The Porter Method

The GF, Casey, asked me to make her some of my famous Chicken Tortilla Soup passed down from generation to generation in my family over the years. So first I had to find the recipe (which really came in the newsletter that comes with my power bill, not from Grandma’s kitchen).

I always have a bit of a problem tracking down the recipe, so I thought I would post it here so I can find it later. The recipe is posted on the Alabama Power website here, but the details are as follows.

Chicken Tortilla Soup

* 4 cups fat-free chicken broth
* 4 cups water
* 3 boneless chicken breasts
* 1 can 98% fat-free cream of chicken soup
* 1 can Rotel tomatoes
* 1 cup skim milk
* 12 oz. Velveeta Light cheese
* 1/4 cup sauteed onions
* 1 teaspoon garlic powder
* 1 teaspoon chili powder
* 1 teaspoon salt
* 1/2 teaspoon black pepper
* 3 low-fat flour tortillas, torn into small pieces

Directions
Boil chicken in water and broth until tender. Cut chicken into bite-size pieces and return to boil. Add remaining ingredients, except tortillas. Boil 10 minutes and then add tortillas. Boil until tortillas are soft – about 10-15 minutes, stirring often to keep from sticking.

Now I don’t add the tortillas anymore because they get very soggy (kind of like a dumpling), but you may like them. Also go easy on the chili powder because that stuff packs a pretty good kick, and this recipe already turns out quite spicy. It is also good with turkey substituted for the chicken in case that is more your style.

Well looks like it is going to be a very wet day here in Mobile today. We have Tropical Storm Arlene coming towards land, and she should make landfall this afternoon. Of course the sad thing is that 70 mph winds from a mere tropical storm just don’t get too many people excited around here.

Weather Channel Update

If you watched the projections of this storm, from the beginning it has been expected to head right up Mobile Bay. Hopefully this is not how the whole season is going to shape up.

One good thing that I can see from starting our hurricane season this way is that at least people will go ahead and grab their hurricane supplies now so they should be ready later if we get any more big storms dropping by.

My phone number has now officially ported to my new cell phone. My good friend Horst had the distinct honor of being the first phone call received on my new communications medium. Of course he was in complete shock when I told him were talking on a cell phone (since he knows how much I have resisted these things).

So begins the great experiment, I have trusted the great and mighty Scoble’s opinion and posted my cell number up on the site. We’ll see if any interesting interactions result from that level of accessibility.

So these days I’m having a problem that comes and goes for me. It is an idea overload. I have so many different ideas running through my head that I end up not really focusing on any of them. So I’ll enumerate them here so that I can at least look back later and see what I did or didn’t focus on further.

The ideas I have are broken down between things that I would like to work on personally and things that can benefit the company I work for.

Personally

J2ME Schedule App for JavaOne 2005
Now that I have received my cell phone (still waiting for my number to be ported), I see that it can run J2ME apps. I would love to be able to load all of the sessions for JavaOne 2005 onto the phone. That way I can see where I am supposed to go next, plus have the ability if a session is full to find quickly my next favorite choice or a list of all of the other sessions at that time.

I have never written a J2ME app so this should be interesting with about 18 days to go till JavaOne. I have created some handheld stuff in C# for the .Net Compact Framework, so it will be interesting to see how the Java side compares.

Unified List Server
I would like to see a server application that can encapsulate all of the following into one dataset that can be added to our retrieved in whatever format the user likes:
NNTP – Newsgroups
Mailing List
Web Forums
RSS

Example: I really like the content available at JavaRanch.com, but I really hate going to a website and looking through the web forums to try and find things that are new that I have not read yet. What I would prefer is to retrieve the forums as newsgroups. That way my newsgroup reader presents everything to me in a nice threaded format with an easy way of seeing what is unread for me. I, personally, like newsgroups (thanks to the fantastic Sybase Newsgroups getting me hooked), but others may want it in mailing list format or RSS format with the ability to reply with comments.

I would like to see an app that does all of this but keeps all data in a central repository, so if you receive it in mailing list format, you reply to the message and it gets updated and is viewable by everyone in their respective preferred formats.

I really think that Apache James is the perfect platform for something like this to be built upon since it encapsulates most of those items already.

Open Source OFX Class Implementation in Java
Implement the OFX standard using something like Castor or JAXB and put it out on SourceForge for all to use. I’ve implemented a subset of the standard by hand (before I learned of tools like Castor) but would like to have the whole standard done.

Work Related

Open Source BizTalk like application
Microsoft’s BizTalk while being extremely powerful also comes with an extremely powerful price tag. Sybase also has a similar product but it comes with a similar price tag as well. There is an existing app called BIE (Business Integration Engine), but I’m not sure how well maintained this product is or will be in the future. The forums on their site are fairly dead (of course it is GPL’d so I could maybe run with it and branch and fix myself).

