Today I had a short presentation about unix command line tools. It had four use cases how to combine simple tools like grep and find in order to do some log mining. Even though I prepared everything the Demo Effect was very much present.

I had company's MacBook Pro connected to the projector. And it froze just before presentation when I was checking my slides. Not just an ordinary program crash but something strange. I was able to move mouse pointer but I couldn't click or type anything. Command+Option+Escape did not work either which was even more strange. So, I rebooted the machine which happens to be first revision MacBook Pro...

Then the terminal was causing headache. As the laptop had german keyboard layout it also has ¨ key next to return key. If I pressed that umlaut key accidentally with return it did not show any extra character but my line had an error. And when I checked the line from history it had some garbage in the end.

As I had done my preparations well I had all those scripts on the paper. The idea was to have live presentation using terminal and connection to some test server. It worked well but those scripts had typos. I was checking them before hand but still some problems occurred. Luckily nothing unsolvable, I had some friendly people in the audience who pointed them out when I was scratching my head.

Anyways, it was fun to have a presentation. It has been a while since I had last one. Now I just have to come up an idea for the next.

"J2EE is more than EJB.
EJB is less than J2EE"

Yes, I am reading Rod Johnson's Expert One-on-One J2EE Development without EJB. So far I have done one fifth and it seems to be really good book. More about this later.

Ambrosia Software has published a new shareware ($19) game. SketchFighter is a traditional two dimensional cave flying shoot-em-up. But instead of traditional graphics it has very different approach. Everything happens on a school graph paper and it looks like it has been drawn by pencils and markers.

Basically the game contains all the normal elements, like hidden items, power ups and boss monsters. But it is very well made and runs smoothly on my 12" PowerBook G4 1.5GHz. In addition of single player mode it has Internet and shared keyboard 2-player mode. I tested briefly 4 minute match with someone from USA and despite high ping there was no noticeable lags or stutters.

As every Java developer has noticed Sun has released Java 1.6 yesterday. It seems to be a nice upgrade as it doesn't change syntax or introduce any new language enhancements like 1.5 did. So, it promises only good things like better performance, reliability and user interfaces without breaking anything. We'll see...

Now I am wondering when Apple releases their version of Java 1.6. Usually it takes some time for Apple to do this and as usually they do not give any exact release date. At the moment they only offer Java SE 6 Release 1 which is based on JDK 1.6.0_b88 on their developer site. Another question is also whether they release it both OS X 10.4 and upcoming 10.5 Leopard or only for later. Most likely they will release it for both because Leopard is promised for the spring 2007.

I am not a great fan of game consoles like Playstation or Xbox. But apparently some people take games seriously. Check this site about damages caused by Nintendo Wii controller.

After experiencing some issues with sound output on SUSE Linux and my work station I started to wonder when was the last time I had some problematic issue with my home computer, 12" Powerbook with OS X 10.4 Tiger. I have had this small laptop since March 2005 so it is already a little bit outdated. It has only 1.5 GHz G4 processor and 768Mb RAM memory.

Recently I received a brand new battery through exchange program so it is hard to say about battery related things but I get over four hours while surfing, chatting and listening podcasts over WLAN. I have had no data loss and I haven't reinstalled operating system. Updating software has been trouble free through Software Update. Also other non-Apple programs have behaved well without strange crashes or such.

I don't have any special carrying carrying case for this laptop but I have a Tucano Second Skin which protects it from scratches in my back bag. The aluminum case is anyways pretty durable and does not show signs of wear easily. But the metal surface is also a source of annoyance. When computer is plugged to ungrounded socket it leaks some electricity to the surface. Even though it is not strong or lethal but it gives tickling sensation if one happens to touch ground while touching laptop's metal skin at the same time.