Lots of levels, but nothing yet to show for it

Today has been one of those days where I walk away feeling like "Wow I learned a lot!", and even though I didn't write a single line of code that will actually be included in the final product I consider the time well-spent as tomorrow (or more likely early next week; I'm trying to learn Spring and Hibernate and I haven't even gotten started on Hibernate...) I will be writing code, and it will be very good code thanks to the time I've invested today.

Levels gained:

• 2 in Spring
• 1 in Dependency Injection
• 1 in Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP)
• 1 in Logging (with Log4j)
• 1 in Unit Testing (with JUnit)
• 1 in Eclipse

And there might be more tonight, if I don't decide that I've had enough. I hit a kind of frustrating point just now with the AOP side of things (or I could have maybe claimed two levels in it alone... ah well): it isn't actually executing what ought to be "before" and "after" advice (separate code blocks that run before and after a given method is executed, respectively). I'm not seeing anything obvious wrong with my config file, but I'm also not familiar enough with the AspectJ notation to say whether I did the pattern for the pointcut right, either.

What Would Sapir and Whorf Say?

I ran into a mental block trying to think of a name for a character in a story this evening, so I decide to scout around the web and see whether I could find inspiration there. I discovered something surprising: apparently, there are only a handful of grown-up names on the Internet; most of the sites that my search turned up only had baby names.