• Ubuntu 9.10 = easiest, cheapest upgrade ever - I'll be upgrading this weekend.
• Towards a Permission-based Web. Wherefore Net Neutrality? Or: Maybe Open Source Wins After All - Thought provoking article.

• DOD open-sources more than 1M lines of code - I mentioned the DoD encouraging using open-source a few days ago and now this, they are contributing to open-source too.
• Chrome OS Beta Downloads - Hope to try it out shortly.
• Android gets a PowerPC port - Part of the reason why Android has an advantage over the iPhone.  It can run and be supported on far more than just Apple's hardware/phones.
• Gallery: Best iPhone business apps - And Apple's advantage, a head start in apps for business.

Yesterday, we released new versions of two of the products in our GlassFish Portfolio, delivering on what we announced a few weeks ago at Oracle Open World.

The first is GlassFish Enterprise Server 2.1.1.  This is a minor release but includes some important bug fixes and updates to several component packages including JSF, Grizzly, Jersey, and  OpenMQ.  More details are on the community wiki.

Building upon GlassFish Enterprise Server 2.1.1 is GlassFish Communications Server v2.  Built in open-source in the Sailfin community, this product provides a robust Java EE and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) convergence platform and in this release adds SIP session replication, Diameter support, and more.  Eduardo has a nice summary in The Aquarium.

You may download GlassFish Enterprise Server 2.1.1 or GlassFish Communications Server v2 so give them a try.  If you want more info or are interested in getting commercial support, added features, and more, contact us or try our online chat with someone that can help you.

• L.A. votes to "Go Google"; pressure shifts to Google and "the cloud" - The city of L.A. "jumped off the cliff first".
• Announcing Google Maps Navigation for Android 2.0 - So long standalone GPS devices.
• Five interesting new details about Verizon's Moto Droid - Competition for the iPhone is good.

• Expanding the Cloud: The Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) - MySQL isn't that hard to install and configure already, but this makes it even easier providing easy provisioning, management, and backup.  More details here.
• SAP Joins Apache Communities, Extending Commitment to Open Source Technologies - It is good to see increased validation of open-source, but it is easy to commit to open-source projects that are already "proven and broadly used".  How about some real innovation and contribution?
• Defense Department issues new open-source guidance - What was a encouraging statement to use open-source before now gets stronger.

• SOA Manifesto unveiled - Nothing revolutionary, but reaffirms many of the practical SOA ideas.
• Salesforce, Adobe bring Flash to Force.com - You should expect to see more arrangements like this.
• Brian Aker asks Richard Stallman about MySQL and the GPL at foss.my 2009 - Stallman is a piece of work.  He criticizes Brian for twisting his words (not sure he was, just asking clarifying questions), but goes way beyond twisting Oracle's words in making the statement that they just want to kill MySQL.

• Jaguar Land Rover switching to Google Apps - It clearly makes sense for smaller organizations, but 15,000 users is sizable.
• Manage your tasks with Google - A nice addition.

• How did IT fall so far behind the tech curve? - It is true, the future of IT needs to be a hybrid on several levels from on-premise vs SaaS and IT being the top-down dictator vs user-defined bottom up approaches.
• Motorola goes all-in for Google Android - While I think my iPhone is a fantastic device, especially when jailbroken, it is closed, proprietary, locked in to AT&T (in the US) and a host of other negatives so I'm definitely interested in how Android matures over the next year which will be about the time my AT&T contract is up.
• SaaS: Shelfware as a service? - SaaS is not a cure all (no duh!).

• Street View: We can trike wherever you like - Trail view?  River view?  Someday, house view?  Send your suggestions in.
• T-Mobile Data Loss Falsely Reflects on Cloud Computing - "We need to stop calling everything that does not exist within our firewalls 'the cloud.'"  Well said.
• EU's MySQL inquiry may backfire for open source - Well written article, but is MySQL an exception or will what the EU is doing become the new rule?

• Google Wave: The moral equivalent of sliced bread - Interesting back and forth between ZDNeters.
• Mono-mania: It's risky business - Good read on how Samba and Mono are different when it comes to patent protection.

