From Adobe Technical Evangelist Ben Forta comes word that the LinkedIn Flex Developers Group is now full to capacity and can accept no more members.
Apparently, LinkedIn groups can have a maximum of 3000 members, and that's how many the Flex-dev group now has. (I wonder who the genius was that hard-coded that limit?) Forta says he is sitting on 50-some-odd requests to join, and can't approve them. Moreover, he pinged LinkedIn Customer Services to ask if there was a way to raise that limit. He was told he can't approve any more requests. "If the limit gets raised," Forta says, "I'll let you know (and will approve those in the queue)."
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Tuesday, December 09, 2008
SlingPostServlet demystified
One of the neatest things about Apache Sling (the JCR-based application framework) is its easy-to-use REST API, which allows you to do CRUD operations against a Java Content Repository using ordinary HTML web forms (or should I say, ordinary HTTP POST and GET), among many other interesting capabilities. The magic happens by way of a class called SlingPostServlet. Understanding that class is key, if you want to leverage the power of Sling without writing actual Java code.
Turns out there's an exceptionally thorough (and readable) discussion of the many capabilities of the SlingPostServlet at the Sling incubation area of Apache.org. You can think of it as the fully exploded version of Lars Trieloff's Cheat Sheet for Sling (an excellent resource). It's the next best thing to reading the source code.
Turns out there's an exceptionally thorough (and readable) discussion of the many capabilities of the SlingPostServlet at the Sling incubation area of Apache.org. You can think of it as the fully exploded version of Lars Trieloff's Cheat Sheet for Sling (an excellent resource). It's the next best thing to reading the source code.
Monday, December 08, 2008
MS Office apps as services
According to Information Week, Tibco and OpenSpan have "teamed up to make parts of Microsoft's Office applications available as services for inclusion in an enterprise service-oriented architecture."
OpenSpan has (in the words of a rather breathless reporter) "demonstrated that it's possible to generate mashups of Microsoft Office applications without changing the underlying application code."
On a superficial level, this is the kind of thing that people do routinely with OpenOffice running in server mode. (Various content management systems use OO to do document transformations on the server. The OO developer documentation shows how to set this up.)
I gather the OpenSpan stuff has tooling for making it easy to create Office-service mashups. It's a good idea and I wish such tooling existed for OpenOffice. It'll be interesting to see if Tibco and OpenSpan score any OEM deals with CMS vendors.
OpenSpan has (in the words of a rather breathless reporter) "demonstrated that it's possible to generate mashups of Microsoft Office applications without changing the underlying application code."
On a superficial level, this is the kind of thing that people do routinely with OpenOffice running in server mode. (Various content management systems use OO to do document transformations on the server. The OO developer documentation shows how to set this up.)
I gather the OpenSpan stuff has tooling for making it easy to create Office-service mashups. It's a good idea and I wish such tooling existed for OpenOffice. It'll be interesting to see if Tibco and OpenSpan score any OEM deals with CMS vendors.
Friday, December 05, 2008
How OSGi changed one person's life
Peter Kriens has written a really nice article for ACM Queue called How OSGi Changed My Life. Go here to read it online. It's a high-level overview for people who are still trying to grok the whole OSGi phenomenon.
OSGi is a game-changing technology, IMHO, because it brings familiar SOA precepts to ordinary POJO programming. (How's that for acronym abuse?) POJOs end up having fewer unwanted intimacies, and if you run them inside Spring inside OSGi, the POJOs don't have to know so much about the runtime framework, either. Compositionality is greatly facilitated in OSGi; the level of abstraction is high; the benefits are numerous and far-reaching. I see OSGi as revitalizing Java programming for enterprise.
Good tooling for OSGi is still scarce. (Doing "Hello World!" is much harder than it should be.) I suspect that will change very soon, though. Meanwhile, OSGi is quite pervasive already (it's in quite a few products, though seldom advertised), and I look for 2009 to be the year when OSGi finally goes double-platinum.
OSGi is a game-changing technology, IMHO, because it brings familiar SOA precepts to ordinary POJO programming. (How's that for acronym abuse?) POJOs end up having fewer unwanted intimacies, and if you run them inside Spring inside OSGi, the POJOs don't have to know so much about the runtime framework, either. Compositionality is greatly facilitated in OSGi; the level of abstraction is high; the benefits are numerous and far-reaching. I see OSGi as revitalizing Java programming for enterprise.
Good tooling for OSGi is still scarce. (Doing "Hello World!" is much harder than it should be.) I suspect that will change very soon, though. Meanwhile, OSGi is quite pervasive already (it's in quite a few products, though seldom advertised), and I look for 2009 to be the year when OSGi finally goes double-platinum.
Tuesday, December 02, 2008
Exception-throwing antipatterns
Tim McCune has written an interesting article called Exception-Handling Antipatterns, at http://today.java.net (a fine place to find articles of this kind, BTW). The comments at the end of the article are every bit as stimulating as the article itself.
