T-Mobile has withdrawn Nokia’s 7210 from sale just days after beginning sales of the much anticipated picture-messaging handset.
Author: Matt Croydon
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Nokia 7210 Problems
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Maverick
Maverick is another web application framework. It’s a cross between Struts, WebWork and Cocoon. The authors have tried to blend the most important aspects from all three frameworks while attempting to keep the maverick framework as simple and unintrusive as possible. From my initial reading it looks like webwork with simplifed cocoon pipelines. Very interesting. Now I just have to find a reason to try it out.
Here is a little blurb from the project’s main page:
Maverick is a Model-View-Controller (aka “Model 2”) framework for web publishing using Java and J2EE. It is a minimalist framework which focuses solely on MVC logic, allowing you to generate presentation using a variety of templating and transformation technologies.
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My J2ME Hello World Experience
Yep. I followed Colin Fahey’s guide and got his “Hello World” app to run on an emulator. That emulator is officially the ugliest phone on earth, don’t you think? Everything was really easy to do, and pretty much just worked. I set up a file called “j2me.bat” which sets the environment variables that I need, and when compiling, I had to substitute “-classpath” for “-bootclasspath.” Overall it was an extremely pleasant experience. Maybe it’s time to take PocketBlog to the next level.
I want to state for the record that I glanced at Kablog the other day, though I did not look at it in depth. I feel that this is a neccesary statement because I might end up with something similar in one way or another to Kablog, and I want to come up with something from scratch. What I end up with will be released with source (license TBD), and I don’t want to be ripping off a well done commercial product, I want to end up with my own thing.
Of course, I’ll keep you updated with my findings.
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Open Source Bugs, Java Caching System
Kevin O’Neill points to Jakarta’s Java Caching System (which looks like a useful project/tool) and says that he has found a potentially nasty bug in the ReadWriteLock class. Hopefully a JCD submitter will stumble upon the buzz generated by Kevin’s post and fix it. Or perhaps someone knows a perfect solution, fixes the problem and emails it off. I like Kevin’s concluding thought:
This hilights both the problem and the power of open source code. The problem is that you can never be quiet sure of it’s quality (though I have mostly found it to be high, and yes I know that the same could be said for closed sourced code); the power is that you can look at the code and make your own assessments/adjustments.
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Spare CPU Cycles
Anybody want to buy the idle power of gulker.com’s massive array of 6 Macs, 5 Linux boxes and an iPod?
No, I don’t, though will it be common practice to rent your spare CPU cycles in the future? Makes me think…
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Mono 0.17, GTK# 0.6
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Mike Kestner announced Gtk# 0.6. This new release includes many new features and bug fixes, and is the perfect companion to the Mono 0.17 release.
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Johannes has contributed a Windows-ready package of Mono 0.17, and its available from our download page.
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Alp Toker has Debian packages.
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RSD
Ben Hammersly implements RSD in MovableType. Dave implemented RSD in Radio on Friday. File this under “A Good Thing.”
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Java related RPMs and Comments about the *BSDs
Cool stuff for Linuxers: JPackage Project, RPM packages of loads of java applications and libraries. I’ve always missed such a site.
That’s a pretty sweet idea, and it looks like there are tons of java projects prebuilt or in source RPM form. Most of my recent Jakarta-related installations have been from the binary tgz, which is simple enough, but having good fairly current stuff in RPM form should lower the threshold for others. Of course, this doesn’t solve your classpath huntdown problems for you, nor does it allow you to experiment with bleeding-edge stuff (that depends on other bleeding-edge stuff), but it’s a great start.
I have also been dissapointed with how stale the freebsd/netbsd/openbsd ‘ports’ of many of the Jakarta projects are. I wanted to use a *bsd for Tomcat 4.x testbed a few months ago, but unfortunately Tomcat 3.x was the latest ‘port.’ I know that this means that I should get off my butt and modernize a few programs for a particular *bsd, but that pesky time thing keeps smacking me down.
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BrainSplatPHP
BrainSplatPHP 0.7.1:
BrainSplat was originally conceived to scratch my itch for a journal program that I could use to replace LiveJournal.It is a simple blogging program that has support for comments. The recent additions is a client interface and a forum like code for formatting BSPHPCode. The reason I made my own was simply because all the scripts I found were generally made for multiple users. And thus, I made my own. I started originally in Perl, but I found that PHP makes a much better interface for these type of programs.
Changes:
Some more themes were added to the distribution, and the BSThemes Web site was created.
