Lion rock

Tianmen Cave

Reading Challenge

The goal of the challenge is to read books from as many consecutive decades as possible. My goal is to read 15 books published in 15 consecutive decades in 2007. You don't have to choose that many books, though! In fact, my original goal was 10 books in 10 consecutive decades, but I realized my 2007 TBR list made it easy for me to go ahead and do 15.Rules:1. First, there will be a prize--a book of your choosing from Amazon.com that is priced $15.00 or less. Only one (well, possibly more) prize(s) will be given. [Edit: I did draw particpants' names from a "hat" for Buy a Friend a Book Week. Joy was the winner, and she chose Watership Down. ]2. You may choose the number of books you read. If you read 4 books in 4 consecutive decades, you will have 4 chances for the prize. If you're really ambitious and read 18 books in 18 consecutive decades, you will have 18 chances for the prize. Books may be read in any order!3. Books read for other challenges are totally acceptable. Almost all of mine are cross-posted with other challenges.4. This is meant to be a fun challenge. Most of us are reading fools and have so many challenges going on. Don't let this one stress you out. Most could probably muster up at least 3 or 4 books for it without even trying.5. The challenge lasts from January 1 through December 31 of 2007. Any book you've read this year will count for the challenge. However, you must sign up for it by midnight ET on June 30, 2007. If you're later than that you can still participate, but you won't be eligible for the prize. All you have to do to sign up is comment on this post. Please comment leaving a link to your tentative list. You may change this list at any time. I will have another post for you to comment on at the end of the year to see how you did.A good source to find out when books were published is wikipedia. For example if you follow this link, you will see how easy it is to search books by a particular decade.My list for this challenge is here and on the sidebar. You may use one of the buttons below. Or, if you're creative and have already made a button, feel free to use it as well.I hope I've answered everything. Let me know if there's something I've missed, and have fun reading!

Violence bear pillow

Sunshine and smiles

They came to laugh, to cry, to save, to die. And most of all, to love everyone in every way.With Smile Brigade's new EP Eering, Creaky, it's like they've created a song for every important moment of life. Want a softly scarring break up anthem? That would be Hand In A Jar, which informs your ex-lover (or chosen person that you're mad at) that they are dead to you. Smile Brigade will tell you what you need to hear, but with a cushion in the form of sweet, sweet music to soften the blow. For those times when you're enjoying a sunny afternoon on a farm, as all of us are wont to do, there's Josanna, a slightly country ditty that may find you reluctant to go to church and would rather just sit with you on some verandah.In five songs, the EP covers everything from old-time folk tunes to toothache soft pop with the wisdom of an old bearded man who lives in a forest, used to cut down trees for a living, and knows what it's like to lose love. Part of it probably comes from playing with long-established bands like Of Montreal and Modest Mouse. Take the less-insane Sunlandic Twin days from the former and the latter's firm grip on small-town reality, and that's a little what Smile Brigade is like. And they really do want you to smile. Smile and Smile is probably the standout track, a rolling, piano-driven tune with that easy to learn chorus. No, really, smile. It's in a slightly threatening way that you're afraid they might hurt you if you don't actually do it.Smile Brigade - Smile and Smile

Trip to California

A long trip has come to an end. Almost 3000 miles are behind me. 14 days .... effectively almost 13 of them in the US. It was a great vacation. And I will do such a trip like this definitely again. The Hotel in Las Vegas was really nice but there was something different that stunned me: I saw a colibri in the wild the first time in my life. That was really impressing. But wait ... i didn´t wrote a thing about the two days. The 12th day (yesterday) was the day of the travel from Los Angeles to San Francisco. As we didn´t knew how long the CA-1 took and we had just 12 hours to our flight we decided took the risk out of the journey. So we didn´t drove the full monty of the CA-1, we took the US-101 instead for a large part. It´s a great route to drive nevertheless. But you can´t drive from LA to SFO without driving at least a part of the CA-1 ... so we diverted from the 101 at the CA-25. It´s a great route ... but depending of your stomach, you shouldn´t or should eat something before. This route is almost as curvy as the streets in the Muir National Park. I assume your should have bags ready for passengers with a tendency to motion sickness. The further ride was great. Point Mugu. Santa Barbara. and then up the 101 to the airport in San Francisco. We left the Pacific Ocean at Gaviota for a short reunion at Pismo Beach. At the end this last part of the trip was 425 miles long. By the way: Santa Babara is definitly on my shortlist for a next vacation in California. Nice city, nice beach ... the weather was a dream at that day. Too bad, that we just stopped for a late breakfast there ... At shortly after 9 pm our aircraft departed almost on time. It was a really smooth and nice flight with the exceptions of some turbulences over Greenland. We arrived shortly after 5pm and and some time later i had boarded the flight from Munich to Hamburg. Since 21:15 pm i´m at home and a really great vacation has found it´s end. This is the last of the daily reports from my trip. But this isn´t the last article about the trip .

A Max status bar

JUnit Max 1.1.26 offers two improvements: The status bar now contains a widget that shows the state of the last Max run: red=failed, green=passed, and gray=running). This is intended to be the first toehold for an overall UI to complement the in-situ feedback. Please let me know what you think and what you’d like to see there. Long-running tests are now correctly terminated when you start a new test. I learned two lessons in developing this release. The first is to deploy as soon as there is additional value. I had the trim widget done yesterday by noon. I thought about deploying. Then I looked at the punch list for the GA release and though, “Nah… I can get one more item off my list.” Mistake. The one more item took me a day and a half of serious re-design. The second lesson is that changes to concurrency strategies are one of those “rippling” changes Yourdon and Constantine warned about, at least the way I design the original strategy. I kept getting tripped up by making a change then needing to change three places that (often silently) depended on the first change, and then… The automated functional tests still haven’t fully recovered. Okay, and one bonus lesson: when you have a mess, make a bigger mess before cleaning up. I had a lot of complexity down in a leaf object that spawned a VM and an object to talk to it. I couldn’t see how to clean up to support reliable cancellation of long-running tests. Once I had inlined as much of that object’s complexity to its caller as possible, though, the way forward became clear. The calling object was now a mess, but it was easier to factor cleanly. Trying to hide away the complexity earlier had made my job harder. Inlining to get all the gunk in one place made it easier.