Random Thoughts... by Jack Handy

In case you weren't aware, Firefox version 3 is now available for download. Its tasty. Apparently Opera 9.5 is faster though. Regardless, they both kick the poop out of IE for everything except watching Netflix on demand.

If you're interested, you can get a free Obama bumper sticker from Moveon.org at https://pol.moveon.org/obamastickers/?rc=homepage

Apparently YouTube is Rick Rolling everyone for April Fool's Day. Hilarious. That's even better than google.au's future search.

Just wondering if anyone else is using del.icio.us or Google Reader or any other good ways to share the useful informations from the interwebs. I know Matt and Maria are on del.icio.us. I know Matt and Tito are both on Google Reader. I've been using blogger (a.k.a. blogspot) for my more technical blogging lately, and I've kind of been liking it. I haven't been doing any social posting here or on myspace or facebook. I'm really finding the more passive style of link sharing is more my cup of tea. No offense to the twitter crowd, but I feel like that kind of constant updating is a little too much for me. Anyway, curious on what other people are doing for sharing useful information.

Also, I recently found XKCD thanks to Tito. Loving it.

hello. I've been away for awhile. I've been using my blogger account again lately. Mostly for tech stuff though. Anyway, just posting for the sake of it.

You are now able to switch carriers over to Sprint and help support Planned Parenthood at the same time. Sprint plan. 10% of all of your monthly charges go to Planned Parenthood of America without additional cost to you. Also, if you stay with their plan for at least 3 months they'll refund any early termination fees that the provider you switched from charged you up to $175. Added bonus, I'll be able to call you for free since Maria and I also use Sprint.

So, there's this website ottobib.com where you input the ISBN numbers for books and it generates the bibliography for you. Thought it might be helpful to some of you guys who might have papers coming up.

Next Tuesday (February 20th) is National Pancake Day. Free pancakes at IHOP from 7AM to 10PM

Wow, I never knew getting rid of teens could be so easy. I need to carry one of these with me at all times and get one installed on my house.

In honor of Barry's most excellent new icon, I will switch mine out too.

Birthday shout out to all of the late September folks. Al ( last Friday), Mikey (last Saturday), Kai and Mike (today).

awesome.  Check out Weird Al new White and Nerdy

Looks like the Wii will be coming out on November 12th and will be $250.  A little bit higher than the original esitmates I was hearing, but still pretty good considering the PS3 is going to be $500 or $600 and the XBox 360 is Around $400.  Long live the stupidly named winner of the newest round of console wars.

Looks like MGM / New Line Cinema is coming back from the dead.  And they're making the hobbit.

Happy Birthday to the Mel.  Jager it up.

Who actually decides to name a product fubar?

Happy birthday to two of my guys.  cricketboy and ozzyguru

So apparently people do like electric cars.  Especially when they look nice and do 0 to 60 in 4 seconds flat (that's better than a normal Corvette).  And apparently people are so damned excited that they'll throw $100,000 at it. The first 100 are already pre-sold. Apparently they family Sedan model will start selling in 2008 at around $45,000 so they'll be dropping in price fast.  Here's hoping.

I've been working on the Document Management System (DMS) at work for the last 6 months or so.  Normally working on this project wouldn't be that bad for me except there have been some twists.  First off, a branch of the code was opened up for us to work on while a consulting firm worked on a different part of the project.  Second, I added in two really drastic refactors by adding in the Spring and Hibernate frameworks.  This was no small task.  Finally, after working since early February with two developers under me, the project went out to production.  That was roughly one month ago.  We were pretty happy the day it went out and I thought everything was pretty smooth.  Then Monday came and it was evident that the application, though functional, couldn't perform under load.  Once 40 or users logged in, the servers were fragged..  They actually had to be restarted six times during the day.  This lead to the first production rollback in over two years for DMS.  Needless to say I was pretty upset about five months worth of work getting rolled back.  So, we went back and put in some tweaks, load tested the hell out of it and tweaked it some more.  This past Saturday it went out again.  I've been biting my nails waiting for the bottom to fall out.  But after running all day today and still responding in less than 1 second for all requests I can finally say it works.  The response times are the fastest the system has ever had and the feature set is better than ever.  The best part, this proves out my theory on these new frameworks.  We were able to eliminate 14,000 lines of code between the last release and this one, keep all of the functionality and improve performance.  Oh happy day.


YAY