[JAVAONE] JavaOne Keynote
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 ubiquitous. This argument rests on the premise that the world is a lot more than personal computers, and very importantly includes mobile devices like cell phones and PDAs. In trying to put this in to numbers, they seem to try to take credit in counting the number of network elements of all kinds of things which I don’t think of as Java (RF-ID tags are not really Java are they? Is eBay Java? I don’t think of ring tones as Java.)
Take Away 2: There’s a renewed focus on the desktop. With this new focus, I think Sun is admitting that in the past Java was not known as suitable for desktop apps. And of course this point contradicts the preceding one to some extent. Java Studio Creator is their VB killer. But the demo was confusing because it looked more like a drag and drop web based development tool. The business that this is for non-programmers is not especially believable, but this is not different from MSFT
Take Away 3: Sun talks a lot about monetizing Java , about the size of the opportunity for developers. Sun claims that the Java economy is $100B. Not sure how they get to that number My questions is how will Sun itself make money here? I asked some people, and the answer I got was “Sell hardware, sell Java cards.” Somehow I am not persuaded. Why are they doing so poorly?
[JAVAONE] Visiting the Java tribe
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
[JAVAONE] What’s going on with Java version numbers?
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!
What’s a blog anyway?
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 left as the top entry before I headed down here?
So, this is just a reminder of what I already knew, of course, that anyone around the world can read this. And secondly, that anyone with the name Salas might be tempted to see what's to be seen on www.salas.com, so be careful what shows up on the front page!
A blog is a contraction of the word "Web Log", as in web diary or web journal. A blog is a web page where a single person writes whatever they choose to write on some kind of regular basis, for whatever reason makes sense to them. Who reads blogs? Who knows? It's hard to know. Why? Because for one reason or another there's an interest in what's being written.
There are a few blogs (relatively) which are really amazingly interesting and have information and news which are otherwise impossible to find. That's why I read them. (I probably wouldn't read www.salas.com if I wasn't writing it, if that makes any sense 🙂
As an illustration, and if you are still reading this entry, I am going to guess that you might be interested in what's going on in Venezuela. I live in the USA and I don't read Spanish. I get my up to date news about Venezuela from "The Devils Excrement" which is a blog written by someone who seems to live in Venezuela.
The odd thing with blogs is that I don't know who writes The Devils Excrement and what their bias is or is not. (I don't even have any proof that they live in Venezuela.) But when I am able to correlate what they write with other sources I do get the sense that it's accurate. But for all I know it's 100% pure propaganda. So you do have to be a careful consumer of this stuff.
Balls
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.
BlogBridge Beta, part deux
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:No picnic! ** While the promise is great, it doesn't live up to it. And to think that this has been a feature of Java for years and years (I think 4) and it still is full of problems. Still the notion that in one fell swoop we get intallation and on-the-fly updating is pretty powerful, so we'll just keep on struggling with it.
Threads aint Threads One area of Java where cross-platform is not so cross is in Threads. When it comes to the intricate timing, interaction, and detailed ordering of things, Threads on Windows can be totally different from Threads on Linux. The effect? A solid performer on one platform turns into a deadlock on the other. Fix the bug on the other and the one breaks. Fun.
Anyway, live and learn. I am still a believer! I think we can consider the first early beta up and running, so we are returning to our cave to work on features. As usual, if you want to be a beta tester, please send email to beta@blogbridge.com and we'll see if we can fit you in.
The Day After Tomorrow
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. Yes the special effects are impressive, but the story, the dialog, the way the characters react, is so stilted, so ridiculous, that it annoyed me after 5 minutes in the movie.
And I am not objecting on scientific grounds. I don't know enough about the science to judge whether or not its realistic, semi-plausible, or totally nutty, but I am willing to suspend disbelief. And by the way, about the special effects: why do these folks standing around in sub zero temparatures in street not even look cold?
Anyway…
[GEEK] Ever get confused about logging.properties formats?
I know I do! Here's a very concise summary of the syntax that will jog your memory when it needs to be jogged!
[GEEK] Getting URL objects to time out
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");
BlogBridge beta is ON!
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 as beta testers is that you will give us feedback with enough detail that we can do something about it, and a chance to correct problems that you find.
We are very interested in your feedback on the feature set and usability of BlogBridge. You can have a lot of influence on the direction we take this application. Any and all suggestions are welcome.
Please send your questions and comments to the yahoo groups list so everyone can see the questions and answers. If you haven't joined the list yet, then please do so now as it will be the easiest way for us to keep in touch. You should have received an invitation to the list. If you have not, please advise us and we will put you on the list.
We will be putting up a wiki page where we can post standing comments, information, references, help, faq's etc.
Now a few items of introduction to the application (I wouldn't call this 'Help' yet!)
The buttons on the left are 'Channel Guides.' They represent collections of Channels (RSS Feeds) which have something in common. Right now, the names of the Channel Guides (e.g. 'Favorites') are purely cosmetic. There are no special semantics there (yet.) In the near future you will be able to add and delete Channel Guides and enable various kinds of 'Automatic Processing' on them.
The scrollable region in the middle are 'Channels' (which what BlogBridge calls RSS Feeds.) We didn't call them blogs or rss because the universe of RSS feeds is broader than just Blogs and feeds. We are designing an application for 'mere mortals.' You can add and delete Channels. You can drag and drop Channels to move them around, within and between Channel Guides.
BlogBridge comes with a set of default Channels in each Channel Guide. Feel free to change that.
The scrollable region on the right are 'Articles' (which is what BlogBridge calls RSS Items.) There are several controls on how Articles are displayed in the Preferences dialog box.
Ok, ready to go?
Here is the link to install and run BlogBridge: [blah blah blah] Please do not publish it to anyone. Instead if you know someone who would like to run the beta, please introduce them to us. If the url gets out we will just change it 🙂 We want to keep this beta to around 20 people until we have a first level sense of how things are and how much work it is to support you all.
After all, our primary mission is to build great software.
Thanks, and have fun!
Pito Salas and Aleksey Gureev"