Blog of Henry Jia (贾宏宇)

Sun Extends the JES Price Model...
To further expand customer choice, Sun announced that its business model for the Sun Java Enterprise System will be extended to third-party operating systems and hardware platforms. Besides Solaris Operating System (OS) for SPARC, AMD Opteron and Xeon systems, as well as Linux, Sun will add support for the HP-UX operating system on the PA-Risc architecture and the Microsoft Windows Operating System for x86 based hardware, including AMD Opteron-based systems, beginning next year. Customers will now be able to take advantage of the simple, predictable and affordable approach to reducing cost and complexity that the Java Enterprise System (JES) provides on hardware platforms of their choice. See the detail.

Feelings about Longhorn
I took a look at Longhorn today.

Besides the technologies (like the new .net framework) under it, Longhorn has a upgraded usability experience from XP. It shows a user centric solution. Here are some areas I noticed related to usability.

First, the information is organized in different groups for the user easy to access the information needed, especially for the large amount of information.

Second, the space is organized more efficiently. More and more windows can be hidden or shown or change their sizes according to the user's operation.

Third, easy for communication. The functions for contacts are greatly improved. You can easily find the needed people and communicate with them in your proposed way.

Fourth, the 'search' function is greatly improved. You can now search the files, emails and other information on the net in just a simple way.

Longhorn gives a good example to us developers to think about the usability. Besides the good/cool technologies, we also need good usability design to make a successful product. Avalon (together with WinFS, Indigo) is cool, the incentives to do so are cooler.

Mozilla Localization
To help and ease the availability of mozilla products towards different world cultures and languages through the support of the open source community, MLP (Mozilla Localization Project) is set up.

MLP is based on the i18n (international) framework and covers both the projects (Mozilla Suite, Firefox, Thunderbird) and documentation.

From the project status, here are many contributors actively working on this project. Also, glad to see that Chinese versions (zh_CN, zh_HK, zh_TW) are actively worked on.

Music Club Activity
To make our lives colorful, we set up several clubs in SCERI (Sun China Engineering & Research Institute), including Movie Club, Music Club, Badminton Club, Basketball Club and so on.

Today, we held a lovely Music Club activity. We practised our singing by karaoke in Party World. It's a splendid place. People can sing, play and have dinner there. Also, there are many kinds of free drinks supplied. We had a quite good time there. Also, we found some new stars from the performance. A plan to set up a chorus is proposed. Wish it a great success and hope we enjoy work and enjoy life everyday.

Sun's price formula
It's a quite good article describing the price formula of Sun.

The lovely CS&S linux (Continued)
It uses Konqueror as its file manager and resource explorer. It has a easy to use control center.
Control Center

CS&S linux (中软 Linux) 4.2 includes Mozilla 1.4 as the web browser and Evolution 1.2.5. It uses KEdit as the documentation application which is not so powerful as OpenOffice and in my personal opinion, this is some important missing in this release. No development environment is included in this release.

Generally, for end user, this linux release is simple but easy of use. Comments welcome. :-)

The lovely CS&S linux
Today, I tried the CS&S linux (中软 Linux) 4.2. Though it's a product released last year. I still like its lovely look & feel. Also, I like its easy usage. In this release, it includes applications based on Gnome and KDE. Also, it integrates the applications developed locally in China like the intelligent ABC input method developed in Beijing University, the transtar (a whole documentation translation tool) from TranStar (译星). This release also contains the similar look & feel as Windows like the title bar, and even for the screen saver. :-) Here are some screenshots.

Install 1
Install 2
Start Up
Desktop
Input Method
Transtar
ScreenSaver

Sun Fire F25K server delivered :-)
Glad to hear the news that the Sun Fire F25K server is successfully delivered.

gnome & garnome
Gnome has reached 2.6 now. It includes many good features like the improvement of nautilus, control center, epiphany, gnome meeting, accessibility and so on. See the cool screenshots for the exciting upgrade.

For developers, another way to use Gnome environment in an easy way for the related tools and so on is to use garnome. Garnome can help you a lot when you develop new stuffs which target for next generation Gnome.

PalmSource in China
I just received a newsletter from PalmSource which reminds me of the developer party on May, 15th [In Chinese] that I attended.
PalmSource Developer Party
PalmSource is trying to attract more engineers in China to focus on the PalmSource PDA solutions. It has setup the China branch [In Chinese] and organized activities frenquently since last year, including conferences, parties, salons and so on. Hope it can expend the activities' size quickly and attract more people to join. Also, hope PalmSource can react to the market quickly.

Linux World China 2004
Here is an important activity in China, Linux World China 2004 which will be held on August 24 - 26.

Linux has been prompted in China greatly these years. More and more people are beginning to try linux, both as server or desktop client. There are some local famous linux solution company in China like CS2C (China Standard Software Company), Red Flag. Also, most famous international companies have entered China. Besides Sun Microsystems, there are IBM, HP, Red Hat, Novell and so on.

Happy birthday, Mozilla foundation.
It's the first annuversary of Mozilla foundation now. See Mozilla web site. Happy birthday, Mozilla foundation.

Mozilla Developer Day 2004
This developer day will be held on Friday, August 6, 2004 in Google Campus, Mountain View, CA. The important topics include:
o Mozilla Foundation Update -- Mitchell Baker/Chris Hofmann
o Roadmap Overview -- Brendan Eich
o Hello, World - Application Opportunities with Mozilla's XUL - Nigel McFarlane
o How to Improve Web Site Compatibility Using Mozilla - Bob Clary
o Firefox Rollout Plans/Marketing Plan - Rafael Ebron

Mozilla is a award-winning open source project name for browser. It's used widely on linux/unix platforms. It has competitive performance to Internet Explorer (IE) from Microsoft even on Windows platform. It's standard focused. By now, it has 2 solutions for the release, one is the traditional suite, the other is the seperate firefox and thunderbird. Enjoy.

Wish the activity a great success.

Links for 3D Desktop - Looking Glass
This is the link for the Looking Glass project which is hosted in Java Desktop part on java.net.

LG (Looking Glass) is a quite cool java based 3D desktop window management solution. From this project, we can see that Java is quite suitable for the desktop application development. The performance is not an issue.

Java Desktop is a host site for the Java based desktop solution. There are many good projects hosted there like LG, JDNC, JDIC.

Enjoy there.

Mozilla super-reviewers
Glad to see that some experts are added in the Mozilla super-reviewer list. Sure their joining will help a lot the review process and make the project move on quickly. Welcome, members.