Nomar is a Cub. I don't know what more I can say about it except WOW! The rumor has been around for a little bit but it has always been with one of the Cubs' starters going to the Sox, generally Matt Clement.
I was at my parent's house when I heard the news and immediately started thinking worse-case scenarios as to who they were giving up for Nomar. Boy, was I surprised. Jim Hendry is a genius.
Hopefully Nomar will be in the lineup tomorrow as Greg Maddux goes for his 300th win. Should be a fun day at the Friendly Confines.
Simon Brown has been reading Hibernate: A Developer's Note. He seems to like it. I'm hoping to pick it up this weekend if I get the chance as I've heard other good things about it.
We are possibly going to use Hibernate at work so it never hurts to get up-to-speed before everyone else.
While reading Chris Blizzard's blog, I came across a link to Monotone, a new (to me) version control system. Since most of my working day is spent working with CVS and possibly Subversion in the future, I always like to keep my eye on this space.
Monotone looks interesting. I haven't tried to install it yet but I think I will over the weekend.
One benefit is that the idea of a distributed system is built in from the start. It's not that difficult to get a local CVS repository up-and-running so you can commit things locally and keep the history. The problem is when you try and sync that to a master repository somewhere. CVS really doesn't like that and invariably things get merged badly and you have conflicts.
Savant is a build system which extends Ant in some interesting ways. It has some similarities to Maven but seems to be just focusing on the build aspect as opposed to the various things Maven tries to do.
I think I'm going to dig into Savant a bit more closely though because it has some ideas which I've definitely thought about but never got around implementing.
TheServerSide has a good overview as well.
Peter Lindberg has posted a couple of interesting posts about what is the definition of software development.
The first is actually more of an anti-definition since he doesn't buy into the current belief that an architect draws up the plans for the project and then hands them off to those that will build it.
The second is really a great one. In its simplest definition, software development is innovation.
It's the dreaming of an idea, putting something down on a napkin in a coffee shop, coding late into the night and finally creating something which was once in your head and now it is alive.
At any rate, definitely some things to think about which Peter is very good at giving.
Edd has done it again. He's introduced DOAP to the world. DOAP stands for Description of a Project and looks to be trying to be FOAF-like except for individual projects.
I could see some very useful tools coming out of this. Definitely something to keep your eye on.
Today, the Cubs hit for the home run cycle against the Reds. They had solo, two-run and three-run homers as well as a grand slam. They have been living off the home run this year and unfortunately sometimes, they die for lack of one.
I'd like to see them have more big innings because of singles and walks then because of solo home runs. But a win is a win.
The Cubs are 10 games out of first and 2 games out of the Wild Card. They need more things like yesterday badly. Prior and Wood should have almost 40 starts by now but they only have half. That makes a very big difference no matter how well the other pitchers have been.
Today is the 1-year anniversary of the Lofton/Ramirez trade which helped the Cubs get into the playoffs. Hopefully Hendry is going to pull off something similar soon. They could really use another bat and some bullpen help.
There is a difference between:
cvs up -pr1.5 customer.jsp >> customer.jsp
and
cvs up -pr1.5 customer.jsp > customer.jsp
Unfortunately, I decided to use append instead of replace. Now, I have to fix about 50 files I had just rolled back. Yay me!
It's a bit old but I recently came across this post about using Jython and Spring together with a little Velocity mixed in. I like the idea of using something like Jython at the controller-level. I think that gives you a ton of flexibility.
Pyb is a Python-based build tool which was inspired by Ant. Another piece of technology that needs to be looked at.
Found and subscribed to another cool site tonight, All Things Jythonic. Lots of cool stuff.
At work, we've started to use TWiki for various documentation pieces. This external editor could be very useful.
I subscribed to taint.org tonight and found a very cool idea for a new prompt.
Basically, it is a two-line prompt which has some useful metadata included. I might just have to try it.
I'm in the process of parsing some large XML files and the default Python parser is really slow. I remembered reading Mark's experiences with libxml2 so I thought I would give it a shot. Talk about the right thing to do! It's definitely faster and easier to work with.
I really didn't know too much about XPath today but things like this tutorial from IBM (free registration required) helped immensely. Also, a few blog posts also came in handy.
In the last week, Ben Hammersley has been on a roll, releasing code to put various data into RSS. First, it was putting the FedEx tracking data into RSS. Next, it was Google results in RSS. And now, it is the installed Perl modules in RSS.
The last one is the most interesting one for me. Having any type of system data in a format which you can read as part of your day is a very good thing. I could see someone having a clean master machine and then whenever a new Perl module is installed, the RSS feed would be updated, and anyone reading the feed would know to update their machine as well. Obviously this could be automated so the updates happen magically.
Rafe really likes the Spring Framework. We've been talking about starting to use it here at work and I'm beginning to read more about it. It does look very clean.
The one problem is that I don't know what to build in order to give it a good test. I don't want to weblog software since I find that just tedious. I'm trying to think of other possible web apps that could be useful to me on either a personal or professional level.
I hadn't heard of DamageControl until I read Erik's Linkblog. He pointed to Lars' entry about the differences between DamageControl and CruiseControl. Guillaume also compares the two.
Both are Continuous Integration apps which allow you to have builds whenever a CVS check-in is done. This is very useful when you have many developers and an active codebase. DamageControl seems to be written in Ruby while CruiseControl is Java-based. That's really not a big deal to me but to some it might be.
Bill Simmons writes for ESPN.com and ESPN the Magazine. He is also a die-hard Boston fan no matter what the sport. He especially loves the Red Sox. Unfortunately, he can go overboard representing the feelings of Red Sox Nation, at least in my opinion. My buddy Michael might disagree though.
Brian at RedBird Nation has broken down Simmons' latest column. Excellent reading even if it is from a Cardinals' fan.
developerWorks has a very cool article about how to use the Eclipse IDE as a platform for Python development.
We have standardized on Eclipse at work for development so the article gives some great ideas for making the IDE work even better.
A few months ago, the powers that be at my work decided to close port 6667 on our network. That's the IRC port which I was using daily to keep up with the rest of the world.
Unfortunately, I haven't found a perfect way to get around it so I feel really silly when I have to read about Edd's stepping down as editor of XML.com especially when my friend Kendall is going to replace him.
Edd also gives a look at what he is and will be doing over the next few months. Some great things to look forward to!
I Tivo'd yesterday's Cub game mainly because the Franchise was pitching. I watched at work via GameCast since I knew I couldn't wait until 9pm to start the game. Obviously I was overjoyed for Sammy to get the big hit and how Prior pitched so watching the game last night was fun. Unfortunately, the recording stopped right when Sammy was coming to the plate in the 10th. Thank goodness I knew what had happened or I would have really been mad.