March 2005 Archives

is a wonderful thing. We did an inside easter egg hunt, and then because the weather was ok, an outside hunt (it's amazing how far 2 dozen eggs go when you can double-team the baby and re-hide!)

Her sense of amazement at the idea of colored eggs outside ("Blue egg!"), her determination in finding them ("Hmmmm"), and the joy when one was spotted ("I find! I find!") made me remember, or at least gave me a glimpse, of a more innocent time of my own life.

I remember a friends of the family that would come and watch us when my parents went away on business. They were Bill and Sigthora. Bill would take us to the park, and we'd go on a treasure hunt. We'd be searching for coins, of course, rather than eggs, and we always fell for Bill's trick of leaving a trail. He'd be walking behind us, urging us on, and we could go around the same rock twice, marveling how we missed those pennies the first time around. The same trick works with easter-eggs and trees, it turns out. Thanks Bill. I haven't thought about you in a while, and you've left me some wonderful memories.

In modern fashion, I've recorded some of Alexandra's first easter egg hunt. But as I'm a lousy video dad, I forgot to charge the battery, so it's only a part. She'll have to have her own memory trigger someday, just like I did today.

We've heard of Danese, though...

One of the things were doing at the Apache Geronimo project is implementing JavaMail and JAF (mostly Jeremy's efforts, I'm doing a simple SMTP transport). We're doing this because we want to have a complete open source stack, and can't bundle in Sun software. The Sun Binary Code License that comes with the JavaMail and JAF jars is incompatible with open source - you need to indemnify Sun, for example, and you aren't allowed to distribute the jars outside of a complete program, so we can't keep them in cvs/svn as well. We also had the same issue with Sun's JMX distribution, so we've (well, Jeremy actually) helped fix MX4J to be 100% spec compatible.

Doing JavaMail has been.... interesting. JavaMail precedes the JCP, written early in the Java era when it was thought that applets were a good idea. The result is that the spec is sometimes a little soft in the details, and I think we caught Sun by surprise asking for the TCKs. However, credit where credit is due - Sun did scramble and get the materials together. Now we're just waiting to clear legal stuff.

Anyway, I was reading the docs for the Sun SMTP transport and found a few gems.

From the "Throw Exceptions to Indicate Problems and Success Department" :

"In addition, if the mail.smtp.reportsuccess property is set, an SMTPAddressSucceededException will be included in the list for each address that is successful. Note that this will cause a top level SendFailedException to be thrown even though the send was successful."

And also here, you have to admire the honesty :

"Note also that THERE IS NOT SUFFICIENT DOCUMENTATION HERE TO USE THESE FEATURES!!! You will need to read the appropriate RFCs mentioned above to understand what these features do and how to use them. Don't just start setting properties and then complain to us when it doesn't work like you expect it to work. ,READ THE RFCs FIRST!!!

I need to find an alternative.

I've been reading a lot lately about the panic over the google "Autolink" feature. LIke podcasting and the debates about syndication feed formats and tools, I don't grok the whole problem with the Autolink feature of the Google Toolbar.

From the hype, it seems like Google has somehow hijacked all web content, changing to suit their nefarious purposes.

But... it's done by an add-in? For IE? Only for MSFT Windows? And you need to push the button to make it work?

I mean, you shouldn't be using IE anyway. But if you are, can't you just not install the toolbar? And if you just can't help yourself, can you just not push the button?

So Floyd polled the audience at this morning's TSS keynote introduction with a few questions, and asked a question that was a complete surprise to me :

Where would you keep your datamodel/schema for an enterprise application?

a) In a modeling tool

b) In executable SQL scripts under source control

c) in a neutral format like XML

d) distributed throughout the source code of your domain model

In order, it was b, a, c, d - no surprise. The obvious question this is why do we want to do "d" via annotations in EJB3?

Ok, this is the start of day 1. Got here last night late, and caught up with Patrick, Hani, Mike, Cedric, Crazy Bob, (and his charming SO!), what we'll simply call the "Spring Posse" (lots of Spring developers... the set is best expressed as [~Juergen]) and probably some others - it was late. Interesting crowd. We closed down the bars at Caesar's, went to "Fatburger" at the insistence of Patrick (I think we're in for a lot of hamburgers this trip...), and then to Treasure Island to find more bars. I actually was able to stay out later than Crazy Bob, which is quite an achievement. When drinking with Hani, never say "I'll have what he's having", because it will involve fruity liquor and probably a little umbrella.....