As I mentioned last week, we were able to get a number of talks on Java EE 6 at Oracle Open World and the Oracle Develop conference going on as I write this in San Francisco.  In looking for folks thoughts and reactions to what they saw, I came across a blog entry by Cay Horstmann that I thought hit on a bunch of the key points we were hoping to share there so deserved a mention.

A few quotes from his blog:

"I cannot overemphasize how much simpler EE6 is than just about any web programming model I know. All of the bad parts of the old EJB are gone. No XML. No crazy packaging of WARs and JARs inside EARs. Annotate your beans and persistent objects, and let the container worry about the database, transactions, clustering, and so on."

"Similarly, if you haven't given GlassFish v3 a try, you are in for a very pleasant surprise. It is fast. Startup is not just faster than JBoss, but faster than Tomcat! Hot deployment works great, there is a nice admin UI and a scriptable command line interface, and the Eclipse and Netbeans integrations are first-rate. I can't see myself going back to Tomcat—there just would be no point."

If you want to learn more, visit glassfish.org and download GlassFish v3 Preview which will give you early access to these new capabilities Cay mentions.

One of the cool features of the iPhone OS 3.0 was the built-in Voice Memo app.  No longer would I need to deal with a separate app and having to transfer the files around awkwardly as they just sync with iTunes nicely.  WooHoo!

Well, it was a woohoo for only a bit, as I discovered this weekend that the Voice Memo app seems to stop recording around 25-30 minutes now.  A bit annoying as this caused me to miss about 10 minutes of what I was recording as I didn't notice it right away.

"Why might this be the case?" I asked.  A bit of Googling revealed this thread on Apple's discussion forum where the consensus is that OS 3.1 broke this and introduced somewhere around a 74.3 MB file size limit.  Depending on what you are recording this causes it to stop somewhere between 25 and 35 minutes it would appear.  Worse, reports are that when it stops you can't start recording again for a minute or so.

So, what was a cool app that solved a real use case is now useless for anything that might go over 20 minutes.  Back to using 3rd party apps as it doesn't appear Apple has even acknowledged this issue let alone said when it might be fixed.  Has anyone else ran into the problem or found a solution other than a 3rd party app? 

• The T-Mobile-Microsoft Sidekick data disaster: Poor IT management going mainstream - Ooops.  But is this really cloud?  Or just a regular data center not being backed up?  James Governor's 15 Ways to Tell Its Not Cloud Computing may help answer that.
• Apple versus Microsoft: The top 20 stolen ideas of the OS wars - It is interesting to remember where some of the features that we take for granted came from.
• Sun, Oracle chiefs vow: Sun technologies will live on - It was great to see Scott on stage and Larry went after IBM.
• Windows 7 boots 42% slower than Vista, says study - Ouch, are the claims of it being faster just smoke and mirrors?  More concerning, "By the end of a simulated two-year period, Windows 7's startup times increased more than 330 percent."

Oracle Open World comes around every fall and while Sun has been a sponsor in the past, for the first time, at least in my recent memory, we will have sessions for Sun software, specifically around Java, and more specifically for my interests around Java EE.  And not only are we at Open World but we are at the smaller Oracle Develop event being run at the same time.

At Open World, the Java EE specific sessions are:

• S312765 - Java Platform, Enterprise Edition: The Foundation and Future of Your Enterprise - Tom Kincaid - Monday 4pm-5pm Marriott Salon 4
• S312767 - Easy Database Access from Java with Java Persistence API 2.0 - Linda DeMichiel - Wednesday 10:15am-11:15am Marriott Nob Hill AB

• Mickos letter to EU: Approve Oracle-Sun deal - A good read that (IMHO) accurate outlines the situation.
• Dell creating Android phone? - Interesting move, but surprised about this: "Interestingly, Dell is splintering the Android stack and shipping the phone with modified or missing Android libraries, making it a bit harder to program. The tipster reported that some apps won’t work on this version."
• AT&T ends iPhone VoIP restrictions; Skype set free - Great news.