The time has come for me to write my last blog post on this blog. As far as I know, this blog will stay up but remain inactive since I won't be able to log in anymore, so don't expect any news here anymore.

As mentioned, I will keep blogging on my new personal site, more specifically blog.larshenriksen.com. Keep in touch and I hope to work with all of you at some point in the future again!

Lars

It is almost time for me to say goodbye unfortunately! Only a couple of days left for me as a Sun Campus Ambassador... It has been a great job and I'd recommend anyone to take the job if they ever have the chance!

This will be my last post besides the post containing all the photos from the November presentations. I'll post that tomorrow (a bit later than promised, I know - that thesis has taken more time than expected).

For those of you who want to keep in touch, I can be found blogging at the address below. And yes, I had to create my own blog - you really get addicted this stuff!

http://blog.larshenriksen.com

For now, have a great New Year!

Just a quick post to let you know that NetBeans 6.0 is ready for download! As you know, this is the way to go for Java/C/C++/Fortran developers, so get it while it's hot!



Updates on all of the November presentations (incl. images) will be posted next week...

One of the many things that separates the software world from the real world is sharing. Another is the speed of innovation. A new program with amazing new features that change your life can be distributed to the world within seconds, thanks to the internet. This model is very different from the "old" world where e.g. a carpenter can build a new house with "amazing new features" but he obviously can't share his house with the rest of the world.
This very important difference requires a different perspective from people in the software world. But some (most?) people aren't very good at distinguishing between the two worlds...

People in the industry tend to become very narrow-minded. As mentioned before, I really like to read comments on Digg and /. and fanboyism (yes, it's a word) is at times very extreme, primarily visible when talks turn to Apple and to some extent also Google.

People will always have preferences, both in the real and the software world, and that is not a problem - it's natural. What I would like to highlight in this entry is that times change really fast in the software world which means that it is hard to maintain preferences the way you do in real life. I understand that you buy the milk that you're used to or the same brand car that you bought the last time, but you have to think differently when it comes to software.
Software changes much faster than anything in the real world. This means that you continuously have to reevaluate the software you use to maintain optimal productivity (or whatever the goal of your usage is). Hard to switch, you say? Then you're not using open source programs and/or they're not based on open standards.

When I do presentations, I won't say that NetBeans is the best IDE. Anyone saying that is wrong because there are plenty of other fine IDEs out there which all have their strengths and weaknesses and one might be good for one task but not for the next.
So, in theory you should just try all of them whenever you start a new task. But there is one limiting factor: That little (or big) yellow price tag. And this is one of the areas where Sun differentiates itself from most of the competition: There is no price tag. There is no price tag on Solaris, you can just go download it for free. There is not price tag on Glassfish, you can just go download it. There is no price tag on NetBeans, you can just go download it!

It is a shame to be less productive than you can be. The software world changes faster than anything else. So be open minded and try new things! Especially when it's free to keep an open mind.

...and this years JAOO is now over. Here are a few pictures I took with my phone at the conference.

A really beautiful morning - on our way to Århus


The conference was held in Musikhuset - a very nice place


A lot of people from SDU were there as crew


A LOT of NetBeans cds/Solaris DVDs were handed out from the Sun booth!


There were some really interesting talks - here's Erich Gamma (GoF)


Also Suns Chuk Munn Lee gave a really good (and funny!) presentation of JavaFX - see one of his presentations if you ever have the chance!


A panel discussing whether we need quality architecture (we do!)


Finally: Me! (The sun was really bright - I look less awkward in real life)


As mentioned in this post, I strongly encourage anyone to go to JAOO - it was my first time but I will definitely be going back if I have the chance!

Ok, so I had initially promised myself that I wouldn't write about Apple stuff again - it isn't the right thing to do... But I just saw the prices for the iPhone in the UK at the live Apple event and I just can't believe it...

The minimum price for the iPhone including the contract (for 18 months) is 899 pounds. There are not enough exclamation points in the world to follow that sentence, so I didn't even bother to put a single one. 900 pounds is a bit more than 1300€ or just below 10 000 danish kroner. The rules for contract length in Denmark will probably make the price smaller, but adding the usual taxes will bump it up a bit again...

Wow... Just wow... I am speechless :)

Yippie! No, seriously: Yippie! We are now approaching the final release of NetBeans 6, but for now you'll have to settle with the NetBeans 6 beta 1. If you haven't tried it, please download it now and try it out - if you haven't worked with any of the milestones, I promise you that you'll be very pleasantly surprised! The editor capabilities of NetBeans 6 alone are worth the download... (but remember, it's in beta)

And the beta is not the only release from Sun right now. Glassfish V2 is also out and some major improvements have been made there as well. As soon as I get the chance to set it up, I'll let you know...

