I have not managed to journal my experience with the Head First Java book by Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates, but it has been great. One concept that I have had trouble with prior to Head First Java is the relationship between events and listeners with graphical user interface controls. Coming from a Visual Basic background, the programming of an interface was largely simplified, and subsequently limited.

While teaching the use of the ActionListener interface, the book fleshes out the concept of interfaces in general via the hands-on experience gained while working through the GUI-related chapters. In short, if you haven’t learned Java yet, get the book!

Almost every spare moment I have had lately has been devoted to trying to get through the Head First book since I have so much work coming up with the J2EE study group. This weblog will probably be pretty sparse for a while.

Kathy Sierra has another great entry in her java.net weblog today. It’s titled How are you on a blind date?, and if you do develop software, this entry is a good reminder of a foundational principle – you are making something to be used by OTHERS.

Take a look at it; I found it a refreshing reminder that there is art and beauty in what I do. For me, that matters – and I think it should for everyone.

Not too long ago I posted about becoming more involved with Debian Installer than just being a tester. Since then, time constraints have forced me to choose some activities to drop. Given that the last 8 ISOs I burned for testing the new installer did not work, and that the activity has very little bearing on my actual work, the Debian stuff had to go. It’s not that I don’t like Debian or that I don’t think that it is a great Linux distro; I am just out of time. I closed my open bug reports so as not to leave stuff lying around on the Debian bug tracking system.

Most of my time these days is going toward advancing my Java skillset. I am going to be in a J2EE SCEA study group starting March 15, 2004, which is eating almost all of my bandwidth outside of work. I am looking forward to it, though.

So I am working through the Absolute BSD book, getting my new FreeBSD install up and running. Early in the book, Lucas talks about using RCS to control your commonly-revised admin files. I had no idea that RCS was already on the system. I had even less of an idea as to how simple it was to use. If you are just getting into *nix, take the time to learn RCS. You can have an annotated and commented revision history for your key files, such as /etc/profile, /etc/rc.conf, etc. (Was that redundant?)

I will try to add in an example, but I am really pressed for time these days. If you want to know more, check out the book! It is a great complement to the other available documentation.

Now, if any developers are reading this and wailing at the mention of RCS, bear in mind that I am talking about using RCS for system administration tasks. Yes, there are better options for revision control, but for the average administrator, RCS is ubiquitous enough and presents a minimal learning curve. It seems to me to be a great fit for adding some process to the average *nix administrative workload.

For development, I don’t have too many problems with CVS. However, I am checking out Subversion based on some recommendations I have read. The only thing that bugs me is the use of non-text data stores, but for all the things it offers, I can’t get too hung up on that quirk.

There was some followup on the Atlanta ColdFusion User Group community mailing list discussion about CFMX as an enterprise platform that I had posted earlier. Some folks had good questions, so I tried to elaborate a bit more. The content of that reply is posted here…
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