I’ve been getting a few things done rather ahead of schedule lately, which is a fairly large shift from normality. I’m cracking on much faster than I thought I would with a new Glassfish-based version of this site, I’m already buying Christmas presents, I’m renewing insurance ahead of schedule, I’ve booked parts of next years holiday - it’s all go.

Java and Glassfish is proving to be a bit of an interesting foray. Previously, I had written Java off as slightly irrelevant and not particularly high- performance. However, many people and things have corrected this impression I had, that seems to be at least a good few years out of date. Anyhoo, I’ve developed in .NET for work for a good couple of years and it was remarkably easy to slip into Java development. The biggest hurdle was the stupid terminology (wtf is an EJB?) and getting that translated into sensible-speak (oh, it’s a thingie!) was rather useful. Netbeans has been awesome throughout all of this. I’ll probably get it finished during the rest of the year and end up sticking it behind lighttpd.

In the real world, I’m having a hilarious time figuring out how to navigate 24 miles a day through London traffic on a bike. I’ve put 300 miles on it now and have so far discovered what it feels like when the clutch overheats and that I think the fuel gauge is broken. Running out of petrol on the north circular with the gauge saying I had a 1/4 tank left was a key highlight. I’ll ‘have a word’ with the nice garage people when I take it for its first service. The clocks did just go back, so it’s all rain, cold and stupidly slippery roads from now on. Great!