The Kitchen Sink Weblog: Tales from Sun's internet facing edge

Today I thought I would take it easy. I put in a lot of hours recently and thought I would take off early. I even started early (8AM) just so I could get away... Yeah Right! That didn't happen. I spent far too much time playing around with awk to try and parse the survey data in a better way. My scripting skills are rusty, it took me a few hours to get it working.

Speak of the devil I promised some results from the survey. Well a sizeable number said they wanted at least some of the channels from Watson. I guess that wasn't too surprising. The top five channel requests were Weather, TV listings, Movies, Ebay and Package Tracking. Most people weren't bothered by the orange icons, but some (12%) didn't like the UI overall. There was interest in an SDK. 32% chose "sort of interested" and 25% "yes I'm interested". Given that the audience we surveyed were developers, I was surprised at the consumer focus, both in the suggested channels and in the target audience they selected. While it's true that the survey should have used checkboxes because many thought it would appeal to multiple audiences, most, 79%, choose to answer the audience question with "Consumer". I would have thought more people would have been interested in using this as a solution to their enterprise's overwhelming streams of data and information, but I didn't get a strong sense of that at the show.

I'm pleased that we got input on our project, and I'm *very* pleased on how well Alameda ran on XP. Alameda has been developed on Macs and Solaris and has had very limited time on Windows (and Windows 2000 not XP). We had a heart attack when we found the demo machine was XP not JDS. And yet it ran pretty well! I was also pleased to see the 1.5/5.0 and 1.4.2 VMs coexist peacefully. I might be dating myself here, but I remember what a *nightmare* it was to have multiple versions of the same software running on a Windows box. On Unix you just created a shell script to set the EVs to point to the desired installation. With Windows you just didn't go there, you found another box.

blogs.sun.com is likely to be quite quiet next week. Sun is having it's annual summer shutdown week. It's forced vacation, but most of us don't mind. I'm flying out to Texas to see my mother and check into some real estate. She doesn't have DSL or cable or even dial up (shudder), and the nearest Internet cafe is 12 miles. Last time I used AOL and it was impossible to close the account and get them to stop billing me... never again ...

Just for fun, here's the Kitchen Sink image we used for the splash screen ...

Kathy