APEC is a joke

Australia is holding the APEC summit in Sydney this week. Apart from APEC being a joke generally by pretending to be in the interest of common people, this whole debacle with The Chaser penetrating the incredibly expensive security has deservedly so exposed how bumblingly inefficient, docile and wasteful the modern business/political overly bureaucratic culture is.

Good on the guys from The Chaser. If legal action goes any further against them, I believe nation wide protest will be in order.

Bishop John Spong

I had the privilege of attending a lecture by Bishop John Shelby Spong this week. I had no idea what I was in for as I am staunchly anti-religion. I was wondering whether I would be able to sit through a religious lecture even while I was driving to the event. Within 5 minutes I was glad I had gone.

I hadn't done any research on Bishop Spong and had no idea who he was, how renowned he was, or more importantly, how progressive his ideas are. Spong is an unapologetic Reformist of Catholicism and Religion in general. I don't want to try and outline his ideas here as they are articulately outlined on his site. I do encourage you to read his site and his wikipedia entry.

I found the talk engrossing. Completely different to what I was expecting. I went in with defenses up ready to shoot holes in everything the speaker would say. During the talk I could hardly fault a single thing. Everyone should listen to this guy, the pious, the atheist, the agnostic and the everywhere in between. I'll be buying some of his books for sure.

Grails JCaptcha Plugin

An app I am developing at work with Grails called for a captcha thingy to prevent automated bots from using the service. Turns out JCaptcha is the business for captcha solutions in the Java world (in my opinion anyway). Two main points sold me: Spring Framework friendly, and a cleanly modularised design. Better documentation wouldn't hurt, but maybe they will get to that after the official 1.0 release.

Anyway, I took the time to make a JCaptcha plugin for grails that makes it almost too easy to use captcha tests in your grails app.

Words/Phrases I don't want to hear today

• Web 2.0
• Blog
• Ajax
• JSF
• Restructure
• Right Sizing
• Agile
• PeopleSoft
• SOA
• ESB
• CRM

Sometimes, IT is ridiculous.

Catchup Post

Been a long time, bullet point catchup required I think.

• Been extremely busy at work, mostly working on a Grails application which has been cool.
• Been working on an LDAP library for Groovy, Gldapo
• Released a Groovy library for packaging behaviour/data to be injected into classes at runtime, Injecto
• Released a plugin for Grails for including captchas (via JCaptcha) in your grails app JCapthca Plugin
• Bought some gear to set up a home studio
• Went to a really interesting talk by Jack Bacon about his book "The Parallel Bang". Very interesting talk.
• Signed up for vocal lessons again. I have been before, but want to focus more on more traditional music this time just for something different.

That's all I can think of for now. As you can see, I have been spending more time in front of the computer than I should. Hopefully after I get Gldapo out I can take a bit of a break.