John Watson

In the last eight months I have...

• Gone on a 2nd annual mission trip to western Louisiana with my two daughters to build a new home for a family of six who lost everything in Hurricane Rita 18 months before. [Editorial tirade: Funny how the media jackals are off to find fresh meat and nothing is mentioned about the people still struggling. If it is mentioned, it's always a brief aside about New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina and that's it. I guess Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Nicole Richie, and God forbid, let's not forget about poor Anna Nicole are far more important headlines. Gimme a break!]
• Navigated the sale, along with my business partner, of our small consulting business to a software company. I along with 5 employees converted to full time employees joining the new company. For me, it's a change from being your own boss, a.k.a. "the boss" to being in an organizational chart that's 25 times larger.
• Re-doubled efforts to build a membership system for our local church, on the side (several more posts coming from this effort).

Late last year I blogged about trying to use CentOS under Virtual PC. After several attempts, I basically gave up. There's something to be said for marketing and "mind share" - which Ubuntu has plenty of. Earlier this year I took a stab at using Ubuntu with Virtual PC (and Virtual Server) and got a lot further. In fact, I managed to get a full working version for a developer environment. I also got a version going for an Oracle server, a WebSphere/DB2 server and even a streaming media server.

Things went so well that I repurposed an old dual-processor Dell workstation to run as an Ubuntu development machine on "bare metal". I normally work in Windows but now can "dabble" in Linux without difficulty...

Because I'm working on enterprise-class applications using J2EE, I opted for using Ubuntu 6.06 (a.k.a. Dapper Drake) since it is the official server version with L.T.S. (long term support).

I can install and use the following on either environment:

• Java 1.4 and 1.5
• Eclipse IDE
• JBoss application server
• DB-Visualizer
• Ant/Tomcat
• Perforce
• Firefox

The cool thing to me as a geek is that I can be on two totally different architectures and platforms and use the same tool sets to work on the same code.