15 Sep 2006
The day started with getting up at 4:00am, sending a few work emails, and getting into a van with 7 or 8 of my closest colleagues (I mean that in the literal sense… that van was small).
NFJS is being held in Redmond again this year so that meant catching the ferry from Victora -> Vancouver and driving down. Highlight of the morning was the Pacific Buffet on the ferry. On the way down I cracked open my e-book of Pragmatic Version Control with Subversion and read about a quarter of it. Good book, we’ve been running subversion for about a year now but I’d like to take the time to see if there’s anything we’re missing or could be doing more effectively.
One of the things that changed this year is that they’re giving away free long and short sleeved t-shirts instead of backpacks. Personally I like the shirts but a couple guys on the team were looking forward to backpacks. Too bad for them I guess, I’ll survive with the JavaOne backpack.
I started the day off with Brian Goetz’s Introduction to Java Threads. Unfortunately for me, I guess previous participants had rated Brian’s material too difficult and he had to de-scope his presentation. He had a full slide deck but barely got into the interesting stuff at the end. A quality presentation, but technically didn’t offer much that I wasn’t already aware off.
At JavaOne I heard good things about the Java5 concurrency talk but unfortunately wasn’t able to attend it then, but luckily Brian’s second talk of the day was all about the new concurrency framework. I won’t get into too many of the details here but it was an excellent talk. I left with a number of items that could be immediately integrated into the code base and an understanding of where the new concurrency utilities would simplify some of our homegrown threading utilities. Writing thread-safe code is a an interesting challenge, and Brian did a good job of covering the basics while getting deep enough to keep me interested.
Last talk of the day was yet another one of Brian’s, Improving Java code quality with code auditing tools. Sounded interesting enough. After picking up the slide deck, I noted that the talk was centered on FindBugs, a static analysis tool that I’d read about previously but hadn’t yet had the opportunity to play with. When I get back to the office, I’m going to try and find time to play with FindBugs and look into how it integrates with CruiseControl. It’s a useful utility and I have no doubt that it would catch bugs and improve overall efficiency. It’s amazing what you read about but don’t necessarily take seriously until someone credible shoves it in your face and says hey!, this thing works and here’s some hard results.
And with that came the end of day one. NFJS always has had good food in the past and it’s been so far so good again.
12 Sep 2006
See Creative Zen Micro Headphone Jack Fix
I’ve had my zen micro for a little under 2 years and have been plagued by rather annoying headphone jack problems every 6 or 7 months. I say every 6 months because the first time I managed to have Creative repair it free of charge, but the second time Creative wanted $13 to talk to their support line about paying for a repair. I’ve been forced to run holding the connection in place for the past 4 months.
Now, out of principle, I’d rather not pay for hardware that breaks regularly for others and isn’t particularly denied by Creative support folk (the last email correspondence ended with someone recommending that I try twisting and holding the headphone connection in place).
I’m not really an Apple fanatic, so the Sandisk Sansa looks appealing if and when I end up deciding to make another purchase. Anyone have experience with it?
It looks like Costco has it, an added bonus for nothing more than a convienent return policy.
09 Sep 2006
This past week was my first week back at work after spending sometime travelling on the coast of Oregon. I didn’t spend a particularly long time down there, but in 8 days I managed to find a bit of peace and relaxation. I took the laptop but didn’t bother even attempting to find a wifi connection… besides the one in the Portland Doubletree and the ones in rest stops along the I-5… once I got down to Oregon it was lights out for the laptop.
I’ll start off by saying that this was the first vacation I’ve taken in the past 1.5 years, and at ~8 days including a weekend, it wasn’t really enough. I’ve still got at least 3 weeks of vacation left to try and fit in this year.
We started off our travels from Vancouver, B.C. and headed down to Portland for the first night. We didn’t really stop along the way, except for the occassional energy drink but other than that not much. We did a bit of sight-seeing in Portland for a day before travelling through Salem and Eugene enroute to Coos Bay. It was a Sunday so pretty much everything was shutdown in Salem and Eugene. Stopped at the University of Oregon and walked around the Campus, including the old cemetary and took some pictures along the way.
At Coos Bay we stayed at Sunset Beach State Park. It was quite a nice park, we rolled in around dinner time and were pretty much fogged in for two days. A pretty bad accident on the highway along the way slowed traffic down a bit, but other than that, it was a good trip down.
From Coos Bay we travelled up the 101 to Honeyman State Park, near Florence. This was the highlight of the trip because of its proximity to the Oregon Sand Dunes (basically the state park backed out on to the dunes). We ended up doing a guided tour on the dunes in what amounted to a converted school bus with a roll cage on top. We also rented ATVs and drove around for an hour or two. It was awesome, except for the fact that I got stuck in what they call a *witches eye *and had to spend about 25% of my time pushing myself out. Everyone I talked to knew about ATV’ing on the dunes and it didn’t disappoint.
Honeyman was a nice and private park, it had a little lake in it that you could use kayaks or paddle boats on. Weather was good, probably the best of the trip. Down south it was cold & foggy with a bit of rain, and the northern coast made for some cold evenings.
After Florence, we continued up the coast to the Newport area where we camped at Beverley Beach State Park. This was a nice park that backed directly on to the beach, it had it’s own beach access that went under the highway. It wasn’t the most private of camp sites but it was getting close to the long weekend and had to do. Newport’s got a nice aquarium that we checked out for a few hours, I’d recommend it. It’s got Sea Lions, but you’ll no doubt have already seen them along the way in Sea Lion Cove or countless other coastal inlets.
We were pretty much done with Oregon after Newport. Last stop on the trip was in Long Beach, WA at some private campsite on the beach. We didn’t get in until around 10 at night and quickly setup camp for the night. All was well until about an hour later when a couple truckloads of kids rolled up into the two campsites beside us. Of course it was the long weekend so needless to say they started partying about 10ft from our tent and didn’t stop until they were kicked out at 7 or 8 the next morning. Luckily we didn’t end up having the pay for thenight but it was the worst nights sleep of the entire trip and probably my life. The name of the campsite was Lands End RV and you might want to stay clear of it. Park management seemed nice but it still wasn’t a very good experience. I’d recommend sticking to the state parks wherever possible.
It was an awesome trip and I’d recommend it to anyone that hasn’t seen the coast yet. Coos Bay -> Florence -> Newport -> Astoria seemed like a pretty nice progression and gave an opportunity to experience the different coastal environments (dunes, forests, coastal, inland, etc.). I’ve got 300-odd pictures up on Flickr.
Here’s a few shots of the ferry ride from Port Angeles, WA to Victoria Harbour.
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