iPhone SDK now available

I totally forgot that today Apple had an iPhone event scheduled for today. I'm currently watching the session while I write this. I just signed up for the iPhone SDK and cannot wait to get back into Objective-C. I used to be a NeXT (predecessor to Mac OS X) developer so seeing some of the familiar API's and language will be great. The best part is the Exchange integration that will be coming in June, finally I will be able to get my work email on my iPhone (wait, is that something I really want?). So are you going to build your own iPhone apps? As I start to develop some apps, I'll post my experiences here asap.

JavaPosse Roundup 2008

I'm off to the JavaPosse Roundup 2008 tomorrow morning (Monday March 3, 2008). Three of us from Overstock.com are going together. It should be a real blast. Late last year, James Ward of Adobe came out to speak at the November UJUG meeting about Flex. After the meeting we were out at a local pub called, Red Rock and James said if there was one conference you were going to go to in 2008, the Java Posse Roundup 2008 should be it. So I'll be there tomorrow afternoon, and cannot wait to meet everyone and to go skiing at Crested Butte. I also put together a collection of past Posse episodes for the drive down, here they are:

• Episode 9, interview with Josh Bloch
• Episode 14, interview with Jonathan Schwartz
• Episode 25, first episode with Joe Nuxoll
• Episode 32, interview with Gavin King
• Episode 70, interview with Brett Porter of Maven
• Episode 99.5, interview with Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo (JRuby)
• Episode 100, the number says it all
• Episode 107, special from JavaPosse Roundup 2007
• Episode 155, interview with Martin Odersky (Scala)

See you there!

Update on my dad

A quick update on my dad. After having a stroke on January 31, 2008, and a good family friend passing away a few days later, I'm happy to say that my dad has come home. After being in the hospital for about three weeks and catching the virus that caused the hospital to be locked down (meaning that he had no visitors for 10 days right after Bill K passed away), he was discharged because the virus had another breakout. Last weekend was a little scary, his blood sugar levels were way up, and his blood pressure was too high. My mom tried to reach a doctor but no one was available (the Canadian health care system for you). My folks finally got to a doctor on Wednesday and it turns out that he had the wrong prescription for his diabetes. Once the prescription was straightened out, he started to feel better. It will take several weeks for him to really feel the full impact of the medication but I can hear it in his voice already. He is starting to do much better. One more good thing, he can talk like his old self, fortunately the stroke only affected his balance which he is working on correcting. To everyone that contacted me, thank you very much for your thoughts, concerns, and comments. Dad - its great to have you back home, I love you very much!

Guitar Hero III - Where have you been?

For Christmas my wife and I got our family (we have three boys 11, 10, and 9) an XBox 360. But not any old XBox, the Halo 3 edition. My 10 year old and I have been playing Halo for years (Halo and Halo 2), so getting the 360 late last year once Halo 3 came out, seemed a no brainer. Since I'd been playing Half Life 2 for a while on our old XBox, my wife also got me the Organge Box for Christmas (great set of gifts btw, thanks honey). I've always liked Halo but Half Life is a way more engaging game, the physics are better, you can interact with just about everything and the gravity gun is hard to beat. I also think the the story is way more interesting. However, for pure game play, not much else comes close to Portal, Valve's new game introduced as part of the Orange Box. So Christmas was great I played a lot of Half Life 2 and Half Life 2 Episode One (almost finished). Then it happened... A couple of weeks back we were at our local Best Buy and they had a pallet of Guitar Hero III wireless guitar and game bundles. We've been talking about getting Rock Band so we could all play, but we thought we'd start with GH3 first. When we got home I started to play on easy to get the feel of the game and ended up almost finishing the solo-career game. I'm not sure how to describe the experience you get playing the game but the first thing that came to mind was "this is the ultimate air guitar experience." If you've ever listened to your favorite song and wished you could play the guitar (I know, I should have learned to play the guitar, but I didn't and now I'm too lazy), then GH is for you. After playing for a couple of weeks, my wife started to play and it has been a blast. We are almost through the co-op career on Medium but Knights of Cydonia is kicking our ass! So if you were wondering where the Seam Maven archetype is, now you know, GH3 has taken all my free time, and what a great ride it's been. BTW, now I find myself wishing all my favorite songs were in GH3. While driving to work I keep thinking, I want to play that on my plastic wireless guitar :-)

