Well... A few thoughts... 811

1. Starteam 2005 is Awesome. Its leaps better than Source Vault, which is huge strides better than Source Safe.

2. I quite like Weblogic 8 and EAR deployment (especially when you've got some massive projects). I've come to realise how much is missing from Tomcat. I still dont like the custom deployment descriptors that all J2EE servers require. The fact that you have to pack and unpack jars to configure descriptors is just plain unhappay.

3. IntelliJ IDEA 5 is great. I like the Favorites view, the javascript support and the html support but I will wait for more features before I shell out more cash for IDEA IntelliJ as 4.5 still keeps me highly productive.

4. Error handling and logging... If I get furious about one thing, its error handling. There is no excuse for poor error handling and use of logging. None at all. One of the worst things I was once told was that "Logging isnt required because its not a requirement. Oh, and who is going to look at the logs anyway". (That just makes me angry). Anyway, thats in the past, right now I'm dealing with a decent system that could be one third its current size.

5. Toplink ORM - Seems nice, I still prefer Hibernate as an ORM. I'm still to work with Hibernate 3 but from what I've read it's come along way. The only additional feature that I would like is for it to calculate and apply additional indexes (as specified) by SchemaGenerator.

6. We got a new Nescafe coffe machine. #811 is the number for hot chocolate. Its enabled me to cut coffee out of my diet. All i've got to do is spend a bit more time in the Gym and a wont see the effects at all. If only I could cut out beer + redbull + jagameister I'd have slightly more healthy weekends.

7. Whats with lists anyway? I'm just jotting down a whole lot of thoughts.

8. I thought I'd have had withdrawl symptoms when moving from Java 5. Alas, a whole lot of libraries need to start using annotations effectively (reduce total code by 10%).

9. J2EE Client Application Modules... First time I've heard of those. A J2EE client container sounds intresting but I wonder what horrors are involved in getting that to work.

10. After work... ? Probably newscafe, its in walking distance now that I'm @ Discovery. Too convenient. Even better is the company bar - R5 a hansa.

11. What have I been up to lately? I went to a charity ball last weekend... theme... larger than life. I bought a large cowboy hat, othewise, very memorable. 5 weeks ago I went to another charity ball - Christmas in July. Very red, lots of elves. Then the polo @ Inanda polo Club. Its been a while since i've been in the sun the entire day.

12. Otherwise, time to go look at a problem ... :(