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I'm done for the year work-wise, and probably blog-wise. So this is as good a time to take a look back on the blogs that I wrote this year.

January

My adventures of installing Windows on the Second Hard Drive (Linux on the First) still gets a lot of hits from Google by people who wants to do the same.

I wanted a Patterns of GUI Application Architecture book. One that's a level above the Swing books, and one level below the User Experience books. SourceBeat's Desktop Java Live might be just such a book.

February

I wrote about Subversion for the first time. I would write about it several more times later. But, as 2004 draws to a close, I'm still using CVS as my source control tool here at home. Inertia is to blame. I have very good reasons to switch to Subversion. But I don't have any good reason to switch away from CVS.

March

The No Fluff Just Stuff Java conference was here in St. Louis. It will come back in March 18-20, 2005. I highly recommend it.

April

I learned about spurious wakeup in a comment by Tom Hawtin to my Thread Synchronization Puzzle blog entry.

I appreciate all the comments left on my blog.

May

I talked about Mono and BeanShell. Both a solid technoligies without a lot of hype but does a lot of things. I haven't installed Mono since I upgraded to FC3 yet because the yum repo for Mono 1.0.5 on FC3 does not exist.

June

I had a little bit fun at JavaOne's expense. What I didn't expect was that this entry was later cited in a blog entry by Bob Sutor, IBM's Director of WebSphere Product and Market Management in IBM's Software Group. Makes me wonder how blog entries are propogated in the blogosphere.

I had a blog entry about the Home Edition of XML Spy. This is another one of those, I heard about it, I downloaded it, I installed it, but I never really used it items.

July

Unlike XMLSpy, I did use the Free Together Designer From Borland. The fact that it's written in Java and runs on Linux might have something to do with it. A Borland sales rep called me a few days later asking me when I will buy Together Control Center. I felt really guilty for not planning to purchase within the next 12 months.

August

I predicted that Sun will never open source Java. Now that we've learned IBM's plans on open sourcing Java, maybe the day will come when Java is bundled with my Linux distribution. And that's all I'm asking for.

September

I made a blunder with this silly blog entry. But I drew a lot of hits with this one.

October

The good times are back! Java jobs made a strong resurgence in October. All indications is that it will go on strong for as long as the eye can see!

October also saw the launch of Google Desktop Search. Unfortunately, the download-install-forget cycle is repeated for Google Desktop Search. During the last couple of months, I have attempted to use it only a handful times and each time I did not find what I need. The locate command from Cygwin was far more useful for me (I have a cron job that runs updatedb --localpaths='c:/' at midnight).

November

In case you missed it, I love JPackage.org.

December

I haven't blogged it yet, but Eric Burke gave a fantastic presentation on Hibernate at the OCI Java Lunch. He will bring the talk to the St. Louis JUG in April 2005.

There's my year of blogging in 2004.

Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

I'll see you in 2005.