My mom's dog Lilly is over for the week. My mom, Ross and the kids are at Disney World for the week. Last time Lilly was over, she and Bandit played non-stop. This time however, she seems quite... um, "unplayful". Bandit pounces on her, nibbles, barks, licks, etc.. and she doesn't blink. Poor Bandit just wants to play and can't understand why Lilly won't. She's probably about 8 years old now and likes to sleep a lot. I think after a couple days she'll be more playful.

This weekend my tape drive arrived. I got it all hooked up and found out that my SCSI controller's BIOS utility doesn't detect any devices!! I then attached a second tape drive borrowed from work (shhhh :) and it also isn't detected. I guess that's kind of good. Hopefully it means that there's something wrong with the SCSI card, not the drive. Like everything else, if I'm going to get the tape drive going I have to dedicate many hours of spare time just to get the hardware working, and to learn all about the backup software I plan to use called "bacula".

I also decided to download Solars 10 (the 11/06 version) to burn on DVD and use on that second server computer that is supposed to be running my web apps. I downloaded 5 files, and used "cat file1 file2 file3 file4 file5 > burnthisfile" as per the instructions to create the final ISO. I used Gnome's built in "Burn ISO" feature to burn the DVD. When I tried to boot it, it complained that the CD is corrupt or missing files. It turns out the Gnome ISO burner only burned about 678 MB of files. That must mean it's only made for CD-R not DVD-R. So I either have to spend time finding, installing and learning software to burn the DVD, or can download the 6 cds instead. Or, if Sun would ever ship my free Solaris 10 DVD media kit I could just use that. Hopefully it'll arrive any day now. So once again, I'm going to leave that for later. It won't be a quick setup. I'll have to learn basic UNIX concepts as they are different than linux. I'll also have to learn about creating zones and containers, managing resources for containers, setting up a linux container with Cent OS, etc.. before I can install the first app. Two of the apps require Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and should run OK in a CentOS linux container. It sucks, but I'll have to leave this for another month or two until I can dedicate a couple weeks to it.

What else? My Windows box is still useless. I have not touched it for weeks since I bought Vista and installed it. My Sound Blaster Live sound card and 3Com network card are not supported. I haven't had the time to figure out what to do about it yet. I started thinking that maybe I should be using Vista on a brand new computer that is fully compatible, but cannot justify the cost unless I can sell some of my old stuff. But then it would be handy to turn my old P1.5GHz windows computer into a machine for trying new linux distros on, maybe solaris, etc.. a machine I can wipe whenever I want. I just can't justify the cost. I don't need a new computer. What do I do about the $200 copy of Vista I bought then? ARGG..

I brought my laptop home this weekend to do some work. I didn't do any work because I got caught up in other things. I'm weeks behind the schedule I told my boss I'd be following and wanted to make up for some time. The reason I'm behind is because every thing I want to do is an up hill battle. I'm a newbie in all kinds of areas such as securing java web services, web service registries, doing certain things in JSF, etc... I've realized that I really am a Junior Java Programmer. I've only been at it for a bit over year and have come a long long way, but there is still a hell of a lot that I don't have experience in yet. Plus, I'm a one man team. In bigger companies you'd have people who specialize in certain areas working on the team, and above everyone is the software architect who's mastered it all. I've got nobody to go to for help and advice except mailing lists, paid Sun support, and my library of books. I think for a one man team made up of a Junior Java Programmer, I have done well. I just have to keep at it.

I'm almost finished reading a book that teaches the Agile Unified Process and Object Oriented Analysis & Design. It says the project should first start with someone who's skilled in systems analysis which doesn't necessarily mean they have programming skills. They have skills we don't have and can produce tons of useful documentation vital to the project. Next the software architect looks it over and comes up with a high level system architecture. He documents it etc.. There should be a couple of programmers, and one person who specializes in data. He's got solid DBA skills. The architect might find that there are several significant sub-systems that can be delegated to other teams with similar skills. The book goes into great detail about iterative development, all the documentation that should be done before and during development, what each team member does during each iteration, etc.. Very facinating. I would be quite happy to work under a skilled architect on a team like the one described in the book. It would take a lot of pressure off me, and I could learn a lot from the team members. I've scratched off the 4 month block of time that I had planned to use for studying for the Sun Certified Enterprise Architect exam. Even if I passed it, I don't have many years of war scars in Java EE, and have not yet gained experienced using all the GOF and J2EE patterns. The ones I have used made a big difference in the readability and extensibility of my code.