Rules Engines
This is a solution looking for a problem for me. I’m positive this could be incorporated into our business, but just not sure exactly where it would fit. Drools has just released version 2.0 so I’m very interested in checking it out.

BPM (Business Process Management) and Workflow Engines
Another solution in search of a problem. There are a couple of open source products out there (jBPM, Java Workflow Editor, Open WFE) but I need to figure out where they would fit.

JBoss Application Server
JBoss looks pretty interesting and there are a couple of different things they are doing with it, need to see what it has to offer. This is a good question for the Cynergy Systems guys. Have you guys done much with JBoss?

(Sidenote with small plug: Got to meet some of these guys out at TechWave 2004 and have interacted with them in the Sybase newsgroups. They are definitely some sharp individuals and aren’t afraid of hard problems, so if you need some consulting or training done you may want to give them a call.)

Oh well that is enough about things I want to work on, how about some neat links.

Very cool applications up at 37Signals.com that take advantage of the new AJAX paradigm (all the cool kids are doing it, why aren’t you?). Check it out.

Also if you were just about to get around to registering for the free Sun Certified Java Associate Beta Exam…well, you snooze you lose. They have had enough people register for the exam, so they have closed registration.

So it is with great regret that I must confess to you all that the end of an era is here. I feel like a small part of me has died inside. After standing firm for oh so many years I have finally given in and I have a confession to make…

My name is Doug Porter, and I have signed up for cellular service.

Those of you that know me know that this is a very big move for me. I have always had a love/hate relationship with the telephone in general. The cost of basic telephone service always seemed absurd to me, especially with the monopoly of the Bells in days gone by. So about 2 years ago I ditched my home land line and signed up with a VoIP service.

The VoIP provider I have used is Packet8.net. Like I tell people, VoIP is not for everyone. For me it worked pretty well for the way I use the telephone. It was cheap ($20 per month for unlimited local and long distance), and it worked fairly well accept for a couple of issues. Such as:

Whenever there were bandwidth or network issues the call quality suffered. Some people on certain cell phone services could not reach me at my VoIP number. And of course Murphy’s law always prevailed and whenever I was waiting on or trying to make an important call the service went down.

But other than that, I was happy with it.

But I finally have come to accept that I really need a bit more connectivity these days, so I finally bit the bullet and signed up. I had my good friend Rob (who is the wizard when it comes to these things) help me find a great deal on a phone and service that would fit my needs. He set me up with a service deal (and a nice discount coupon) from LetsTalk.com.

So, supposedly next Tuesday I will receive my new phone and become a proud member of the Cingular network (which from the looks of the coverage map should cover me just about anywhere). Then it will be goodbye to Packet8. They have served me well but it is time to move on.

On another note, I have just tried out a password protected wiki called PbWiki (which of course being a Sybase user I thought would stand for PowerBuilder Wiki, but alas it stands for Peanut Butter. Because it is as easy as making a PB&J sandwich…get it..). Very simple and easy to use. I’m using it to collaborate with my friends on getting together information for our upcoming trip to JavaOne and San Francisco. If you need something simple then this fits the bill nicely.

As part of my professional development for the year, my company DailyAccess Corporation has decided to send a coworker and myself out to Sun Microsystems‘ JavaOne conference in beautiful San Francisco, CA.

I am absolutely excited to be able to attend this conference. The environment we use at work is Sybase PowerBuilder for internal applications used by our employees, Sybase EAServer as our application server (housing components written in Java and PowerBuilder), Java Servlets and JSP’s for our website, and a nice Oracle database for the backend to round it all out.

So I am hoping that the knowledge I’ll gain from JavaOne will help me improve the code I write for the components in our application server along with other server side processes we have written in Java. I’m also looking forward to some of the sessions on various web frameworks. We will soon be deciding on a new web framework for our sites and this should help us have more information to make an informed decision.

I am going to try (we’ll see how it works out) to give a day by day post of the goings on at JavaOne along with pictures of the event and city. So stay tuned to this space.

Once I decide on the sessions I want to try and attend, I’ll post that here also, so you can play along at home.

The conference runs from Monday, June 27 – Thursday June 30. I will be arriving into San Francisco the evening of Saturday, June 25. I have decided to take some vacation time after the conference, so I will actually be in San Francisco the following week, leaving to come back to Mobile on Friday, July 8.

If you are going to be at JavaOne or in the area and want to try and get together, let me know. A la the great Scoble, I am going to be posting my contact information in this space soon. We’ll see how it works out. So check back and you will be able to find out how to reach me if you want to get together during the conference.