Quick Hits, 5 June
Yeah, I haven’t posted in a while. Work’s been getting busier, and I spent much of last weekend on a totally extracurricular coding project. The fruit of that project, though, is that once again you can AIM hawkeye5Cell to send me a (free) text message on my cell phone. AOL and SunCom don’t have their act together yet on the real AIM forwarding service to GSM phones, so I wrote a Java client using a couple of third-party libraries for the AOL and SMTP interfaces. Eventually I will release this app to the public, but I need to:
- debug re-connecting after a connection drops
- move configuration options from hard-coded Strings into an XML file
- figure out how to properly build a standalone JAR file using Ant — I’ve got web-apps down, but basic JARs not so much
- resolve licensing dilemmas, which may require me to rewrite the SMTP library so the whole app can be GPL’d, in line with Jaimlib
A few column thoughts have crossed my mind over the last week, but I don’t think any qualified for a full column on their own. Judge for yourself, though.
- Sammy Sosa — the finding that his other 76 bats were all cork-free seems to indicate to me that this was an isolated incident. Rob Dibble said Wednesday morning on ESPN radio that while he didn’t believe for a second that this was an honest mistake by Sosa, he figured that Sammy could just be desperate to get out of his slump. I’d say suspend him for 5 games and get over it. This should not call into question his previous accomplishments.
- Realignment — if the message boards speak truth, there’ll probably be another full story on this one soon. Donna Shalala and five other (current) Big East presidents, including VT’s Charles Steger, held a brief meeting in Washington today, at the American Enterprise Institute (a rather strange place for Shalala to be seen, that’s for sure). My money says this was a “So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish” moment for Miami, and maybe a courtesy call in an attempt to stave off lawsuits. Fat chance there, unless everybody involved winds up happy, and that’s not very likely.
- Denominationalism — Ian posted a link to an interesting blog by a young former Baptist pastor who converted to Catholicism and is telling his conversion story via blog. My main problem with Catholicism has always been the exaltation of mere humans — particularly the Pope, but I also have issues with the Catholic attitude toward the Virgin Mary that seems to verge on worship at times. The Pope issue is pretty simple, though — I don’t believe that “[U]pon this rock I will build my church” (Matthew 16:18) was meant to invest Peter and any human-appointed line of successors with Christ’s authority, but rather just to set him as an example of faith. (I know there’s a lot more doctrine behind it than this, but this seems to be the root of it all.) This is one main division I have a tough time getting past; the other is free will vs. predestination, which is definitely worth a whole column to itself. Once you get past those two issues, the division of the church into denominations is really just different assignment of style points.
So… any on-topic commentary from the peanut gallery?
5 June 2003 / 5 Comments / Tags: tech, life, baseball, realignment