Podcasts and Music

For a while, I was only listening to NIN's Downward Spiral

To and from work, on the cassette tape in the car

(Yes just a cassette player in the 14 year old car)

But I finally started listening to the Cutting the Cable podcasts, especially those on Firefly.

Listening on the old 1G SanDisk mp3 player I inherited (looks like only $23 for one new)

This is apparently a summer project from Fringe podcasts guys (how I heard about it)

I'm not watching the Firefly episodes, but I do appreciate them more.

And I'm looking forward to watching them again at some point.

Probably on Netflix streaming, unless their pricing changes again.

JavaOne in October

As of yesterday, I am signed up to attend JavaOne 2011.

It will be from October 2-6 in San Francisco, California!

This will be my second time on the west coast and first time in California.

Normally I wouldn't attend such an expensive ($2k to register) conference but work is paying.

And yesterday was still during the early bird pricing.

I'm registered but still need to book flights and a hotel.

I can't really be excited about it. I don't like flying and I'm not sure what I'll be doing there.

These talks do sound interesting.

And at least the registration info said it could cater food for vegans.

Coincidentally Java7 became available yesterday.

I don't really care. I mean it is nice to see movement on Java. But I'll be more interested after the updates come out and it becomes stable.

Not that i'm even working on the latest Java6, so who knows when I'll try out the new features.

Coding Cave

Finally after a month and half, I have emerged from my coding cave.

I was completely immersed a the project up until its inevitable release into the world.

And late in the process, there was lots of scrambling and solving issues/blocks as always.

I was up late nights, spent little to no time gaming.

Maybe I should call it coding tunnel vision.

Thought about renaming this blog to 'coding by candlelight' but I see it was already used.

At the end of this long process, of course the deployment wasn't smooth.

One of the big lessons was more TESTing.

That one area that wasn't fully tested, that was ignored, it will come back to bite you for the smallest mistake, and it did.

There were atleast 3 bugs/problems in a section of untested code that delayed a fully working deployment. Despite being small and simple to fix, it took time.

So next time, put the time/emphasis needed on testing.

It's definitely a scary feeling having your creation, grown in a sterile and safe environment, unleashed into the open where chaos will reign and attempt to break it.

But at the moment, so far so good.

And although I am happy to move onto new work, I do look forward to going back and improving it soon.