McCune lists a number of patterns that (I find) are very widely used (nearly universal, in fact) in Java programming, such as log-and-rethrow, catch-and-ignore, and catch-and-return-null; all considered evil by McCune. My comment is: If those are antipatterns, the mere fact that such idioms are so ubiquitous in real-world Java code says more about the language than it does about programmers.
I've always had a love-hate relationship with the exception mechanism. On the whole, I think it is overused and overrated, at least in the Java world, where people seem to get a little nutty about inventing (and sublcassing) custom exceptions and ways to handle them, when they should probably spend that energy writing better code to begin with.
McCune lists a number of patterns that (I find) are very widely used (nearly universal, in fact) in Java programming, such as log-and-rethrow, catch-and-ignore, and catch-and-return-null; all considered evil by McCune. My comment is: If those are antipatterns, the mere fact that such idioms are so ubiquitous in real-world Java code says more about the language than it does about programmers.
I've always had a love-hate relationship with the exception mechanism. On the whole, I think it is overused and overrated, at least in the Java world, where people seem to get a little nutty about inventing (and sublcassing) custom exceptions and ways to handle them, when they should probably spend that energy writing better code to begin with.
Monday, December 01, 2008
Get paid for being job-interviewed
At last, an online service that deters head hunters from pestering me.
The unusual promise made by NotchUp is that potential employers who want to contact you directly (avoinding the expensive services of a professional placement agency) will actually pay you to agree to an interview. All you have to do is sign up with NotchUp, and wait for the phone to ring. (And wait. And wait.)
How much will you get paid? The NotchUp folks have put a fee calculator on their site. It shows that an IT professional with 10 years of experience can expect to receive $380 per interview.
NotchUp membership is free to interviewees, but you have to go through an application process and be accepted. Which already sounds fishy to me.
The unusual promise made by NotchUp is that potential employers who want to contact you directly (avoinding the expensive services of a professional placement agency) will actually pay you to agree to an interview. All you have to do is sign up with NotchUp, and wait for the phone to ring. (And wait. And wait.)
How much will you get paid? The NotchUp folks have put a fee calculator on their site. It shows that an IT professional with 10 years of experience can expect to receive $380 per interview.
NotchUp membership is free to interviewees, but you have to go through an application process and be accepted. Which already sounds fishy to me.
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
What Sun should really do
I've worked for companies that are in Sun's situation (most recently Novell), and I have a few observations based on my years of watching hugely talented groups of people produce astoundingly good Java technology, only to see the Greater Organization fail to find a way to monetize it.
Like Sun, Novell is a venerable tech company with an interesting past. It finds itself today in a situation (like Sun) where profitability is consistently miserable, but the balance sheet is good. The parallels between Sun and Novell are far-reaching. Both were started more than two decades ago (Novell in 1979, Sun in 1982) as hardware companies. Both soon found themselves in the operating-system business. Novell owned DR-DOS, which led to Novell DOS, which in turn became the boot loader for NetWare. Along the way, Novell acquired UNIX from AT&T.
NetWare was an extraordinarily successful OS that Novell foolishly stopped supporting shortly after acquiring SUSE Linux in late 2003. I say foolishly because NetWare was a cash cow that required very little code maintenance to keep going, whereas SUSE Linux sucked Novell's coffers dry as the entire company pivoted in the direction of things that are extremely hard to make money on (viz., open-source software, something Novell had little experience with).
Distraction destroys profitability (someone please make that a bumper sticker...), and this is something that has cost Novell and Sun a great deal of money over the years. Technology is exciting, and promising technologies have a way of siphoning attention away from more prosaic sorts of things, like finding and solving customer pain (i.e., making money).
Technologists have a way of convincing themselves that some technologies are more worthy than others. And quite often, what happens is that people at the top who should know better become seduced into allocating large amounts of lucre to the promotion of money-losers (on the theory that eventually they are bound to become money-makers) while cash-cow products get money taken away (on the theory that "this product is a winner, it's throwing off cash like crazy; we don't need to promote it").
I've started and run two successful businesses (including one that I launched in 1979, which is still in operation under a different owner, today) and I've seen friends and relatives start and run businesses, so I know first-hand what it takes to keep a business right-side-up; and I know some sure-fire techniques for making a successful business cartwheel out of control into a ditch, trailing black smoke.
One of the main things I've learned is that you never promote a loser; you always put your money behind proven winners. Never take marketing or development funding away from a winner to promote something that is either a proven loser or not yet proven to be a winner. (That's too long for a bumper sticker. It should be on billboards.)
Back to the software biz for a minute. Novell and Sun are both "operating system companies" to some degree. This already carries with it the stench of death. Being an OS company was a great thing back in the Carter years; it was lucrative in those days. It's not a great thing today. It siphons off money that is better deployed elsewhere. Microsoft (with its "Live" series of SaaSified product offerings) has recently gotten the message that the Web is the new OS, and the desktop is irrelevant as a metaphor. This is a huge paradigm shift for Microsoft. But they finally get it: They get that the future is in things like collaboration (human connectivity) and dynamic assembly of reusable content. They are starting to understand that infrastructure is not something customers want to have to know about; that everything that can be virtualized should be virtualized. Customers instinctively know this, even if they can't articulate it.
