New year, new issues, new inventions and a UFO

Hope you all had nice Holidays. Myself I did as little as possible, part from eating too much good stuff and a few glasses of champagne on New Years Eve. Also had a nie experience with a chocolat dessert and some wine from Banyuls, a naturally sweet red wine from the very south of France, almost on the border to Spain.

On the second of this month I was back in the office to find that a number of collegues where doing the same. Thought I'll be quite alone in the office, but there is plenty to do in the curent project. As it turns out there are some JUnit coverage numbers to pump up - there is a report to be produced for a managerial meeting next week, which in turn means that the JRE 1.6 issue has to be postponed until next week. There are a few new things to care for during these JUnit and Eclipse plug-in test cases that confuses me; running the test case separately everyting is nice and peachy, executing it in a suite causes it to fail. It seems that the corresponding bundle is not instantiated properly for the plug-in under test. Anyhow, it is problably something obvious when it has been figured out.

Another issue to cater for later this week and coming weeks is to start evaluating the Newton component framework. In the project I am assigned to we have the need of a server portion and as we are doing much development targeting OSGi, there is a high degree of reuse possible. Further, Newton will enable us to concentrate on prodcuing POJOs as the framework takes care of the details related to lifecycle management and distribution. The latter is a very intersing aspect; one of the evaluation criterea is to see how this can be achieved on a single JVM (OSGi ) and across several JVMs (it makes use of JINI). There will be more posts on this matter when there is more to report.

Came across some new intersting inventions. I think it becomes increasingly difficult for science fiction writers as more and more of the "inventions" they have imagined has been realised, or is about to be eventually. Peter F. Hamilton, though, has come up with some very intersting things in his books, some which I believe has revitalised SF with some new concepts. Some of these are not that far fetcehd as can be believed, they should actually be feasible within not a too far away future. E.g. the "Expanding armour" described in the article referenced above comes quite close to what Mr. Hamilton has invented in some of his books (see "Fallen dragon" and the Confederation triology).

Well, speaking (writing) about things related to outer space; a UFO was sighted at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, or so it is said. Visitors or not, it seemingly hovered over the terminal building just to shoot off shortly there after. Could it be yet another climatologically change related phenomenon?