John Gordon

As other folks have tried to do, I'm trying to reduce the 80MB bulk of Axis2 to keep my already bloated client code as trim as possible. For whatever reason, be it that Axis2 is used in so many different ways, I wasn't able to find what the minimum would be for a client using xml beans as the binding framework. After some digging, this is what I got:

fall has yet again returned to Maine. In fact, we're actually approaching the end of the most beautiful part of it. Our backyard has two maple trees, one of which has already dropped it's leaves. As someone who has lived in a city environment almost all my adult life, I'm enjoying watching what these trees do. Today, for example, the maple, which heretofore had held onto it's leaves, decided to drop almost all of them en masse on the space of about an hour. It wasn't uncommon to see during the 20 minute span of time I watched to see 20-30 leaves sailing to the ground simultaeneously.

The Downeaster, Amtrak's commuter rail between Portland, Maine and Boston, now offers free wifi! This makes the four hour commute a productive one!

we went to Grace's friend, Elea's, 4th Birthday party. Here's a handy-dandy slide show of the pics (ignore the blurry ones, would ya?). You can click on the image to go to a larger slideshow.

My daughter, Grace, went to her friend, Teague's, birthday party today. It was a lot of fun and I got to play around with a cheap camcorder I picked up the other day, the Flip Video camcorder. It's good for catching those odd moments. An added plus is that no one feels self-conscious when you're taping them because it's so small. No one even commented on what I was doing with that funny little white thing. You can pick one of these up at Target for $110. Not bad.

I put together a little birthday movie from what I recorded. Click the link below to get it. Happy Birthday, Teague!

This guy on an airplane is able to crash the entire entertainment system thanks to a classic 'Off By 1' coding bug. Don't worry, the plane lands safely ;-). Read about it here.

It's been a long time, or at least it's felt like it, but I finally have a working Macbook again. It's actually a brand new Macbook, Apple replaced my old one. I would have gone after them with torches and pitchforks if they hadn't.

As you recall, I sent my Macbook off to get fixed with some trepedation because of all the problems I had with my crappy 12" iBook 4 years ago. Well, sure enough, I got another dud. Not even two hours after I got my Macbook back, the logic board died. This was after I waited a week to get the danged thing returned. The next morning I was on the phone to Apple explaining how I wouldn't put up with it again. My chances were slim to none for getting a new Macbook, but then a wonderful thing happened. I proved that I suffered from a crappy laptop in the past. Once they dug up the repair history on the crappy iBook I had, they agreed to send me a brand new machine.

Well, this should serve as a reminder that you shouldn't buy the first version of a computer, my Macbook is now randomly shutting down--instant turnoff. There's no error in the system log and it isn't because of a specific program because it sometimes shuts down 2 seconds after the happy mac sound is played at boot up. I found this thread that describes what's happening to my box. It's a shame that I'll most likely have to send it in. It'll probably be a week before I get it back.

I was shagrinned to see a post in the thread saying something to the effect that it was great that the fix is free. Who cares if it's free? I would like to have purchased a laptop that actually doesn't break! It reminds me of the G3 iBook that I bought, a 12" about 4 years ago. It too had a defect that would cause the display to die. Apple finally acknowledged that it was a hardware issue and has been paying to fix it every time it craps out on me (3 times to date). The funny thing is that I gave it away to a friend, and the same day my new Macbook starts acting wonky, the G3's screen goes out again. Kizmet.

I recently finished my first version release for a study aide app I use for learning Spanish. It mimics how one uses flashcards to memorize vocabulary. Access it here. You can create your own quizes but you first need to create an account. Though basic right now, I plan on adding more features to it:

• Quizes will remember what you got right and wrong, allowing you to be retested on only the one you missed.
• Save quiz results and report on quiz statistics

A friend of mine, Jun-Dai, confirmed that you can use it for Japanese as well. The trickiest bit was gracefully dealing with users hitting the back button in the browser during a quiz.