Today is a significant marker in my life, the first anniversary of the passing of my mother-in-law. Her death was sudden and I was unprepared for it. While shocked and sad, after the week of mourning was over, I expected life to return to normal quickly. In many ways it did, but in retrospect I'm amazed at how much flux there was throughout the following year. In hindsight, I now see how depressed I was for several months after her death. It feels silly to say that, since I'm generally a happy person. The idea of me being depressed for a day let alone a month feels very out of character. But I was and it affected the decisions I made and blurred my focus, both personally and professionally. I've been searching during most of the past twelve months and it took a while to find myself again, as my wife has so patiently endured. My productivity at work took a nose dive for a while, partially because I became extremely disinterested in what I was working on. My disinterest ...

So in my  previous post  I explained how to simplify your logging with Maven and SLF4J. If you haven't read it yet, please do before reading more.  Since then I've discovered an easier and cleaner way to remove the secondary frameworks from your Maven dependency tree. Here's a revised overview of the steps: Decided which logging framework will be your primary, aka who will actually write to your log file. Define the dependency scope of all the secondary frameworks to be ' provided '. Configure your project to depend on drop-in replacements of each secondary framework from SLF4J. Define secondary frameworks as provided Use the dependencyManagement section for this. Its used when you might have a dependency transitively. Add dependency on SLF4J Add the following to your pom.xml Conclusion So now in only 3 steps you can redirect all your logging to your primary logging framework without changing a line of code!

Well its about 10 years too late for some of this stuff but I figured I'd open the source to my dead projects I have lying around. Some are pretty raw, like my flocking applet from a college course, while others are completely functional and dare I say beautiful code, like my X10 Java library. FlockingApplet - a graphical applet that simulates the flocking behavior of birds. handlecheck - a web app that searches the web to see if your favorite username is taken. gwt-common-widgets - a collection of Google Web Toolkit widgets x10-java - a Java library for home automation.

I've done something that I swore I'd never do, I've set ratings limits on my TV. As a kid/teen/young adult I swore I'd never use the V-chip on my kids. My thought was, how can you not be around to see what your kids are watching that you need to lock down your TV!? Now with the wisdom of 5 years as a parent, I can't watch my kids every second of the day, and for that 30 seconds I leave them to go to the bathroom, they somehow always turn on Wanted or 300 or Zombieland or _____(fill in the blank with a rated R movie I own). My 20 year old self would be very disappointed, but my 33 year old self says "You don't know what you're talking about." (P.S. He'd totally be geeking out our setup at my house though with our iMac-based home media server with 150 GB of movies played via a settop box (AppleTV) on an HDTV. 1998 Brian thinks that's AWESOME!)

Taken at The Jacksons'

Taken at The Jacksons'

Taken at The Jacksons'

Taken at ESPN Building 4

Self-explanatory....

I realized today that I had made this nice flowchart about two years ago of how I decide when to add qualifiers and increment version numbers, but I never shared it anywhere very useful. This is heavily based on the version numbering scheme that Maven inherently understands. You should also checkout the excellent versions plugin for Maven that include some great utilities for upgrading your plugins and dependencies.

So I started using GitHub for a side project and discovered their very cool feature of service hooks. A service hook allows a repository administrator to setup a callback to another service when a commit is made to the repository. For example it can send an email, or chat a message via Jabber. Now continuous integration servers, like TeamCity , can poll source control systems every few minutes to see if any changes have been committed. But wouldn't it be more efficient to use a service hook to trigger a build? Looking at GitHub's service hooks, there wasn't one already available to callback a TeamCity server, but right on that same page was a link to the open source repository for GitHub Service Hooks . They "eat their own dogfood" so to speak and make it very easy to contribute new service hooks back to them. So I took an evening, did my first Ruby coding in a while which included more time getting Ruby setup and working on my Macbook than actually coding....

"Daddy, what happened?" "It blew up, honey." My sister was five and she was the first to speak. I was seven and knew I was going to be an astronaut. We were in Florida on vacation and the shuttle was supposed to launch while we were there. My awesome parents drove us from our condo in North Palm Beach to the Cape, not once, not twice but three days in a row as the launch continued to get scrubbed due to cold weather. I remember the instant the shuttle blew up, watching it from the side of a nearby roadway, and I knew exactly what happened. I remember the crowd gasp. And I remember my sister pulling at my father's arm and being the first in the crowd to say anything. I remember being annoyed, as most typical seven-year old brothers tend to get, when she asked a question I knew the answer to. I remember the look on my parents' face. I remember feeling sad. But most importantly, I remember how proud I felt and how much more I wanted to be an astronaut...