Sometimes I am astonished where life takes me or let's say my job / profession. A little bit more than 2 1/2 years ago I joined a project where we wrote and documented a proof of concept (POC) application for a big company in Salt Lake City. It was fun as long as it lasted even though I could live without the political games but that seems to be an integral part of any big company. That said I learned a lot about ServiceMix, Maven, Spring and OpenESB. After the project ended surprisingly just before Xmas I never went back using ServiceMix. Now I got a short term contract for another big company to review their usage of ServiceMix, suggest best practices to be followed and document my findings

Because of a friend I started to use Skype and initial it looked nice even though I only used it as another IM. But when I reactivate my Little Snitch application I discovered how many outbound connection Skype is actually creating. I think after 30 I stopped counting. Because I have no idea where Skype is connecting to or what it needs these connection for I decided that this is enough to drop the use of Skype.

That wasn't too bad to do when you know where to look for (<User Home>/Library/Application Support) but when I tried to delete my Skype account the Skype website said that I could not delete the account. That was enough for me to ditch them for good. Lucky me I did not trust them in the beginning and did not add any more personal info as absolutely necessary.

I hate that when business lure their customer in that way and then hold on to their data. Even though I am fully aware that deleting an account probably does not mean they actually delete the data physically but it means that I made it clear to Skype that I want my data to be deleted.

-Andy

In Cover Flow nearly half of my albums don't have an Artwork and iTunes store is unable to find them. First I had to figure out on how to install external artwork and then on how to fix an issue where iTunes did not accept the artwork

I use several types of Version Control Systems so far starting with Visual Source Safe, CVS, Subversion and others. I think the first time I heard about GIT was that one could commit without being connected to a server. This sounded nice but then I never found time to look into it. This changed fast 4 weeks ago when I stumbled over Letters.app which is hosted on GitHub. Now I see GIT as a very efficient way to experiment around with open-source code without having to get committer status or alike to post you own code or enhancements

Due to my advanced age I have a larger collection of old vinyls that I not listen to anymore because it is just too cumbersome to deal with them. I tried several times to digitalize them but this takes so much time and effort to do so and the clips and other distortions are annoying to say the least so that I have gave up after one LP. Then I read a review about VinylStudio which sparked my interest and I downloaded the trial version to see if it works. Even with the trial limitations I decided that it was worthwhile to invest the $29.95

Through the Blog of James Duncan Davidson I heard that Jamie Oliver was giving a speech at the TED in Long Beach. Because I was wondering what it was about I watched it on Saturday night. Isn't amazing that it needs an Englishman to try to address the problem of bad eating habits on a big enough scale the problem demands. I am not saying there were not many Americans that are addressing this problem and I for sure heard of some of them but not in a speech like this

In a past project a co-worker brought up the idea to user Dozer to map beans (DOs to TOs etc) from and to certain representation. As much as I liked the idea in the beginning I am not at a point where I have to strongly warn other developers from using it. It works fine when you more or less map the same structure but as soon as you want to do some advanced stuff Dozer is not worth the time and effort when one considers that writing a mapping class is just some stupid code

As discussed beforehand I was quite frustrated with Apache Sling when I gave it a spin for the first time. It took me two weeks to finally get my head wrapped around how things are done in Sling. This includes issues like how to package an OSGi bundle (ug, ug, ugly), how to run an integration test so that the Jetty is started with Sling and the created bundle is deployed and how to actually read and especially write to JCR

After I discovered the Apache Sling project I nearly got disgruntled by its incomplete documentation on their web site. It took me an entire day to make their little blog tutorial work and it was not my fault

SpringModules' JCR sub project seemed to be a good fit for my current project until I realized that it is out of date and has some other problems

Using the Plugin myself to improving this blog I started to see some bugs and shortcomings. Therefore I started to address them and make sure the plugin is well behaving. The first problem I ran into is that setting properties on an Object is not as simple as I thought and so I revised the file name pattern and the implementation to make it work. In addition I did add dialogs to communicate with the user about problems during the publication like the server is not running, a page or object cannot be found etc.