So then, what's a Sun to do?
First, stop worrying so much about the future and figure out what's making money now, so you can try to massively scale whatever that happens to be. Remember: Invest in winners, not losers. Find out what's working. Crank the volume full max on it.
The next thing to do is obvious: Kill your losers. Utterly walk away from them, now, today, this minute. Redeploy the resources to your winners (or else sell them off).
The very next thing to do is apply the foregoing principles to your people. Find the winners (the true contributors, the people who are making successful things successful) and reward them. Not just with money, but with whatever else they want: promotion, recognition, travel, alone time, or whatever. People are different. Most techies are not motivated by money.
Likewise, identify and weed out the mediocre, the tired, the overly comfortable, the complainers and morale-killers; find the toxic individuals (they're everywhere) and remove them somehow. Just getting rid of the toxic people will cause those who are left to be more productive.
Next, pivot the orgnization in the direction of innovation. This is exceptionally difficult to do. I was involved with the "Fostering Innovation" Community of Practice at Novell during a time when Novell was desperately trying to become more of an innovation-centric culture. One of the kneejerk things Novell did was increase the bonus paid to employees who contributed patentable inventions. Novell eventually was paying $4500 plus hundreds of shares of restricted stock for each invention accepted by the Inventions Committee (of which I was a member). What happened was that we got goofy submissions from all over the company, while certain senior engineers who knew how to game the system succeeded in making a nice side-living on patent bonuses.
Innovation is fostered when you simply set innovative people free. Innovators will innovate for their own reasons; money has nothing to do with it. All you need to do is clear the path for these individuals. At Novell, as at Sun, there's a special honor reserved for senior people who have a track record of accomplishment. We called them Distinguished Engineers. These people were like tenured professors. They came to work in pajamas (not really) and did whatever they wanted, basically, with no fear of ever being fired.
That's a stupid system. Tenured professorships lead to sloth. Not every Distinguished Engineer is a burned-out has-been on the dole, but some are, and it sets a bad example.
Younger engineers (and others) who are proving their potential as innovators need to be recognized while they're at their peak. (The 45-year-olds with a track record of innvoation in the 1990s need to be considered for early retirement. Recognizing someone a decade too late serves no purpose.) What I advocate is a system of "innovation sabbaticals," awarded to budding innovators (of any age) who are doing Great Things and are likely to do more if set free.
Finally, going forward, hire good people. This is any company's best and only salvation. It's the foundation for all success. When you have difficult problems to solve (as any troubled business does), hire very, very smart people who have no prior experience with the problems in question. That's how you get fresh answers that bear tasty fruit.
This blog is already too long, so I'll stop. In a nutshell, what Sun needs to do is focus light on itself and conduct a pre-mortem. The first order of business is to find out which pieces of the business are profitable, and scale those. Then find out which pieces of the business are sucking cash, and amputate those. If that's two-thirds of Sun, so be it. It means Sun needs to be a third as big as it is now. It'll shrink down to that size eventually, so why spend time and money getting there the slow way? Go there now. Shareholders will applaud.
And by the way, be clear on one thing: This is all about earnings-per-share. There is no other goal, no other agenda. Sun is a business. It's not a charity organization or a full-employment program for has-beens. Earnings per share comes first. Everything else follows.
Find and reward (not necessarily with cash!) your best people. Get rid of the losers who are bringing morale and productivity down for everyone else.
Set innvoators free. They will innovate for their own reasons. Just let them.
And get out of the operating system business. The Web is the OS, for cryin'-out-loud. Even Microsoft has figured that one out.
Like Sun, Novell is a venerable tech company with an interesting past. It finds itself today in a situation (like Sun) where profitability is consistently miserable, but the balance sheet is good. The parallels between Sun and Novell are far-reaching. Both were started more than two decades ago (Novell in 1979, Sun in 1982) as hardware companies. Both soon found themselves in the operating-system business. Novell owned DR-DOS, which led to Novell DOS, which in turn became the boot loader for NetWare. Along the way, Novell acquired UNIX from AT&T.
NetWare was an extraordinarily successful OS that Novell foolishly stopped supporting shortly after acquiring SUSE Linux in late 2003. I say foolishly because NetWare was a cash cow that required very little code maintenance to keep going, whereas SUSE Linux sucked Novell's coffers dry as the entire company pivoted in the direction of things that are extremely hard to make money on (viz., open-source software, something Novell had little experience with).
Distraction destroys profitability (someone please make that a bumper sticker...), and this is something that has cost Novell and Sun a great deal of money over the years. Technology is exciting, and promising technologies have a way of siphoning attention away from more prosaic sorts of things, like finding and solving customer pain (i.e., making money).
