Despite all their problems, every now and then the federal government actually manages to do something right. This morning I woke up to find that my tax refund had been directly deposited into my Wachovia account. Of course, for the moment I’ll just ignore the fact that this money was mine to begin with.

04/29/2005
   AUTOMATED CREDIT US TREASURY 220 TAX REFUND
   $101.00

Sydney Brenner, 2002 Nobel Prize Winner:

We now have unprecedented ability to collect data about nature but there is now a crisis developing in biology, in that completely unstructured information does not enhance understanding. We need a framework to put all of this knowledge and data into — that is going to be the problem in biology. We’ve reached the stage where we can’t talk to each other — we’ve all become highly specialized. We need a framework, a framework where people can come back to us and say, ‘Yes, I understand.’ **Driving toward that framework is really the big challenge.**

Wolfram Research has a list of unsolved problems in mathematics. I plan to solve one of these each week. Just kidding.

I just attended my first Atlanta Java Users Group meeting this evening. Ray Elenteny of Optio Software gave a hands-on presentation on the topic of Eclipse Plug-In Development, introducing the Eclipse Standard Widget Toolkit and its Modeling Framework along the way. Their company utilizes the Eclipse framework as a foundation for Java applications. The Java community is surprisingly strong and vibrant here in Atlanta. This is also a great networking opportunity and I look forward to attending future events.

I wanted the dust to settle before I began writing in my weblog again, and today it has. As most of you are well aware, having to work full time makes it difficult to pursue other hobbies and interests. For myself, this includes certifications, music, and academia. Today, I’ve renegotiated my contract with Objectware. As a result, I’ll only have a three-day work week from Tuesday through Thursday. I think that this new arrangement is a good compromise for myself and my employer, as it allows me to develop for open source projects while still earning enough income to pay the bills. It also affords me the opportunity to focus on a future that includes graduate school and the GRE.

Mark and I discussed the arrangement over drinks and the dinner and stumbled upon Lori, of Blogger meetup fame, and her boyfriend. The city of Atlanta just seems to get smaller and smaller the longer I live here. And that’s a good a thing.

When they tell you not to upgrade production systems unless absolutely necessary, they mean it. I would never have thought that an interaction between the recent NSS authentication changes and the Java VM would cause havoc on one of our systems. But buried in the depths of the Sun Bug Database you’ll find that the Java virtual machine segmentation faults with a particular version of the libnss_ldap.so library. Go figure.

A JNDI Tutorial on building directory-enabled Java applications. Utilized in Apache Jackrabbit, as well as other Enterprise applications. The initial stumbling block in learning a new topic is getting familiar with the vocabular and terminology used.

As a kid, I used to read Highlights for Children and I fondly remember the comic of Goofus and Gallant. Somehow, I find now that it’s not that much different from my current roommate situation. You can guess as to who is who.

I know that DNS is not exactly a walk in the park, but when you’re one of the world’s largest Internet Service Providers you’d think that you could provide stability for something as basic as domain lookups. I’m currently using the following public DNS server:

199.5.157.128

since both the primary and secondary DNS for Comcast appear to be down. If you know of any others that are actually responsive, please let me know. Like Pedro, I struggled for a good fifteen minutes to find a server, as I only have a few IP addresses actually memorized to some console production boxes at work. This problem seems to be happening almost weekly and it’s seriously getting on my nerves.

Update: Though I can now ping the DNS servers, name resolution refuses to happen. Looks like the media has picked up on the Comcast DNS outage as well.