

4.
There is no disease for this cure,
I tell you what is

on my lips and what I know
it is too soon to know but

something is
falling from me like rain in sunlight.

- Peter Klappert

The Dropkick Slurpies

The cousins came for Thanksgiving and we had a band all of a sudden.

What sports I am going to try and watch this long weekend

Wednesday November 25th:

Nothing?! Well, some college ball will be on and I'll watch it. Maybe this is the night for the Charlie Brown special. Maybe catch the Dookies being beat.

Thursday November 26th:

Yes, I'll catch the NFL, but there is not much to cheer for. Green Bay at 12:30 root for them for tradition's sake.

At 4: root against the Cowboys or Raiders? This shall be when dinner is! Or college basketball.

At 8: Go Broncos! Actually, I'll be watching Texas A&M and rooting for them tilting at windmills.

At 4 I should catch Clemson in basketball. And flipping later to the top 20 matchup of Minnesota and Baylor.

Friday November 27th:

Oh yes, the buffet commences. After going out to cut down our Christmas tree (yes, we are doing this Friday!!) I am going with a wood fire and...

at 2:30 College football, WAR EAGLE! No. 2 Alabama at Auburn
I'll want to catch some Nebraska (our great opponent) at 330
at 7:30 Pitt (booo) at West Virginia (triple boooooooo)

but, most important, we have VT vs. Temple in hoops at 8!! The stove will have the room at 90 by then so Nelson and I can jump around in our VT bball shorts.

Saturday November 28th:

VT has a 6:15 basketball game against Deleware that I'll watch if televised and assuming the UVA matchup is a blow out. But Saturday is built for football, college football:

Noon- I have to watch Clemson beat old man Spurrier.
3:30 The Hokies march toward yet another 10 win season
I'll have to flip to see F$U pull the upset on the annointed ones.
8:00 - rooting for Georgia Tech (grumble) to beat them dogs.
10:30 if I am still alive- NAVY!

Sunday is rehab and dancing and ignoring my fantasy football team.

Jamming with Aran and Nelson

I promise to have more like this soon. Grandpa Nelson came by on the way from seeing his very ill father and we got to have an impromptu jam session.

A Note about my Name

Well I just don't do blog posts anymore do I? I'm also hopelessly behind on my video editing and producing.

So, the nickname DougHed? From Quake in the clan days. I was DougHed in the No Pants clan. We were killers and I still have flashbacks. Sometimes my kids find me whispering "BFG 9000".

- Don't bring a shotgun to a rocket launcher fight.

I love this picture

Phyllis doesn't, but I do.

From

She loves this one, which I do too:

From Paris 2008

Sometimes love

Sometimes love
Can be as simple
as finding your daughter’s mouse dead in its cage
And burying it
While she’s out of town

Sometimes love can be as simple as a dog
Touching his cheeks as he turns his
Large white head to your hand

Sometimes love can be easy as making your son’s bed
Or smelling his washed head or holding
His hermit crab while giving it water

(For my sake, realize the mouse was old
And she knew
And had picked a place out to bury
Her, dear Silver)

Sometimes love is crying over those you’ve lost
In war, and in tragedy

And in nothing but peace, like flurries by the tarmac
Sometimes love can be not killing a man
You know deserves to die
Or hunting
For food for a family
Hungry in an Appalachian winter
And making a quick and merciful kill

And sometimes love is sitting
On the memorial benches
Among the dead outside
The Pentagon with pictures
Of your friends
With pictures of them smiling
With pictures before
They were a bench

And sometimes love can be the last story
Before bed
Or describing constellations
To your children
you hope will live so far into the future
And live such good lives into that dim
Horizon

Cloud Computing: Show me the money panel

Well ok then, this sounds just a tad bit more like marketing or how you actually make money doing this stuff? Goodness knows I need lessons in that.

A knowledgeable friend tells me that SOA is fast dying.. great, we are just getting into SOA for a client, but.. anyway.. he says the near future is all about the Cloud. So, here I am.

Rags, the speaker (really) is saying- Cloud computing is replacing SOA and web services. “Cloud computing- everyone says they are doing it, but are not sure what it is and they are in fact lying.”

First up: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.

Ok, this wasn’t actually a demo of Amazon, but actually the amazon guy’s little traffic map application and I had no idea that going to one site, grabbing images (maps in this case) taking a snapshot and storing them locally and maybe doing a little manipulation. So, everything I do is now categorized as CLOUD Computing. I declare JPI experts on cloud computing and we will be talking at future conferences.

Sales Force guy is reinforcing this impression- grabbing sales data, crunching it, producing a map. That’s cloud computing.

FACT: I do not think they are right. But they are interesting.

The Enterprise Integration Patterns guy is talking: he’s doing a servlet for us. Oh, he writes the little app and puts it INTO the cloud. The cloud part is the ASP where you can put your app out there. Well, that’s pretty cool.

The Intuit presentation was much better- a little applet on the cloud that goes out and grabs client data from various sources to build them a billing record. That’s very useful and made much more sense. Reach out, grab a few fields here, a few fields there, and some other fields over here, pop into a nice AJAX front end and voila, a great little app.

The Microsoft guy is up next and his prime number checker app just died a horrible death. He blamed JSP and we moved on. Poor MS guy.

Wrapping up the day

Tired!

SOA at Enterprise Scale: Solving Real Challenges with GlassFish ESB

Whoah, this was a snoozer. Off to air hockey.


Coding REST and SOAP Together

Two guys from Prague. I think REST stands for Milan Kundera Potato Farmer. I could be wrong. I’m just surprised they threw one vowel in there.

What’s new in Groovy 1.6?