Technologists have a way of convincing themselves that some technologies are more worthy than others. And quite often, what happens is that people at the top who should know better become seduced into allocating large amounts of lucre to the promotion of money-losers (on the theory that eventually they are bound to become money-makers) while cash-cow products get money taken away (on the theory that "this product is a winner, it's throwing off cash like crazy; we don't need to promote it").
I've started and run two successful businesses (including one that I launched in 1979, which is still in operation under a different owner, today) and I've seen friends and relatives start and run businesses, so I know first-hand what it takes to keep a business right-side-up; and I know some sure-fire techniques for making a successful business cartwheel out of control into a ditch, trailing black smoke.
One of the main things I've learned is that you never promote a loser; you always put your money behind proven winners. Never take marketing or development funding away from a winner to promote something that is either a proven loser or not yet proven to be a winner. (That's too long for a bumper sticker. It should be on billboards.)
Back to the software biz for a minute. Novell and Sun are both "operating system companies" to some degree. This already carries with it the stench of death. Being an OS company was a great thing back in the Carter years; it was lucrative in those days. It's not a great thing today. It siphons off money that is better deployed elsewhere. Microsoft (with its "Live" series of SaaSified product offerings) has recently gotten the message that the Web is the new OS, and the desktop is irrelevant as a metaphor. This is a huge paradigm shift for Microsoft. But they finally get it: They get that the future is in things like collaboration (human connectivity) and dynamic assembly of reusable content. They are starting to understand that infrastructure is not something customers want to have to know about; that everything that can be virtualized should be virtualized. Customers instinctively know this, even if they can't articulate it.
So then, what's a Sun to do?
First, stop worrying so much about the future and figure out what's making money now, so you can try to massively scale whatever that happens to be. Remember: Invest in winners, not losers. Find out what's working. Crank the volume full max on it.
The next thing to do is obvious: Kill your losers. Utterly walk away from them, now, today, this minute. Redeploy the resources to your winners (or else sell them off).
The very next thing to do is apply the foregoing principles to your people. Find the winners (the true contributors, the people who are making successful things successful) and reward them. Not just with money, but with whatever else they want: promotion, recognition, travel, alone time, or whatever. People are different. Most techies are not motivated by money.
Likewise, identify and weed out the mediocre, the tired, the overly comfortable, the complainers and morale-killers; find the toxic individuals (they're everywhere) and remove them somehow. Just getting rid of the toxic people will cause those who are left to be more productive.
Next, pivot the orgnization in the direction of innovation. This is exceptionally difficult to do. I was involved with the "Fostering Innovation" Community of Practice at Novell during a time when Novell was desperately trying to become more of an innovation-centric culture. One of the kneejerk things Novell did was increase the bonus paid to employees who contributed patentable inventions. Novell eventually was paying $4500 plus hundreds of shares of restricted stock for each invention accepted by the Inventions Committee (of which I was a member). What happened was that we got goofy submissions from all over the company, while certain senior engineers who knew how to game the system succeeded in making a nice side-living on patent bonuses.
Innovation is fostered when you simply set innovative people free. Innovators will innovate for their own reasons; money has nothing to do with it. All you need to do is clear the path for these individuals. At Novell, as at Sun, there's a special honor reserved for senior people who have a track record of accomplishment. We called them Distinguished Engineers. These people were like tenured professors. They came to work in pajamas (not really) and did whatever they wanted, basically, with no fear of ever being fired.
That's a stupid system. Tenured professorships lead to sloth. Not every Distinguished Engineer is a burned-out has-been on the dole, but some are, and it sets a bad example.
Younger engineers (and others) who are proving their potential as innovators need to be recognized while they're at their peak. (The 45-year-olds with a track record of innvoation in the 1990s need to be considered for early retirement. Recognizing someone a decade too late serves no purpose.) What I advocate is a system of "innovation sabbaticals," awarded to budding innovators (of any age) who are doing Great Things and are likely to do more if set free.
Finally, going forward, hire good people. This is any company's best and only salvation. It's the foundation for all success. When you have difficult problems to solve (as any troubled business does), hire very, very smart people who have no prior experience with the problems in question. That's how you get fresh answers that bear tasty fruit.
This blog is already too long, so I'll stop. In a nutshell, what Sun needs to do is focus light on itself and conduct a pre-mortem. The first order of business is to find out which pieces of the business are profitable, and scale those. Then find out which pieces of the business are sucking cash, and amputate those. If that's two-thirds of Sun, so be it. It means Sun needs to be a third as big as it is now. It'll shrink down to that size eventually, so why spend time and money getting there the slow way? Go there now. Shareholders will applaud.
And by the way, be clear on one thing: This is all about earnings-per-share. There is no other goal, no other agenda. Sun is a business. It's not a charity organization or a full-employment program for has-beens. Earnings per share comes first. Everything else follows.
Find and reward (not necessarily with cash!) your best people. Get rid of the losers who are bringing morale and productivity down for everyone else.
Set innvoators free. They will innovate for their own reasons. Just let them.
