shwango! blog

On Tuesday night I proposed to Jen and she accepted! She was pretty surprised since I did it on the day before our three year dating anniversary.

Yesterday we finally got some Spring weather in Cincinnati! Nice, sunny and 70 degree day! Fired up the grill! (Not that it was the first time lighting the grill this year – I’ll grill out even in the snow!) Of course today is wet an rainy.

Since MyEclipse doesn’t natively support EJB3 (yet), you need to include the EJB3 libs in your project – I’m using JBoss, so I’ve got the JBoss EJB libs. There’s great post in the MyEclipse forums on getting it set up. I added a few posts over there on which libs I needed – but here’s my screenshot for reference. (Technically you only need Eclipse, but I use MyEclipse and think it’s worth the little bit of cash.)

And to use MySQL for the tutorial:

@GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.AUTO)
and remove the @SequenceGenerator annotation – that worked for me.

Here’s another great EJB3 tutorial.

The Train Expo was this past weekend at the Cincinnati Convention Center. Pretty cool stuff! I just started getting back into trains and model railroading over the Christmas holiday after Jen took me down to Holiday Junction at the Museum Center – they also have an amazing model of Cincinnati in the 40s as well as the re-opened Tower A which overlooks the Queensgate yard. (Webcam of the model.)

Some pictures and movies of the train expo: day 1, day 2, and a few movies.

Jen’s been pretty understanding of my new hobby! Actually she doesn’t mind it at all – just how much time I’m spending on it!

I also did a little “railfanning” a few weeks ago.

Here are some pictures over looking the yard on the Hopple St. viaduct and a few pictures from the Longworth Hall parking lot.

I think I’ve mentioned before that over the past two years or so I’ve really been getting into Java and J2EE development. I’ve got a cool app running on JBoss using EJBs, Quartz for scheduling and MySQL for the database. Pretty stable too in the year or so it’s been in production. Most of the “good” stuff in our TF platform is running on JBoss now too – not really using the J2EE features yet since there’s so much old code still there, but making progress. Anyway…

I just started playing around with JBoss’ EJB3 stuff and I’m lovin’ it! I didn’t mind EJB 2.1 since I have MyEclipse and XDoclet to easy the amount of code I had to write, but this is much better! I’ve only just done a few small demo apps, but so far it’s really great.

Want to listen to a great podcast with Gavin King (of hibernate fame) discussing EJB3 and JBoss’ new Seam product, check out the Java Posse’s interview with him!

I highly recommend the PDF book Getting Real by the 37signals guys. I’m not a Ruby or Rails user, but I really like what these guys are doing – I use my Basecamp almost daily. Great ideas abound! The book has some “common sense” stuff – but reiterating that never hurts since many people don’t use common sense! And I just really like their style. The book is a short 170 pages or so and a very quick read.

Also, if you didn’t listen to the Venture Voice podcast with Jason Fried of 37signals, check it out! 37signals’ James Buck was on Audible Ajax recently.

This comment I got is hilarious! Those of you who suffered through the v.com fiasco would get the inside joke! Whoever posted that, thanks – I busted out laughing when I read that! Aaron, was that you?

The new Intel based Macs look so sweet. Not sure if I could decide between a 20″ iMac or a MacBook Pro. Both would be nice…

Geez… I can’t believe it’s February already! And I didn’t even have one post in January, even though I should have! Besides wishing everyone a Happy New Year, January 15th was Jen’s birthday! So, happy belated blog birthday to Jen! I won’t promise to write more often, but I will try – as Joel says “The more you write, the more you’ll be able to write.” And I want to be able to write.

I know I haven’t posted in a while, but just wanted to post a Merry Chistmas and Happy Holidays message to my one and a half readers out there!