Oh, Microsoft... I hate you. It's nothing personal, really, just pure resentment that you screw me over so badly in the name of providing features for a set of gamers.

Throwing the shout-out to the Cutlassian Privateers: yo ho ho and a bottle of... um...

As enterprise programmers, we don't "program" quite so much any more. What we do is write systems, fairly small units that leverage libraries to do stuff.

Congrats to Evan O’Dorney, winner of the National Spelling Bee. What's interesting about this is that the distribution of homeschoolers v. nonhomeschooled kids was unexpected (for me.) I expected more homeschoolers!

I'm a bit miffed. I apologize. Really. I want a new aggregator, I'm really a bit busy to write one, and I keep thinking that somewhere we (as a community) could write something that ended up not being a ton of crap.

While at JavaOne 2007, I recorded a podcast with Gordon Jackson from DataSynapse, an application virtualization vendor. We talked about what application virtualization meant, and the value that virtualization offers developers and deployers.

From CNN: Kurt Vonnegut is dead at 84. This royally sucks. I always found Vonnegut's writing to be bitter, liberal, funny, and dishonest in an admirable sort of way.

Would you be willing to test out instantiation of a namespace in JNDI on Glassfish startup? I can't figure out for the life of me why I can't get JMS resources to survive a restart.

Arun Gupta finally got me to fulfill my promise and try out JAX-WS again -- and I found that he was right, JAX-WS was working exactly as I'd hoped it would.

I find myself really missing the days when men were men, rabbits were rabbits, and Glassfish started all of its services when it needed to so that it could connect jms/foo references to valid queues and connection factories when I expected them to.

Kathy Sierra's situation with threats sent to her blog is intolerable, but sometimes the reaction to it - being applied to sites found unpleasant - is wrong too. Let's ALL grow up some.

I just got out of Mike Cannon-Brookes' talk on using Lucene, and it was rather interesting. He never quite said why you should use Lucene instead of some of the other products out there (Java Content Repository implementations, for example)...

My rabbi - well, okay, my father's rabbi, really, but I'll claim him - asked me to write a poem for my father to use at his funeral. I'm no poet, but I wrote this despite my lack of skill.

Barry Morton Ottinger 1934-2007 Human Being Rest in Peace.

As I'm watching my father surrender rather quickly to a blastoma: treasure the time you have with the people you love. The memories you have, the impact you have on your people... those last forever and are a huge part of what makes you who you are.