Like most tech-boys I normally have about 3 or 4 projects that I’d like to be doing if I had the time to do them, access to a PC at a reasonable time.

So far the this list consists of:

1. Playing with QuickFix/J, I won’t say exactly what, as I have been sitting on this project for ages.
2. Tinkering with this blog. I must say I am hugely impressed with WordPress. It’s all very slick and just works. Even more impressive that it’s all done in PHP which is generally the spawn-of-the-devil to code/debug
3. Do some coding work on Formatted Dataset API. This is useful little library written by and old Sybase Consultant, which hasn’t had a new commit in 3 years. I recently had to Maven-ise it for a project I was doing here, and I would be nice to add that back to the Sourceforge trunk. I’ll have to check with the owner for CVS/SVN access.
4. Pick up a new language, I’ve been flirting with Ruby/Rails, and forcing myself (with little real enthusiasm) do plough through a C# book. Other candidates are JRuby (duh), Groovy (unlikely) or one of the new breed of functional langs on the jvm (Scala or Clojure).
5. A little app for my wife’s card making habits. This I’ll probably tie in to the picking up a new lang. Possibly building out the back end using Rails, with an FXRuby front end. It amused her no end last night when I started gathering requirements and sketching out a schema while watching Heroes in bed.
6. Re-read my Spring book. That seems to be taking off over here.

Of course half this stuff will never get done, but it’s still nice to have a list.