The World Reflected in the Eyes of Another

The unofficial end of summer is always a time for reflection, so it's kind of cool to see myself reflected in the eyes of a frog:


From this perspective, it's clear that I'm rather large and intimidating which helps to remind me that others are likely to perceive me very differently from how I might intend...

It's also apparent that I'm not the only one always on the lookout for bugs!


The bugs themselves are busy too. This bee is absolutely covered with summer's bountiful harvest of pollen.


I'll bet most people have never stopped to notice how many kinds of bees are really buzzing around out there. This one's busy lapping up sweet nectar as well as collecting protein rich pollen on her hind legs.


I'm sure that even fewer people notice that the flies too are rather pretty if you take the time to look really closely.


Life is a rich tapestry full of the unexpected. I don't even know what kind of bug this is, but it's certainly fierce looking!


Contrary to popular believe, I don't spend my whole life answering newsgroup questions. It's certainly one of the gardens I nurture with perhaps a little too much zeal. But I do have time for my other gardens too.

In EMF-land, we're just finishing off polishing the final chapters of the second edition of the book and we've decided that since it's been so incredibly painful we should prolong the short term pain by writing an appendix to describe the new features of EMF 2.3 so that we can avoid the longer term pain of ever having to write a third edition. Like my hardy Hibiscus, it's taken a long time to bloom.


I'm also pleased to have finished a prototype for a more flexible and powerful URI converter along with support for content types; please see 191077 for patches. The enhanced URI converter APIs support things like exists, delete, timeStamp, and isReadOnly to allow one to build a fully functional application without hard dependencies on the backing store APIs used to prop up your resources. In addition, it supports contentType to allow one to define resource factories based on resource content rather than on file extensions. I'll need to write some documentation to describe how best to exploit these new capabilities. Probably it will be easier for folks to provide feedback once we commit the changes and start providing builds for EMF 2.4. Just as the garden gets better each year based on experiences from previous years, so too EMF keeps getting better.

So let's say goodbye to summer with the attitude that there will always be more summers and likely even better summers. These sunflowers are most certainly a very lovely way to say goodbye.