Saturday, March 15, 2008

We are experiencing technical difficulties...

At some point in the relatively recent past, my origami website database got corrupted.

I don't know exactly when or how - but it did.

Because it is essentially a static reference site - I never really have done any maintenance on it.

I keep thinking that I should rewrite it (Since the site was created six years ago, it could use some work).

Also, this just highlights the fact that I should host it myself.

Just in case you want to find where a particular origami pattern is published, here is the site in it's current (very old!) form:

http://origamicentral.org

(You will notice that it auto-forwards to http://origami.joyfulnoisewebdesign.com)

I'll post about it again after I get around to rewriting it (And it won't auto-forward after that).

Yeah! More work for me.

Friday, March 14, 2008

Employees of 'some company' are not eligible...

As if to highlight the fact that programmers (typically) make poor testers (at least for systems that they worked on) - A new Geronimo user sent a question to the support list that basically said "When I deploy an app to the root context it doesn't say that it is in the correct place".

That is something that I noticed quite a while ago. But, because I was able to work around it - I never bothered to look any deeper. This is at least the second time that someone else had to complain about something before I 'scratched my own itch' to fix a problem that I had experience myself.

Well, it is fixed now.

Hopefully, I will learn my lesson this time. If I run into a problem, then there is a good chance that someone else will too (eventually). Besides fixing a problem once means I don't have to remember how to work around it.

My brain is cluttered enough as it is.

Friday, March 7, 2008

You have reached the end of side one...

I wonder how many kids have never heard a recorded voice say that.

Anyway, it is the end of the work week (supposedly) and my first week of having a blog.

Amazingly enough I manged to get in enough posts to look like there is one for every day of the week.

Next week (or later tonight, or sometime this weekend) I will hopefully be able to post something that is actually worth reading.

Hopefully.

Thursday, March 6, 2008

My first 'pearl' of wisdom for you...

Even though it might seem like a good idea to be the only one who can do a particular task at your company or be the only one who knows some particularly important piece of information - it really isn't. There are degrees of being indispensable and they probably could at least limp by without you there (they just may not want to limp by).

On the other hand, it is really no fun when you have your own deadlines to meet and one of those other areas where you are the -only- expert suddenly catches fire.

Is human cloning possible yet?

Bummer.

Writer's block one day in...

Something that I was worried about (that has kept me from starting a blog in the first place) is trying to figure out what to write about on a regular basis.

And here I am on the second day with plenty of things that I -could- write about but unsure about what actual might -belong- here.

The idea behind 'backwards hindsight' is to try to get a little closer to 20/20 when looking into the future.

If I'm lucky (and you are too) then some of the problems/solutions that I write about will give you a different way of looking at the problems that you run into that will make finding the answers easier.

We'll see.

Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Since you probably don't actually know me...

The big 'point and giggle' part about me writing Java off as a fad way back when is that now it is one of my favorite languages.

And that is a good thing since it is the primary language that I use at work and the language that Apache Geronimo (an open source project that I am a committer on) is written in as a J2EE and JEE5 application server.

So it would have been nice to have had those ten years or so programming in Java.

Oh well.

If only I had known then...

Back in 1995 I read a book about Java programming and did a couple of tutorials.

After finishing that experiment I decided that Java was too slow, too cumbersome, and that it wasn't going to go anywhere.

Oops.