I just met with my new accountant this morning. I like her already. Why do I have a new accountant? It seems that my old accountant (of years and years) has been promoted. I guess being elected president of a world-wide accounting association is a promotion, isn’t it? Anyway, as an independent consultant, I am incorporated, so I need an accountant.

Over the years, I have hinted and hinted to my old accountant that I’d really rather find someone else (like someone at the accounting firm) to perform my bookkeeping. He always laughed, and said I did a good enough job. Of course I did a good job. I don’t accept shoddy work, especially from myself. No matter how much time it takes. And it takes me a lot of time to get my accounts up-to-date for year end every year.

But today, since I was starting fresh with someone new, I threw myself on her mercy, and admitted it. I suck at bookkeeping. It takes me hours and hours, that eventually amount to days and days, just to get my yearly books done. Her horrified look was somewhat entertaining. Even better, she immediately insisted that I stop wasting my time, and just bring all my paperwork in, and after personal tax season is over, she make sure it gets all entered. And she said it would only take her people a couple of hours to do it.

A couple of hours?? I could almost cry. Yup, I must really suck at bookkeeping. And now… I don’t have to do it anymore. YAY!!!!

This may not seem like big news, but for the thousands of FreeBSD users, it’s huge.

FreeBSD Foundation Java Downloads

The FreeBSD Foundation has a license with Sun Microsystems to distribute FreeBSD binaries for the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) and Java Development Kit (JDK). These implementations have been made possible through the hard work of the FreeBSD Java team as well as through donations to the FreeBSD Foundation that supported hardware, developer costs, and legal fees.

Picture Lori’s jaw dropping and hitting her desk…

Apple – Boot Camp

More and more people are buying and loving Macs. To make this choice simply irresistible, Apple will include technology in the next major release of Mac OS X, Leopard, that lets you install and run the Windows XP operating system on your Mac. Called Boot Camp (for now), you can download a public beta today.

Joe McGlynn

We’re already hard at work on the next release of JBuilder, codenamed “Peloton”. At the same time, we’re working on Service Pack 1 for JBuilder 2006.

So get on to Quality Central and enter your bugs, and vote for bugs NOW, while they still have time to work on them.

Rubernate Overview

Rubernate is an object-oriented storage for Ruby objects based on relational database.

For all you Hibernate addicts…

Continuous Integration Server Feature Matrix – DamageControl – Confluence

Stumbled across this great comparison of continuous integration tools. If it stays up-to-date, this will be a great way of figuring out which tool works best for your next project.

Free Home Values Nationwide

We’re sorry! We didn’t find any cities matching your search of calgary, ab. Please verify that you entered the city name accurately. We’re continually expanding our database of properties, check back soon.

Just like Zillow, this competitor doesn’t know anything about Canada, so don’t bother.

Grails – Home

Grails aims to bring the “coding by convention” paradigm to Groovy. It’s an open-source web application framework that leverages the Groovy language and complements Java Web development. You can use Grails as a standalone development environment that hides all configuration details or integrate your Java business logic

It will be interesting to see where this project goes. My gut feel, without having looked deeply into either project, leads me to believe that Grails (based on a scripting language) stands a better chance of succeeding than Trails. I’d love to see someone compare the two projects.