My two Clojure projects, life in Sedona Arizona, and my new book project

Two Clojure projects?
Well, actually, I had just one Clojure project until today. I refer to my project as KB2 (KnowledgeBooks.com 2) and it is basically a kitchen sink for everything that I thought that I wanted in a personal (and perhaps small group) research and content management system:
  • A personal version of Evernote: allows me to collect eBooks, web pages snippets and notes in a personal repository that is searchable. I use a Firefox add-on I wrote to capture multiple selections on web pages and send them to the web app.
  • Uses NLP to identify entities in eBooks, web pages and notes and add an information icon that provides DBPedia (WikiPedia) information on the fly.
  • Uses the Bing search API to find information on what my NLP analysis code considers if the main topic of eBooks, web pages and notes.

I enjoy meditation (also practice Yoga since about 1975 and Qigong for about two years) and after my early morning mediation this morning I had one of those ah-ha moments:
In using KB2 myself, the automatic Bing searches showing results on the side and DBPedia entity lookups started to get in my way after the novelty of these features "wore off." In other words, the Evernote team new what they were doing when they designed their (rather good) product! This morning I cloned KB2 into KB3 removing everything but the "personal version of Evernote" functionality. KB2 has a lot of useful Clojure code in it, and if I am not too lazy I might open source it all. KB2 has had so many rewrites that the Clojure and Clojurescript (and a little Java and JavaScript) code really need some cleanup love.
Life in Sedona Arizona
My wife Carol and I have been enjoying the early spring time in the mountains of Central Arizona. My friend Bill Bohan (one of the authors of the book Great Sedona Hikes) took this picture of me while we were hiking on Bear Mountain last week:


I have also been enjoying gardening. Several friends and I volunteer to keep a 1 mile historic irrigation ditch functioning to provide water to a historic farm and Crescent Moon Red Rock Crossing Park. The following three pictures (the first two taken by Don Fyffe) show me and some friends unloading some wood chips someone gave us for the farm. The third picture shows me holding up a bok choy I grew with the community garden in the background:

My new book project: "Power Java"
I was 'scientific' in my approach to choosing the material for this book: I had 11 topics that I wanted write about and I used a Google survey (it is located here) to get feedback from people who follow me on social media. Both the survey results and some great suggestions emailed to me by Alex Ott really helped me narrow down the topics for the book. Thanks to everyone who helped! (You can still add to the survey if you want.)
It was a difficult decision choosing Java for this book project. Most of my development in the last year has been in Clojure and Haskell (with a little Ruby and Java) but I decided that the book would have a wider audience written in Java.
I might provide an appendix and additional sample code showing the use of some of the examples with Clojure and JRuby wrappers but it is so easy for Clojure and JRuby developers to reuse Java code that I am not sure if it is worthwhile adding this material to the book. (Feedback on this will be appreciated, BTW.)


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