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Not too shabby considering I was standing, unsupported shooting through iron sights with a slight wind.

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According to Rasmussen reports, only one out of three voters believe global warming is caused by human activity.

The rest of the story is here.

Well, I had so much fun that my wife and I went shooting. She brought her .22 Magnum revolver that she got from her brother and we also rented a Glock 17 (9mm). We had a good time and I was hooked. I wanted my own handgun.

I did some research and it seemed like the XD was the hot thing out there now. I enjoyed the Glock, but I liked the XD just a bit more. It also came with more for the money, and I told my wife I wanted one.

So she ended up getting me one for my birthday, along with a UpLULA speed loader, a couple of extra magazines and cleaning kit. It wasn’t easy finding one as they sell out pretty quickly, but find one we did.

XD 45 with UpLULA loaders and cleaning kit

First 100 Rounds

Today I got to shoot it for the first time and I put two boxes of round through it. I am very pleased to say the least. The picture below shows about 4 mags worth of rounds. With the exception of a few stragglers most are in pretty a good group. If my math is correct, I put 73% in a 5″ grouping. All of these were at 10 yards.

First 100 rounds with XD 45

For a little fun I put a couple mags into some head shots. Only one miss. Again at 10 yards.

2 mags into the heads

I then hooked up a smaller target, put it at ten yards and shot about a mag and half (the rest of my .45 rounds). I was a bit off on that one and wasn’t too pleased. Maybe it was a little fatigue, who knows. I also shot my wife’s .22 for a little variety. It is quite accurate and I managed a couple of 2″ groups with it at 7 yards.

All around, I am very happy with the gun and my shooting. I plan on going at least twice a month and working on those groupings.

There were two areas that I had trouble with. The first was the plugins and was the easiest to overcome. I just had to reinstall them. The second however was logging which was completely revamped in Grails 1.1.

Personally I always had mixed results with logging settings in different environments. Turns out this site was the worst. However I like the new approach although it took the longest to get right. Some of it is because the documentation is a bit light in the area, especially with regards to custom appenders. I use two appenders, a daily rolling appender and an email appender for errors.

My file appender now looks like this:

appenders {
  console name:'stdout', layout:pattern(conversionPattern: '%d{ISO8601} [%p] -%X{user} %X{ip} # %X{sessionid} - %c{2} - %m%n')

appender new org.apache.log4j.DailyRollingFileAppender(name:'rollingfile', datePattern:"'.'yyyy-MM-dd",layout:pattern(conversionPattern: '%d{ISO8601} [%p] -%X{user} %X{ip} # %X{sessionid} - %c{2} - %m%n'), file:'../logs/patriotroom.log');
}

I still haven’t gotten the email appender working yet though.

Besides that, I also had to turn off the nice warning about the createLinkTo tag being deprecated. Guess I should fix those

The best part of the upgrade though is the –nojars build option. This is a real timesaver. My war file went from 25mb down to 6mb, which means my upload times went from just over 2 minutes down to 18 seconds. Now that is nice!

Logging

Seems you are stuck with using the JDK logging. Let’s face it, no developer in his right mind chooses that over Log4j. There just isn’t enough functionality there to make it worthwhile (reporting anyone?).

Persistence

You are limited to JDO. This can be both good and bad. JDO and related technologies, are fine for many applications, but there are times when you just need more power than object queries allow. The upside is that you probably don’t have to worry about data scaling needs.

Threading

You can’t create your own threads, nor presumably can anything else. This may be a big hindrance for many applications. For example I use the Quartz library all the time for various scheduling needs (especially in Grails).

There are a few other things you can and can’t do, but the ones above require some serious consideration before choosing to deploy on the app engine. On some brighter news, it looks like the Grails group is working on making Grails compatible with GAE. That alone will probably be the biggest use on GAE, and that isn’t a bad thing at all.

I.B.M. withdrew its $7 billion bid for Sun Microsystems on Sunday, one day after Sun’s board balked at a reduced offer, according to three people close to the talks.

The article goes on to say that other possible suitors could be HP and Cisco. I think with HP it would be similar to IBM in that HP would buy and dissolve the company with the possible exception of Java. As for Cisco, which is just entering the server business it would be a definite expansion of products all around.

Granted, Java has never really been a money maker for Sun but for IBM Sun’s Java software is a big competitor all the way from JVM to JEE servers. The other two companies don’t have a Java stack at all and would most likely leave the Java side alone, keeping out of Big Blue’s death.

Although IBM has pulled out, there is nothing from them getting back into it, and if Sun’s upcoming earnings report looks bad IBM may be the only one willing to buy them. Let’s hope for the best.

Let’s face it, not a single IBM java product is really worth a shit. Their JVM is and always will be the slowest one around, their app server is second worst piece of software I have ever had the displeasure of using, is slow, sluggish and can only run on their JVM.

If Sun needs to be bought to be saved, so be it. But please, please IBM, don’t screw up Java by dumping Sun’s products for your own!

I have to say I agree with GeekDaily and Justin Etheredge assessments. While there will always be cowboys out there, their contributions will be minor to software development as a whole. Like Justin, I too couldn’t believe the commenter who said

I’ll tell you one thing, the Gang of Four book is probably one of my most disappointing programming reads of all time. Completely useless to me. Strange that I can have a successful programming career without understanding that book…

If this person doesn’t get the GoF, they won’t grow as a programmer, and that is a shame. This is the kind of developer that wants to either be told what to do or how to do it without learning something new that can expand their knowledge and better their code.

While Justin likens software to carpentry, I’ve always thought of development likened to painting. You can teach someone how to paint, but that does not make them an artist. At best they will learn how to paint by color, never expanding and learning. They may change their medium from watercolor to oil, but still painting inside the lines.

With regards to SOLID, SCRUM, whatever, I’m not a big methodology person. Doesn’t mean they don’t have their place, but in my experience they don’t last largely due to business reasons more than anything else.

When it comes to TDD, I’m not a write-the-test-first kind of guy, I do believe tests are essential especially in an enterprise situation. In my personal projects I don’t write tests all that often, but in a team environment with a lot of people touching the code it can be a real headache saver.

Justin absolutely has it right:

I have never been so reminded of how immature our industry is than at this point. And I’m not talking about the individual people, I’m talking about the fact that we have sitting in front of us a really good chance at introducing a little bit of rigor into the way that we think about and implement software systems, but people just blow it off. People just want the easy way out, and they don’t want to take the time to actually have to learn and apply some of this stuff.

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