Last week I attended one day event organized by Microsoft named Heroes Happens Here. It is series of introduction targeting new products: Windows Server 2008 (not out yet) SQL Server 2008 (not out yet) and Visual Studio 2008 (out and well). I do not do much Microsoft development these days - my world is currently rather unevenly divided between Java (about 70 %), Web-ish technologies (XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, some Ruby) and OS-X (Objective C) which I am trying to squeeze in and get finally started.

It happened few days ago for the first time: after opening the lid on my MacBook Pro, the machine woke up, but the screen stayed dark. Whatever I did, I just could see cursor and nothing underneath. I had to resort to unthinkable - reboot :-( Some research showed this is known problem - which is from certain point of view good, because many people found hopefully many workarounds. The more information can be found here, here and here.

Program managers want an infinite number of features in zero time, testers and service operations staff want zero features over infinite time, and developers just want to be left alone to code cool stuff. FromI. M. Wright's "Hard Code" by Eric Brechner

There is a saying that necessity is the mother of invention. Such necessity happened last week and forced me to try out the Groovy language. The trigger was need for creating good data set for testing changes in a full text search. I had to locate few hundred of obsolete technical documents to be used as test data, dump the metadata as well as the BLOB data to disc, create INSERT sql scripts and loader that would from Ant pre-load the database with the test set and insert the BLOB's.

With the walking season almost upon us (so far only walks by streets, for the Ottawa River Pathway one still needs a snowshoes), it is time to replenish the stock of listening material. Here are some of the about 10 new podcasts that I tried out recently and decided to keep: 1) Pragmatic Programmers podcast. That was a pleasant find (thanks Milos). The topics covered are very wide - as are topics covered by the books.