Well almost another month since I last posted. The thing is, it's not really because I have been all that busy, but rather, I have just not been up to anything worth mentioning.

Did get some kick butt new RollerBlades, I finally learnt how to skate backwards at a reasonable(or unreasonable in some cases) speed. Managed to get a huge blister on my foot because of it though.

On the tech front, I have been playing with Apache SOAP, and am successfully using it to develop an n-tier application. It's closed source, so I won't say to much, but if the initial reaction to the product is good, I may open source the base, and see how it goes from there.

As much as I love using open source software, and I agree with the concepts, I still feel wierd just giving away something that I have worked long and hard to create. I guess I am just a pure bred capatilist at heart. Yet saying that, if the product is good enough to be marketed, how much better would it be if it had a bunch of kick butt open source developers working on it. Guess I will just have to way up the pros and cons of it all, and just go with what looks right.

Any thoughts. Does anyone actually read this?

Not too much to report since I last posted. Just working, eating, sleeping etc. On the plus side, the Jtrix project is still barely alive, our chief documenter and project manager NikSilver had an article on Jtrix published on JavaWorld. Pity there aren't any live nodes out there for people to play with.

Guess I might have to rectify that problem since I still think it is *expletive deleted* cool technology. A couple of the Jtrix crew are still keeping in touch through a mailing list setup by our ex-sysadmin (MartBrooks), so maybe we can keep the ball rolling and turn Jtrix into a viable Open Source project.

On work front I have been shifted over to a new project, doing some Japanese localization testing, pretty straight forward stuff.

Another week slides by. To be honest I don't know where this week went. Managed to get quite a bit of work done, from writing test cases to doing some benchmarking of an alpha client.

Finally got paid for some web design work that I did ages ago, I was also paid my first weeks contracting wages. It's sweet...

Other than that pretty boring week, even on the home front.

Home:

Had a crazy weekend. Seeing as we are having nice weather for once here in England, my friends and I spent most of the weekend out the the greens(read parks) throwing an aerobi(read modified frisbee that can travel over 1400 meters) around. It was good fun, spent a fair amount of time in the many pubs in and around Cambridge as well.

Work:

Got a preview build of the client today, so we can start writing some test cases. I am getting the boring ones out of the way first(read UI) and then I can move on to the more detailed ones like making sure it can connect through a SOCKS 5 proxy.

Always fun...

Yes I know that I have not written anything in about 2 months. But I have been busy looking for a job. Now that I have one I can concentrate on a few other things.

As you may have heard if you read any of the ex Jtrix peeps diaries, Jtrix is no more. I am now out in the world of contracting. It's quite funny really I have landed a contract with one of my old companies.

I get to play with Mac OS X. So one more feather in my hat. After a bit of a rocky start I am finally getting used to the UI of the Mac, and I have to admit that it is fairly easy to use and help is readily available.

Unfortunately due to the nature of the work I won't really be able to play with some of the cooler applications since I cannot install the developer tools.

Installed Mozilla quickly since the version of IE that ships by default is quite dire, and extremely slow. Mozilla is faster by quite a bit which is interesting.

Well that's what I have been up to recently. This should be updated almost daily now.

Out