vendredi octobre 05, 2007

A good keynote (IMHO)

I find Ted Neward to be an impressive guy when it comes to broad, yet deep, software culture (the JavaPosse folks come close seconds only because of Tor's lack of interest for Web Services :). I was particularly impressed with the way he conducted the JavaPolis 2006 interviews. Really good questions and sooo many different topics.

I just got to listen to his Jazoon keynote from this past summer. This is a good one IMO: not a vendor pitch, relatively technical, forward looking, and funny (that of course depends on your sense of humor). The recording doesn't have good sound quality, but I encourage you to listen to Ted talk about the future of languages and why they now matter more than before. The simple answer (hope I'm not spoiling the talk) is that we have a widely used and adopted JVM. Ted even has tips as to how to sell (or not) any new language to your boss.

This talk had me thinking about AIR's ActionScript VM. Yet another VM. Parrott isn't there yet it seems, so can Mozilla, Adobe and others turn their VM into a successful platform?

More about βloglines (2)

I believe I've been using beta.bloglines.com for long enough to comment further.

- I'm still seeing some sync problems between the the number of new posts shown on the left column and the actual number. This forces me to explicitly click on "Mark All As Read".
- I really miss the smooth scrolling from post to post which is in the classic bloglines.
- Given the travel I do and the many different internet connections I use (home, office, customer or public wifi) I feel this new AJAXy version is just relying too much on the network to be there at all times (but isn't every AJAX app?). I actually move back to classic bloglines to download entire pages of updated feeds (it marks them as read) for an off-line read. This begs the question: off-line anyone (even using gears)?
- One more thing I miss from "Classic" Bloglines is the smooth scrolling from post to post.

SDPY - SPECj and GlassFish

If you're following at all GlassFish, you probably know that it has performance results above commercial vendors. Just one year ago, we had high hopes we would dramatically improve the performance of v2 over the v1 results. And we did. Performance is up by 60%!

Small is beautiful

Lufthansa (Regional) seems to have recently acquired new Bombardier CRJ900 planes. These planes simply provide the comfort of bigger ones in a much smaller form factor. The plane actually flys at 12000 meters (7456 feets) which is higher than average and has an autonomy of 2000km (1242 miles). Its cruising speed is 820km/h ( mph).

I've traveled small planes before (fokker and such) but I really never had such a comfortable take-off (the engines being located on the rear wing help keep the noise down but that's not all), especially with the rainy/blizzardy weather. The rest of the 80-minute flight was pretty much as enjoyable. Nice experience indeed.