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 Monday, March 31, 2003
As I reported a few weeks ago...
BEA upgrades Java server software. The company delivers the first components of an important release of its Java server software and drops the price of its entry-level Java server product. [CNET News.com]
12:56:36 PM 
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Congressman Darrell Issa wants the DoD to buy CDMA cellular network technology for Iraq's postwar wireless infrastructure. (Iraq is one of three countries without a major cellular system; Afghanistan and North Korea are the others. Guess we'll fix that problem for both of them, too.) Congressman Issa has drafted legislation to make that happen, complaining that GSM is "European" technology, and that licensing royalties would go to French and German companies if the DoD follows its current plan.
"If European GSM technology is deployed in Iraq," Issa wrote in a letter to the DoD and to the US Agency for International Development, "much of the equipment used to build the cell phone system would be manufactured in France, Germany, and elsewhere in western and northern Europe. Furthermore, royalties paid on the technology would flow to French and European sources, not U.S. patent holders."
Well, at least the money wouldn't flow back to his district, as it would if CDMA was chosen.
Congressman Issa is from the San Diego area, home of Qualcomm--the patent-holder for CDMA. He founded a company called Directed Electronics, which until last year was working with Qualcomm joint-venture Wingcast to develop hardware for "automotive telematics" based on CDMA technology. According to OpenSecrets.org, he recieved over $160,000 in compensation in 2001 from Directed (deferred from his wages in 2000, while he was still serving on the company's board). Qualcomm was his sixth largest campaign contributor.
GSM is an open international standard. CDMA isn't used by any of Iraq's neighbors. But, dammit, if anybody is going to profit from this war, it should be Darrell Issa, right?
12:44:04 PM
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Friday, March 28, 2003
Sun to drop its customized Linux .[C-Net]. Halle-friking-lujia.
However, I have my doubts about Orion, the Sun equivalent (apparently) to Microsoft BackOffice or something. This smells like yesterday's fish rewrapped in today's newspaper; not that it isn't technically superior in many ways to Microsoft's offerings. 
10:09:40 PM
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 My Neal Award arrived in the mail yesterday. Seven other Baseline staffers also received the award, for Best Department or Column, for Baseline's "Hands On" department.
So, now I have a handy brass paperweight.
12:06:26 PM
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Gateway just sent me one of the company's new Centrino laptops--the Gateway 450 XL--for me to test. And, I've got to say that as someone who primarily uses Macs these days, I'm thus far impressed with the new Pentium M/ Intel WiFi chipset bundle, even if the WiFi technology is a little long in the tooth. The pricetag on this system is around $2090, and while it doesn't have all of the geek chic of my Titanium PowerBook, it'll do in a pinch.
We're minutes out of the box here, so I don't have a whole lot to say about the 450 yet except to give my first impressions. The display, roughly 14 inches, is sharp and bright, and readable in the glare from my window. The system's performance seems to be very good for a laptop, as advertised for the Pentium M --1.5 MHz is the advertised clockspeed of the CPU, though how much of that I'm seeing is open to debate. The basic user aesthetics of the system are good; the keyboard is solid and has good key travel, and the trackpad pointing device works smoothly (though I suspect my carpal thumbs will soon protest over the two buttons and the center scrolling button).
Downsides: no DVD-R drive (the drive is a CD-R/DVD combo); the comparable Apple system has gigabit Ethernet now as an option compared to the Gateway's 10/100.
9:59:13 AM
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Wednesday, March 26, 2003
The web hosting company that serves up some of my domains is Vortech. Vortech recently shut down another customer, YellowNews.org, which posted pictures of the POWs that had been transmitted by Iraqi television and shown by television media around the world, because they said it violated an "adult content" clause in their terms of service.
I've been looking to consolidate my domains on a single host in any case; this helps me down my decision path. Anybody got any reccomendations for a decent, low-cost hosting company that respects free speech and can distinguish between news and porn?
8:23:20 AM
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Tuesday, March 25, 2003
Scott McNealy made a big deal about how people could use a Java SmartCard and log into a "dumb" Sun Ray workstation and have their own desktop come up as he spoke in Singapore during a recent everyone-else-bashing session.
One of my most vivid memories of the last JavaOne conference I attended was all the Sun Ray workstations synchronously crashing and rebooting because of a misconfigured server--a server configured by a Sun engineer. If they couldn't take light usage in the press room at Java One--arguably an ideal setting for this sort of computing--how would they do on corporate desktops?
Imagine a corporate exec swiping his smart card, and trying to pull up data from a spreadsheet, only to have his (and everyone else on the floor's) system reboot like a stuck elevator door for fifteen minutes. Now, that's real enterprise computing.
1:14:27 PM
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Friday, March 21, 2003
Today, as bombs fell on Baghdad, Kevin and I began work on his science fair project. The goal-- to build a helicopter with rotors powered by model rocket engines. $40 at the hobby shop (balsa wood and glue is expensive) and hardware store later, we were measuring, cutting, and gluing together a strange beast of an airframe based on a 1? by 1/4? backbone and a series of 4 A-frames and two pairs of skids. The result looks like a scale model saw-horse collection. We also built the first rotor from 3? of balsa wing; our initial attempts to build an axle for the rotor from a wooden dowel were aborted when we realized how hard it would be to stabilize and transfer lift to the airframe from it.