And get out of the operating system business. The Web is the OS, for cryin'-out-loud. Even Microsoft has figured that one out.
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Google wants to hire 665 people
The WebGuild story about Google laying off ten thousand workers is (sadly) mostly made-up nonsense.
Probably the most outlandish statement in the article is "Since August, hundreds of employees have been laid off and there are reports that about 500 of them were recruiters."
Five hundred recruiters?? ROTFLMAO.
The only scintilla of truth in the entire article, as far as I can determine, is the bit about Google having approximately ten thousand contract workers, which Sergey Brin confirmed in an October 16 story in The Mercury News. The notion that Google will be letting all of them go is nonsense, however. Brin (in the same Mercury News story) did say Google "has a plan to significantly reduce that number through vendor management, converting some contractors to regular employees, and other approaches." That's all he said: "significantly reduce."
It's quite easy to verify that Google is, in fact, still hiring at a brisk pace. Go here to browse the 665 open positions.
Probably the most outlandish statement in the article is "Since August, hundreds of employees have been laid off and there are reports that about 500 of them were recruiters."
Five hundred recruiters?? ROTFLMAO.
The only scintilla of truth in the entire article, as far as I can determine, is the bit about Google having approximately ten thousand contract workers, which Sergey Brin confirmed in an October 16 story in The Mercury News. The notion that Google will be letting all of them go is nonsense, however. Brin (in the same Mercury News story) did say Google "has a plan to significantly reduce that number through vendor management, converting some contractors to regular employees, and other approaches." That's all he said: "significantly reduce."
It's quite easy to verify that Google is, in fact, still hiring at a brisk pace. Go here to browse the 665 open positions.
Monday, November 24, 2008
Flex meets Inversion-of-Control
I didn't realize until just now that there is a Spring-like inversion-of-control framework for Flex, called Prana (available under a BSD license).
Seeing something like Prana makes me wonder how many other staples of the Java world will be emulated by Flex folk.
Very interesting indeed.
Seeing something like Prana makes me wonder how many other staples of the Java world will be emulated by Flex folk.
Very interesting indeed.
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Death of an Eclipse project
A November 12, 2008 slide deck explains why the Eclipse Application Lifecycle Framework (ALF) project will be terminated due, basically, to lack of interest. Except, there was, in fact, interest by a corporation: enterprise-mashup player Serena Software, who contributed significantly to the code base.
The whole story is a little weird. The ALF project morphed into an SOA framework of sorts shortly after its inception in 2005. Serena (an application lifecycle management software firm, originally, but also known for the now-moribund Serena Collage Content Management System) got involved early on. Eventually, ALF was adopted as the underlying SOA and authentication framework by Serena Business Mashups in Dec 2007.
And now the "project leadership" has decided that the Eclipse ALF project should be shut down, with the code being donated to the Higgins project. The Project Leader for ALF is (was) Brian Carroll, a Serena Fellow.
Higgins, it turns out, is actually not ALF-related except in the most tangential sense. I was working in the Identity Services division at Novell in 2006 when Higgins was created. I knew about it through Duane Buss and Daniel Sanders (both of whom are still principals on the project). Daniel and I worked together on the Novell Inventions Committee.
Higgins is (according to the project FAQ) "an open source Internet identity framework designed to integrate identity, profile, and social relationship information across multiple sites, applications, and devices. Higgins is not a protocol, it is software infrastructure to support a consistent user experience that works with all popular digital identity protocols, including WS-Trust, OpenID, SAML, XDI, LDAP, and so on."
It's really largely about identity cards or "information cards" (InfoCards, I-Cards).
In case you're wondering about the name: Higgins is the name of a long-tailed Tasmanian jumping mouse.
So, ah . . . ALF isn't the only SOA-related Eclipse project being taken down now. For info on the others, see this story in the Register.
The whole story is a little weird. The ALF project morphed into an SOA framework of sorts shortly after its inception in 2005. Serena (an application lifecycle management software firm, originally, but also known for the now-moribund Serena Collage Content Management System) got involved early on. Eventually, ALF was adopted as the underlying SOA and authentication framework by Serena Business Mashups in Dec 2007.
And now the "project leadership" has decided that the Eclipse ALF project should be shut down, with the code being donated to the Higgins project. The Project Leader for ALF is (was) Brian Carroll, a Serena Fellow.
Higgins, it turns out, is actually not ALF-related except in the most tangential sense. I was working in the Identity Services division at Novell in 2006 when Higgins was created. I knew about it through Duane Buss and Daniel Sanders (both of whom are still principals on the project). Daniel and I worked together on the Novell Inventions Committee.
Higgins is (according to the project FAQ) "an open source Internet identity framework designed to integrate identity, profile, and social relationship information across multiple sites, applications, and devices. Higgins is not a protocol, it is software infrastructure to support a consistent user experience that works with all popular digital identity protocols, including WS-Trust, OpenID, SAML, XDI, LDAP, and so on."
It's really largely about identity cards or "information cards" (InfoCards, I-Cards).
