Antarctica Service Medal

Not too much technical content tonight. I spent most of the afternoon trying to get OSGi working from a Java Webstart application without much luck. It may be something that I revisit down the road, but for the time being distributing a zip with a set of shell scripts should work. As part of the process, I also learned how to sign a Jar file, which will be useful in an upcoming project.

This morning I pushed out the first update to the Grails app I have in production. Just before performing the actual update, I remembered to double check that my production DataSource was set to 'update' instead of 'create' or 'create-drop' the database. It was lucky I checked because it was set to 'create' from when I was wrangling with MySQL. I had already made a dump of the database, so I wouldn't have lost any data, but I was glad that I checked.

On the non-technical front, I received an Antarctica Service Medal in the mail for the time I spent in Antarctica:


I probably won't have too many occasions to actually wear it, but the medal is a nice memento of my time down there.

And the countdown has begun: 9 days until I'm in the Bahamas for my wedding and honeymoon. Pretty crazy!