Egads Lockergnome pointed to me

I know its hardly a slashdotting but Lockergnome pointed at my aparently "new" v1.0 posting of mReader from last August. Along with it cometh the comment spam!

Thank god for mt-blacklist.

The Challenges of Accenture, and Java

Whatever anyone says about Accenture, whether current employee's or alumini, you can't debate that in the development roles you are never going to be short of challenges.

At the end of last week I got reassigned to some system testing and debugging on some middleware we have implemented for a utilities company here in the UK. This may sound a bit dry at first, until you realise that so many consulting companies have their finger in this utilities pie that the integration layers we have developed and are testing are very sensitive to the politics that go along with the situation.

I have had my hands deep into J2EE and EJB over the last week, debugging, ironining out issues, recoding badly implemented portions (thanks to some of the other consulting companies that have managed to get their grubby mitts into the code). Its been an interesting challenge given my skill track is .NET and my Java experience has been quite limited.

After coding in C# for the last umpteen months, coding in Java is like taking a step back in time. It feels ancient, its syntax is clumsy and long winded. Java makes _you_ do all the work, instead of providing mechanisms for simplifying the construction and readability of code.

So, hopefully, when the switch is thrown on > 1100 field workers, everything goes without a hitch and I can move back to a nice modern language created for this millenium, not last.

I'm tired, but i'm happy...

...but maybe im not this happy!

Sorry Foxy, the Birdy is better

Thats right, I am dumping Mozilla Firefox 0.8 in favor of Mozilla Firebird 0.7.

FireFox is just too buggy. I am experiencing hangs, high cpu usage, lockups. Nasty stuff, especially when you have 10-20 tabs or so open.

Maybe I could live with the FireFox hangs if they provided a "restore to previous state" like the current build of Opera has so that when you restart you don't have to do _everything_ again!