techno.blog("Dion")

I just heard about an Apollo client that needs to be able to talk to the serial point (point of sale).

Apollo can’t handle native access like this (yet? maybe one day?) so how could they do this?

They implemented HTTPNI. I think it is going to go through ECMA next year.

They wrote a server that is native and can do the POS work…. and the Apollo application can use binary sockets to talk to the server sitting on localhost.

Nice :)

I have to admit that it was fun to beat Ben up :)

This is just as embarrassing as it will be to Ben, but at least I won (and won at tennis, and golf, and … ;)

The important story here is that the Wii controllers are a totally new input device.

The Desktop Matters when you get input devices like this. I can’t wait to get rid of the keyboard/mouse for some tasks. It will be great to see Bill Verplank’s work out there… but imagine how we will have to code with all of these devices.

Ready for onmultitouchdrag="handleMultiTouch"?

There has been a little bit of buzz over the Guice 1.0 announcement.

Guice is a new Dependency Injection framework written specifically for Java 5 and up, and is thus able to think of things in that context. Generics support is first class etc.

Some people have already asked about competition with Spring, which really shows how many people don’t get what Spring is :)

Spring is an enterprise Java productivity framework in my mind. It happens to include a DI framework at the heart of it, but that isn’t all it is.

Guice on the other hand aims to just tackle the DI piece, and comes at it from a different angle.

Rather than seeing the competition I saw the possibilities of using the two together. They already both support the AOP Alliance APIs so you can play nicely. You can choose to use Guice DI with Spring helpers.

So, before we get into a “Spring vs. Guice” mindset, let’s remember how incredibly different they are.

You can read about a comparison from the Guice point of view.

And then Joe goes and writes A Spring competitor from Google :)

Ben announced Nimbus which has been something he has wanted for Swing for a long time…. a cross platform look and feel that Swing developers could be proud of.

Instead of playing catch up with native land, trying to munge the pixels to make them work, and always being ALMOST there, imagine if there was an innovative look and feel that worked the same everywhere.

That is the aim of Nimbus.

Do you ever feel that soon we will be aggregating the aggregators?

How long will it be until there is only one original post a day and we all just aggregate it. ;)

It is already starting to feel like recursive forwarded messages did a few years ago.

After hearing about debacles in open source such as the badgeware fun with SugarCRM it makes you want to push home even more how a huge part of open source for me is the community.

If a company open sources their software yet it is still all run by them it is a token gesture. Sure it is nice that you may be able to patch it in some way. It is great to be able to look at the source too, but that could be done without it being open source ™.

What I am looking for is a diverse community around the product.

If you don’t have any commiters from outside of your company. You probably aren’t community driven.

If you didn’t spend time cleaning up documentation for the community when you opened it up. You probably aren’t community driven.

If your users haven’t helped with the documentation if it is lacking. You probably aren’t community driven.

If you do not have some kind of forums/lists where people help each other out. You probably aren’t community driven.

If you aren’t willing to put in a lot of effort to build your community to get true benefits. You probably aren’t community driven.

Very cool integration of maps and car navigation. I am currently always finding the address on the web or maps mobile, and then typing it into the car when I get there.

They just need to get Prius Assist and even more Google engineers will be on the case ;)

I had to get a Wii for the office. After playing it for the first time this weekend (great party activity) I knew it would be a fun addition.

Nintendo have done an amazing job with the Wii. They have managed to create their own genre for video games. You aren’t comparing the Wii to the PS3/XBox 360 as they are totally different beasts. You are going to buy at least two of them.

It was also fun to watch friends who have never done the video game thing get into it and participate.

This is only the beginning. It doesn’t take a genius to see the next steps, and longer future steps. Bye bye wiimote, hello video recorder watching my movement.

I should be using the Flickr plugin for iPhoto, but right now I am just using the standalone uploader tool.

The problem with this tool seems to be that it hangs from time to time, and the operations are not atomic.

So, if I upload 100 photos and it hangs on 54, 53 end up uploaded but not into a set, so they are in a weird state.

On the Mac the uploader tool also requires hard resets when this happens which is painful.

There are some phrases that get to you. Normally it is business speak and sports analogies and terms like 24/7/365, 110% etc.

My painful phrase of the week was a techie using the term ‘double-click’ NOT meaning it literally, but rather meaning: to go deeper into a topic, to get more information, or to pause on a topic to discuss more.

E.g.

You mentioned one of the new features was Foo. Can we double click on Foo and go into detail?

I wanted to right-click and delete the guy every time he used this phrase :/