I didn’t think that the Penguins had it in them. The Red Wings were clearly superior in their first three home games. And I didn’t think the Penguins would be able to change things in game 7. But that’s why they play the game.

Hero of the Stanley Cup Final: Evgeni Malkin. He came up big after a virtual disappearance in last year’s Final.

Goat of the Stanley Cup Final: Marian Hossa. He walked away from a big contract offer from the Penguins for what he thought would be a better chance to hoist the cup. Instead he finds himself watching the team he spurned hoist the Stanley Cup.

This is a surprise:

Whenever the time came to hire a coach, college lacrosse programs across the country had been reaching out to Princeton’s Bill Tierney for years. They were not necessarily trying to pry him away. They just wanted advice from someone who had spent nearly four decades in the game - maybe a few names, or a couple of places to look.

When the University of Denver began searching for a coach last month, it was no different. Except, Tierney said, the more he heard about the job, the more he was intrigued.

I started following NCAA lacrosse in the early 90’s by sheer happenstance - I would return from my early morning Memorial Weekend tennis, turn on ESPN and find the semi-finals on Saturday and the finals on Monday. This was right around the time that Princeton started their run of 5 championships in 7 years and I became a casual fan of lacrosse in general and Princeton lacrosse in specific.

It would be great for lacrosse to expand out of its north-eastern roots to the rest of the country and I wish DU and Tierney good luck.

A shout out to the nice people at CostCo. I needed them to bend the rules to our mutual benefit. It would have been easy to hide behind the rules. But they recognized the opportunity and rose to the occasion.

Best movie I’ve seen this year. Abrams has revitalized Star Trek by deconstructing it.

But I can’t help but feel that this was an action movie with Star Trek characters rather than a Star Trek movie. Not that I’m complaining.

I’d like to say that I’ve been using XML for quite a while. But deep down inside, I know that only recently have I really been using XML. Prior to that I was using flat files with angle brackets.

Now, I actually create and maintain XML schemata for my documents. I can validate against an XML Schema from the command line and java. I create presentation style sheets so that my XML documents can be more easily viewed. And I’m getting to be a pretty fair hand with XSL.

A reader writes in, requesting greater control over the behavior of the entry element of the Ant PropertyFile Task:

I am having a problem where in, if the number in test.properties is more than 999 then the increment adds a comma. The incremented number after 999 will be 1,000.

The answer is to use the pattern attribute of the entry element:

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<project default="run">
  <target name="run">
    <propertyfile file="test.properties">
      <entry key="count" type="int" operation="+" value="1" pattern="0">
    </propertyfile>
  </target>
</project>

With the addition of this attribute, the count property no longer includes the thousands separator:

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$ cat test.properties
#Sat Apr 18 20:16:30 GMT 2009
count=999
$ ant
Buildfile: build.xml

run:
[propertyfile] Updating property file: test.properties

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 0 seconds
$ cat test.properties
#Sat Apr 18 20:29:41 GMT 2009
count=1000

For customer “Dwight Shih”, project “weblog”, I am ranting.

I get it. People implement a time tracking system so that they can roll up activities for accounting purposes. But

• Rolling up data is easy.
• Collecting data to roll up is hard.

Customer, then project, then task may be the natural accounting hierarchy. That doesn’t mean that you have to make people enter data that way.

If I were a better man, then I wouldn’t begrudge UConn its basketball success.

I’ll be rooting for Stanford tonight, because they’re my team. And they’re a big underdog to the top ranked, undefeated juggernaut from UConn.

But it isn’t UConn’s fault that the NCAA ignored Stanford’s #2 ranking in the polls and judged them only the 5th best team in the women’s tournament.

And it isn’t UConn’s fault that Stanford has regressed from a perennial favorite to a team that is underrated by the selection committee.

So I really don’t know why I was rooting for Michigan State over UConn last night.

That’s Obese.

Since that inauspicious beginning, I have lost 15 pounds and moved from borderline obese to solidly overweight. Another 20 pounds and I’ll achieve borderline normalcy.

Maybe it is karmic payback for Elway forcing a trade from Baltimore to Denver back in 1983.

Maybe Josh McDaniels was just too green and too insecure to handle this first crisis as a NFL head coach.

Maybe agent Bus Cook saw an opportunity to rewrite a cap-friendly rookie contract to favor his player [and himself].

Maybe Jay Cutler needs to grow up and realize that this was business not personal.

But one thing is for sure - Jay Cutler is now a Bear not a Bronco. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.