I talked with a friend's wife who has family in Slidell, LA. It sounds like everyone survived the storm with little damage although some of her family is still waiting to hear. My friend's family weathered the storm at their house and had a couple of trees down, but nothing major.

As for my friend who is on a tour of duty, they are expecting him back soon. Definitely keeping the folks in the gulf coast in our thoughts and payers.

I know Alpha 2 of Deer Park has been out for over month, but I just tried it a couple of days ago. I have to say that it seems much faster especially when using the "Back" and "Forward" buttons. It is supposed to have "Better support for Mac OS X" which is a definite positive. I was also surprised that a number of the extensions I use still worked with it. The only one that didn't was Bookmarks Synchronizer, but I use Simpy now anyway.

From this slashdot article, you can read this blog about the survival in New Orleans. It talks about some of the challenges they are having in the aftermath and trying to keep their systems online. There are even links to some pictures.

There are many debates as to the best language and environment to develop in. Most of my primary development in the past 3 or so years has been in a J2EE environment. For the first several years developing in this environment, I thought it was a great environment and provided many of the necessary functions in the provided APIs. As I used it more and more, the limitations became more obvious.

At work, we are coming to the end of 3 development projects. All 3 projects seem to be sitting in a good position and we have been fairly agile with our development. With 3 primary members on the team, we overlap and help one another out. To be able to do this, you have to work with quality people. This was something that I was reminded of numerous times while I played basketball in college (maybe I will compare those another time).

I am very optimistic about the results from these projects. If nothing else, we should remain agile throughout the process even when the unexpected happens.

This is a very interesting article written by Bruce Tate. He points out some of the limitations of the Java language and how those are being addressed in Java. It also covers some other possible languages like Ruby, Python, etc.

Secrets of lightweight development success, Part 7: Java alternatives

He mentions at the end of the article that he is going to look beyond Java in future articles. Those should be interesting as well.

I help maintain a fairly large Java application written using EJBs. At the time it was written, we using some of the latest techniques for cache information on the application server itself. This has really proven useful and has decreased the load on the database server. During peak loads, this has proven beneficial and even necessary.

So, has this caching had any negative side affects?

This is an interesting article on engineering students and why the higher education system isn't working in the US. I have to say, that where I went to school, I didn't run into most of these problems (courses were taught by professors not T.A.s). Although, I didn't stay in the aerospace engineering field mainly because of the fear of being laid off (for example from the article, "...getting laid off from a great job at General Electric.")