when you find the need to go beyond documentation.. IDentity EnAbled Services

This PR NewsWire report published earlier this PM, announcing the Samba OXtender which enables the replacement of Microsoft Exchange as well as Microsoft Windows Server was the nicest article I read today. It was really worth a mention here and so... here goes...

New Open-Xchange 'OXtender' Enables Replacement of Windows Server : giving customers the option to fully replace Microsoft Exchange as well as Microsoft Windows Server.

[ Read More... ]

1. New Open-Xchange 'OXtender' Enables Replacement of Windows Server
   Yahoo! News (press release)
2. Open-Xchange offers Microsoft Exchange/Windows Server alternative
   ComputerWeekly.com
3. New Open-Xchange "OXtender" Enables Replacement of Windows Server
   Linux PR (press release)

while the entire industry harps on google and it's stock price, Yahoo is way ahead of the game with web 2.0. check them out and decide for yourselves. Comments welcome!! Tim O’Reilly writes :

If Netscape was the standard bearer for Web 1.0, Google is most certainly the standard bearer for Web 2.0, if only because their respective IPOs were defining events for each era.

Google doesn’t have the image of being the most out-spoken company. Especially because of the what I associate with term “web 2.0”. Therefore i'd have to say; "sorry Tim your'e wrong" (at least this time). Google sure has made huge strides in the right direction by recently embracing blogging, rss aggregation, video on demand, DRM etc... but we tend to forget all about YAHOO. Yahoo IS taking the appropriate steps in making web 2.0 a reality. Believe me. they really are. Whats really intersting though is that a google search for the term web 2.0 lists yahoo as ranked number 2; and if you know about google ranking technologies, thay do have a pretty good algorithm (just kidding) for it. Much of the 1.0 is (or was) Google. Web 2.0 is gonna be yahoo, and I bet my lucky dollar on it. Another good comparision link is Google Labs vs Yahoo Research. mad money prediction : (after a couple of beers) :: as contrary to Jim Cramer; Boo Yaaahhh YHOO. sell sell sell; sell sell sell GOOG. AND hey !! I'm no expert in the NY stock market. Get ready to loose all your money if you wanna follow my ADVISE... I guess you can judge for yourselves. You know better right ? The older the better.... and this old article speaks volumes ;-) knock knock !! ?

UPDATE : Did you see the google stock price today (ie: January 18th 2006) ?? I'm getting good at predictions.... (just kidding) here's a screenshot of GOOG just 9 hours after this post ;-). Guess I should start my own TV show. Please do me a favor and do not compare it to YHOO today.... I'm gonna loose my chances of hosting my own TV show if you do ;-)

UPDATE 2 :

1. Google Catches Cold
2. Google sinks, shares hover at $400

Now that the StorageTek acquisition has successfully closed, we @ Sun are planning to take the time to celebrate and get to know one another. We are looking forward to the strengths and synergies that StorageTek brings, and we are very excited to welcome the newest employees to our Sun family! We're having a party to celebrate! Please join us on Wednesday, September 7 at 2:30pm at the Paramount Conference Centre (see live invite) to get acquainted and to have some fun! UPDATE: Guess what, Jonathan Said,

Sun has been a leader in network computing for more than 23 years. We offer leading-edge solutions in areas such as security, encryption, identity management, data protection, access management, data availability, disaster recovery, and virtualization that enable customers to use, share, manage, and store all information from creation to deletion. These solutions improve security, lower costs, and increase service levels while mitigating risk for your business.

According to this report, we recently announced the "Open Media Commons" initiative, aimed at creating an open-source, royalty-free digital-rights management standard. According to our COO, Jonathan Schwartz, the growing number of rival DRM standards that are incompatible with one another could stifle innovation and economic growth.

"It's an interesting idea," Gartner G2 analyst Mike McGuire said of Sun's effort. "But you've got a whole bunch of audiences that have to be satisfied with this."

Microsoft is pushing its Windows Media DRM, Sony has its own version, and Apple has its FairPlay DRM, which it has so far declined to license, which works with its iTunes and iPod products. In addition, cell-phone makers are already starting to sell phones that work as digital music players, and a consortium of carriers and handset makers known as the Open Media Alliance is developing its own DRM standard, OMA, for phones. There is also Coral, a group formed by more than 30 tech and media companies, including the four major record label companies to create DRM interoperability standards.