Over lunch, we discussed the various laws of physics that we were going to need to take into account as we built this strange bird. It?s great that his sixth grade science class is so focused on physics right now--we can talk about Bernoulli and Newton and apply what he?s learning now directly to this project.
Now, to get it to fly will take more than physics. But he does go to Catholic school.....
11:10:31 PM
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Thursday, March 20, 2003
RealNetworks's "war coverage" has pre-empted the free download page on Real's site. Follow the link to the Free RealOne player, and click the download link on the next page...and it takes you back to the front page again. Hmmmm.
10:04:53 AM
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Monday, March 17, 2003
For those who speak code....
While (GeorgeBushIsPresident = true,
++ungood){
document.writeln(“God, we're screwed.”);
// figure out how to insert break here
};
5:16:24 PM
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Thursday, March 13, 2003
 I know that they're busy moving the deck chairs around at Blogger since the acquisition, but I didn't know they were running Blogger on Windows servers...until I got this error message today when I tried to set up the community blog for one of my sites.
Um, guys, time to either (a) reconsider your code base, or (b) buy more Windows seat licenses.
10:55:58 AM
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Wednesday, March 12, 2003
Hmmm, an interesting wrinkle with OpenOffice--I can't print to my inkjet. The print jobs go into a bit bucket somewhere. I can, however, print to an EPS file or to a PDF, which I can then print from another software package if I'm so inclined. Uh....not good, guys.
UPDATE: Okay, now I can print. An interesting little preferences setting in the "StartOpenOffice" application (Support Direct to Postscript Printing) was set on by default, which meant a bunch of Postscript was getting streamed to...lord only knows. A little un-check of the box, and a restart of OpenOffice, and voila...
4:15:21 PM
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Okay, so I went through the brutal 160-plus megabyte download of the OpenOffice Mac OS X Final Beta(previous attempts had failed to complete), and installed it. So far, no surprises--it looks very much like versions of StarOffice I once used on Windows and Linux. Very much like them, as in almost disorientingly so--a Windows-like application interface running on my Aqua desktop.
The file compatibility with my MS Office X documents looks good so far, and the response of the app is snappy on my 450 MHz PowerPC Cube despite the multiple I/O layers now running on it. I'm using Apple's latest X11; I'm not sure if that's what's accounting for the over-scroll response to the scroll wheel on my Logitech USB mouse or if that's an OpenOffice thing (if I don't turn it click-by-click, OpenOffice flies from one end of the doc to the other).
Font display is, well, a little jaggedy despite installation of GhostScript and the other add-ons. Quartz doesn't appear to be applied to the X11 interface. 
Other than that...well, I'll be doing an AppleWorks / OpenOffice shootout over the next two weeks, and I'll let you know. But there's already one thing that OO has to its advantage--AutoSave. And for the number of times in recent history that I've had a power-disconnecting event here in my office, that's a feature I can use.
2:05:52 PM
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Monday, March 10, 2003
I've gotten over 20 emails in response to my Fighting Spam with Spam column since it was posted to the web last Friday. And that's just the mail directed at my own mail address--the "sound off" link generates mail to the magazine's letters mailbox. This is the most mail I've ever seen on a column--undoubtedly, it's because spam is just one of those subjects that touches everyone.
A personal aside: I don't necessarily think that David Black's idea would make any difference, even if it is technically feasible. It could create as many problems as it solves; it's sort of like trundling out nuclear artillery to deal with a shoplifting problem. Sure, nobody will be shoplifting anymore, but then again, nobody would be able to make money legitimately in the market anymore either once the fallout settles.
2:39:57 PM
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I've finally gone and done it. After endless aggrevation, I have removed Microsoft Word X from my digital toolbox. And while I still occasionally use Excel, I have moved almost excusively to AppleWorks 6.2.4 as my daily productivity tool.
Why? Well, it reads and writes to Word and Excel file formats. It's not intrusive. And it doesn't crash with the dramatic regularity that Word does on OS X.
Also, it came bundled on my Macs.
I had considered using OpenOffice...and I still may. But somehow, the idea of installing XWindows on Mac OS X to run a word processor seemed a bit...much.
1:06:57 PM
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Wednesday, March 5, 2003
I asked BEA's CEO if the relationship between his company and Sun had changed any since Sun started bundling its own application server with Solaris (Sun also bundles BEA's Weblogic with some Solaris servers). He said, "If I thought a hardware company could make good software, I could just put my feet up on my desk and relax." He also said that he had tried to talk Scott McNealy out of putting so much energy into the Sun ONE products, to no avail.
But he said the relationship hadn't changed, and that things were great with Sun. However, in an answer to a seperate question, he revealed that 20% of BEA's license sales were for the Linux platform now. And it wasn't a Sun exec doing a keynote on the first day; it was Carly Fiorina.
