The Sun BabelFish Blog
Don't panic !
Scoble gets thrown off Facebook
Scoble, who became very famous for getting blogging started at Microsoft, got ejected from FaceBook for crawling his network of friends. This is the problem with closed social networks and data silos in general. He seems to think the solution is data portability. More than that: the solution is Open Social Networks. You should be able to use a simple web server and just link up to your friends friend of a friend (foaf) file, whichever service they are using be it their own machine located in their basement, a service provider, a government owned machine, ... . Just as I can link from this blog to any blog. This would allow people to own their piece of the network, like they can own their blogs.
This is what Beatnik, a friend of a friend browser, which I described in this email to the social network portability group, will make it easy for anyone to do.
Everyone is welcome to help on this open source project: artists, documenters, Swing experts, testers, RESTafarians, ...
Posted at 05:09PM Jan 03, 2008 [permalink/trackback] by Henry Story in Java | Comments[0]
Vote for Java6 on Leopard!
As mentioned previously a lot of Java developers on OSX are upset at Apple's silence as to its intentions with respect to the release of Java 6. There used to be a developer preview available, which was pulled recently with no indication as to when a replacement would be available. People like me who upgraded in the hope of having the latest and greatest - which we have been very patiently waiting for over a year for - are very disappointed. It creates all kinds of annoyances, like not being able to run Java Tutorial examples. Some who are working on Java 6 projects cannot use their computer easily, without resorting to installation of a separate OS in a virtual machine, to do their job. We all like OSX: its a beautiful easy to use Unix that usually really helps us get our work done. I have been very happily using it since 2004.
The first solution of course is to have our voice heard. One way to do this is to file a bug with Apple. Please do this! The only problem I have with it is that as opposed to the Java bug database which is completely open, the Apple bug database is completely closed. So there's no real way of verifying how many people have posted a report. We must therefore complement that action with an equal Open action. Following the noble example given to us by Nova Spivack, when he asked for people to make their voice heard in support of the Burmese people and got some real results, let us do the same to help Apple make the right decision.
Anybody who would like to support this issue in the blogosphere, should help post a blog with the string
13949712720901ForOSX
The first part of the string is the decimal notation for 0xCAFEBABE [1], the magic cookie for JavaClass files (thanks David for the number and the pointer to Fredericiana's photo). Then post similar instructions on your blog or point people here. Let's see how far this gets us! [2]
We should then be able to use any search engine, Google is a good choice, to search for this string [3], and hopefully motivate the managers at Apple to invest more time on Java and be more open about their plans with the community.
Your vote may also be an energizer to those groups that are starting to port the OpenJDK to OSX (via the mac java community).
Notes
- Oops I just noticed a mistake here. 13949712720901 in dec = 0xCAFEBABE405 in Hex. Even better. So that's CAFEBABE + the HTTP 405 Response, which means "Method not available". :-)
- If you know a foreign language then please translate the instructions and explanations so that more people can understand what is going on. Always post a link to some instructions. Language is a Virus, but it is most virulent when it is understandable and hyperlinked, of course.
- A search on Google Web returns more results - more than AllTheWeb or AltaVista - but Google Blog Search contains less duplicates. The real number of votes is somewhere between those two numbers, as some people are voting on their open source web sites, which are not always feed enabled. Simon is keeping count.
- Karussell is keeping a list of related articles.
Update
Tuesday Nov 13: Landon Fuller has been able to get a very nice hello world GUI app running on OSX using the FreeBSD jdk1.6 port. It runs under X Windows only. Excellent work!
Nov 20th, 2007: Dave Dirbin publishes the first beta release of the open source java 6. This campaign has gathered 105 blog votes if we count the results from Google Blog Search, placing it easily among the top 10 bug reports at the Java Bug database. The Google web search returns 256 results, which will contain the blog search, many duplicate pages pointing to blogs + some extra votes people may have placed on the web. I guess that those extra votes may pop this bug report up to the top 5 position.
Wednesday Dec 19: Apple has put a developer preview of Java 6 up on Apple Developer Connection. It is nice to see things progress on that side. As a result of this conflict, Java development on OSX has become a lot richer, with an open source JDK starting to compete with the closed one from Apple. This can only be good for both, and for developer and customer confidence in the platform.
