Here's a look at Sun's newest attempt at at the desktop market, Project Looking Glass. You will need RealPlayer or QuickTime to see the demo. There's a lot of cute tricks, but I don't see anything useful about them. The constant bashing of Microsoft without mentioning the name is just plain annoying. The one trick I like that was not shown here and is not available in Windows but is in X, is the ability to roll up the contents to the title bar. It's nice to get the window out of the way for a minute. You can get it in Windows with WindowBlinds.
The new team has weekly staff meetings. Normally I'd consider this bad, but they try to make them worthwhile. This week was a short overview of Hibernate. It's a framework for mapping relational databases to objects. I found it fascinating and way too short. A few years ago I went looking for a system such as this. A system like this would make some things quite a bit easier. I imagine there are gotchas as well, but it will be fun to learn.
I've been tasked to learn JRules from ILOG. The first challenge with it was to get the thing installed. They have an automatic registration feature built into the install, but the corporate firewall blocks it. The alternate solution was to have it write a registration file as a XML document, and email it to an automated server. At this point I found out through some testing that attachments with an XML extension are blocked by the antiviral software. That fact elicited a few choice comments from the local development community. My personal comment is that we can all step back about twenty years and use UUENCODE and UUDECODE. I did find a way around it. I understand the concepts of the software, but I need to get at the nuts and bolts to get a good handle on it.
So much of the week was spent outside the 'he who knows much that is hidden' role to plain noob (definition 1a, although I could do 2 ). It's refreshing, challenging, and nice to get a chance to see different methods and technologies.
We convinced Patrick to do a camp on life around a river at the Ogden River Parkway. To do this, everyone must get up by 7:30 am. I consider it good conditioning for when school starts. The kids do not have to get up as early as last year since we are not carpooling anymore. With Thomas, there are too many kids to fit in an average car. Anyway, although he hated getting up for it, he did enjoy the camp. I didn't get much out of him about what they did, since it ends at noon and I don't get home until 7. That's one of the things that suck about ten hour days. By then the camp was a long time ago from his perspective.
April went to the school this week to help out assembling some stuff they are selling. That turned out to be a good thing, because she found out that while Thomas was registered and all the paperwork was done, he was not in a class. Some sort of snafu, and not hard to fix. It would have been a big surprise if we had not found out until the picnic a few days before school starts.
The kids went to The Little Treehouse on Thursday with some friends. The have an Oval Office mockup. We had considered sending Rachel and myself to Washington, D.C. this fall. April researched some hotels and came to the fast realization that this is a Presidential election year, and the city is very busy. We decided to hold off until spring.
Still no word on the deck railing. Home Depot says that it's supposed to be here any time now.
Mike Gibby's video blog page is down, so I will assume he is in the process of moving. Carl Stark has already moved. There have been a few changes for people this year. April has a talent for pointing out all the good things that resulted from a change in our lives. I think this is one reason she likes change, and one of the many qualities I like in her.
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