I am the ghost of groovymother.com. Woooooo!

He danced a dainty tango

Hrmph. I was all excited that I’d found a download of the Um Bongo commercial, but the video clip is only 15 seconds, not the full 30 second masterpiece. Curses. Foiled again.

“Sleep? Isn’t that some inferior caffeine replacement?”

This is a very odd feeling.

Last night, I managed to get 9 solid hours of quality sleep. This is unusual for me, as I am decidedly insomniacesque. Then this morning, I had my usual large Dunkin Donuts coffee. But since I was awake to begin with, I’m now buzzed beyond belief.

So, by not being tired, I am able to think through problems carefully. But because of the caffeine, I can’t concentrate on anything for more than thirty seconds. For example, since starting to compose this post, I’ve checked my email three times.

I’ve gotta try and balance this out sometime.

Geek Gushing

Hurrah for technology. I’ve spent the last week playing around with various bits & pieces, and have been getting cyberwarmandfuzzies left, right and center. Non-programmer-types can probably skip this post, but if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to gush.

First up, a hearty hug and a handshake to Mac OS X. My Blue&White G3 (purchased cheap from a company who, following several rounds of layoffs, now had more PCs than employees) has been sat under my desk for 6 months now—Occassionally prodded or played with, but never really used. But after installing Jaguar, I’ve spent some time learning to love it, and I have to admit, it’s ace. The lovely whoop-de-do UI, combined with the underlying Unix is just a stunning combination. Being able to SSH to my Mac and install all the usual Gnu goodies just sets my nerd-heart a flutter.

Next up, Omnicore CodeGuide. Now this is what an IDE should be like. I’ve used it for a couple of revisions, and have gone on and on to my friends about how much time I’ve saved with it’s real-time MS Word-like error-highlighter, but the new version just made my jaw drop—Being able to edit code in a running app and have it execute without recompiling is a dream come true for this programmer. If you ever program in Java, then get this IDE on your desktop forthwith.

Finally, I giggled like a schoolgirl whilst playing with Apache Axis—The open-source group’s Java implementation of SOAP. While I thought that Microsoft had done a great job with .NET in making it easy to deploy a web service, Axis blew me away with how easy they made it:

OK, here's step 1 : copy the above .java file into your webapp directory, and rename it "Calculator.jws".

Now for step 2… hm, wait a minute. You’re done!

Axis developers, I salute you.

OK, enough blethering about computers—back to the funny links…

Culchir

It’s high culture like this which makes me miss living in Edinburgh.

Where’s “Viva Ned Flanders”?

Chocolicious

Maybe Cadbury’s should send India some Roses to apologise.