Using a single strobe on light stand with the 14-54mm f2.8

14-54mm Zuiko Digital and 105mm Sigma EX-DG Macro lens, 2 flashes with wireless triggers and one colourful lolly ;D

From the 2008 Chingay Parade. Pardon the noise on the photos. I had to bump up the ISO a fair bit.

Some photos:

And not-so photos:

The wife and sis-in-laws thought we'd have some fun doing some glamour shots on Shahira's birthday, so here's both my sis-in-laws posing for some.. Before we knew it, its 3am in the morning! :D

Couple of Macro, Infrared and Street photography.

Sun acquires MySQL and Oracle acquires BEA. Its a brilliant move on Sun's part to acquire MySQL, arguably the most popular open source db in the world, after having invested in Glassfish and having open-sourced Java.

The Spring community will also benefit greatly from the BEA-Oracle merger with the latest release of WebLogic using Spring at its core.

I look forward to what these mergers will bring!

Circus Manager: How long have you been juggling?
Candidate: Oh, about six years.

Manager: Can you handle three balls, four balls, and five balls?
Candidate: Yes, yes, and yes.

Manager: Do you work with flaming objects?
Candidate: Sure.

Manager: .. . knives, axes, open cigar boxes, floppy hats?
Candidate: I can juggle anything.

Manager: Do you have a line of funny patter that goes with your juggling?
Candidate: It's hilarious.

Manager: Well, that sounds fine. I guess you're hired.
Candidate: Umm ... Don't you want to see me juggle?

Manager: Gee, I never thought of that.

DeMarco, Tom & Lister, Timothy - Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams
Dorset House Publishing, 1999

While using C3P0 as your connection pool (either with Spring or otherwise), sometimes you might get an exception like this:

** BEGIN NESTED EXCEPTION **
com.mysql.jdbc.CommunicationsException
MESSAGE: Communications link failure due to underlying exception:

** BEGIN NESTED EXCEPTION **
java.io.EOFException

STACKTRACE:
java.io.EOFException at com.mysql.jdbc.MysqlIO.readFully(MysqlIO.java:1956)

This is quite a common problem which shows up when C3P0 is configured incorrectly or by using the default settings. The problem occurs when C3P0 is trying to use a connection already established by the pool but was closed by the database server. When C3P0 tries to use this already-closed connection, the error is thrown.
In c3p0.properties, try experimenting with the following values:

c3p0.preferredTestQuery=SELECT 1 
c3p0.testConnectionOnCheckout=true

This will force C3P0 to test each connection before passing it to the application.
If you are configuring using spring/hibernate, do note that *only* these properties are configurable in the applicationContext.xml file:

hibernate.c3p0.acquire_increment
hibernate.c3p0.idle_test_period
hibernate.c3p0.timeout
hibernate.c3p0.max_size
hibernate.c3p0.max_statements
hibernate.c3p0.min_size
hibernate.c3p0.validate

The other properties should go to the c3p0.properties file located in the webapp class root folder.

If you get an exception such as:

java.sql.SQLException: com.mchange.v2.resourcepool.ResourcePoolException: Attempted to use a closed or broken resource pool 

Ensure that the timeout value configured for c3p0 does not not exceed the database server's wait timeout.