Posted at 11:12PM Nov 02, 2007 [permalink/trackback] by Henry Story in Java | Comments[30]
the limits of a free flickr account
I took some time, but I just hit one of the limits of my free flickr account. Here is the message I am seeing at the top of my account:
You've run into one of the limits of a free account. Your free account will only display the most recent 200 photos you've uploaded. All of your photos beyond 200 will remain hidden from view until you either delete newer photos, or upgrade to a Pro account.None of your photos have been deleted, and if you upgrade, they'll all come back unharmed.
To get a pro account I need to shell out $24.95 per year. This is not unreasonable, but it is making me pause and think how much I want to continue with this service...
What are the alternatives? Well I have my own server at bblfish.net. I am already paying for that service, so I might as well use it more fully, and upload my pictures there. But pictures take up quite a lot of space so this is not going to end up being cheaper, as it will use up more space and force me at some time to either increase the space on my rented server or even buy my own server. What would I get for that price? I would certainly get more control over my work, but at the cost of more work on my part. Publishing photos could be done simply with an improved BlogEd, which can push those photos to the file system. This would make publishing easy, but would not give me the interactive collaborative features of flickr, where people can directly add notes to the pictures, tag them, etc... Adding that functionality is not a huge amount of work, but it makes maintenance of the service more difficult, which means costs in developer time, which has to be paid somehow too...
What is the price of freedom? Owning your content at URLs you control may long term be worth quite a lot, a bet Tim Bray clearly is making, by hosting everything on his own server...
Posted at 09:16PM Sep 08, 2007 [permalink/trackback] by Henry Story in Art | Comments[13]
Scoble Gets the Semantic Web
Scoble just wrote a post "I finally get 'semantic' Web" after seeing a preview of what Radar Networks is about to unveil. I could have had a look a few months back when I was in SF, but I like to not have to keep secrets... Still for Scoble to change his mind like this is quite remarkable.
It is interesting in the remarks to his post all the reasons people put forward to doubt the possibility of the semantic web being able to coming about at all. The most vocal type of point made recently, is that it can't work because you just need one liar to muddy up the waters. This was the jist of a pretty nasty Register article Tim Berners Lee goes postal on spam. But the point Tim makes is clear and easy to make, in a simple question and answer session:
- Don't we all comunicate?
- Yes
- Are there not many liars amongst us?
- Too many
- So how can we communicate then, if the above reasoning is correct? After all if it just needs a few liars to mess up communication, and there are many liars, then it follows that communication must be badly messed up. In fact what do you do when you encounter a liar?
- When I recognise him I never talk to him again.
- So that's what one does with spam web sites and junk news sources. One just avoids them, and all their friends.
Why is it easy to uncover liars? Because what they say does not mesh. It does not mesh with the rest of reality. So the more information you have at your disposal, the more meshing of different points of view you do, the more the inconsistencies are brought to light, and the easier it is to pin point the source of the inconsistency. Trust is a very valuable resource. Those who squander it, are doomed to eternal silence, as their words become meaningless and unheard by all.
Another noteworthy example of an up and coming, but public and visible Semantic Web application is DBPedia, described in great length and with a lot of pictures by Michael K. Berman in his Did You Blink? The Structured Web Just Arrived. If you don't want to wait for Radar to Unveil their service, to get some taste of what's happening go check it out.
Or of course you could go to the Semantic Web Conference in San Jose coming up in May.
Posted at 09:16PM Apr 05, 2007 [permalink/trackback] by Henry Story in SemWeb | Comments[1]
sorry for the updates!
Roller the engine behind this weblog, does not give one the ability to make minor changes to a post. That is every change, however minor - be it just adding a new tag to a post - changes the updated time stamp in the associated rss 1.0 or atom feed. For people reading this post from my official blog site this won't be noticeable at all. But for those reading this with aggregators such as JNN or BlogBridge, or even for those web aggregators such as Planet RDF, they will be forced to either never take account of updates and only order posts by created time stamps, or they will have to suffer what may seem like SPAM behavior. So this is a plea for forgiveness from my Planet RDF readers.
To solve this problem Roller's editing window should have a small checkbox with the text "minor updated" next to it. Ticking that checkbox would leave the updated time stamp as is, though the change could be noted by an edited time stamp. Note that having an edited time stamp is not at all necessary. But it would make a couple of things more easy, such as helping clients to synchronize with minor edits on the server without disturbing run of the mill readers. The app:edited element was added to the Atom Application Protocol, for just this reason in fact.
Update: I have created feature enhancement request 1358 on the roller JIRA site. Please add your comments or support for this feature there. It should require only a very little amount of coding.
Posted at 03:12PM Feb 15, 2007 [permalink/trackback] by Henry Story in General | Comments[1]