In case you're wondering about the name: Higgins is the name of a long-tailed Tasmanian jumping mouse.
So, ah . . . ALF isn't the only SOA-related Eclipse project being taken down now. For info on the others, see this story in the Register.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
How to set your head on fire
The folks at Jabra (the Danish headset manufacturer) are having a product recall. It seems Jabra's lithium batteries can overheat and catch fire. According to the company's announcement:
Dear Jabra GN9120 CustomerNot to worry, though. The "extra-crispy" look is in.
In cooperation with the Danish Safety Technology Authority (Sikkerhedsstyrelsen) and the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, and other regulatory agencies GN Netcom is voluntarily recalling Lithium-ion batteries from ATL (ATL P/N 603028) used in GN9120 wireless headsets and sold from January 2005 through September 2008. These lithium-ion polymer batteries can overheat due to an internal short circuit in the batteries, which can pose a fire hazard. The battery has only been used in the GN9120 wireless headset. If you are using any other headset solution from GN Netcom you are not affected by this statement.
Why are CSS editors so fugly?
The other day, I happened upon a long list of CSS editors, arranged chronologically (newest tools first). I haven't tried any of them except Stylizer, which (beware) lays down the .NET 2.0 framework as part of its install process. (Allow 10 minutes.) Stylizer has a really beautiful UI but is far from being the point-and-click WYSIWYG stylesheet designer I've been looking for. (It's really just an editor; you do a lot of typing.) Although I must say, Stylizer beats the living crap out of most other free (or crippled-down eval-version) CSS editors I've seen, which all tend to look like this unfortunate travesty.
Does anybody else see the irony in the fact that most CSS editors are unbelievably fugly? I mean, if anything cries out for a decent visual design tool with eye-pleasing widgets, it would have to be a CSS editor. But most CSS tools (at the freeware level, anyway) look like they were designed by Eclipse programmers on bad acid.
I guess this is the ultimate example of programmers not knowing how to design user interfaces, and design experts not knowing how to program. Maybe it's no wonder 99% of CSS editors look like Notepad in a 3-piece suit.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Using Yahoo Pipes in anger
I finally had an opportunity to use Yahoo Pipes to do something useful.
The quest: Create a super-feed that aggregates a bunch of different Google developer blogs (12 in all), including AJAX Search API, Gears, Gadgets, OpenSocial, Open Source, Mashup Editor, Web Toolkit, App Engine, Google Code, iGoogle, Desktop, and Data API blogs. And: Show the most recent 8 entries for each of the 12 blogs.
Also: Make a searchable version of same, so that you can do a search for (let's say) "Atom" across all 96 latest blog entries in the 12 categories.
I was inspired to create this Pipes-app (plumbingware?) when I saw the recent press release concerning ArnoldIT's Google monitoring service. The ArnoldIT aggregator is dubbed "Overflight" (for reasons known only to the CIA, perhaps).
I was disappointed to find that Overflight is not available as an RSS feed. It also is not searchable. Hence, I went ahead and mashed together my own version of Overflight using Pipes.
As it turns out, I was able to create the Pipe app in a matter of 90 minutes or so (around half an hour longer than I'd budgeted). I didn't have time to aggregate all 74 Google blogs, so I focused just on twelve developer blogs. The resulting app is at Google Developer Blogs Super-Feed, which you can subscribe to here. The keyword-search version is here. (It supports single words or exact phrases.)
I confess I was skeptical, at first, as to whether the performance of a Pipes app that draws together 96 content items from 12 feeds could possibly be acceptable. It turns out to be amazingly fast. Even the queryable version is fast. I have yet to run a keyword or key-phrase search that takes more than 4 seconds to bring back results.
If you haven't tried Pipes yet, you should definitely spend a few minutes exploring it. It's a bit klutzy and constraining (in my experience), and it's sure to frustrate many a grizzled Java or C++ developer. But as a visual Web-app designer, it's an interesting approach. Here's hoping Yahoo takes it a bit further.
The quest: Create a super-feed that aggregates a bunch of different Google developer blogs (12 in all), including AJAX Search API, Gears, Gadgets, OpenSocial, Open Source, Mashup Editor, Web Toolkit, App Engine, Google Code, iGoogle, Desktop, and Data API blogs. And: Show the most recent 8 entries for each of the 12 blogs.
Also: Make a searchable version of same, so that you can do a search for (let's say) "Atom" across all 96 latest blog entries in the 12 categories.
I was inspired to create this Pipes-app (plumbingware?) when I saw the recent press release concerning ArnoldIT's Google monitoring service. The ArnoldIT aggregator is dubbed "Overflight" (for reasons known only to the CIA, perhaps).
I was disappointed to find that Overflight is not available as an RSS feed. It also is not searchable. Hence, I went ahead and mashed together my own version of Overflight using Pipes.
