Is it August already?

I've just realized that it has been 4 months, to the day, since I last posted to this blog. Now, some may put it down to laziness, lack of enthusiam, or the inability to muster together something interesting to talk about. However, in my case, it is none of the above. Back in March, my wife and I decided to join the league of homeowners. After a number of years of renting, we had decided that we'd funded enough of our landlords' vacations, and it was time to gain some equity.

So, amongst looking at houses, sorting out mortgages, tracking down insurance, finding out about taxes, and the thousands of other things that happen during the house buying process, this poor blog went on the back-burner.

Aside from home life, things have been very busy at Envoy. We're working on some very interesting stuff right now, and sometime in the near future I'll go into more detail about the solutions we're building.

So, I'm back in the saddle again. Some interesting things have happened over the past few months. On the Java side of things, Eclipse v3 was finally released. I've been using it for the past few weeks and have been very pleased. The CVS Integration is great, and makes handling configuration management tasks very easy - in fact, it's even been known for an IntelliJ-using colleague of mine to ask me to do some CVS tasks through Eclipse!

The recent news about IBM contributing Cloudscape to the Apache group is also interesting. The choice of production-quality Open Source (non-GPL) embeddable Java databases has been rather limited. Projects looking for embedded database capabilities now have the additional choice of a proven technology.