Yes, I'm still alive... I've just been very busy with certain things I can't really talk about in public. Please forgive me.

(now onto my regularly scheduled link blogging)

First of all, I'm terribly sorry, Mary, but opensolaris.org is really not that big a deal -- at least not until there's actually something usable for the community to download and install.

It's good to see another Spring book getting released. I'm not sure whether I'll be buying Craig's book (although I'm very confident that it's a high quality piece of writing, in authentic Craig Walls style) since I'm anyway getting a complimentary copy of Apress' forthcoming Spring book any day now, but I'd still like to extend my congratulations to Craig for getting another book out. Then again, I wouldn't be surprised if I found myself skimming through Craig's book within a couple of months... "Hi, my name is Lasse and I'm a book addict"... Oh, and one more thing -- my condolences, Craig.

Aspect-oriented programming. Ever heard of that? Yes, I know it's the hottest thing right now -- right after the Paris Hilton video -- but it's also something I've pretty much ignored so far. I do read Adrian Colyer's blog on AspectJ to keep some kind of a touch on what's happening on that side of the geek universe. Unfortunately, reading entries like this only makes me feel small. I mean, how the heck am I going to learn all that new syntax...?

In the Googleplex, Cedric has come out of the closet as a SAX-fan. I'm not a SAX-fan. Not even a SOX-fan. Not even a Red Sox fan. I prefer DOM and XPath. Why? Ease of development and maintainability. I've written my share of SAX handlers that are basically building their custom DOM object model from the SAX events. If you don't know that you've got a bottleneck in front of you, don't optimize it. Just don't. And my condolences to Cedric as well.

Now back to me for once...

I've lately started listening to audio and video recordings by a variety of techno-celebrities while I do other stuff. For example, I'm quite certain that without JavaLobby making Vincent Massol's Maven presentation from JavaPolis available online, I would know much less about Maven (although I don't have any plans of migrating to use Maven instead of my beloved workhorse, the good old plain vanilla Ant). I've also got a couple of Ruby tutorials on my desktop as QuickTime movies, I've been listening to a number of IT Conversations (I have to listen to Ken Schwaber's talk again because those damn co-workers wouldn't let me do anything on the keyboard without at least one interruption per 5 minutes :), I've watched Mike Clark's two-minute introduction to CruiseControl, I checked out Steve Jobs' keynote at Macworld 2005, and so on and so on. Today, I noticed that I'm not the only one to notice a trend.

Last, I know I promised I've got things to say -- thoughts provoked while reading "Getting To Yes" -- but I've had to put those thoughts aside for now. I'll do my best to get rid of my "extra" activities so that I can start thinking again ;)