Suggestions Welcome

So I'm going to be in Boston for the traditional PsiU alumni new year's party, and since I never get around to taking time off from work I decided to take the day before and a few days after off. Basically I'll be heading up to MA on tuesday night and I'le be driving back to CT on sunday night.

So (when I'm not working feverishly on the book) I'll be hanging around with some time to kill...

Anyway, the real question is: what should I do when I'm there?

There are at least one or two friends of mine who are going to be around, so I'll probably be able to scrounge up a few co-conspirators for whatever evil plan I come up with, but so far I'm totally stumped as to what we should do.

I mean come on, there HAS to be something interesting we could do in a city as cool as Boston, right?

Right?

Any ideas?

$ego++

My article made it into chromatic's best of 2003 article.

Cool.

Another Reason TypePad is Cool

Atom Support.

It rocks that my weblog's already starting to work with the latest and greatest technology, and I didn't have to do a damn thing to make it happen.

That's why I don't mind paying for TypePad.

Best Bug Ever

http://subversion.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=1640

On Target

As usual, chromatic knows what he's talking about.

DragonFly and Variant Symlinks

So it looks like DragonFly has been making considerably progress since the last time I looked in on them.

Most significant (in my opinion anyway) is the fact that they've implemented variant symlinks.

They're symlinks with variables in them, which are replaced with the contents of variables that can be set on a per-process, per-user, or per-system basis. All you VMS people out there are probably thinking "wow, that's a lot like logicals", and yeah, it sure seems like it.

Interesting places to look in the code if you're curious would be the command line tool for messing with the variables, and kern_varsym.c where much of the magic is implemented.

Neat stuff all around. I'm looking forward to giving DragonFly a try at some point.

A Bad Sign

It's probably not a good thing when you're reminded of the fact that you should throw out that two week old leftover chinese food by the fact that you're putting more leftover chinese food in the refrigerator.

The More Things Change...

So apparently the specific content of whatever I'm supposed to be writing has approximately zero impact on how much procrastination is involved with getting the chapter in question written.

A few weeks ago I was working on the chapter of my book about "Advanced Apache Integration", and since I'm not a huge Apache person I wasn't exactly thrilled about writing about it. As a result I ended up putting it off till the last minute, and wrote most of the chapter (which I'm still not happy with) in the last day or two before the deadline.

Today, I'm working on the chapter about "Best Practices", which is pretty much an excuse to blab on and on about how people should run their projects, and as anyone who's discussed the topic with me knows, I love doing that, so you'd expect that I'd have no trouble kicking out a chapter about it, right?

Wrong.

It's still a few days before the deadline, and I'm still not even close to done...

Making Progress

Apparently the Geronimo guys are making progress.

They were actually able to demo the Sun pet-store example program at the closing sessions of Apachecon, after spending much of the conference frantically fixing bugs.

Nice work!

It's always good to see neat projects like this moving along, and for someone like me who only has the vaguest clue about J2EE the only way to be sure they're moving along is when they actually start putting something together that resembles a finished product in functionality.

What Does "Gewinnertypen" Mean?

So apparently we won an award.

It's in german, so I can't read most of it, but it seems to be for "best newcomer of the year."

Cool.