Year: 2003

Ingo has been playing with the latest new SOAP thing from Microsoft:

Within the previous weeks, I’ve been working with a future product from Microsoft. It was one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a long time. The only drawback was that I just couldn’t tell anyone as I’ve still been under NDA. Can you imagine how it feels, when you are part of a small group which has seen the best thing since sliced bread and you just want to shout it out but you aren’t allowed to?

I can’t wait until the rest of the world is allowed to play too!

Via freshmeat, RSS Mix Tape:

RSS Mix Tape reads items from specified RSS feeds and displays them in a list. Selected posts can be categorized and commented on, and an RSS feed is generated for each category. It also supports LiveJournal input whether or not you are a paid user.

In short, RSS In, RSS Out.

It runs with Python, PyQT, PyKDE, and xmlbase.  Of course, OPML would probably be the format of choice for containing a list of feeds, though I understand the want for RIRO (RSS in, RSS out).  I don’t know how easy it would be to have the commentary in OPML.

If anyone has an RSS mix tape feed that they update fairly frequently, I wouldn’t mind checking that out.

I found this article last night via the java.sun.com RSS feed:

Implementing an end-to-end J2ME application is no small feat, and the architecture and development of such a system can be quite complicated. This article uses Sun’s Java Blueprints showcase application, Java Smart Ticket, to show you how to design and implement a complex, end-to-end application based on MIDP and J2EE. We will discuss the design patterns, architecture, and implementation tricks used to create the application.

Matt Raible noted the release of Eclipse 3.0 M1 yesterday.  Get it here.

I’ve always been more than impressed with the stability of the milestone releases.  I was waiting for a 3.0 milestone before I upgraded, and here it is.  Thanks again to the Eclipse team, y’all ROCK!

Jeremy points out many RSS feeds are available for the Yahoo Buzz index.

I’m also glad to see that he enjoyed 2 Fast 2 Furious.

Here’s a quote from the back cover of my freshly purchased copy of The Animatrix:

This DVD willl not work in a CD-ROM drive and the DVD-ROM features are not available on Apple Macintosh.

That’s kind of a bummer for Mac-based Matrix heads.  DVD-ROM content usually sucks anyway, so hopefully you’re not missing out on too much.

A special note to the RIAA and MPAA:

I saw The Animatrix before Reloaded came out thanks to peer to peer file sharing technology.  Last night I purchased The Animatrix because of p2p.  You gained a sale, you didn’t loose one.  I wasn’t quite sure if it was worth purchasing based on the four quicktime shorts that are on the net.  I saw the whole thing and knew that I had to have it.  Stuff like this happens more often than your statistics show.

That is all.

Patrick has some very good observations on Nukes, a *nuke clone built by the JBoss.org team.

My thoughts: does the world need another *nuke clone?  In Java even?

Infoworld reports that the JBoss Group is not worried about the CDN split:

“It’s really not a big deal and it’s something that we’ve seen for a long time,” said Ben Sabrin, director of sales and business development at JBoss Group in Atlanta, on Thursday.

Via freshmeat, Clustered JDBC:

Clustered JDBC is to databases what RAID is for disks. C-JDBC provides transparent database clustering (partitioning, replication, etc.) to any Java application through JDBC. It works with any Java application without code modification and with any datase engine. C-JDBC has been successfully tested with Tomcat, JBoss, JOnAS, MySQL, PostgreSQL, HSQL, SAP DB, Oracle, and more.

OSNews:

OSNews learned that the Gentoo project is porting their software distribution system, Portage, to Mac OS X. This makes Gentoo the third project developing such a system for the Unix-based OSX, after Fink and Darwin Ports. The Gentoo project also plans to create a GUI for OSX at some point, there is no ETA for it so far.

Thanks to Russ and the guys at #mobitopia, here’s an Inquirer article on the JBoss fork/coup:

 8:00 am — Seven consultants for The JBoss Group publicly announced the immediate termination of their contracts and the foundation of their new company, Core Developers Network. Their charter “is to provide a commercial infrastructure to enable open source contributors to deliver their professional expertise to the marketplace, independent of their contributions to open source projects”.

It’s all quite confusing.  The Inquirer story is completely from the CDN point of view.  No word yet from Fleury and what’s left of the JBoss team.  I have a feeling that this fork is bad PR for JBoss, the CDN, and Open Source.  The major app server vendors are going to use this fork/coup as proof that Open Source is volitile and that customers are better off with their closed solutions.