This should be fun- it’s all new because I have no idea what Groovy is.

I assume it is this: http://groovy.codehaus.org/

This is one of the talks I signed up to get outside of my box.. literally I have been mainly staying in a box here.

Well, it’s got BigDecimal arithmetic. Don’t underestimate the importance of things like this!

Fascinating- three examples of “Hello World” in Groovy. I’m lost. I’m not sure how many of my clients want something that says “Hello World!” and responds “Hello Groovy”.

Wait- I am sure. 0.

http://Groovyconsole.appspot.com

AJAX Performance Tuning

Ahh... this was a good talk...

Here’s some meat and potatoes for me.

Optimization Strategies: scale down your development environment- both your client and your server, because users invariably have lower quality than developers; browser incompatibilities should be researched early; do performance testing as well as usability- start with single users, then go to multi users; use tools to test; QA last, then ship.

FUN FACT: These strategies mostly go back well into the 1970s, but don't tell anyone I know that.

Good AJAX design separates content (HTML, XML, XHTML) from CSS from script. That’s each goes in its own file folks.


De-reference unused objects:
Var foo = ‘blah’: // then do something
Delete foo;


Setup vars for your declensions. This goes WAY back in coding history:

This is bad
divs[i].style.color = white
divs[i].style.alignment = right
divs[i].style.blah = blah

This is good:
Ds = divs[i].style
Ds.color = white
Ds.alignment = right

And so on. Simple.


To do with pages: Put style sheets at top. Put script calls at bottom. We’re going to try this.

Rethinking ESB

Oh boy, this speaker is not what I’d call engaging. Not good for first class of the day.
I mainly care about ESB for grabbing a single “thing” off the shelf and plugging it into much larger/broader applications we build.

This talk- focus on the API being simple, easy to learn, snap in, snap out. All great ideas, until you really need the bean to do something complex, e.g. plot a complex set of S-Curves for value management of a capital construction project, then a whole set of them. Sorry, I’m being snotty, but that’s the sort of real world stuff we run into and that API cannot be simple.

Here’s a nice point: when doing complex graphical output, give an option to view the data. I may have to run that by the line of business for their graphs. We sort of do this already! Yay.


Don’t wrap your business logic in code. Well, duh. Actually, I need to be careful here, having done that. But no longer! So, lesson to you- don’t wrap your business logic in code.

FACT: There will always be bugs (they said it, not me). So, be careful with your patch management.

FUN FACT (from Doug): Bugs are what happens when life is what happens when you are waiting around for something great to happen.

AJAX vs. Java

This seemed like a pretty useful discussion, but the presentation and content was fairly tortured. They tried to make it all entertaining, but I wanted to see some of the functional work done to deliver useful data to users.

So, here’s the take away- Java is much faster these days. Well, we knew that- remember 1.0? 2.0? Complete pigs and made up the popular phrase “Java- write once, run slow everywhere” or “debug everywhere”.

FUN FACT: Ajax and graphic rendering, even in 3D is still faster than Java, once you have the images to the user- especially in chrome (in IE, not so much).

The biggest wins for client side java these days seems to be its thread less nature (a very important, but singular issue) and it’s use in smaller devices (which is a much bigger issue as this is where the world is going). And by smaller devices, I should throw in giant TVs that are now including MIPS chips like LGs new LCDs. Why? Movies, games, anything on demand.

REALLY FUN FACT: Blackberry is head to toe java. You can’t do that with AJAX (duh) and it is the largest user base hands down. Blackberry doesn’t do anything crazy like working with only one carrier (ahem, iPhone) but with 400 of them. Dayum.

So, yeah, Java is great, but doing rich UIs like google wave, inotes R8.5 and other things with AJAX is still the best choice. Marry it up with a push method, like comet, and then you have everything you need.

Thoughts on fund raising

I volunteer for a local charity and, not surprisingly, donations are in the tank this year. They've asked for social events ideas and I have always thought a casino night(s) would be great for raising money and getting a younger crowd into the charity. I've also thought about regular Texas Hold'em tournaments.

I'm wondering if anyone has any experiences, suggestions, etc. for this sort of thing. I have never put together a casino night and I am daunted by how much work might go into it. Poker tourneys, however, I've done and they are very easy to organize.

AJAX and JSON

Ok, I can tell already this one is a little too basic for me. The basic idea is that AJAX is DHTML with XML. We’ve been doing the latter for ten years and the former since it first came out. Though I can use the brush up on current JSON.

Very useful things, that are new to me:

• Jsoneditor.net -- As the name says, an easy and rich editor.
• Jsoneditor.appspot.com -- same as above with neat features
• JS Loader - http://www.jsloader.com/ -- load libs independent of platform and in order and with great confidence.

Sun Opening General Session

Well, this was refreshing. Compared to the whacky motivational speakers Lotus and IBM seem to prefer for their general sessions, Sun does it up with people doing the work and what they are working on and why it's cool.


FUN FACT: Last IBM conf. was Neil Armstrong- neat, but, um, he's not a programmer.


FACT: I already have Armstrong's autograph on my wall.


Down to some Java business. JavaFX will kill your DVR with a blunt object. DVRs will be around in ten years, but not for folks who like to order up their own content- much of it for free with commercials. TVs will just be another net appliance on your home Wifi, running whatever comes after N. Game consoles- you have 5 more years, maybe 7.


FUN FACT: Everyone in the AJAX talk has a laptop on and they just told us to turn off all electronics. Everyone just laughed.

FACT: Chicago Options market runs java applets on hand helds and the whole system logs 300,000 transactions per second peak. 300,000 transactions. Per. Second. Mind blowing.