Ken Saks wrote about a few upcoming features, and I’m liking what I see right now. A few of those - a standardized shutdown/startup API, simpler packaging, simpler async API - I can very much relate to. I still remember having to implement specific application server interfaces simply because there’s no way to have your EJB bean do something on application server startup and shutdown. Then there’s the totally nightmarish packaging when there’s a combination of (EJB) JARs and WARs that shares libraries (do we put them in WEB-INF? Some app server specific lib folder? Where? Argh!). And you’re pretty much screwed if you need to have a singleton like behavior among EJB components.

No doubt, those issues can be worked around, but a spec like EJB is supposed to take care of plumbing stuff like that. Good to see much is still planned after EJB 3.0 has been released.

The recent bad weather in KL (rains almost daily) has been a real pain to the photographer in me. That’s until I a few days back when there was this thunderstorm not too far from where I live. Being far meant there’s no rain so I manage to mount my tripod near the window of my apartment and did some long exposures hoping to photograph lightnings. This was the only keeper of the 15 minute attempt (the storm blew out of view after that).

Surprisingly, the bright lightning barely registers on the camera. This image was post processed to bring out the lightning as I saw it (minus the colors). The unprocessed one looked barely like a spark on camera. I tried boosting the ISO and using a large aperture but that just caused the whole area to brighten up, further swallowing up the lightning. For this keeper shot, I used ISO@200, f5.

So the next time you’re stuck indoors with a storm looming, rest assured there’s still something you can do with your camera