Month: June 2003

Russ is offline because of Network Solutions.  DNS issues will be resolved soon, but until then you can find him here.

Robert Stephenson at weblogs.java.net:

In a session Thursday afternoon, Michael Kölling and John Rosenberg demonstrated BlueJ, a Java IDE they had developed over the last seven years for teaching O-O programming.

BlueJ’s guiding philosophy is to make it possible to teach object-oriented concepts first, before students even begin to write code. It does so by representing the objects in a UML-like graphical format, and showing their instances as boxes on a tray at the bottom of the screen. Clicking on an instance brings up a list of its methods, which may be executed directly. The result is so stunning that, once you see it demonstrated, you wonder how we could ever have taught programming any other way.

A friend of mine took a Java programming class at a mostly liberal arts school a few semesters ago.  I can assure you that his experience with BlueJ was less than positive.  I tried to help him out a few times, but unfortunately I don’t think his teacher had a grasp on object oriented programming or Java.  His teacher took the ‘follow this list of instructions’ way of teaching, which requires you to do work without actually learning what is going on.  Those instructions unfortunately made no sense.

I don’t want to harshly judge BlueJ, I’m sure that it is quite a good program.  The problem in my friend’s case is a teacher without a clue.  I’m sure that when coupled with a good teacher, this program can make learning Java and OOP easy.  BlueJ lowers the barriers for learning Java but it also has the ability to create ignorant and confused developers.  This is not good.

After spending most of yesterday offline (against my will mind you), here’s a quick roundup of notable links:

• Emmanuel points to a review of open source GIS systems.
• WebServices.Org points to and discusses the WSDL 1.2 working drafts.
• Pocket PC Thoughts and Gizmodo note that Sony is investing in OLED technology.
• Erik has some excellent coverage of JavaOne and more, making some of this roundup redundant.  His pulse was also published.
• Dave Johnson is thinking about migrating Roller CVS, downloads, and mailing lists from Sourceforge to java.net.  He also has an aggregation of Rave comments.  I personally think that Rave has potential.  We’ll see.
• Linux kernel version 2.5.70 is out.  Here’s the changelog.
• MagpieRSS , a PHP RSS parser, 0.5.1 is out.  It’s a bugfix release.
• Doug Kaye: OO May Not Be the Best for Web Services and Web Services Boon for Customers, Not Investors.
• Slashdot is even harder to read nowadays.  Lately there have been many more good stories in sections that don’t make it to the main page.  Good news that won’t make the front page is currently playing in the following sections: Games, Developers, Apple and Science.

I’ve had intermittent connectivity today.  I think my cablemodem wanted attention.

DPReview:

Thanks to forums contributor ‘Andreas P’ for spotting this, a Taiwanese technology website is currently running an article about the difference between CCD and CMOS sensors. On this page they have a copy of a Sony sensor road map, on it is the ICX 456 sensor, it’s 2/3″ in size (8.8 x 6.6 mm) and has eight megapixels (a pixel pitch of 2.7 µm). The box on the roadmap is marked ‘1H03’ (first half ’03) which would make it available for manufacturers looking to release some prosumer cameras before Christmas this year (a new Sony DSC-F717 or Canon Pro 90 perhaps?).

Phil: I can’t see this being a good thing, we’re already seeing higher noise levels from the five megapixel 1/1.8″ sensors. I’d rather see manufacturers putting more development into lenses, dynamic range, automatic white balance and improved image processing, there are some things you can’t cover up with more megapixels.

Jeremy Zawodny:

Don’t argue with a self-proclaimed database expert about MySQL. It’s just not worth it. I thought it’d be entertaining but it’s more draining than anything else.

With some quick coding and JSTL, Russ has put together an RSS feed for the links in #mobitopia.  He also tweaked the IRC links page to include comments.

TheServerSide notes that JPublish 2.0 has been released.

Update: Yes, I’m a little slow.  🙂

ExtremeTech:

IBM and Infineon Technologies AG said Tuesday that they have reached a key milestone on the way to commercializing magnetic RAM as early as 2005.

At the VLSI Symposia taking plane in Japan this week, IBM and Infirnon said they will announce that the two companies have jointly fabricated a 128-Kbit Magnetic RAM (MRAM) core on a 0.18-micron process, the most aggressive use of lithography to date to fabricate an MRAM.

Russ got the #mobitopia IRC Links page up and running.  So far today, my favorite links are:

• Sean Brandt is blogging JavaONE keynote via GPRS
• Erik Hatcher must have been involved in the java.net thing somehow, given his entry.  Very cool stuff.
• Java.net of course
• Java.com too.

Newsforge notes that OpenMOSIX 2.4.20-3 is out.

I4U:

Sony Japan announces (raw translation) the Qualia 016 (Q016-WE1) small digital camera.

It’s a cute little camera, but can it really cost 380,000 yen?  That’s like three grand US.  Quite silly for a 2 megapixel camera, no matter how tiny it is.  It still has to be larger than a piece of Memory Stick Duo.

I just wanted to let everyone know (this is mostly for the googlers in the house) that Red Hat 9 installs just fine on a Toshiba Satellite 2545CDS.  It’s a 333MHz K6-2 processor, so don’t expect it to be fast or responsive, but it works.  I’m having PCMCIA IRQ issues (I haven’t been able to make any of my PCMCIA cards work yet), but hopefully I’ll get the resolved.  If not I might try Gentoo or NetBSD.

The IRQ issues could also be hardware related.  We shall see.  At bootup, it was kind enough to tell me that I should really try passing pci=biosirq to the kernel.  Tried it, no luck so far.

Next step is to get some flavour of Linux back on my friend Adam’s IBM thinkpad.

Can’t.

Focus.

Eyes.

Joi:

If only the guy in Memento had a blog…

Core News notes a sad thing:

We will be stopping all orders until we can get this straight.

An official webpage will be setup explaining the details shortly. Until then, those who have ordered will be getting a computer abit slowly as the missing parts will be coming from what different places have in stock etc.

Please allow us some extra time.

I’d be really bummed if this great thing is squashed by lawyers.

LWN notes that Richard Stallman will be speaking at George Washington University on June 12.  I’ll try to get out of work and check it out:

When: Thursday June 12, 6:10pm
Where: Phillips Hall, Rm 415
The George Washington University
801 22nd Street
Washington, DC

Christoph Cemper, who I’ve recently started reading, has some great linkage this afternoon:

• Ars: Intel ships its 1 BILLIONTH processor.  Dr Evil: “One BILLION processors.”
• TechDirt: Dot-com is making it into the Oxford dictionary, baby!
• BBC News: The CIA uses 5 year old technology.

Thanks for sniffing out the links, Christoph.  Keep it up, man!

Mental note [via Derek Willis]: look into Aggreg8, a Mozilla Firebird extension for reading RSS feeds.  Judging from the version number (0.0.1), it’s alpha-fantasic, but definately worth checking out.

Of course, I’ll probably never be a two-paned aggregator kind of guy, but it’s worth a look.

Update:

Here’s a thumbnail with a full sized image.  The user interface is clean in appearance, but the flow definately needs some work.

OSNews:

FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE is now available. Release notes for all five architectures, here.