bright white smiles

Today I saw an old friend of mine on a tooth whitening ad.. Jaya.. she always had such a beautiful smile.

I spent the day looking through Visual C++ code that controls Internet Explorer. Found a perfect example of what we need to do - basically, kill a session :) If that means killing the browser, or just directing to a URL which will kill all cookies for us - whatever.

I just wish I could get up to speed on the Microsoft object model instantly.

I learnt a neat trick to "reset" the configuration of the Netpoint webcomponents. Open it's little setup text file (webcomponent/access/oblix/config/setup.lst) and set it to incomplete. That's why I love Oblix products :)

I've never seen the movie 'Bambi'.

Brain fuel needed - too much is not enough

Although working on an applet to read/write from the filesystem should be simple, it's not. First it had to be signed, which I wanted to do with a real certificate, not enough time so I self-signed it. Second, it had to spark a thread to forever poll the file for updates. Third, my laptop doesn't have nearly enough RAM for java development. Fourth, I dislike applets intensely.

Finally (after about 50 bazillion network blips), gain RDP access into the silly windows machine that hosts the site, and IIS can't find the jar because it's in a virtual directory.. solved that by settling the jar into the root site and setting the codebase parameter up one level.

People asking me all day "how it's going" were really frazzling my nut.

Anyway, I'm in the Ottawa airport, which has free wireless all over the joint (Go Ottawa!) and I think I have fixed the mistake that was crashing the client (opening a thread in the "paint" method is extremely stupid). One cannot think clearly when rushed!

My brain is so needing glucose constantly that I have been super hungry for the last three days. Subsisting on granola bars and other junky things is not cutting it - I need some roast beef!

at biermarkt 

i try to stay awake and remember my name

Next week I am starting my new job. After feeling like I might die for the past week (including 4 days of a crazy fever), I feel like I'm starting my life again.

I'm a little intimidated, not by the quality of work that is expected of me, but by the caliber of people I will be working for and with. I gather that this team of security and identity consultants are elite and bring the best to whatever they work on.. at least I hope so. That's exactly what I want to live up to.

filo so fi cool

I'm having loads of fun being a bum. I get to spend all day reading geeky books, playing with J2EE/J2ME platforms and listening to webinars. Yesterday I built and deployed (to my Nokia 3650 and boy's SE T616) a "Hello World" midlet. Today I'm digging into the Javapolis 2004 presentations.

A couple of weeks ago I watched a Hibernate presentation by Gavin King and heard his Australian accent, I had the same surprise today listening to Rod Johnson - Sydneyite creator of the Spring Framework and author of the two Expert One-on-one books that I own.

The buzz term "Dependency Injection" for Spring's container basically describes the homegrown framework I was working with at my last job. It's awesome to compare a design I understand with the open source version - with the advantage of the books and the community opinion for Spring.

http://www.javalobby.org/av/javapolis/33/johnson-springinaction

winter hibernation

Sometimes one wakes up feeling refreshed from an afternoon nap.. Sometimes one feels like death.

Trying to get my head round Enterprise J2ME by Michael J. Juan is more exhausting that I imagined. Not being yet comfortable with the nitty gritty basics or the development environment nixes the probability of productivity.

I am alternating between the Sun Mobility Studio, Eclipse with EclipseME plugin and going through the Wireless Toolkit examples. Eclipse is winning because I'm predisposed to loving it anyway - ever since I've read more about it's ethos and archtecture.

I'm getting annoying with learning a little bit about everything. I need to focus, but there's so many things to distact my sleepy head...

email.. finding a job.. irc.. working with oblix products in the US.. the latest scientific american.. possibly moving to vancouver.. piepiepiepiepiepiepiepie!