My recollection of the events leading up to the cancellation are lots of boring meetings and yo-yo-ing emotions as the winds shifted around the fate of the project. In the end my opinion didn't matter, it was a decision made way above my band level (bands are how you know where you fit within the giant IBM hierarchy).

I know some of the folks at Brightline and had a chance to see the product. The early version I saw was great and I'm sure what they are showing at LotusSphere is even better. I wish them luck.

The installer for the JRE tries to make running java programs easier by mapping .jar to javaw.exe. But this only helps if your jar contains a Swing or AWT app. If your jar contains a console utility you get no feedback at all.

What I've done to make life easier for myself is to make a new file mapping to an extension called .jex.

(path to java)\java.exe -jar "%1"

There's probably a better way to do this. If anyone knows (besides switching OSs) please let me know. Given the ubiquity of Java in the world I would fiqure we aren't the only folks to have been bothered by this.

Unfortunately the formula for a cowboy movie says you need a love interest and some bad guys to have a gunfight with. On the good side the movie has a great gunfight. Every squeeze of the trigger by Costner or Duvall has emotion and purpose. The sense of killing is very real and honest. My problem is with the extra characters - the love interest and the bad guys. In juxtaposition to Costner and Duvall , they are all mindless and wooden. The movie needed to spend a little more time to provide some motivation for their behavior. Annette Bening is wasted in the role of the love interest. She has very little dialog and there's no time spent developing any chemistry between her and Costner.

A nice surprise in the film is the work of Abraham Benrubi who has a minor but pivotal role and does it well. If you've ever watched ER you will recognize Mr Benrubi as the big guy behind the ER desk.

It's sad to see a movie with such potential not be full realized. While the work of Duvall and Costner was superb and the cinematography beautiful, the script was just too uneven and the editing seemed rushed (certain scenes near the end of the movie just don't make much sense). I do recommend the movie but not without reservation.

It's a shame that VH1 recently dissed the Captain on it's I Love the 70's show. This blogger posted about the ill treatment the Captain received and received some funny responses. I love the first response the best.

Oh man... that's WRONG. I grew up with Captain Kangaroo and Mr. Moose and all. Someone dump some ping-pong balls on them NOW!

Other notables:
"You are the swordfish that will never shower".
"The goats you buy shed a perfume that makes Marxism so terribly clear to me."
"The expanse of your intelligence is a void no universe could ever fill."
"Your delightful banana reminds me of a cosmonaut in high heels."

My chances for getting Super Bowl tickets are pretty low, I understand only about 15% of the Patriots season ticket holder will get tickets for Houston. My fingers are crossed.

Update: We didn't get picked in the lottery. No trip to Houston for us.

The drop-ship skips again, like a stone, engulfed in flames...AND CRASHES INTO THE STATION. A TREMENDOUS FIREBALL. The remainder of the ground team watches their hopes of getting off the planet, and most of their superior fire power, reduced to flaming debris. There is a moment of stunned silence, then...

HUDSON

(hysterical)
Well that's great! That's just fucking great, man. Now what the fuck are we supposed to do, man? We're in some real pretty shit now!

HICKS

Are you finished?

A funny side note related to this release is the frenzy of grammar geeks fuming over the choice of the word Quadrilogy instead of the more formal Tetralogy. I like the word Quadrilogy. I bet more folks understand what it means too.

To my mind this is an argument for letting the folks closest to the work be involved in shaping the process they use to achieve success. I agree with this and that's how things have worked on most projects I've been involved with. Its also how I prefer to work.

Unfortunately its not how things work on my current team- but I kind of understand why. The team is HUGE and this idea doesn't scales. Unless the team was subdivided into autonomous units that could choose their own process its not feasible. I'd really like that, but don't expect it to happen.

It it weren't so funny it would be scary.

There isn't a screen shot of the product on their website so don't bother looking. Perhaps the UI is just so radical and minimalist that they thought a picture would be a disservice. It's piqued my curiosity. Perhaps that's the plan.

Usually things don't live up to the hype so I don't expect much. But as someone who's basically dissatisfied (bored) with the current state of software UI I welcome some fresh ideas.

I've attempted to highlight both the oo-ness and the java-ness of the language. This idea sprang from another submission that also used the Century Gothic font in all lower case. I really like this font.

I threw togther another one this afternoon. This version incorporates a 'mascot'.

When I let the knee jerks settle down I do see the wisdom in it. In fact this is addressing something that's been bothering me for a long time. The fact that there was no real 'Java Bean' technology for the server side developer. EJB's are only Beans in name. They don't really resemble the introspectable container objects that are regular Java Bean.

So this brings me the final thing I wanted to say. What's with the name - Service Data Objects. In the second paragraph of the JSR it states

This pattern, called "Data Transfer Object" [1] [5] [7] and "Transfer Object" [2] [3], will be called Service Data Objects (SDOs) here.

I realize this probably wont happen. The companies that make up the JCP have too much invested in EJBs to muddy the water with another Bean name. I think It's a shame.