In June of this year I joined a new company that is doing some rather advanced Java work. I had to get current, tout de suite, and in so doing, I’ve really gotten interested and engaged again. Spring and Hibernate have really changed from the older versions I was using, and so has JUnit. All for the better, from what I can tell.

And with this renewed interest, I’ve bought my first new Java books in over 3 years. I bought Effective Java (2nd Edition) to replace my first edition and Java Concurrency in Practice, because I heard good things about it. So far, I’ve read about 2/3 of  Effective Java. I used to buy Java books all the time. I have tons of them. But when I got bored, I stopped shelling out the cash on the Java books.

Java-land is still a very nice place to play. Sometimes you have to get an outside perspective to realize that.

I paid my registration fee on Friday, and I’m really looking forward to attending. I’ve only been using WordPress since late June, but I’m already hooked. Anyone else going? I’ll be driving to Birmingham on Friday night, since things get going at 9:00 Saturday morning.

see more pwn and owned pictures

But here’s the rub: for now, it’s Windows-only. How can this be? It’s built on top of WebKit, which is Apple’s updated version of KHTML, and both run on OSX and Linux. So what gives, Google? I know they say that there will be OSX and Linux versions “soon,” but how long is that?

I found directions for building Chromium, which says on its homepage, “Google Chrome is built with open source code from Chromium.” So I downloaded all the source code and tried to build it. Here’s 2,000 words about how it went

I guess I’ll just have to wait for the official OSX release.

I also love hamburgers. With cheese, preferably Swiss. Chili’s has a really good burger.

But never, ever, in my wildest, weirdest dreams, would I want to combine them. Krispy Kreme doughnuts and a cheeseburger. Ugh. But apparently the people at Google thought that was a good thing. I hope the plate they put those on has the phone number of a local cardiologist enscribed on it. Eaters of those things are going to need one.

Another annoyance was that they kept rearranging the order of my feed folders. I am meticulous about organizing bookmarks and feeds; I have them categorized into folders, and those folders are in alphabetical order in the feed list. And Bloglines keeps moving them around, maybe once every two weeks, for no good reason. Very annoying, indeed.

So the other day I decided to give Google Reader another try. I exported all my subscriptions from Bloglines and imported them into Google Reader. Thus far, I’m quite happy. The response time is snappy and I like the fact that I can share things from my feeds into a public list which is available here and that can feed into my FriendFeed feed. I’m going to keep using Google Reader, and while I will check back in on Bloglines occasionally, it looks like I may have found a new feed reader.

If you click on it to view it better, you’ll see the problem. The stats graph is shifted about 200 pixels to the right and about 150 pixels down. On Safari it looks perfect, but not on Firefox. This doesn’t happen with Firefox on Windows, so it’s some sort of quirk with the Mac version.

Has anyone else seen this, and do you have any suggestions?

What I forgot was that after installing 2.0.2 I also setup a mail account on the phone to my company’s Exchange server. The problem was that even though I had “Push” turned off in the “Fetch New Data” section of Settings, when I added the Exchange server, it defaulted to “Push.” Once I discovered this, turned “Push” off and told it to fetch every hour, my battery life is right back where it has always been.

So, if you’re losing battery life faster than you expected, check your “Push” settings, not just in the Settings tool, but for each email account you have setup.

Damn, this is hard.