techno.blog("Dion")

I have flights to Boston for a No Fluff Just Stuff this weekend.

Then, the weekend after, I am flying to London for the weekend (friends wedding).

I just finished a great book, and was thinking about what I would be doing on the plane. Then suddenly I got up, and went out to buy a Sony PSP. I am a FIFA fan, but since I have so many of those, I went for the World Soccer game. I also grabbed Wipeout, which seems really fun.

Now I am ready for the painfully boring flight to London and back :)

It was cool to see Jim Hugunin announce IronPython 0.7.1 to the world.

This is one of the first releases made since Jim has been at Microsoft.

I could tell that Jim had a lot to talk about, when I met him at the Microsoft Technology Summit a few weeks ago. Hopefully more things will get out there and he will be able to talk more.

Great work Jim and team.

A friend pointed me to http://yagoohoogle.com/.

Not sure which search engine to use? Use both :)

I wonder when YaGooHoogleMSN.com will come about?

You also have to watch out. If you put in a ” the whole thing breaks as it doesn’t escape it, and the frame src gets messed ;)

I know that Apple likes you to pay for their point releases. In the past I have seen that the point releases are more than a typical point release.

However, there is still something pyschological about forking out that much money each release.

Tiger has some nice features, but nothing that really makes me think “WOW I NEED THAT”. Maybe I haven’t seen it yet. An automator, RSS in Safari, and others are certainly not it. I will be interested in Spotlight though, and some of the other features.

I think it would be easier to stomach as a subscription model. I am always happy when I see Software Update jump up and grabbing the latest and greatest applications. I appreciate that hardworking developers like me ;) are working on this stuff and need to be paid.

It would feel better if I paid for a subscription for $X/year that granted me access to new features, including new OSes.

But maybe that is just me.

A friend pointed out the new ‘Satellite’ link on Google Maps.

Go to an address and hit it to see it kick in!

That is very very cool.

Now I just want Google to be more personalized friendly… and let me save common places so I don’t have to type my damn home address in all the time when I do directions ;)

Oh, and it will be really nice to get more map data in there (satellite runs out in many places, and europe will be a nice addition too ;)

And, wouldn’t it be nice to have state lines, lines around cities, etc etc. It can be hard to know what you are looking at sometimes when all you see is Satellite data.

It doesn’t even remember what you have typed before.

It is cool how the satellite work can piggy back off of the standard maps. Instead of mt.google.com there is now kh.google.com which returns the squares as satellite images rather than 2D maps. It is also interesting to see the subtle Google copyright as a watermark.

Justin Gehtland has opened himself up to some critique after boldly coming out with some performance numbers wrt an application that he ported from Java to Rails.

There are definitely areas in which you could jump on the numbers, but I would rather not try to make this a “which is faster: Java or Rails”, but consider that, as he says… Rails can perform fine.

One of the big points though is the fact that there IS a large difference between performance and scalability.

Also, the tests that Justin has had time to do are only a small slice. It would be great if we had resources to do some serious performance work. Maybe like the PetStore? ;)

Brian Mc has some great thoughts in Expressiveness Matters. It is particularly interesting to hear him talk about caching in the platforms, and his C/ocml story :)

NOTE: Brian also is your friend if you are a Lucene user, thanks to his Lucene/Spring integration

What have been the good April Fools jokes so far?

• Pairon Chair
• Commentator
• Google Gulp
• MSN Search
• Yahoo! Launch
• Social Network for Social Networks

Competition is the mother of invention. After SQL AOP was invented, Cameron quickly came out with A-SQL. Both projects have common goals (bringing AO to the DB world), but we have different philosophies.

So, I quickly realised that some of the concepts that were placed in SQL AOP also fit nicely with XML. I have to give some of the credit to Hibernate 3, which has been called an ORXM rather than just an ORM.

I want the ability to modularize my XML cross cutting concerns, just like I do with my SQL ones. Luckily, we have great features such as Schema to help me out. Anyone who has worked with ref’d in XML can attest to this.

In fact, I have started to eat my own dog food here. Instead of using <preGoal> with Maven, I am using <before> SQXML advice.

I also feel that with SQXML AOP, we do not have the need for SDO, as this merger of SQL and XML can handle Web Services automatically.

Take that Cameron :)

:)

It was cool to read about Google implementing Mozilla prefetching for the top hits of a search.

This could be really useful in any web application. Many times you know the common paths of your users, so why not speed things up and let the browser do its PreFetch Thang when your idle user is reading away.