All my blog posts and articles
Java Web Start is a piece of Java platform that’s meant to ease the deployment and updating of Java applications. It’s a great idea, but disappointingly implemented. There were several JavaOne sessions about Web Start. There are some great enhancements coming in Java 5.0 (1.5) A semi-miraculous JA...
Read more →I had never heard him speak – He’s a lot of fun to listen to – funny and with a sense of his audience. This was a shorter keynote then yesterday. This wasn’t the kind of rah-rah motivational speech that I was expecting. He did drive home a few points, clearly showing what he was most interested ...
Read more →What’s going on with Java version numbers? There was Java 2 (where the version numbers were 1.3 and 1.4) and the Tiger release just coming out is 1.5. The release after Tiger is going to be called 5.0?! What is going on? Talk about sowing confusion. Not that marketing ever was a Sun strength!
Everyone loves to beat up on Microsoft’s Outlook. Including me! See Outlook Haters Anyone? and Outlook 2003 Rant. It is true that Outlook is a bit of an...
Read more →I am here at JavaOne and living among a very different crowd than I’ve been in lately. It’s the gathering of the Java faithful, and there’s a different feel here compared with the world I come from, the Windows/Microsoft world. Here are some of my field notes and random impressions. The keyboards on Sun computers have different spacings and I keep making mistakes in typing. The mouse has two buttons and no wheel. But the right button does something different from what I am used to. And boy, just taking a screen shot of something, some process crashed and dumped on my screen. (The computer didn’t crash, just the process…) …more later
As you know I am attending the JavaOne conference. I jotted down my key takeaways during the keynote for myself, which I thought I’d share here. The keynote featured several Sun execs, particularly Jonathan Schwarts, their President and COO. Take Away 1: Java as a platform is incredibly ubiquit...
Read more →I am away from home, at my home in Curacao for a reunion of Salas folks from around the world. I saw an childhood friend of mine, Raul, who asked me ‘So what’s a blog, anyway’? I was taken aback, because, what would Raul be doing, reading my blog, and especially with the rather ‘odd’ image that I le...
Read more →Sorry to make my Blog x-rated, but this picture was just too much 🙂 “ A visitor looks at Rasputin’s [deleted] displayed at the first Russian museum of erotica in St. Petersburg. The museum was founded by Igor Knyazkin, the chief of the prostate research center of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences.(AFP/Interpress/Alexander Drozdov)”. Via Yahoo News.
I shoulda known… There’s cross-platform and then there’s cross-platform. A week later, about 20 testers later, we’ve done 2 more sub-releases (up to 0.5.2 now) to shake out various platformy problems. It’s one thing to get it to run and another thing to get it to run right. **[Java WebStart:](...
Read more →Occassionally, I will have either an incredibly positive or negative reaction to a book, play or movie and I will be moved, who knows why, to write a bit about it here. Well, I just saw “The Day After Tomorrow”and it is totally lame...
Read more →For some reason, it is not possible to get at the Socket object that the URL object uses for its network I/O. And so, on the face of it, you can’t set or change the time-out time. However here are two, semi-kludge properties that Sun has provided us to overcome that deficiency: System.setProperty(“sun.net.client.defaultReadTimeout”, “10000”); System.setProperty(“sun.net.client.defaultConnectTimeout”, “10000”);
I know I do! Here’s a very concise summary of the syntax that will jog your memory when it needs to be jogged! Syntax for Log4j Cheat Sheet
Here’s the beta invite email that just went out… Wow, this is exciting! 🙂 “Thanks again for participating in this first beta of BlogBridge. A few comments before getting going: This is an early beta. There are features missing and there are bugs. Please bear with us! One of our expectations of you...
Read more →We are busy getting BlogBridgeready for beta (send email if you want to participate.) I hope we are only days away. But in doing that, and updating the web site, I thought this might be of interest… Java really works! Here are three screen shots of BlogBridge, on ...
Read more →Another article in the New York Times about RSS: “Called R.S.S. (the initials are variously said to stand for Rich Site Summary, Really Simple Syndication and more obscure formulations), this increasingly popular online tool turns a morass of disparate information sources into an automatically generated and neatly organized index of the latest articles and postings” You know we are not yet mainstream when the abbreviation periods are included in the name R.S.S. I mean when’s the last time you saw H.T.M.L. or for that matter I.B.M?
BlogBridgeis getting ready to go into a limited beta test. The purpose is to get some early feedback on the basic User Interface model and the overall product vision. If you are interested in participating, please send an email to email@blogbridge.com. Doing a beta when...
Read more →The beta test is almost ready to go. The plan is that it will start very small, with only a few users, and then based on feedback and results we will expand it as we release revisions and updates. If you are interested in joining up, send me email at beta@blogbridge.com.
Pop!Tech is one of my all time favorite conferences. So favorite that I bought a ticket for this year’s event way in advance. I have hit an insurmountable schedule problem and so I have to miss it this year. So, I have a ticket that I can’t use, they won’t refund (the X*&!@(#&!@#’s) but I can transfer. And it is substantially cheaper than what they are charging now because of when I bought it. If you are interested please contact me directly by email.
Note to self: The FTP task in Ant relies on the library: commons-net.jar from Apache. Be not confused, this is different from the library: ant-commons-net.jar, which I believe is the Ant interface to commons-net.jar. In other words, you need them both, in ant_homelib. If they are not both there you can a ridiculously cryptic error message. ** p.s. Didn’t I say “GEEK” ?**Dave, thanks for the words of encouragement.
As I continue to make rapid progress on BlogBridge, now with a significant amount of help, I am asking myself some tricky questions about licensing, which I thought I’d try out here. (By the way, BlogBridge is the blog reader that I’ve been working on and which is soon ...
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