Ted has a nice post (and good comments) on AOP, via a JUG he attended. The comments have a good history tidbit as well.

I have always been a big fan of open standards (and ofcourse open source). I realized the benefit of it recently.
As you might have heard, my work laptop died. I was working on part 2 of this article, and was going to demo it at the recent WebSphere Portal Conference. Lucky for me I had built the portlets to JSR168 spec. You can read about some of my thinking here . I also had used application scope of the session to simulate click to action like functionality between 2 portlets so that I was fully JSR168 compliant. Hence I downloaded Jetspeed2, and deployed my portlets; installed 6.54 Domino server all on my lower-end T30 with 512MB RAM and was able to successfully demo the application.
Since I had some time after I built the demo on the loaner, I was able to whip up an AJAX portlet accessing my Domino agent to populate details about a person, based on the shortname entered.
Two lessons, I took away from this experience - write to standards, be a minimalist.
Minimalist in that, my IDE was pure Eclipse 3.1 and Ant+XDoclet to build/deploy my portlets, so that I didnt need the 5+GB RADv6 on this temporray loaner of a laptop.
I enjoy RADv6 and the richness of the tool, but for cross-platform and for multi-site builds I have the minimalist setup as well.

I have completed the first draft of AJAX support for our trip from VA to Austin. The XML source (still very rudimentary is here) and the actual mashup of our trip with some additional data is here.

I found this site very useful, as we have been preparing for Ms.Rita. Traffic is awful on I35 southern end and there is a flock of people already in the Austin area from Galveston and the neighboring cities.
We are also having the ACL Music festival this weekend, which also has attracted tons of folks from all over.
It will be an interesting weekend and I will try to capture pictures of any cool activities for public consumption.

Here is my latest copy of the DXL Presentation I gave at the WebSphere Portal Tech Conference today in Las Vegas.

Its been only just over 48 hours since we have been in the Austin area. There is a great bookstore (chain) called Half Price Books, which houses used and rare books at dirt cheap prices. I only had less than 20mts in the store, and picked up some gems for couple fo bucks..
-The Last Apocalypse

-Undaunted Courage

-Latin America: Interpretive History
and other books for the kids.
The prices were very comparable to online stores (ofcourse there is no S&H) and I get it NOW.
I cant wait to go book hunting tomorrow - the cool thing is that, there are 3 of these close to where we are and each one has much different collection to offer (since they are unique in what used books they get and stack)..

We are now fully into the ‘hook’em horns culture. My horns trounced Rice this evening.
It was great to drive back just after the game and see a sea of orange..Go long Horns!!

I was reading Ted’s blog and he has a post on The World is Flat by Tom Friedman.
When I first read it, it was a good fast and informative read. It was more revealing than it was for Ted, as I have been more of a bystander and user in the Open Source revolution, than a player and at the fore-front like Ted.
It was also good to watch Tom on Charlie Rose few weeks ago.
No matter what your affiliations and interests are, this is a good read.

I want to look at Design by Contract, Aspects and continued unit testing (in all of my Java/C#/Python) programming.
I have been dabbling in writing unit tests, but not to the extent I would like to. Hence I am embarking on “write tests first before coding”; I really have been thinking about AOP for a while and its time to jump in my next coding project; DBC is a new area that I got interested in the past few months and want to play with DBC tooling for Java, before I venture into other languages.
I also have to brush up on Emacs.
I was looking to experiment and learn some of these on my trip to Austin, but due to the laptop fiasco, I ended up just reading a whole lot and not actually working on anything.

We finally pulled into Austin around 1620hrs local time today. Here is the updated GMap.
I am working on the XML addition and will have an update soon.
More pics coming your way, as well.

I am sampling the CDs I have purchased yesterday on Beale St. Here are the two I like so far-
Alvin Youngblood Hart -

His music is very smooth, earthy and soulful. He reminded me of Muddy and Robert Johnson. I liked his style and his variety. Must listen for anyone looking for younger blues musician. As TajMahal said about Hart - the boy got thunder in his hands, sure does… I like Keb Mo, but I really enjoyed Hart.
Robert Johnston-
He is a one man band locally from Memphis. He is entertaining and has a mixed style of rock/blues.I enjoyed him due to his versatility.
Still more to come…