techno.blog("Dion")

When I read about something like the year of Google Wifi I suddenly think about how great it will be to live in a world where the internet is as ubiquitous as the air around us. Always connected. iPhone + Skype = BYE BYE AT&T.

Then I quickly come down to earth as I:

• Find myself in downtown Palo Alto with a million networks, and none of them work
• Have to reboot my darn router again
• Sit in a conference with no Wireless

… and the list keeps going on …

At least I keep dreaming, and congrats to Google Wifi.

JAVA is a technology whose value is near infinite to the internet, and a brand that’s inseparably a part of Sun (and our profitability). And so next week, we’re going to embrace that reality by changing our trading symbol, from SUNW to JAVA. This is a big change for us, capitalizing on the extraordinary affinity our teams have invested to build, introducing Sun to new investors, developers and consumers. Most know Java, few know Sun – we can bring the two one step closer.

Oh man, I couldn’t help laugh when I read The Rise of JAVA – The Retirement of SUNW.

It had me immediately thinking of a room of people:

• Ok, what can we do to make a difference
• Brainstorm new names for JavaFX?
• Nah, we don’t have anything else to rename yet….
• Yes we do! Let’s rename the stock ticker symbol
• YAY! WHAT VALUE WE ADD

Oh momma.

Someone just sent me this:

“I’m still laughing, too. Maybe now Jonathan can honestly say Sun has monetized Java.”

As you may have heard, Zoho Writer was released, which is the first phase for Zoho to offline their office suite.

Michael Arrington said:

Zoho, which competes head-on with Google Docs & Spreadsheets, managed to launch offline functionality on their product before Google did. The fact that they are using Google software to do this makes the story somewhat ironic.

I actually see this as a good thing. By opening up Gears early on in the process, through open source, everyone gets to play. It is a big show of faith for Gears. Of course, Google could have held Gears back and released it at the same time as a bunch of offline Google applications, but that isn’t the point. Gears is about making the Web a better place through offline, and we want the Web to be able to benefit.

That is why I am excited to see Writer join the list of developers that use Gears.

Blake Commagere: “As you

J-Squared Media has launched their

I had a nightmare recently. Some bugger from China got into a shared machine that almaer.com is hosted on. It has been a royal pain in the backside and finally kicked me enough to outsource as much as possible.

I started by setting up Google Apps which meant changing my DNS to point mail.almaer.com (and start, calendar, docs, …) to the Google domain.

I then setup all of the accounts that I needed, and generally played with the admin side of Google Apps.

The one thing that I was bummed out about was the lack of a nice migration path for my old email, filters, etc. It was easy to migrate some items such as contacts however.

Then, a kind soul pointed me to gXFER, a free tool by LimitNone that migrates email, filters, contacts, calendars, and more. It does lack Google Docs and some other items (e.g. Google Reader stuff) but it does a lot of the heavy lifting.

What was particularly interesting was that the application was just a gadget! When you get into the details you see that it is doing things like sharing calendars from an old to a new, opening up pop3 on one side and sucking it over from the new one, so it is a little sneaky.

Gregor and I were hanging out at MashupCamp awhile back. As we started to blabber on in our usual euro-way, I realised that Gregor was talking some sense for once, so I fired up Audacity and recorded our chat, which became a Google Developer Podcast episode.

The sleeping giants in the enterprise are looking up and wishing that they could do some of the things that the cool kids can in the mashup world, but they have different needs (authorization, service levels etc). Sounds like an opportunity to me!

Thanks Gregor!

Is it sad that the mentions of AOP these days relate to code like:

String.prototype.capitalize = String.prototype.capitalize.wrap(
function(proceed, eachWord) {
if (eachWord && this.include(” “)) {
// capitalize each word in the string
return this.split(” “).invoke(”capitalize”).join(” “);
} else {
// proceed using the original function
return proceed();
}
});

“hello world”.capitalize() // “Hello world”
“hello world”.capitalize(true) // “Hello World”

As soon as Microsoft announced that IronRuby would be opened up for external contributions, it was unclear if this meant the DLR or not.

The answer is. Not.:

The DLR will be released with the MS-PL license, but it will likely not ever accept contributions. This was a bit of a shocking statement to me when he said that but then he explained it. It was a bit of a gloss-over though so I’m not sure that people caught this. The DLR will ship inside of the CLR which ships inside of Windows. Therefore, they can’t accept submissions to the DLR because they need to keep that IP pure.

When he said that a lot of things snapped into place for me. I’m not sure why I hadn’t thought of that myself. If they don’t keep the Windows IP pure, they are opening themselves up for potential lawsuits from someone who’s IP was injected into Windows without the proper licensing in place and so on.

I have been seeing an interesting trend recently, the increased merging of device and Web service.

Body Bugg is a recent example of this. You wear a device that tries to calculate how many calories you are burning, and it sends that into the Web service. Then, you, and your personal trainer can see what is going on (as you also enter what you are consuming).

You can also imagine how cars will continue to talk over the wire. I think we have just seen the beginning, and it makes me want to be able to do a FBQL query for “friends where one is a rails developer and the other is an electrical engineer” to find the next pairing ;)