As it turns out, I was able to create the Pipe app in a matter of 90 minutes or so (around half an hour longer than I'd budgeted). I didn't have time to aggregate all 74 Google blogs, so I focused just on twelve developer blogs. The resulting app is at Google Developer Blogs Super-Feed, which you can subscribe to here. The keyword-search version is here. (It supports single words or exact phrases.)
I confess I was skeptical, at first, as to whether the performance of a Pipes app that draws together 96 content items from 12 feeds could possibly be acceptable. It turns out to be amazingly fast. Even the queryable version is fast. I have yet to run a keyword or key-phrase search that takes more than 4 seconds to bring back results.
If you haven't tried Pipes yet, you should definitely spend a few minutes exploring it. It's a bit klutzy and constraining (in my experience), and it's sure to frustrate many a grizzled Java or C++ developer. But as a visual Web-app designer, it's an interesting approach. Here's hoping Yahoo takes it a bit further.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Pixel Bender plug-in for Photoshop is out now
According to John Nack, the Pixel Bender Gallery plug-in for Photoshop CS4 is now available for download from Adobe Labs. Nack explains that the plug-in "runs filters really, really fast on your graphics card," and notes that the filters people write for Flash will also work in Photoshop (or so he says). A nice added bonus is that the same filters will work in After Effects CS4.
Can't wait to try it.
Can't wait to try it.
Moore's Law v2.0
It's no secret that conventional chip designs are about to hit the wall with respect to scaling. Moore's Law 1.0 is in danger of being repealed.
Not to worry, though. Years of research into so-called 3D chip architecture is finally beginning to bear fruit, and it looks like cubes will start replacing chips in at least some devices soon. (HP is making steady progress in this area, along with IBM and others.) Moore v2.0 is well on the way to reality.
If you want to learn more about this technology, check out the latest issue of the IBM Journal of Research and Development, which is devoted to 3D integrated circuit technology. A particularly good overview article is here.
Not to worry, though. Years of research into so-called 3D chip architecture is finally beginning to bear fruit, and it looks like cubes will start replacing chips in at least some devices soon. (HP is making steady progress in this area, along with IBM and others.) Moore v2.0 is well on the way to reality.
If you want to learn more about this technology, check out the latest issue of the IBM Journal of Research and Development, which is devoted to 3D integrated circuit technology. A particularly good overview article is here.
Monday, November 17, 2008
Java HotSpot VM options explained
Have you ever wanted an exhaustive list of all those inscrutable command-line options you can use when you want to force the JVM to do something a certain way while you're either troubleshooting an extremely bizarre bug or trying to figure out why performance sucks even more than usual?
Try going to:
http://java.sun.com/javase/technologies/hotspot/vmoptions.jsp
I don't know if this is an exhaustive list, but it certainly looks like it is. Just reading the various descriptions is quite educational. If you're interested in tuning the JVM for max performance, this is a must-read.
Try going to:
http://java.sun.com/javase/technologies/hotspot/vmoptions.jsp
I don't know if this is an exhaustive list, but it certainly looks like it is. Just reading the various descriptions is quite educational. If you're interested in tuning the JVM for max performance, this is a must-read.
Saturday, November 15, 2008
The fugliest code I've ever written
The other day, I started to wonder: What's the single fugliest piece of code I've ever written?
It's really hard to answer that, because I've been writing code of one flavor or another for roughly twenty years, and in that time I've committed every code atrocity known to man or beast. As I like to tell people, I'm an expert on spotting bad code, because I've written so much of it myself.
What I 've finally decided is that the following line of C code is probably the single most ghastly line of code I've ever perpetrated:
This is one of many fast-blit tips I explained in an article I wrote years ago for MacTech magazine. Fortunately, I write mostly Java and JavaScript now, and I no longer have to deal with pointer indirection, and today my aspirin drawer is only half-full -- or is it half-empty?
It's really hard to answer that, because I've been writing code of one flavor or another for roughly twenty years, and in that time I've committed every code atrocity known to man or beast. As I like to tell people, I'm an expert on spotting bad code, because I've written so much of it myself.
What I 've finally decided is that the following line of C code is probably the single most ghastly line of code I've ever perpetrated:
(*((*(srcPixMap))->pmTable))->ctSeed =Explanation: Long ago, I used to do graphics programming on the Mac. I don't know how the Mac does things today, but ten years ago the Color Manager rebuilt a table whenever Color QuickDraw, the Color Picker Manager, or the Palette Manager requested colors from a graphics device whose color lookup table had changed. To determine whether CLUT had in fact changed, the Color Manager compared the
(*((*((*aGDevice)->gdPMap))->pmTable))->ctSeed;
ctSeed field of the current GDevice color table against the ctSeed field of that graphics device's inverse table. If ctSeed values didn't match, the Color Manager invalidated the inverse table and rebuilt it. For fast redraws, you want to avoid that. You could avoid it by forcing the ctSeed field values to be equal.This is one of many fast-blit tips I explained in an article I wrote years ago for MacTech magazine. Fortunately, I write mostly Java and JavaScript now, and I no longer have to deal with pointer indirection, and today my aspirin drawer is only half-full -- or is it half-empty?
