where in the heck have i been? it’s been almost 3 weeks since my last update and i have more to blog about then ever before. probably the fact that i just haven’t had the time to write a decent blog is my only excuse, but even that is hardly justifiable. so, my mildly-mannered friend, you ask .. what have i been doing these past weeks?

all my release dates have come and gone. jbosside 1.4 and jbosside/aop 1.0.1 are out on sourceforge. you can do me a favor and provide some feedback by getting them here. i can honestly say that releasing these two packages consumed the better part of my life the week of the 20th and up to and including monday of last week.

after releasing and finalizing everything monday, i had a day and a half of eclipse meetings here in dallas where i got to meet all the big players in the eclipse foundation. i was pretty impressed by everyone there, and look forward to making an appearance at eclipsecon in march (the day before jbossworld. yay!). i’m really amazed how extremely political and process-laden the inner workings of the corporate open source community are. when competitors work together, it can only spell chaos no? i spent thursday morning in a conference call with the wtp api guys and didn’t contribute much — i’m mainly still trying to take in as much as possible because there’s so much to digest in the wtp project. after the call ended i worked on getting all the jbosside 1.4 documentation updated for 1.4, which i still haven’t completed. the time is fleeting, i swear. the latter half of thursday and friday were used to code on the jboss webtools contribution, and fix some looming bugs in the aop plugin. today i spent my time dealing with a consulting debacle (which i leave for tomorrow, yay!), supporting my aop plugin over the phone, fixing more aop bugs, and finalizing the webtools contribution. too. much. work.

let’s discuss my travel schedule. tomorrow afternoon i fly out of dallas to arrive in austin, and spend a half day with ivelin and the austin jboss crew to talk about various business related stuff, then i fly to orlando to spend the rest of my week consulting on site. i’m hoping to fly back thursday night so i can get some work done friday, but my flight is for friday night just in case i need the extra day.. hopefully not. on the 15th i’m flying out to lovely sacramento on my first ever training assignment. i’m extremely excited, and nervous at the same time. i hope i do well, wish me luck. i’m going to take 2 days of personal vacation after that training to go down to san diego and hang out with opie.. i miss muh bro!

what with all this work related stuff to talk about, i haven’t had a chance to update on the most important thing in my life: paige!. friday morning i woke up with a strange desire to go out and spend a lot of money on paige. these kind of feelings don’t come to me often, and when they do.. i usually talk myself out of it, and get disappointed because paige doesn’t get to be surprised. and i like surprises. paige has been wanting a laptop pretty badly lately, and i must admit that i’ve been wanting to check out an ibook/powerbook for some time now. so, friday morning, without any discussion with my wife (she was actually asleep at the time), i headed down to fry’s and bought paige a brand new ibook g4 along with accompanying mac keyboard. i have to say that i am very impressed with the ui of this thing, it is sexy as hell. it also is very easy to use, and has a command line which makes me feel at home. i’m thinking about picking up a g5 for my next personal desktop computer, but i’m kind of worried about performance in eclipse, i’ve heard it runs dog slow on os-x. maybe i can have my myths debunked by searching the ‘net more, but i really don’t have the motivation to search. it also seems that my website renders beautifully perfect under osx. i suppose it was smart to test with khtml (safari’s engine), huh?

speaking of the website, it looks like there’s been some problems with null pointer exceptions popping up on your first visit. this only happens after the server’s been running for about 2-3 weeks without being restarted.. i think it may have something to do with mod_jk, but i’m not sure. regardless, i’m thinking about changing the backend out, yet again to a standard blog engine that will give me a little bit less grief then my current self-rolled solution. i’ve been playing with blojsom and i like it so far. when i do change out the back end, the interface will stay mostly the same, because this layout is just too unique for words ;).