I wish the CDN luck, but it looks like they don’t need too much of it:

This means The JBoss Group is going to have a tough fight on their hands here in the States. Core Developers Network has a superior grasp on the CMP internals. They’ve got the entire Jetty crew. They’ve got the man who authored the distributed transaction manager and the JCA subsystem. Their early work heavily influenced the drive to AOP. They have an Apache Jakarta board member, which could make things very interesting. Their site indicates they’re expanding beyond the JBoss horizon to cover a broader spectrum of open source J2EE software. Finally, they’re driving home the distinction between “Business” and “Project”.

Honestly I’ve only ever tinkered around with JBoss.  A major barrier for me was the fact that for anything beyond bare INSTALL information, you have to buy the book.  How do I administer JBoss?  Buy the book.  How do I configure this thing the way I want it?  Buy the book.  That never thrilled me too much.

Update: This is really more of a coup than a fork.  It’s a corporate fork, and not an open source one as far as I can tell.  Here’s some more info from the CDN site:

We are committed to having the same level of involvement in our current projects that we have had in the past. This means that we will continue to work on the JBoss project itself. In addition, we will continue to support the JBoss project via the jboss-development and jboss-users mailing lists maintained by SourceForge.net, as well as any other open public forum. Unfortunately, the forums on jboss.org are a commercial venue for the JBoss Group LLC, and therefore we will not be participating in them.

PocketPC Thoughts reports that Palm is buying Handspring:

Actually, the board has approved the purchase of Handspring, it hasn’t happened yet. According to this CNNMoney report, the deal won’t happen until this fall and will be after PalmSource has been spun off. The spin off was also approved late yesterday.

When I read stuff like this I wonder if it’s still April.  Many related stories can be found at google news.

Reverand Jim:

Please move the letter “Q” away from the letter “W” on my keyboard. They are far too close together. If that isn’t possible, please change the keyboard shortcut for “Close Every Window and the Entire Application without asking any questions” from CTRL-Q to CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-Q. If you can’t do that, then please add a dialog box to confirm the fact that I want to close all 27 of the tabs I just opened.

If there were a t-shirt for that, I’d have a drawer full of them.

From the Netcraft blog:

Rackshack had a large transformer explode and start a fire today. Amazingly, given the pictures of the firethey seem to have prevented it from affecting their network performance which, at least for rackshack’s own site, is no different from any other day.

Jeff Darcy the Canned Platypus:

My employer finally came out of stealth mode yesterday, so I can finally talk a little bit about what we do. What we provide is an “appliance” that plugs into a storage network in front of your old disk array, and gives you the ability to turn back the clock on your storage to any arbitrary point in the past. This differs from the snapshot products everyone already has, because it doesn’t require that you had the foresight to do a snapshot just before your database went nuts and messed up all of your data. You can always restore to just one minute before, without needing an omniscient snapshot strategy. Furthermore, restoration is instant. Sure, we’re still doing stuff behind the scenes for a while but, as far as anyone in front of us is concerned, every block on that volume just went back in time. Lastly, we store all that old data in a way that’s very space-efficient. We’ve worked with some Big Brains on how best to do this, and the result is a huge improvement over snapshot or backup non-solutions that require anywhere from 2x to 6x your original dataset size to get even less functionality.

That’s some mind boggling stuff.  I didn’t even know that was possible.  Good luck.

Things are hopping in #mobitopia this afternoon.

I managed to get Haystack installed and running last night on a WinXP machine.  It seemed like the first time I ran haystack.exe it installed and initialized a bunch of stuff then went away.  I gave it some time, clicked haystack.exe again, and after a few minutes (I think) it started up.

I’ll write more about Haystack as soon as I can poke around a bit.

Lessig:

We have launched a petition to build support for the Public Domain Enhancement Act. That act would require American copyright holders to pay $1 fifty years after a work was published. If they pay the $1, the copyright continues. If they don’t, the work passes into the public domain. Historical estimates would suggest 98% of works would pass into the pubilc domain after 50 years. The Act would do a great deal to reclaim a public domain.

You can find me at number 107.

DPReview has the inside track as always on the Konica KD-510Z.  As far as I can tell, the difference is that it’s silver.  I have a KD-500Z in front of me, let’s do a little spec rundown:

Konica KD-500Z	Konica KD-510Z
5 megapixel	5 megapixel
3x optical zoom	3x optical zoom
SD/MMC/Memory Stick	SD/MMC/Memory Stick
Black	Silver

There’s also a specs page for the KD-500Z.  Here’s what DPReview has to say:

After all that the KD-510Z seems to be a fairly unremarkable five megapixel three times optical zoom digital camera virtually identical to the black bodied KD-500Z they announced at Photokina last year.

Yep.  Shh, don’t tell.  It’s about 99% the same camera.  In silver.

Don’t hype it if you don’t have it.

The Register has a report that Amazon is thinking about licensing Apple’s Music Store technology.  That’d be quite amusing since Apple licenses Amazon’s 1-Click technology.

We shall see.