Overstock.com and Seam

As I mentioned a while back, I now work at Overstock.com. One of the things I've been working on for a couple of months is bringing JBoss Seam to Overstock. First off, just to clarify where we are using Seam: We will not be using Seam for the public Overstock.com website, the one you might be familiar with here however; we will be using it for internal application development. This is a really exciting time for me at Overstock because I'm helping to usher in some new technologies like Seam and my other favorite open source project, Maven. Since something like Seam is new to Overstock, I've had to put together some training courses, get "the seam Book" and put together a Maven Archetype to jump start projects. Over the next couple of days, I'll be posting a working pom file (along with a download) you can use for your own Seam/Maven project. My efforts are based on Michael Yuan's posts about Seam and Maven, with tweaks so you don't have to inherit from the Seam pom. One last thing on the Seam front, in case you missed it, there is a new Seam community site now available. The best part of all is that it is built on Seam. If you cannot eat your own dog food than your framework sucks :-)

Goodbye to a family friend

On Thursday, January 31st my Dad, Bill Maki, and a stroke. What I didn't know till later in the day was that a longtime family friend (45+ year and my Dad's best friend, Bill Kapush (another Bill), was admitted to the hospital with chest pain. There is only one hospital in my home town and they were down the hall from one another. The next day, Friday February 1st, while still in the hospital, in the care of a nurse and in mid sentence, Bill Kapush put his head down and died! I couldn't believe it, on Wednesday, January 30th, Bill Kapush, Bill Maki, and my mom were having dinner together and everything seemed okay. Two days later and my dad has had several strokes, has been diagnosed with dimensia and cannot talk too well and Bill Kapush is dead. My dad and Bill had stated to talk to one another every day for the last few years, it was part of their routine, another change my dad will have to make. I'd like to offer my condolences to the Kapush family, I know it was a big shock to all of you and my thoughts and prayers are with you. If you live near your parents, why don't you drop by and say hi, if you don't live near them call them today to say hi, or better still let them know you love them, you never know how fast life can change everything.

A very sad day

Unlike my usual posts, this one is not technical in nature. I've had a really rough day and wanted to record it so I could look back and remember how things went. So today is my birthday, another year older and probably the scariest day of my life so far. This morning around 8:30 my folks called to wish me a happy birthday and when I talked to my dad (who is 76 btw) I noticed he was having a real hard time talking, then he started to slur, at that point I realized something was up. My mom took my dad to the ER and it turns out that he had had a stroke, a couple perhaps. Unfortunately, there was worse news, he has dementia. I guess this explains why my mom has beens saying for a while that my dad is forgetting things, not aware of what's happening, etc. I think the scariest thing, for me at least, is talking to him. He doesn't sound like my dad, and when he talks I just want to hug him and make it better (I guess that's what happens when you yourself are a dad). It seems that he isn't really aware of his diagnosis, so maybe that is a good thing. So have you had a loved one that has gone through this? If so, how did you handle it? What did your family do, did they gather around one another or stay away? I was planning on going to my home town tonight but my mom asked me not to, to give them a few days to work it out. Dad - if you read this, I love you and hope you know what a great dad you are!

All Apple Fan, All Geek?

So after reading Matt Raible's post, I had to know how I measured up. So here it is: 73% Geek 89%How Addicted to Apple Are You? For fun, my wife and I thought we'd see how we'll do in the pending Zombie Apocalypse, we got a 55% chance (I tried to copy the URL and reloaded the page, maybe I should re-evaluate my Geek percentage).

Rocky Mountain Software Symposium

I just finished uploading my slides for this weekends Rocky Mountain Software Symposium (aka NFJS Denver). I have two sessions, one on JPA and another on Maven 2. Here are my presentations. I hope to see you there.

Eclipse Tip

Are you tired of seeing all Java files in your Eclipse project showing this icon: Would you like to know if a Java file is an enum, an Interface, or maybe an annotation? Just turn on the Java Type Indicator preference and your class icons will change from this: to this: . For detailed instructions on how to turn this preference on, check out this Eclipse help page.