What's it all about, Alfie?

They have updated Java again, once again, it's an across-the-board update:

Java for Mac OS X 10.5 Update 4 delivers improved reliability, security, and compatibility for Java SE 6, J2SE 5.0 and J2SE 1.4.2 on Mac OS X 10.5.7 and later.

This release updates Java SE 6 to version 1.6.0_13, J2SE 5.0 to version 1.5.0_19, and J2SE 1.4.2 to 1.4.2_21.

So we're at pretty up-to-date versions of Java for OS X. Not bad. It's no surprise that we're lagging behind the Sun JDKs - Apple has never really pushed the envelope on JDK releases. But it's nice to be up to date just in case.

Today has been a lot of clean-up and planning for the future today. I am at a brief pause in the development cycle, waiting for the Q/A Team to certify an application of mine so that I can then put it in production and reap the benefits of the fixes and features. While I was waiting for this, and helping them out when needed, I wanted to run through all my emails and make sure that I didn't have anything outstanding that needed to be done.

Turns out that I did - imagine that.

I needed to pull two pages into one by adding a single checkbox and a simple if-then construct to pick the right URL for the request. This would allow us to choose whether to hit the in-memory database of my app, or hit the back-end database. There are a few new webapps on the server, and this addition was really needed in order to be able to maintain the app under adverse conditions. Just makes sense to consolidate these into one.

There were a few other things I needed to do as well... nothing major, just cleaning up emails, sending out status emails, checking up on folks - organizational maintenance stuff. Got all that cleared out.

Then I spent a little bit of time planning for the next new feature for the app in Q/A. I needed to make sure I could see where to update for the new information, how to make sure it'd work regardless of the conditions. In short, it's not too hard. I'll be able to add in the data to the base elements, then the existing code will automatically aggregate across it, but the new code will be able to filter on it and come up with the exact data we need.

Pretty nice.

I did need to do a bit of explaining to the original author as he came up with a pretty decent idea that will make it easier to be sure that the old test cases and code will work with the new data. It was a little strained after I agreed with his idea and he still wanted to understand what it was that I proposed. We probably went around this a few times before he got it, and that's OK - just a little miscommunication.

In the end, it was a very productive day and lots of stuff got done. It just wasn't Wow! work, but necessary nonetheless.

Very odd thing is happening to me this afternoon - I'm trying to buy a simple iTunes email gift certificate for Nina against my PayPal account (my default funding source) and it keeps saying that the credit card is refused. Not really. I can buy a song, so that's OK, but if I try to get the $20 iTunes 'card', it fails. I've put in my information several times - no difference. Odd... very odd.

So I'm thinking it's something that's temporary on iTunes Store. Gotta be. PayPal is OK, saying I created the 'Pay agreement' with iTunes, but it's got to be the call from iTunes Store to PayPal that's causing the problem.

So I had to tell Nina that she's going to have to wait for a bit to let this issue settle out and then I can send her the money. Maybe this evening, maybe tomorrow. But I feel certain it's OK as I'm able to buy a song. Hmmm... very odd indeed.

UPDATE: I bought an album, upgraded a song to iTunes Plus, all that worked. But the gift certificate didn't. Wild. I'll have to wait and see how it plays out this evening.

In my previous job I had a TextEdit document that had all kinds of notes in it about the place, the applications, what to do when, how to do things, etc. It was a "How to" of all the things I had to do and needed to remember in the job. I also had a nice blog about all the things I did during the day, and the combination of these two made a really nice package to pass on to the people that remained. They didn't appreciate it, of course, but it was my choice not theirs.

This morning I was looking at the file I was creating after three months of being here, and decided that I didn't want to leave it in TextEdit as there wasn't anything special about that. No real linking, no multiple pages, etc. VoodooPad was the answer, and since I didn't have that much to move, it was pretty quick.

Even better that the formatting and styles followed the cut-n-paste, so it took me all of 5 minutes to make the index page and then make the page for the one page I had some information typed up for. Pretty simple.

Now when I fire up VoodooPad Pro on my laptop I'll get the basic Kitchen Sink doc of mine as well as the document for work. Nice. Should make it a lot simpler. Sweet.

I noticed this morning that Firefox 3.0.11 is out and from the release notes it looks like it's a security update with a single bookmark database fix. Well... at least it's progress.

I have to say, with Safari 4 out and Google Chrome on Mac OS X making progress, the update for Firefox 3.5 should hurry up or look to be significantly lagging behind. Hope to see it soon.

This is a picture of my team at the Shop - Jeff's the manager, Jean, Raj and I are the developers, and this is in the corner of the trading floor by a window overlooking Jackson street on the 8th floor of the Chicago Board of Trade.

I have to say, after three months, it's still a great job to have and it's a real pleasure to work with a bunch of nice people.

I like SimpleScripts at HostMonster! This morning I got an email from SimpleScripts saying that WordPress 2.8 was out and was ready to upgrade my installs at HostMonster. Two things: one, I didn't know that 2.8 was even out yet (beating the Fantastico time-to-market by a ton) and two, what a wonderful service to let me know that there was an update available rather than me having to know and then look to the Fantastico site to see if it's there yet.

Very nice package, SimpleScripts. I'm glad I moved over. WordPress 2.8 I haven't heard anything about, but we'll see what it has to say for itself in the coming days.

Well... today I decided it wasn't worth it to keep working in Git when it's not really supported in the Shop. The approved version control is Subversion, and that's not really horrible, but it's not as nice as Git or CVS. The requirement that you have to change directories to change to a branch is silly. I understand why they did it, but it was a bit of a cop-out. At the same time, subversion holds the 'ignore' files in metadata, they could have held the branch/tag info.

Anyway... without support I decided to move. The problem is, there are no real tools to move from Git to Subversion. What I ended up doing was to create a new project in Subversion and then import the latest copy of the files. I lost the entire history to date on the two projects. It was a little disappointing, but in the end, we have something that I can easily share with other developers.

I feel a bit sad for not being able to use Git, but in the end, the realities of the work environment dictated that it had to be done.

Today a co-worker wanted to leverage the back-end Google Visualization system I have created for my web app. Given that I've got all the web services with database connections and the Google Visualization data generation, it made sense to look at the Google Visualization Gallery and see if they had something that would fit her needs. If they did, it would be relatively easy to make a page that issued an AJAX call to my server with the request for the database to be returned and placed into a simple x-y graph tool.

The first thing I needed to do was to subclass the GoogleVisualization class and create one that uses the back-end database connection as opposed to the in-memory database connection. This would allow her to execute queries against the back-end database, which was what she wanted. From there, all she had to do was to glue it together with a little HTML.

It took a while, but she's getting the hang of it.

Wow! It seems I missed quite a bit with DrawIt... it's at 3.8.2 already with the latest Sparkle notes saying only:

• It's now again possible to change document size
• Bitmap images can again be edited in external editors

I've looked on the web site and I can't seem to find the release notes for the other releases. Bummer. Oh well... it's up to date anyway.