del c:\ /f /s

Luckily, my current employer has enabled me to go to JavaOne this year. I was only able to attend Tuesday and Wednesday, but I did see some interesting stuff. I attended the EJB 3 Interceptors session by Bill Burke, from JBoss Inc (my current employer), and I was intregued with what I saw. This seems like a powerful mechanism for extending the capabilities of EJBs. I also attended an JUnit 4 with Java SE 5 session, which was pretty good as well.

I fixed a little bug with the preferences panel for Convert and Paste, and posted an update for the plug in. This is the first fully functional release of the plug in, and you can get it from Firefox's extension site at http://groggluebutt.blogspot.com/ or from the SourceForge project page for it at http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=165483. You can go to my site to let me know about any interesting regexps you use with the plugin. http://www.grogscave.net.

I posted the results of my first add-on for Firefox called Convert and Paste. XUL is the framework that Firefox uses to implement all of the browser UI, and it is actually a quite interesting system for UI creation and extension. I defined an overlay that put a new menu item, and some bindings to keys for my add-on, as well as some a properties page to control the add-on. Convert and Paste allows you to apply regular expressions to the contents of the clipboard and have those contents modified as they are being pasted. I actually created this out of a slight frustration of repeatedly having to convert slashes from backward to forward when pasting links to files on to our corporate wiki from my Windows laptop. The add-on is GPL and I'll post it to SourceForge soon. For now, you can see it on my site at http://www.grogscave.net.

We closed on the house! After going to the bank to empty our savings account of the proceeds of the sale of our first house, we carried our down payment check into the lawyer's offices. Therese and I were a little scared, but we were very much ready to get out of the two bedroom crapartment. We walked into the lawyer's office at about 9:00 AM. Before filling out the paperwork, the laywer mentioned that they hadn't recieved funds for the loan yet, but that we should worry because they should be there by the time we finish signing the papers. So off to signing we went... After finishing up, we waited for a little while for the lawyer to have one of the assistants copy all the papers and check on the status of the funds from the mortgage. So we waited. And we waited some more. Finally the lawyer popped back in and said that the funds for one of the loans made it, but the other load was taking some time. At 11:00 AM, the lawyer suggested that we might want to head out ...

Here's a photo of the new house as of our last walkthrough. Just want to plug Sharp Residental as a pretty darn good builder. We spent a couple hours going over everything with a fine tooth comb, and my wife and I noted less problems than the Sharp representative that walked through with us! If you are looking for a quality builder, Sharp Residential does a great job. Only 7 days until our closing, and Therese, Ian, and I are very excited!

Since I'm in a role now where I regularly get on calls with the sales team to talk tech to customers and prospects, I get to hear to some interesting "sales phases". I think these phrases are borne of an environment where the sales person is trying to keep the upper hand in a conversation by always having a response to some situation. I'll attempt to keep a log of these phrases here. I do have to credit my brother-in-law, Joe, for giving me the idea for doing something like this. When he first moved to my area, he had started keeping a notebook with all the funny stuff he heard during the day. My first entry was heard on a customer call talking about my company and the speaker was trying to communicate to the customer that we are a company with staying power. The phrase that this salesperson uttered was an interesting combination of two common phrases. The resulting was that our company was not one of those "fly by the seat of the night" companies. I heard m...

This weekend our refrigerator stopped performing it's normal job, and now it is mostly just taking up space. We've already lost two quarts of milk, and our ice is starting to melt in the freezer. It's getting pretty smelly in there too, what with our 95 degree weather. Also, our pool was closed off due to someone deciding to *ahem* excrete feces into it. So my son is driving Therese crazy because he can't swim today. Our kitchen sick faucet is leaking as well. Only about 132 days until we should be in our new home...