Bill the Plumber

My Macbook Pro 17″ is about 3+ years old and I had great anticipation for WWDC today.  Boy was I disappointed!  No more 17″ Macbook Pro!  17″ is a must for me and their graphics card (as usual) is middle of the road.  The big thing is the Retina display, but you may not be able to see a difference.  I’m actually kind of really pissed off.  So much so, it may be time to ditch Apple.  The only things that may keep me are:

• High quality product and high quality support.  Apple is 2nd to none in both of those categories (at least in my experience).  I’m willing to pay big bucks for both of these things if they are a reality.
• Commercial Unix.  The High quality product/support combined with  a unix-based laptop.
• No-thought/knowledge-required Windows dual-boot (Bootcamp).
• The awesome touchpad
• Automatic iphone sync/backup

I’m looking for a gaming laptop alternative, please offer recommendations!

If I have to go back to Windblows, its got to be with a kick-ass gaming laptop.  I took this route back in 2006 and purchased an Alienware beast of a laptop.  I returned the initial shipment because it was not assembled correctly (hard drive wasn’t fully connected) and just broken in general as well.  Got a replacement, but that died in less than 1 year.  I tried to get help from Alienware to fix it (my warranty was still valid), but gave up after 1-2 weeks of getting the run-around from their support.  Bought a Macbook and have been happy every since, until today…Before 2006 it was also an endless string of crappy Dell notebooks.

Can anybody recommend a kick-ass 17″+ gaming notebook that they have bought in the past year that wasn’t broken when you got it and doesn’t have horrible support and is decent quality?  Maybe Alienware has improved?  Asus? Hp Envy?  Its hard to tell who is a good company and who isn’t when dealing with these high-end laptops.  I’ve spent a few hours searching and reading, but can’t really get anything definitive on quality of product/support.

This has got to be the coolest mobile phone accessory ever…

I don’t usually make a lot of noise about a beta release, but there’s some new security features I’d like everybody to test drive (along with a bunch of bug fixes).  Also, there’s a few backward incompatibilities to be aware of.  New features?

• SMIME integration.  You can now send/receive SMIME encrypted and/or signed messages over HTTP.  This is great if you have the requirement of encrypting message bodies.
• Subresource locator support for client proxy framework. Thanks Peter Murray for this!
• Jackson 1.8.5 upgrade

As always, to download and see documentation follow the links from our website.  Take a look at our Jira release notes.  You might also want to check out the Migration guide to view what has broken as far as backward compatibility.

Got an iPad delivered last Friday.  I didn’t get the 3g one.  I haven’t been too happy with AT&T’s data network.  I like the iPad.  Its great for browsing the web at breakfast.  What I bought it for really was for reading books.  I read like 5+ trashy sci-fi/fantasy books a month and my home office is starting to be overflowed with paperbacks.  The iPad seemed like a better solution over the kindle as, a) it wasn’t much more b) I probably will find other uses for it.  I must say, reading from the iPad is 10 times better than reading from a book.  Its easier to hold.  I can make the font bigger.  Built-in nightlight.  Automatically remembers where I was in book.  I think I would pay to subscribe to magazines and local newspapers that had an interface designed for the iPad, especially if the content could be delivered electronically so you could view it offline.

I don’t know if you’ve been following Massachusetts politics, but there is a run-off election for the deceased senator Edward (Ted) Kennedy between Martha Coakley and Scott Brown.  I’ve been telephoned twice, once by each candidate’s supporters.  I think the difference in how these polls were conducted tell you a lot about the candidates.

Scott Brown’s poll:

It was automated and voice-recognition driven.   A long series of questions were asked before the final “Who will you vote for?” question.  Questions like “Does abortion affect who you will vote for?”, “Do you support a health bill that will add trillions in debt to our country?” “Do you believe in fiscal responsibility for our govt?”.  Very slick…

Marth Coakley’s call:

It was a person who first states “I’m from the Martha Coakley campaign”.  She asked if I knew there was an election on Tuesday and if I was going to vote.  She asked if I knew where the poll was.  She asked if any voting members of my family needed a ride to the poll and gave me a number to call if I didn’t have a ride.  That was it.  There was no “Who will you vote for?”  Nothing else.

If you’re a MA resident, I hope you vote on Tuesday.  Its a pretty important election no matter what side of the fence you sit on.

We’re getting ready to release 1.2.GA.  This is a release candidate that fixes a bunch of outstanding bugs and reorganizes the project a little bit as well.  It is strongly suggested you take a look at the migration guide because a few pieces of RESTEasy have been refactored into separate Maven modules.

All links to documentation and downloads are available at the RESTEasy Project Website.

Saw this in the Boston Globe today.  The Dali Lama is a pats fan!

Darryl Taft did a nice piece on RESTEasy.  Thanks Darryl!  It is always cool when eWeek finds the stuff we’re doing at JBoss news worthy :).

I enjoyed being “Angry Bill” for awhile, but I think it has run its course.  Really, its not because any grief I’ve got at Red Hat or within the Java community.  It all has to do with my family.  I actually get a lot of crap for “Angry Bill”.  My wife uses it to ridicule me.  My paranoid mother (you know how mothers are) thinks some crazy on the internet is going to take too much offense and seek to do me bodily harm.  When my wife and extended family started calling me “Angry Bill” instead of Bill, I knew it was time to make a change.

So, what to change it too?  Doing a play around Hani‘s nickname for me, Bill Berk, is a thought.  From wikipedia:

• Berk, slang for an idiot
• Berk, rhyming slang for Cunt

Idiot and Cunt pretty much sum up my major contributions to the open source Java community.  Yet, a play around Berk is still too much of the same thing as “Angry Bill” was already a metaphor for the same adjectives.  If you knew who The Real Angry Bill was you’d understand that I was making fun of myself by naming my blog “Angry Bill”.  Besides, I’m scared that people will actually start thinking my real name is Bill Berk and not Bill Burke.  Now that would be a catastrophe 😉

I could be really boring and name it “Burke Central, Bill Burke’s tech blog”.  Or maybe “Tech Tailgate”?  “Bill’s Blog” sounds kinda corny, but catchy.  Or how about “Mr. Bill‘s Blog, Oh Nooooo! Mr. Bill talks tech”