Spoilers, Audiobook

Plenty of TV spoilers going around for me lately,
and are apparently hard to avoid (from facebook and word of mouth).

I'm behind on both the Walking Dead and Fringe, so it was bound to happen, especially with big events (ie characters dying) which can't be kept secret.
For Fringe, since I did get caught up a little, I have to say I was still shocked to see it.

I started to watch season 3 of the Walking Dead season 3, but stopped after the first episode.
It's good, action packed, I like where the story is (at the prison),
but I realized I wanted to read the Governor books before seeing him on the show.

Currently I'm listening to the audiobook for Rise of the Governor, picked up from the library on 9 cds.
I'm also planning to read/listen to Road to Woodbury next.

Battlestar Returns

Glad to see the return of Battlestar, even as a web series.
I watch most of my content online, so it actually works out well.
Just watched the first episode of Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome on Machinima youtube.
I had to check it out after seeing the trailer.
Feels like going back to basics for me, with the cylon war, viper pilots, and CG space fights.
Adama was one of my favorites (because of Olmos) and its focused on him, joining the Battlestar ship for the first time.
Except for a few production quirks as others mentioned (distracting lens flares), I enjoyed it.

Space Adventures!

I just finished another Isaac Asimov book The Currents of Space,
Story of a man trying to remember who he is and the great danger he came to warn the planet about.
Another great space mystery, whodunit, with many characters playing detective.
Great visuals of a layered society with literal upper and lower classes, rich lavish city above in bright lights and peasants below in the shadows.

The follows up my previous read of Pebble in the Sky.
A man travels through time into the future, is subject to an experiment that gives him special mental powers, must adjust to a futuristic radioactive earth, must avoid being put to death for being too old, and also race the clock to save the galaxy!
Humanity has spread out across millions of planets and forgotten its origin, Earth, a poor isolated backwater planet with its population not even regarded as human anymore.

Both fun scifi stories from the library, I sure appreciate free reading.

Sherlock

I just finished the first episode of season one of Sherlock (BBC) on Netflix.
Great show, I enjoyed it. Sort of like a younger House and Wilson, if they always worked together and both loved to bend the rules.
Only bad thing so far is how few episodes I have left to watch (5).
I was going to check out Elementary (if only for former-Hacker Jonny Lee Miller), but after hearing reviews and seeing previews for this show, I had to watch.

Lesser Known

Finished two comics (series) from the Library recently.
Villians United and JLA The Tornado's Path.

I really enjoyed both after getting into them, especially the focus on lesser known/under-appreciated heroes and villians, like Catman and the Red Tornado.
Between the two, there were tons of DC universe characters I was clueless on and had to look up.

How can you go wrong with villains fighting villains, redefined characters and comebacks, an android trying to be human, and a zombie to prove how fragile humans are? Plenty of action and brutal scenes.

PDF Font Obsessive

I ran into another issue using Flying Saucer/XHTMLRenderer to generate PDFs: i18n.
I've had to dig into Flying Saucer a few times before (finding and upgrading to R9 for CSS fixes like word wrap, overriding image resource loading), and so it happened again.

During testing, i18n characters were missing (such as Polish, including this one).
I first suspected it was an issue with handling UTF-8, but after debugging I found all was handled correctly (property files, unicode codepoints, XHTML) up until PDF creation using iText.
It looks like the original output differences in PDFs can be explained by the default fonts included and handled only as Latin-1.
In order to handle UTF-8, fonts have to be included manually as shown in the Flying Saucer user guide. And these fonts will be embedded (despite saying otherwise).

In my CSS I was referencing Arial and other fonts.
To keep these I'd have to reference their absolute TTF file path and embed them in the PDF.
Since I'm not sure on the legality of this, I searched for alternative fonts with clear licensing.
I tried FreeSans, DejaVuSans, and finally settled at the moment on Liberation Sans matching Arial the best (and with the least vertical spacing)
These ended up adding 40-60k to the PDF size for embedding the different font types (sans/serif, regular/bold).
But thankfully now the UTF-8 characters are displaying in the output PDF.

Combat Yams

Here's a little nostalgia.
I found a screencap playing Combat Arms from 09, with hacking of course.

For a while I really enjoyed playing it, fast-paced run-and-gun.

The Complacent Developer

I've grown complacent in my current position.
I like what I do. Despite being challenging and stressful at times, I find it satisfying. I've learned a lot about bad programming over the last year.
I'm being paid to do it, not the amount I would like, but enough to survive.
I like my team. I work with a nice bunch of people.

And as it must happen, my bubble is burst, as it was today.
One of my team members is leaving. The developer I've worked closest with, who started with me, and is the only other developer who knows the applications as well.

It was a bit of a shock, but not completely surprising.
I can only speculate his reasons for leaving: corporate culture is not a good fit or holding back creativity, wanting a domain change or just to work on another project, and of course money.
I can understand all of these reasons for leaving, except money.
Apparently at this time I feel having a great team and project to work on is more important, otherwise I would be looking elsewhere (or maybe this is just my complacency).

From an outside perspective, he seemed bored, or maybe his norm is regularly browsing the internet/news.
I wouldn't describe him as the best coder, considering mistakes and missing details at times, but he is great at pushing ahead (getting to 80/90% quickly). He's someone to commit code without running the unit tests and then needing to commit a fix after the build breaks. But he has great ideas, especially on technologies, and wasn't afraid to speak up or against. I'll miss this input. And he was easy to get along with, not abrasive, not annoying.

