MY enterprising friend Drew showed me some Internet sites that finally have good pictures of the destruction on Cayman. Iv lived there all my life and I don’t know where these pictures were taken without the labels. Iv been everywhere on that island and all the landmarks, trees and vegetation have been stripped clean. Some building lifted off the foundations and floated away. People in Florida should count themselves lucky.

Pictures by Courtney Platt 1, 2 & Leroy Wall 1.

I’m trying to ignore all this and get back on track with Mindshare. I’m playing with CVS, and when I say playing thats sarcasm. I have CVS builds of JXTA Platform & JXTA Security, JxtaNetMap, and beepcore in eclipse now. Now its time to modify beepcore so it can make connections over a JxtaSocket. Then build an Echo Service demo that works over JXTA. Give me echo and i’ll build you the world.

I’m gonna just dump links to what news I can here. I haven’t heard anything directly from the island yet but I will post again today when I do.

Power is off on all 3 islands. Access to www.candw.ky is down, indicating that at a bare minimum Cable and Wireless shut off their servers. Land lines cell phones are reported working at least in part. Radio Cayman is off the air. I am also currently unable to reach Cable & Wireless international roaming customers.

Flooding has been reported in low lying areas. Storm surge is at 8ft. High winds are blowing down trees, light poles and removing roofs from buildings. Most power on the islands runs over light poles.

News Reports at this time:

• http://abcnews.go.com/wire/World/ap20040912_646.html
• http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=3486973
• http://www.caymannetnews.com/ - Last update at 11am local time. This could mean they have a satellite Internet link of some kind, perhaps provided by the British news crew.
• http://news.google.com/news?q=cayman - google news search for ‘cayman’ which should yield current news stories for the next few days.

I am officially, as of this afternoon, an FIT student for another full semester. Paperwork has been signed, money has changed hands, the deal is done. I can say I’m fairly psyched about that.

This extension of deadlines means that I can turn my attentions back to code, which I love, and stop writing about code, which I love less. The extra time means that Mindshare is definitely going to get BEEPed. The plan calls for replacing the TCP/IP Sockets in BEEP with ones from JXTA. BEEP was, thankfully, designed for this to happen. Unfortunately i cant find any examples of anyone doing this. I guess that means it qualifies as ‘heavy wizardry‘. The bad news is I have no test suit because such tests need to be written in using JXTA and BEEP. I have a BEEP book on the way that should help with test & app development.

A friend wanted to do some ‘cool’ stuff in Java so we may sit down at the keyboard in the not too distant future and use JXTA and BEEP to make a simple one-to-one, P2P chat app. Something like a pair of walki talkies.

Of course there is a hurricane baring down on the very spot where I am writing this. His name is Fances and he’s a bad boy. Cat 4, very organized, nasty stuff.

So its time to actually write my thesis, that means putting words into a word processor, by and large. So immediately I think “Ill use M$ Word!”. And then I think “Word will destroy my documents formatting, 15 minutes before I’m ready to print!”. I mean I like word, but it sucks to fight with it over formatting a complicated document. So then I think “Lets use Open Office, it might be better”. Well it is better, but its not as nice to work with, it too caused me to fight with numbering and formatting. This sucks.

Then I think, “Don’t people write Books and Papers on computers all the time?!”. Well sure they do, they use LaTeX. Well that solves the type setting problem. What about XHTML? Lets be blunt:

• I want to write in Word (or OpenOffice)
• I want to get clean customizable XHTML output, both multi-page and single page versions
• I want to get PDF output that conforms to Florida Tech $21 “Style Guide” (that didn’t come with any templates!)

DocBook is supposed to do all that. That bad news is “its complicated”. You need a ‘tool chain’ that involves several applications processing your text and some sort of script to make it all less painful.

If I get this all working ill have to make a point of providing FIT students with the tool chain so they don’t have to suffer. Come on FIT, there is no excuse for not providing a template!