Ravings of an Intermittent Fool

I've finally gotten around to reinstalling MT, so that blogging can continue. Andrew is already back at it. I hope Billy installed the server with RAID this time.

One of my favorite Java sites is Cafe au Lait. It now features a RSS 0.92 feed. I've subscribed.

Currently I am in town for JavaOne. I am staying at the fabulous Westin St. Francis. Their web site says that the rooms are high speed enabled. That should have read "some" of the rooms are high speed enabled. Not a biggie, they were able to move me to a room that was wired. I just pulled out my laptop and plugged it in and got nothing. It was strange. No link light at all. I looked under the desk and the supplied ethernet cable was connected to a Cisco ADSL modem bolted on the wall. None of its lights were on. Then it dawned on me. This outlet was connected to a light switch. Doh!

Other than that small snafu, the service has been pretty good (although overpriced $14.95 for noon to noon service).

Had dinner with Billy tonight. We had a nice steak. We cooked down some onion, mushrooms, and garlic with butter. It reduced really nicely and tasted delicious.

I still can't believe that the JavaOne 2003 conference doesn't have public Wi-Fi access for attendees. I also can't believe this is part of the big announcements at JavaOne this year.

I still can't believe that I am getting married in 15 days. All the planing has gone so smoothly. Its either a testament to all the work Angela has done, or lots of pain and pressure will be collapsed into the next two weeks.

I finally got around to signing up and adding my blog to JavaBlogs. Its quite a trip to see my posts on the homepage of JavaBlogs. However, it is frightening as well. Now, I almost fear posting something to my Java category as it might appear stupid or misinformed.

I have noticed that the usability of the printed JavaOne Program Guide is very, very poor for finding the entries for sessions and BOFs. One would think that the sessions or BOFs would be arranged in some sensible way, perhaps by the session or BOF number (e.g. TS-3063) or prehaps alphabeticly by title. No, that would be too easy and too obvious. The people putting the book together decided to split the sessions and BOFs into seven seperate lists based on category and then alphabetically within those categories. The trouble is, when looking at a given session number, it is very difficult to find the abstract. You have to figure out what category it is in, then find it within that category. That's a lot of work to go through espacially if you only have a few minutes in between sessions. Some of the sessions and categories are easy to guess but others are quite hard.

The conference schedule booklet does have a mapping of session number to topic number, but its not with the sessions as they appear in the day by day grid. It is in the back of the book. That is three different places to look to find one abstract. A more usuable design would be to include the category number up in the corner of each square on the daily grids.

Of course having connectivity at Moscone with a live webpage of the daily schedule complete with links to session abstracts would be the ideal situation. But as I have noted before, there isn't any WiFi there.

According to Simon Brown, there was hotspots in Moscone North and the Alumni room. Wish I would have known. But still, even if I did, how useful would it have been? I want access where I am most of the time, the sessions. A co-worker of mine was at MS TechEd last week in Dallas and had Wi-Fi access almost constantly for the whole week.

I'm in the midst of putting together some demo web sites and I am trying to follow the latest specs on web page construction. This means using CSS instead of HTML tables for layout. Here are two sites that have tons of examples (and have helped me out quite a bit:

glish.com: CSS layout techniques

CSS Tableless Sites

The first site is far more polished and professional and the second link features a mixture of thousands of end user submitted examples.

For some reason, my dream last night involved doing cosine, sine and tangents on a blackboard....thankfully, I haven't had to do that stuff consciencely since sophmore year of college.

One of the goals of this blog is to be useful to others. Hopeful, it will be better than this.