It's been a while since I posted something here. There has been a lot going one since the last time I posted. Here are the top things.

1. I'm engaged
2. 2 more months before I get married.
3. I'm the new team lead for Content Technology
4. I created a new site called thebridalbell.com
   

Here are some other notable event (important in terms of things I keep up with)

1. Ken Griffey Jr sitting at 599 Home Runs
2. Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee

Hmm there are so many more things but I'm drawing a blank, oh well. Hopefully more to come.

So its a sad day for me. Yes I was really wanted to see Barry Bonds hit his 756 home run live, just so I could be part of history, but I didn't really make the effort. A few weeks ago Barry was in Chicago, I was planning on standing out side of Wriggly, but only in hopes of catching his 756 ball so I could sell it. So why is it a sad day for me? Well I have to say that I've always believed that Ken Griffey Jr would be the one to break the record. I've always thought he be the one or atleast be the one of this era that be the closest. I think if it was him not Barry I'd have made every effort to make sure that I was watching. I still hope that Griffey still can beat 756 or whatever number that Bonds puts up last.

So I got my new ip address and domain name and had a little trouble getting my scripts to work correctly for deployment. Just for sake of clarification, the scripts I have are used for sending my changes to the server and unwaring and waring my deployment. Why would I unwar and war my deployment. Well the reason is because the number of libs required for my webapp. The jars are around 10mb and sending them locally to the server wastes valuable bandwidth that I have to pay for, not that I have that much traffic!!! Though it does waste a lot of time! So I have all the common jars located on the server and only scp the jars that change. The big pain in the behind is that I have these PermGen errors/Out of memory errors. The box has a gig of memory and so it was the last thing I'd thought I'd see. Looking on the web has revealed that the default Permgen setting is 64mb and its suggested that I bump that up to 256mb. And thats why I'm writing this blog as I wait for my fire wall changes to take effect. As a side note, although I have a gig of memory I see that at least 700mb is already used. I don't know whats running besides apache, and mysql, I'll need to figure that out sooner or later. When I launch tomcat it takes up 200mb so I'm left with 18mb left, there is still swap space, a concept that I don't truly understand so... hopefully this works before I have to start disabling things.

I'm about to launch a new site. I'm pretty excited to now have more than one, running on the same "platform" code and running on the same server. The last development thing I need to do is set up caching. I also have to fix my scripts to handle the fact that I have two sites. I think for now I won't version my code and just release a new version of the sites at once. Its kinda risky, I've had registration issues before and didn't notice, but I'd like to get this out the door first. I need to be able to pay for my sites. I'm a little concerned about the multiple ip thing not working out but, I can't see why it would. However I wouldn't consider myself an expert.

So the big item in the news lately is the iPhone. I am a big fan of it. The day after it came out I rushed out to play with it and thats it, after all it it $600 and I just bought a car so.. In any case the iPhone is just as impressive as was shown in that presentation with Steve jobs. I showed it to my girlfriend a few days later, and surprisingly she really wanted it. Again its $600 and we split the car (Acura TSX). Its pretty tough to get her to really like new technology, the same goes with me, but I'm always looking to play with the next cool gadget. Just to show how big of a fan I am I purchased some July options at a strike price of 130 for around 3.10, I purchased it a few weeks before and the price went down to $1 something, the time which I should have bought it. That however is my life so.. In any case I sold it yesterday at 4.10 as apples stock has jumped over $130 and today the option is around $5. Again the same story of my life, can't complain profit is profit =). It doesn't mean that I don't think the iPhone will do poorly, on the contrary i just purchased Jan 2008 options at a strike price of $200 for $1.58. The only reason I sold so quickly is that its a July option is set to expire July 21 and apples earnings don't come out until july 25 so..

I'm still waiting on hearing news about K.G and Kobe. I really hope K.G goes to the suns rather than the lakers. Ideally I want to see K.G in chicago. Speaking of athletes coming to chicago, here is a message directed to Ken Griffey Jr. "Please come to Chicago"

there are alot of interesting free tools out there, one of them i just ran into is the yahoo news web services. its nice to see i can implement this all via json. the biggest disappointment is all the work around that needs to be done because of browser security. although this would be a great time for me to learn json i'd rather not have to implement the work arounds. most likely ill just consume the web services via xml from my server. i'll have to implement a xml parser, but i believe the final solution will be more flexible in terms of my overall architecture.