To lay the foundation for the Open Media Common initiative, Sun will immediately share its internal Sun Labs program Project DReaM, what it calls "DRM/everywhere available."

Aint that what "Driving Innovation" is all about? ;-)

After getting numerous non-threatening "warnings" compiling my code using java build 1.5.0_01-b08, I was still bothered about the "warnings" even though my code compiled just fine and worked like a charm. However I decided to cleanup my code to get it to a point whereby I circumvented the "warnings" themselves, and my quest for it led me to the discussions around java 1.5 generics (an emotional one). Since I was using Hashtable(); HashSet(); Hashmap(); etc, I kept getting this error; and all I wanted to do was NEGATE these warnings.

The discussions around Java Generics seem to have been deleted from the sun forums, I am not sure why,

Marc Logemann has a nice writeup on Erasures and the backward compatibility issue However I fixed my issue using declarations as follows: (after I made a few mistakes following the Niel's posts on the same subject, it was my bad as it was "I" who made some wrong assumptions after reading his post)

Hashtable<Object,Object> env = new Hashtable<Object,Object>(5, 0.75f);
Map<Object,Object> map = new HashMap<Object,Object>();

I am reposting this here so that folks who still have questions on how to fix these warnings, could help themselves by just changing the method by which the declarations are made. You can also follow the links on this post to get deeper insight into why this change was made, and the reasoning behind it.

I really hope that this helps you folks as, I had to do some serious digging/searching before I found the answers for what I was looking for.

Also read Ken Arnold's, Jason Hunter's, John Mitchell's, Weigi Gao's, Antonio Cisternino's, Tim Jansen's, and Bruce Eckel's blog.

For information about generics and the core generification, see JSR 14 and the generics tutorial (PDF).

For those who are always bothered about content on their blogs being questionable, here's a short explantion of the definitions of terms that one needs to know regardless of whether he/she 's blogging or not.

• A Copyright is a form of protection provided to authors of “original works of authorship”, both published and unpublished. Copyright protects the form of expression rather than the subject of the expression. Federal copyright registrations are issued by the U.S. Copyright Office. They give the copyright owner exclusive rights to reproduce the copyrighted work, to prepare derivative works, to distribute copies of the work, and to perform and display the work publicly.
• A Trademark is a word, name, symbol or device which indicates the source of a product and distinguishes it from the products of others. A servicemark identifies and distinguishes the source of a service instead of a product. Trademarks are issued by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. They prevent others from using a confusingly similar mark, but cannot prevent others from making the same products or from selling the same products under a clearly different mark.
• A Patent is the grant of a property right to an inventor. What is granted is the right to exclude others from using, offering for sale, selling or importing the invention. Patents are issued by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office.

I hope this helps those bloggers, who are reluctant to blog with fears of repercussions of their posts. Well, fear is a factor, ignorance is another, and knowledge to know the difference is well the third ;-) just like in ...

God grant me serinity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.

Trust me, I'm speaking from experience...

By this coming Monday all major federal agencies are required to submit detailed implementation plans to the White House Office of Management and Budget that describe how they plan to meet the smart-card requirements outlined in Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 201 (download PDF). The 2004 presidential directive requires all federal government agencies to use smart cards to authenticate employees for access to resources. SmartCards aka Java Cards are effective... very very effective. The Java Card Development Kit, includes a complete environment in which applets written for the Java Card platform can be developed and tested. It enables developers to create applets that utilize the features of the Java Card API. Now : This technology is not something new. We've been at it for ages... Why do folks shudder with reluctance when they are given new technologies to play with? Well, ask us, and we shall show you how ;-) According to this report, Taiwan had distributed Java Cards to it's population (22 million) way back in 2003. So did Taiwan, India, China and others... (I just cannot find those reports, I shall provide you links to those reports as soon as I find them) This article that dates back to 2000 would show you that we truly are the early adopters of this technology. So why is the federal sector still fumbling with their deadline for deployment soon approaching. and hey, The DoD nomenclature for Java Cards is CAC (Common Access Card), and who do you think is behind it ?? Well, truthfully, the peices of plastic are from Schlumberger, the card readers for windows are from ActiveCard and THE REST, By US !!! ;-)