Friday, November 14, 2008
Google Chatterbot
Google's Douwe Osinga has come up with a freaky little online app that turns the almighty Google hash engine into an oracle (not to be confused with Oracle). All you do is enter a word or two into the text box, and wait. The app will do a Google search on your words, find the next "suggested" word and print that, then it will remove the first word of your search string, add the found word, and repeat.
Quite often, the app generates a disarmingly logical response. For example, this morning when I entered "JavaFX will," the reply came back: "javafx will be open sourced monday."
Occasionally you learn something you didn't know. "Richard Stallman" brings back a response of "richard stallman founder of the free african american press."
Interestingly, "top secret" brings back nothing.
Sometimes the app produces garbage. Or is it poetry? When I entered "Sun will," I expected something like "lay off thousands." Instead I got: "sun will shine lyrics by stone roses that are not newly completed and that are in earth orbit but more likely at the top of the mark is to show that the flds not only persevered they fought back they didnt".
e e cummings lives!
Quite often, the app generates a disarmingly logical response. For example, this morning when I entered "JavaFX will," the reply came back: "javafx will be open sourced monday."
Occasionally you learn something you didn't know. "Richard Stallman" brings back a response of "richard stallman founder of the free african american press."
Interestingly, "top secret" brings back nothing.
Sometimes the app produces garbage. Or is it poetry? When I entered "Sun will," I expected something like "lay off thousands." Instead I got: "sun will shine lyrics by stone roses that are not newly completed and that are in earth orbit but more likely at the top of the mark is to show that the flds not only persevered they fought back they didnt".
e e cummings lives!
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Free downloadable tech books
http://www.freetechbooks.com/
As you'd expect, the list includes a lot of stale and/or not-very-valuable titles, but there's also a lot of genuinely worthwhile stuff there. Judging from their "most popular" list, the site is a big hit with C++ programmers. But there are also 23 free Java books, and lots of timeless reference material for programmers of all stripes.
As you'd expect, the list includes a lot of stale and/or not-very-valuable titles, but there's also a lot of genuinely worthwhile stuff there. Judging from their "most popular" list, the site is a big hit with C++ programmers. But there are also 23 free Java books, and lots of timeless reference material for programmers of all stripes.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
For lack of a nail (Java version)
// For the lack of a nail,
throw new HorseshoeNailNotFoundException("no nails!");
// For the lack of a horseshoe,
EquestrianDoctor.getLocalInstance().getHorseDispatcher()
.dispatch();
// For the lack of a horse,
RidersGuild.getRiderNotificationSubscriberList().getBroadcaster()
.run(
new BroadcastMessage(StableFactory.getNullHorseInstance()));
// For the lack of a rider,
MessageDeliverySubsystem.getLogger().logDeliveryFailure(
MessageFactory.getAbstractMessageInstance(
new MessageMedium(MessageType.VERBAL),
new MessageTransport(MessageTransportType.MOUNTED_RIDER),
new MessageSessionDestination(BattleManager.getRoutingInfo(
BattleLocation.NEAREST))),
MessageFailureReasonCode.UNKNOWN_RIDER_FAILURE);
// For the lack of a message,
((BattleNotificationSender)
BattleResourceMediator.getMediatorInstance().getResource(
BattleParticipant.PROXY_PARTICIPANT,
BattleResource.BATTLE_NOTIFICATION_SENDER)).sendNotification(
((BattleNotificationBuilder)
(BattleResourceMediator.getMediatorInstance().getResource(
BattleOrganizer.getBattleParticipant(Battle.Participant.GOOD_GUYS),
BattleResource.BATTLE_NOTIFICATION_BUILDER))).buildNotification(
BattleOrganizer.getBattleState(BattleResult.BATTLE_LOST),
BattleManager.getChainOfCommand().getCommandChainNotifier()));
// For the lack of a battle,
try {
synchronized(BattleInformationRouterLock.getLockInstance()) {
BattleInformationRouterLock.getLockInstance().wait();
}
} catch (InterruptedException ix) {
if (BattleSessionManager.getBattleStatus(
BattleResource.getLocalizedBattleResource(Locale.getDefault()),
BattleContext.createContext(
Kingdom.getMasterBattleCoordinatorInstance(
new TweedleBeetlePuddlePaddleBattle()).populate(
RegionManager.getArmpitProvince(Armpit.LEFTMOST)))) ==
BattleStatus.LOST) {
if (LOGGER.isLoggable(Level.TOTALLY_SCREWED)) {
LOGGER.logScrewage(BattleLogger.createBattleLogMessage(
BattleStatusFormatter.format(BattleStatus.LOST_WAR,
Locale.getDefault())));
}
}
}
// For the lack of a war,
return new Kingdom();
Adapted from Steve Yegge's Blog Rant of March 30, 2006. Apologies to Ben Franklin (who in turn adapted the original proverb from George Herbert's Jacula Prudentum).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)