Talking to the Owl

Lincoln, RI was selected as number 60 in the Money best places to live poll.  I’m not surprised.  We have a wonderful wooded park with ample mountain biking trailes just out my back door.  Downtown Providence is a 10 minute drive away.  Boston is less than an hour drive away and we aren’t far from the commuter rail line. 

Interestingly, Louisville, CO ranked 3.  I suspect their good mental health center and proximity to Boulder have something to do with it. Fort Collins didn’t rank at all, which surprised me.

When I read the latest technology blogs, I feel sort of guilty for not being as up to date on the tools I use every day.  For example the latest thing that Tomcat 6 has is an Asynchronous Servlet for Ajax, and I’m still using Tomcat 5.0.28.  In fact, I was using Tomcat 5.5, but because of some issues with classloaders, I had to revert back to 5.0.28.  I thought I was being conservative by not using Tomcat 6, but even that wasn’t conservative enough.  This is the curse of the practioner in the world of pioneers and evangelists. 

I wish I could be up on the latest and greatest features of every tool, but alas, I use the tools to get my work done and the three-year-old version is usually good enough for me to get my work done.  I suppose I could work nights and weekends learning new things, and five years ago, that is what I did.  I learned a lot, but I didn’t get out much either.  But now I have a family - and hobbies - or at least hobbies that don’t have to do with computers.

Now that I’m in a transition phase career-wise, here is my time to come up to speed on the latest greatest things.  I was reading an article on event driven web applications and I came across a very novel idea.  I thought it was an incredibly new idea, but it has been in use for about a year and is even in the Tomcat 6 advanced IO features.  I guess that’s one reason for a developer to transition careers every so often.

This blog never seems to stay on topic.  I guess my life can’t be rolled up into neat focused packages and I need to accept that.   When I get bored with topics, I like to think of new ones.  Spring?  Ajax?  What have I written about in the past?  Back in 2003, I wrote out my manifesto as a developer entitled, “Building an Enterprise Environment in Java with Free Software“.  My tools have evolved somewhat, Since I started diving into Spring back in 2004, I now use Spring and Dojo.  Every so often, I reference my links on Simple Tomcat setups.  I fell out of love with the Google Web Toolkit shortly after writing a Bezier spline function using it.

So here I am, looking for a new topic.  One thing I’ve thought about doing is using one of the latest Ajax toolkits to write a very simple LDAP client.  I have a business need and the (free) clients I’ve found really don’t have the kind of enterprise-robust UI that I need.