One of the things that really annoys me about ICQ (and probably chat programs in general) is that people come online and immediately say hello to you to be polite. Then there follows some pointless chitchat: how are you, nice day, been busy, etc. Maybe I'm just way too antisocial but it's pretty annoying. I'm online all the time, if you want to say something to me then just say it, don't bother with all the social niceties which are nice in face to face communication, but just seem kind of annoying to me. Especially when it's the same people day after day, or even multiple times in a day if they come in and out...

So I started watching The Powerpuff Girls on the Cartoon Network. This is a show about three super-heroine 5-year-old girls: Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup. They were created by Professor Utonium, who combined sugar, spice and everything nice to create the perfect girls, but accidently spilled Element X into the mix and the Powerpuff Girls were born. Blossom is the leader, Bubbles is always happy, Buttercup has the kick-ass grrrlpower attitude.

A relatively silly half-hour show which is divided into two adventures of a bit over 10 minutes each. There's always trouble in Townsville that the girls have to stop, a good deal of the time the trouble being caused by Mojo Jojo, a chimp with an evil disposition and a yen to conquer the world, always starting with Townsville.

Maybe I'm a pervert, but the girls are cute and their attitudes and characters are refreshingly simple (but then again, I don't watch many cartoons). There is a sarcastic narrator that's constantly talking, which can get annoying at times. Each episode is so short that the stories are very simple, but taken all together paint a picture that is quite compelling...

Oracle does not make it easy to use their Java tools and applications on a Macintosh. I just found out that I should be able to run our 11i applications the same as everyone else: through the web/java interface. I go there, after a few minutes of downloading and setting up it starts, but then I get an error. Some sort of missing file. I works fine on my NT workstation, but not on my PowerBook.

In a fit of desperation, I look at the source of the html page and download every jar file that it references. Put that in the Mr J Classes folder and try again. Once again it takes a few minutes to start (although once it's running it is about as slow on the Mac as on NT) but this time there is no error and it seems to work fine. I know that the Mac is not a supported platform, but it's amazing what little things could be done to settings and code to make these things work on the Mac as well as NT and Solaris.

Take my group's main application. I downloaded the jar files, created a launchable application using JBindery, set up the config files (which are just text files) and started the server. Dies hard. Check the code. Oh, it tries to spawn another Java process, and it uses Solaris or NT pathnames to do it. Great. Bypass that code (it's not really that important) and start it again. Now it works fine. Slow, but at least I run it on my PowerBook. Launch another couple of servers and everything still runs fine and slow. It's great to be able to do this. Sure it takes me a day or two to fix or find work arounds for the various incompatibilities, but in the end I'm working on my machine and not the hated NT box.

Although great for Java, there are a couple of Windows programs that I need to use. Luckily Virtual PC handles them well enough. Had to reinstall CodeWarrior and add the Windows support, but now I can make changes to those Windows programs and create EXE and DLL files, though I still have to test them on Windows.