Last weekend, I got an iSight. I didn’t actually need one for anything, but I was curious and I had a little spot bonus money to burn. So, while I have yet to use it for its main purpose, video chatting, I have tried it for a different purpose: Delicious Library. This app has a neat trick of turning your iSight (or other webcam, really) into a barcode reader. This was so fascinating to me, that I bought Delicious Library just to play with this feature. That and tracking my books, CDs, video games, and DVDs seemed like a decent idea anyway.

The only game that my father plays on his Mac is freecell. He plays the version available in Rick Holzgrafe’s Solitaire Till Dawn X. This is a pretty nice version of the game (although it lacks game numbers and the ability to automate supermoves), and my father occasionally saves deals that stump him.

Well, yesterday I tried one of them, and after a while, in frustration, decided to see if it was solvable by running it through the automated freecell solver.

I’ve been programming in Java since sometime in 1997, and in all this time I have never embraced certain, now ubiquitous seeming, Java technologies. Mainly I’m thinking about the whole J2EE thing. Partly this is because I haven’t paid much attention to this (huge) development in Java. Partly this is because in 1998 or ‘99 I remember reacting very strongly to an attempt to convert my employer’s entire back office to J2EE. Back then, I was reacting against doing engineering for engineering’s sake. I had no patience for computer science projects, which is what a J2EE conversion looked like to me. As I researched what EJB’s (the primary J2EE thingamajig back then) would give us that we didn’t already have, the only thing I could find was distributed transactions. I’m sure that there a few businesses that need distributed transactions, but I think that they are few and far between, and for certain we weren’t one of them. I didn’t have decision making power back then (and still don’t, for that matter), but I manage to write a convincing email. The J2EE conversion project never happened. Since then, JSP was invented (and reinvented), JBOSS was released, J2EE seemingly took over. I’ve never like JSPs. I’ve like the concept of JSP, but not the actual execution. I haven’t looked at JavaServer Faces. I’ve been using Velocity for this task – very simple, very easy. In general, I’ve been sticking to J2SE and Apache Jakarta stuff. Does this make me a Java Luddite?

We’ve been running on jabberd2 on the new server for almost a week now. So far, so good. Folks are enjoying TLS support. Well, at least I haven’t gotten any complaints.

Some of us are excited about the new conference server (mu-conference 0.6.0), since it actually allows you to configure it, assuming that you have a client that exposes this functionality. The two that I’ve used are gajim (a python/pyGTK client) and, surprisingly, gaim.

On Monday, we finally completed the final piece of server migration, migrating our Jabber service. This was our hardest task of the actual migration, in my opinion. It had the most users, and we, for whatever reason, couldn’t just use the same software we had been using. On our old machine, we had been running jabberd 1.4.3, with a conference component as well as several bridges to other IM systems (AIM and ICQ, if I recall). It hung occasionally, but generally we were happy with it. Well, as long as we didn’t need to touch it.

About 3 or 4 years ago, I bought my mother a scanner for her iMac (G3). Now, my mother isn’t a photographer or particularly interested in scanning pictures or old photos. What she uses a scanner for is OCR. At the time, she was assembling a report for her church, and folks frequently gave her hard copies of things rather than emailing her the documents.

This wasn’t the absolute best solution, since the OCR software frequently introduced a fair number of errors, but it beat typing everything in. This scanner (which replaced an older, SCSI scanner that we couldn’t get to work with the new iMac) was a well-recommened (for the Mac, anyway) Canon scanner. I forget the model number, but it is essentially a LiDE 30. At the time, my mother was either running OS 9, or at least still largely relying on Classic to get stuff done. The scanner came with an OEM version of OmniPage SE for OS 9.