The last time I lost a team member like this, I left shortly after.
Because I knew that things were headed in a direction that didn't feel right, and I lost the only person I enjoyed working with.
But thankfully I am not in the same place.
For now, I still have other good developers and fulfilling work. If and when that changes, I'll reevaluate. Maybe he was right to leave. Time will tell.

I say it wasn't completely unexpected because I knew it had to happen at some point, especially since I felt fairly dependent on him.
With him looking at the path moving forward, I was able to focus on the details and sweep up the crumbs.
He was also able to handle at least half of the meetings/issues/questions, freeing me up at times.
Now I will be put to the test of standing alone as the developer with the most historic/overall knowledge of the applications (possibly the only go-to for info and questions).
And I'll need to dig in and learn any of the pieces I've been able to ignore so far.
Time to step up.

New Spider-Man

I saw the new Amazing Spider-Man film in 3D.

Here was my attitude going into the movie:
I don't have a huge motivation to see this in the theatre, I could wait until it's out on NetFlix or somewhere else. I do like the main actor Andrew more than Toby, but I can't imagine the story is different enough. Hopefully I will be proven wrong.

Well, I'd say it was worth the trip.

To me it felt less campy, almost realistic (if you ignore some of the over-the-top only-CG sections) and a bit raw.

I like that Peter's not perfect, he's human (for the most part). He's awkward at times, injured, struggling to control his abilities, learning on his own, creating his suit, causes his uncle to be shot and cannot save him, seeks revenge against a bully and his uncle's killer. He brings some nostalgia to me as a hoodie-wearing chain-riding and skating kid. And of course I'm glad he's not a wrestler in it but I like the reference to creating his mask.

We see his parents with a better backstory (apparently to be continuted in later films).

I really liked the few funny scenes like the smart-talking spidey "i'm scared of knives" (reminding me of the animated TV series a little) and the Stan Lee's cameo in the library. Oh and the accidental beat-down in the subway "sorry sorry".

I also didn't like the number of people that saw his abilities as Peter: kids at high school playing basketball, people on the subway, police and public out in the street. Maybe it goes to show how inexperienced and vulnerable he is starting out.

I'm not a big fan of the lizard, definitely low in my rank of enemies, but it ended up being a great start to a series of films. I had completely forgotten about Dr Connors appearing in the earlier Spider-Man 2/3 films (not as the Lizard but as a professor/physicist).
The film did have me wondering about how Spider-Man and the Lizard were transformed.
For Spider-Man, did the spider bite transfer part of the spider DNA with the serum to allow merging across species/materials (assuming spiders were spliced with a strong material).
But Peter's appearance does not change to look like a spider (as happens to the Lizard). He gains speed, strength, senses, climbing ability. Is this from such a small exposure allowing a partial transformation with possibly multiple bites from the spider required?
Since the Lizards transformation is different, I assume the formula/serum used is also different. Was the formula from Peter's father wrong? If so why? Did Peter's write it down wrong (he did just memorized it)? Or had his father left it flawed in-case found? It's interesting since both point to Peter being flawed (not remembering correctly or being in over his head).

In comparing this film to comics/animated TV:

• Core theme of Spider-Man is the same as the comic: relatable teen with no mentor, learning for self.
• Peter bit by modified spider (not sure if radioactive as in comic).
• Spider-Man shooting web from devices is same as comic (but unlike earlier films).
• Peter does not catch his uncle's killer (not yet atleast), unlike the comic (and earlier film).
• Peter's parents backstory is different from comic (meeting and death, and probably also working for CIA)
• Peter meets Gwen in college in the comic (some also have this in high school).
• Gwen's dad is a cop and does have a fight with Peter, but he instead dies from Dr Octapus in the comic.
• Gwen is an intern with Dr Connors similar to the animated TV.
• Lizards backstory is different from comic (lost arm in army and works from home in Florida) but similar in animated TV (lost arm from accident, working for Oscorp).
• Lizard also wants to turn NY into lizard-people in animated TV.

There are many different comics and TV shows, so there is sure to be a combination of these that can match the movie.

So why was this film needed?
Apparently there were stories missed in the earlier films that can now be explored. 
An obvious opportunity is a tie in to the Avengers, such as Dr Connors working for SHIELD or a Captain America connection with the Red Skull and Peter's parents (similar to the comics, although probably not since the film appears to blame Oscorp).
I missed the ending providing a sneak peak ahead into the next film, but hopefully we find out the truth about his parents.

Code Warfare and Seam

pinned down after a short skirmish the previous day
it was too quiet, spirits were dampened
earlier morning brought some hope, help would be coming
which eroded throughout the day, it was not enough
deep in the trenches, we waited still, scounts had not returned
our only option was to retreat and go around
all were hesitant, so i made the move...

summary: i hate jboss seam
or rather we all do at this point

for the past 2 days, we (the entire team including even other teams) have been researching seam issues.
including class conflict issues, instances not matching expected classes, not being able to cast, for seam core classes.
the errors had been occurring for the past few months but not caused any observable issues... until now.
and were threatening to hold up deadlines.

today we found what appears to be the cause: having two seam ears in one jboss 4 server
this apparently causes the apps to randomly step on each other,
including loading/creating core seam components from wrong classloader, from other ear.

eventually, i gave up on trying to find out why, as we all slowly did.
it didn't make any sense, all ear isolation settings had been set and no obvious causes.
many fixes/attempts were made, many possible solutions, but none had any effect.

in the end, i went forward with removing seam from one of them.
since it had been added recently for one and thankfully used very little.
so it was a viable option, and better than setting up a new jboss to run each ear in its own.

... and so the battle was won,
but the war will continue
(haha war, get it? ear-war, ok, over and out).