use Perl

I wrote a small Java applet a while back, using Borland JBuilder 5.

Now, of course, I needed to update it, and jar it, and, of course, JBuilder is now at version 10, and 5 doesn't support the JDK 1.5.0, and I didn't want to spend $3000 to upgrade. (Go figure, huh?)

So, I used this little teeny ant build.xml file I put together a while ago, and was able to make my changes and compile under the new JDK, and no more money has to go to Borland.

Which, of course, just re-enforces that the command line is the only way to go...

Evidently, something has changed lately. I keep being teased with the Meta Moderation marker. I hurriedly run for the chance to meta-moderate some posts, but there is nothing there...

Has anyone thought about this very much? I was on a web site the other day, run by some oil affiliated think tank, that says that 2005 is going to be the peak production year for oil.

After 2005, the oil companies will never again produce oil in the quantities they currently are producing.

One would think that society at large would be worrying about this, and planning for the future. What will "poor people" do when they can't get cheap gas to get to work? Just recently there was a "state of emergency" in California because gas was over $3.00 a gallon. I think that price is going to be looked back on with fond memories.

Does anyone have any thoughts formulated, or plans for the future in regards to this? Should we plan on running for the mountains because "it's the end of the world as we know it?". I don't feel fine...

Let's see.
My wife has been up north for the past two weeks, tending to her Mom, who is dying from some kind of internal cancer.

My cousin, (not very close, but not all that distant) is dying *soon* from a cancer that started in his mouth and has now found it's way into his brain stem.

A buddy of mine is losing his dad in the next few weeks to pancreatic cancer.

My company is losing one of our biggest clients at the end of the year, they have informed us, to go with one of our competitors.

Another one of our clients has been unreachable since last Thursday, all we can find out is that their office here in the states has been shut down by the police/FAA.

Now, it seems to me that with all this going on, the past two weeks should have gone by fairly quickly, but instead, they are dragging by.

Two more weeks until I have to fly to Rhode Island and drive home with Anita, and it seems as if the day will never get here.

Then, of course, she is going to go back up for the last several weeks of her Mom's life. That is NOT going to be a fun time for anyone.

I'm getting myself confused. I like Xemacs much better than emacs, but after reading some of the editorials by RMS, I'm beginning to feel that I should use Emacs, even though I don't like it as well...

I've been working hard at getting my SCO Unix machine at work, my Windows XP running Cygwin at work, and my Mandrake Linux box at home, to all use the same scripts, so I can keep everything in CVS
It is a little bit of a pain, as I have to set a few environment variables, but so far so good.
Now I have the same Xemacs environment, and almost all my bash scripts work the same.
I'm about 50% done...

What an obtrusive pain!
What I really want is a mind to machine interface that types what I think, not what I press on the keyboard.

My wife needs a small utility program to keep track of the hours she works, and what she should be getting for her paycheck.
I've decided to write two versions: one in Perl, one in Java, and see how they compare. I think I'll also set them up to use Postgresql, and MySQL, and see how it feels working on both databases.
I can hardly wait. One thing I've already noticed, Java takes quite a bit of setup to do anything...

Hmm, somehow, unbeknownst to me, one of the last time or twos that I updated my cygwin seems to have broken the shell mode in XEmacs.

Man, is that a pain.
I can still use eshell, but I don't care for it at all...

As I was driving to work today, I saw a car coming toward me, at the head of a line of 10-15 other cars.

The driver opened their sunroof, reached an arm up, and let go of their McDonald's bag of garbage. Flew over the car, onto the road, and was run over by all the following cars.

How could anyone possibly still litter this way? Were they a total moron, brain dead, or just not caring about society, the planet, etc.

I do not understand it, and probably never will...