Other Resources

• Official details on the Java Card specification
• Wireless Java Smart Cards
• Product information on PC/SC
• Specifications for the personal computer-/smart-card standard
• Strategic Analysis, Inc. was the first smart card application developer to work with Java-based smart cards. Information on and updates for EZFormatter
• Information about ISO and ISO specifications
• Litronic is one of the reader companies that the CyberFlex development kit supports
• Here is an excellent introduction to "What is a smart Card?"
• A promising and powerful upcoming Java Card
• Jef Poskanzer's Java Crypto classes
• On the subject of OpenCard supporting smart cards on all platforms
• See JavaWorld's first installment in the smart card series, "Smart cards: A primer"
• The second JavaWorld article in the series on smart cards is "Smart cards and the OpenCard Framework"
• Java Card Forum
• How Smart Cards and Java Mix
• Java Smart Card API
• Writing a Java Card Applet
• Developing a Java Card Applet
• Understanding Java Card 2.0 by Zhiqun Chen & Rinaldo Di Giorgio
• Developing Smart Card-Based Application using Java Card by Jean-Jacques Vandewalle and Eric Vétillard
• Java Card Special Interest Group

Java Card technology is one of the best secure authentication technologies for trust, privacy and verification of identity on the network, deployed in way over 500 million smart card and mobile phone environments around the world. Sun is building on this success and applying its expertise to the Windows environment though inclusion of Java Card technology support in its Java Desktop System and Java software systems. This model will not only secure access to the device (mobile handset, desktop or infrastructure), but access to network services, and ultimately access to and distribution of content. This guarantees authentication of the device, of the sender, and of content represented, helping reduce victimization through fraudulent Web sites, and e-mail spam and viruses.

Think about it feds.. You got our number.. (and if you didnt know it, it's +1-800-786-0404)

SO : Andrew would be at the JavaONE 2005 conference presenting on : This was just an FYI for those that many that may forget this IMPORTANT presentation.

I was directed to koders.com today. It's an excellent toolkit for coders to search for open source code. This opensource code optimized search engine boasts of currently spawning 205,234,850 lines of code. Well, for those opensource developers out there, this tool is way more handier than google. There was a time where I'd just google my way to glory searching for code snippets that I could use as guidelines and examples of developing a component. But what would enrage me most was the results that popped up were nowhere close to what I intended to find. But now with koders, I can be rest assured that the results are more specific. I'd recommend this tool to anybody, anyday !!. Developers of opensource projects on dev.java.net, sourcecforge.net, osdp.org, or any collaboration or independent platform could submit their site and CVS trees to be included in these koders.com. koders currently have plugins for eclipse, visual studio.NET 2003 & mozilla firefox. I would be contributing a koders plugin for netbeans soon.

you could search for open source code using this search box :

From this day on koders would stay my google for code. koders also enables you to search for code snippets in any particular programming language. Cool aye !!!

Here's a Screenshot of My Java Desktop. It's so neat and spiffy that I am extremely happy that I have it running on my laptop. When I first installed the Java Desktop on my laptop. everybody around me told me that I was making a brave move. "Think about the graphic applications that you use rohan, how could you generate graphics using JDS, whats gonna happen to Adobe Photoshop? what about dual boot system with Windows XP also running on it, so you are not rendered laptop-less"; well; i tell you, warnings flew left right and center. I didnt hesitate a bit before installing JDS on "my" laptop. & hey !! no dual-boot. I went all the way. Kind of like what my swimming instructor did to me when I was little : he told me to go all the way, just like what my "then" fiance (now 'wife") told me when we spoke about going steady: she said "go all the way rohan, I promise you that you will not regret it". I have never gotten to regret anything so far... so I took the plunge. Java Desktop. All the way. And hey !! I use GIMP for graphics, it's way cool, easy and though I would not say that it outbeats Adobe Photoshop, it's good enough., I use Evolution for my corporate email, thunderbird for persomal email, firefox for my internet browser, mozilla for intranet, and Staroffice. Who says that one would have issues with word documents, I can not only read word documents in StarOffice, I can also create them !!, not to forget presentation, spreadsheets, drawings, charts, workflow, diagrams the works !!. am i so happy I took the plunge ! you bet I am. So IF you are thinking about using it, I say GO FOR IT : ALL THE WAY; and in case you need help as you go along there's always jdshelp, and the community Here is another screenshot:

BTW : The images here are all made with GIMP. And speaking about my "then" fiance, now "wife", asking me to go all the way, look what I'm got now, "roti:kapda:makaan". (for the non desi's it meant food:clothing:home) Aint that the bare necessities ?.