(Maybe I was gaming it?)

A jambalaya that was not dissimilar to the stomach contents of a raccoon....

Finally. All my fault. Finally the Agila mail lists are up. Come join.

We finally got the mail lists and wiki up at Apache for the new JDO subproject of the Apache DB project.

JDO is coming to the ASF. Despite the ongoing enbafflement (yes, I made that word up) of JDO/EJB/PersistentPOJOs, I think that JDO is important when you cut through the politics.

I'm really excited by this. Craig Russell from Sun has been the major force in getting this to happen, and we have a great set of initial committers :

• Craig Russell, Sun, JDO Specification Lead
• Abe White, SolarMetric, JDO expert group member
• Brian McCallister, OJB committer
• Dain Sundstrom, GlueCode, Geronimo committer
• Erik Bengtson, JPOX committer
• Geir Magnusson Jr., GlueCode, Geronimo committer
• Michael Bouschen, JDO expert group member
• Michelle Caisse, Sun, JDO TCK developer
• Patrick Linskey, SolarMetric, JDO expert group member
• Victor Kirkebo, Sun, JDO TCK developer

We have a good mix of JDO experts both from the spec side as well as industry (Craig, Patrick, Abe...), some open source people with commercial experience in persistence technologies (like Dain, Brian, Erik), and some open source people with nary a clue (like me) ;)

Come join if interested. Go to the wiki. Mail list info is there.

Krzysztof Kowalczyk :

Napster had a flaw of being centrialized. It was a matter of winning one case to shut them down forever.

Yes, and and the RIAA had a flaw of being short-sighted. With Napster, it was a matter of winning the hearts and minds of early copyright thieves, to take advantage of the early centralized model and convert the community. Instead, the RIAA shoved it's head in the sand and scattered the community to de-centralized systems, and years of people mistakenly learning that copyright theft was "ok". That's a hard meme to remove.

Krzyszstof again :

Creating an anonymous p2p network that will make pin-pointing individual file shares impossible on a practical level isn’t that hard. And I predict that in 2005 an anonymous p2p network will rise in popularity rivaling current popular p2p networks.

Yep, and the RIAA is going to repeat the first mistake, and lose the remaining slim chance to solve this in a community way.

Happy New Year all! I can't say it's been an amazing year for me, but I learned quite a bit. I hope I remember the lessons.

I'm honestly glad 2004 is over, and greatly look forward to a wonderful 2005.

Now, to solve that age-old problem - what wine do you serve with ham?

Update : the answer to this conundrum (what to serve with ham) is "Conundrum", from Caymus. Our dinner guests brought a bottle of 1990 Conundrum. Deep gold color after sitting for 14 years - I thought it was a big Sauternes - and blossomed amazingly when it got some air. Wonderful. I wish I had the discipline to keep things like this in the cellar for this long.

We also had good champagne, including a wonderful 1997 DVX from friends in Hayward CA...