5:12:56 PM
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 Yes, here it is, folks, the Scott Dietzen bobblehead. Adam Bosworth and other BEA execs were available as bobbleheads as well, handed out randomly to eWorld attendees.
9:42:01 AM
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Tuesday, March 4, 2003
I just got back from BEA's eWorld conference, and there's a lot to report. I'll be posting items over the next day or two as I get the chance; sorry, I couldn't blog this from there because they only had one WiFi hotspot.
Okay, so with Adam Bosworth at BEA, there's been something of a shift in the developer tools side of BEA's strategy: they're trying to create a component economy--they even call them "controls" like the VB components--around their Workshop development tool.
Workshop was originally created to build web services (and was taken directly, it seems, from the work that Bosworth had done with his attempted start-up company just before Microsoft shut him down with a non-compete clause); now, it has been applied to J2EE development for Weblogic in general. It's designed in a way that allows business analysts, or whoever, to wire together business logic components...er, controls, that can be configured by filling in a few fields and clicking a few checkboxes. Sound familiar, VB programmers?
There have been numerous efforts to create a component market around Java. There's a decent trade in Java Beans, but no Java dev tool has ever really approached the Visual Basic level of simplicity enough to create a huge demand for the components. It can be argued persuasively that VB is only where it is today because of the third-party controls market that took off around it.
It will come as no big surprise that Bosworth has brought over a few developers from Microsoft to help pull this off.
Workshop is at the center of BEA's efforts to merge application development and integration into a single environment. If it can manage to evangelize Workshop controls well enough to the developer and ISV communities, it could finally create some momentum around Java development beyond the object-oriented development faithful, making it more accessible to procedural developers and more high-level software pros. The question is whether BEA can execute.
The last time BEA attempted a major Java tool initiative, it gave us WebGain, a Java IDE spinoff that took over Symantec's Visual Café software, and proceeded (mostly through gross corporate mismanagement) to run it into the ground (The IDE tools were acquired by Togethersoft last summer, which, as you may know, was acquired by Borland in October).
Then again, you might say that WebGain was the Viking funeral ship of software companies, apparently set adrift on fire purposely by BEA to put Joe Menard out of their misery.
So hopefully, Workshop will amount to something. One has to wonder about the name, though; remembering Sun's products by that name brings back all sorts of bad memories for me (apologies to Joe Keller).
And another thing...
Wasn't giving attendees bobbleheads of BEA execs just a little narcissistic?
10:59:55 PM
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Sunday, March 2, 2003
I am a multitasking, multi-computer person. I have a G4 "Cube" with a 17" Apple LCD monitor that I use as my "digital hub"--with the help of a LaCie 120 GB "Firewire" external hard drive, an MAudio Quattro 4-channel audio interface, and a Canon flatbed scanner, I use it mostly for image, audio, web and print manipulation (and as the office stereo). I do most of my writing and e-mailing on my G4 PowerBook. And with my usually crap-covered desk, that makes for a severe shortage of workspace--or anywhere to scroll a mouse. (My Windows 2000 server sits at a second workstation in the corner; the monitor is almost never turned on, which tells you how much I've been using Windows lately. My company-issued Compaq laptop....well, I've been meaning to ship that back to the corporate office for a while, as it is currently acting as a bookend.)
In any case, the battle to take back some desk space led me to pick up Griffin Technology's iCurve a lucite laptop stand designed specifically for iBooks and PowerBooks. It lifts the laptop up off the desk to about the same height as the top of my 17" LCD, and there's room to shove the full-size keyboard underneath when it's not in use.
There were a set of adhesive-backed pieces of clear rubber in the box with the iCurve. I'm guessing they're feet and a set of stops for the iCurve's laptop support arms. But the friction pads on the arms do well enough without the stops, and I'm not sure the feet would do anything for the stability of the iCurve.
For $39 bucks, it's a pretty low-impact way to make life with a PowerBook on your desk easier. Plus, it looks so...intentional. I mean, I had used a number of other jury-rigged approaches to propping up my PowerBook before; the iCurve makes my desk look almost professional.
Now, if I could only get rid of the rest of the clutter...
3:22:12 PM
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Last night, as I was browsing at the Apple store in Towson and my toddler got Cheetos dust on the keyboard of a demo eMac, the junior shopboy came up and asked if I had any questions. I explained that I was pretty up on everything, as I work for ZD. He looked at me in awe. He gushed about how all sorts of interesting people come into the store, like Michael Shrieve (the original Santana drummer)... and me.
Umm....I didn't know what to say to the little sycophant. So I asked him for some replacement rubber feet for my TiBook, grabbed a copy of TaxCut and the iCurve I had been coveting, paid my bill and bid him adieu.
This was almost as disconcerting as when Mike Himowitz told my wife I was one of the smartest guys he knew. I don't even know how to process those kinds of messages. My self-image just isn't compatible with them.
12:08:02 PM
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