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Codename: Dashboard
Codename: Dashboard Beta 4.5 is out. It is built on the .NET framework and looks like it provides a nice “at-a-glance” of some potentially important stuff. It looks like it supports news feeds, as there are some screenshots of a feed from The Register. I’m not sure if it uses RSS or scrapes the sites (I hope the former), but it looks like it has potential. [via BetaNews]
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Evolution 1.2.1
Ximian Evolution 1.2.1 has been released. I remember looking into building Evolution when Red Hat 8.0 had just come out, and it wasn’t ready. 1.2.1 officially supports Red Hat 8.0 now. Sweet!
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PHPTalk 0.9.4
PHPTalk 0.9.4 has been released:
PHPTalk aims to be the fastest and most configurable multithreaded message board system available. It has the usual features like multithreading, auto indexing of messages (for searching), customizable colors, etc. However, PHPTalk differs in that it allows you to easily integrate it into existing sites. It does this by not relying on specific display files, allowing you to template most of the frontend, and allowing you to specify an already existing user table. It uses PEAR’s DBI for portability, ANSI SQL for portability, an advanced and documented API, full multilingual support, and full i18n support for date functions.
I can’t say that I’ve used it, but it looks clean and different from the other multitudes of php bulletin board systems.
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Brainf**k Java Compiler
Java Brainf**k compiler (2.0):
The wonderful Java Brainfuck Compiler provides a facility for compiling programs written in the powerful Brainf**k language into Java bytecode class files.
Changes:
The dependency on Jasmin as an intermediate step was removed. BCEL is now used to produce bytecode directly. A proper build system was implemented.
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ROI and Web Services
That’s where my analogy came in. In traditional IT projects, I said, ROI has been as elusive as high-school sex: “The question was always, are you going to get any?” But with web services, ROI is more like married sex: “You know you’re getting it, but you’re always wondering, what can we do to make it better?”
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Webmin 1.040
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DirecTV DSL Calls it Quits
Jeremy Zawodny’s DSL is going away. I hope he can find a replacement ISP soon. Good luck.
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Two Articles From Peterme
Two articles that I need to read by Peter Merholz. The first is on collaboration:
Anyone who has worked with others knows that the best collaborative tools are the simplest. It is likely that, in the last 10 years, the most creative thinking and innovation has emerged from sessions gathered ’round whiteboards.
The other is on user interface:
The Supernova conference was kicked off by Howard Rheingold, who put forth a thesis based on thoughts from Smart Mobs. It was a great way to start the show, rooting it in humanisitic and sociological notions, and not simply focusing on the tech.
One thing that came up that I take issue with is this notion that there is a fundamental difference between “the kids”‘ abilities with new technologies, and their elders. This is a fairly hoary canard. Older folks don’t get new technologies, don’t understand how to use them, but that younger folks adopt it as if it were breathing. This is often put out there as a way to excuse old people from bothering to understand, and, I think, from excusing product designers from bothering to make products for people over 25.
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J2ME/MDIP for Motorola T720 and Others
r0.ini writes “Nice step-by-step introduction guide on how to make that cool app for your T720.” Worth a read even if you never intend to write a program for your cell phone, for the comparison between BREW and J2ME (and implicitly between Verizon and AT&T).
I’d like to develop for as many phones as possible without locking myself into a specific manufacturer/platform (if possible). It looks like the article covers developing for J2ME/MDIP, so it should cover any MDIP compliant device.
It looks like WAP is the lowest common denominator: it works on the most platforms, though it is as limiting as HTML3.01 or earlier. Most if not almost all of your processing has to be done on the server side. This isn’t particularly bad, thought I do have a place in my heart for tightly written compact code that gets the job done. I think developing for J2ME/MDIP is probably a good idea, though it looks like Nokia has a well designed SDK, and MDIP is in there.
I’d like to urge developers to stay away from vendor-specific extensions as much as possible. Ideally, you would be able to write code that would work on both Motorola, Nokia, and other platforms. I haven’t done any coding for MDIP phones, so I’m not sure that this is the case. I know that some java-enabled phones have more features than others, so it would be bad to limit higher end phones to lower end features. However, do your best to “degrade gracefully” for lesser platforms.
I plan to work in J2ME/MDIP in the near future, and I will blog whatever I find out.
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Groove Web Services
Sam Gentile is grooving with web services:
Got the beta of Groove 2.5 and Groove Web Services up and going. It’s quite amazing to me, in the matter of minutes, to pull all the data out of my Groove space with a simple C# program.
That’s what I really like about C#: it’s so easy to just open up a new project and use a web service. It takes just a few minutes.
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Jabber Journal #5 and Strucured Procrastination
Matt Raible notes that Jabber Journal #5 is out. Jabber is on my (long) list of things to do when I have free time. It’s such a cool idea, a cool protocol, a cool way of doing things, I just don’t have the time yet. Perhaps I’ll work it into a session of structured procrastination.
