Today we got a presentation by an IBM guy on the Rational Tool Suite. The presentation wasn't too bad.
One interesting point was that he was using JBoss as AppServer. I would have expected that they have to use Websphere. So much about "Eat your own dog food".

I am now (for nearly two weeks) invloved with Xdoclet as commiter. Xdoclet is a code generator, where you add tags in javadoc format to your source (@foo.bar). Xdoclet then generates Java files and deployment descriptors. Currently I am wading through JIRA, their trouble ticket tool. It's quite some work. But fortunately, you see a result.
I am also currently writing an article for iX magazine about Xdoclet. I submitted it to the editor two days ago in the afternoon, saying that it is not clear when there will be a next release. In the evening, there was a mail on the developers malingl list saying "hey, do we want to release this weekend?" :-)

Gavin King (the hibernate guy) is writing about SFSB. While not everything he wrote is correct (according to the comments, which I did not verify), his last sentence Lesson: beware J2EE folklore! is completely true.
I often hear "CMP is useless". When you ask people why, they tell you some myths or results from a foaf or things they experienced years ago, which is not true on a modern CMP 2.x server like JBoss.

We have been at our local OBI store on Saturday. Over the loudspeaker, the lady was announcing "And now, just in time for eastern: out four million megapixel camera is on stock again". She was repeating this every then minutes.

Wow, they are having such a product at a consumer store, while you can't even buy that in high-end shops. :-)
Experience from the past (marketing guy is pretending that a megapixel screen can display 16 million colors simultaneously) showed that it doesn't make sense to tell the lady that four terra pixel cameras are still a bit in the future.