Finally, here are some articles from various newspapers regarding the two releases... And to quote Roumen/Greg: Happy NetBeaning! :)

The internet has presented users with a choice every time they want new music: The legal way or the other way. This has changed the view of many people I know. It's not about buying music anymore. It's about supporting specific artists because you think their contribution is of significant value to you. If you value the artist, you buy their music. The same applies to software - if you value a software company, you buy their program (with the exception of opensource of course).

The reason I bring this up is AdBlock - an extension I can't live without (but I might have to in the future). When using a browser without it, I... Well, I'm not a happy surfer...
But following the analogy above, I am willing to allow some sites to present ads to me - sites that I visit several times per day, sites whose contributions are of significant value to me. Which brings me to my point: Is there an "allow by site" feature in AdBlock? Or another adblocker which has this feature?

Please post a comment if you know how to enable this feature or know how to hack around it.

One of the tasks I have taken on in my position as the Sun Campus Ambassador at SDU is to advocate open standards. As mentioned earlier (here and here), I have asked SDU about their position on this issue and found out that they are working on making OpenOffice available to students. This project known as Port22 (an article about the project can be found here).
SDU is now ready to test the project and that's where you are needed. There are no requirements to you other than you have to be a student at SDU and you have to speak Danish since the project is not available in English yet. If you want to help out, it's greatly appreciated!
From my correspondence with Hans Kruse Christiansen, head of IT at SDU: (in danish)

Hej Lars

Vi skal meget snart til at pilotteste vores opsætning af OpenOffice – d.v.s. at den studerende får en tynd klient, som giver adgang til vores loadbalancer og bagvedliggende servere med skrivebordets software. Jeg vil høre, om du kunne være interesseret i at være med i pilotprojektet – piloternes opgave bliver at afprøve at det virker og at komme med kommentarer om implementering, opsætningen, performance og evt. forslag til supplerende tiltag m.m.

Hvis du har medstuderende, som kunne være interesseret i at præge denne udvikling med en beskeden indsats her i starten (og gerne senerehen), så er vi meget interesseret i deres bidrag. Kender du nogle, må du meget gerne give dem min adresse. Vi vil afprøve hele kæden fra installation af tynd klient fra en hjemmeside og til brug af softwaren, lagring af data i blackboard, flytning af filer via webdav og print her, der og alle vegne.

Håber at høre fra dig. Vi går snart i edublog.sdu.dk og på blackboard med en annoncering efter piloter, så det vil være optimalt, om vi kan starte meget snart.

Med venlig hilsen

Hans Kruse Christiansen
IT-chef, IT-service

I of course told him that I was very interested in participating in the project and offered to pass on this information to the SDU OSUG which I will do shortly. The only thing missing is the URL to the thin client, which Hans has told me that he will send me as soon as it becomes available. I will post the link here (with his permission) as soon as I get it.
In the mean time, if you want to participate, let me know - I really think this is going to be very interesting to try out! And I will of course post my experience with it as soon as I have tested it...

In 20 days there is one place you should be... JAOO! And the last thing I heard was that there was still a couple of crew spots left, so if you're the least bit interested in software development, apply now!

Bjørn Grønbæk sent me the following information about it (sorry it's in danish).

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bliv crew på JAOO - sidste chance!

JAOO er en af de førende europæiske konferencer indenfor software udvikling, metoder og Best Practices. Konferencen har et omfattende program om Java, OO og .Net med flere end 80 talere, 100 sessions, 15 tutorials og 1200 deltagere. JAOO er specielt kendt for at have internationalt anerkendte talere, forskerer og trendsettere indenfor branchen på programmet.

Se videoen fra JAOO 2006 på www.jaoo.dk


*...interesting, educational and fun*
Som studerende har du mulighed for at blive crew. Benyt lejligheden til at få indblik i den nyeste viden om software, arkitektur, teori og visioner. Brug også de gode muligheder for at etablere netværk til softwarebranchen og medstuderende fra andre institutioner

*Spar op til 23.804 kr*
Som crew får du lov at deltage gratis på konferencen. Du arbejder 1 dag for os (2 x 6 timer) og får til gengæld 2 dages fri og gratis konference med adgang til fuldt program og fuld forplejning. Hjælper du os også før konferencen, får du desuden adgang til tutorials.

*Sidste chance*
Vi skal bruge 75 crew i alt. 66 har tilmeldt sig allerede. Vi mangler stadig 9 crew.

For yderligere information og tilmelding: www.jaoo.dk/crew


Med venlig hilsen
JAOO Team



WHO'S AT JAOO? - http://www.jaoo.dk
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is an amazing opportunity for students, so if you have anything planned, contact JAOO at www.jaoo.dk/crew and if they still have room for more crew, you cancel those plans and come to Århus! I know I am...

This month, I have followed the ECA course at the Technical Faculty at my university (the University of Southern Denmark). The course was about combining the knowledge gathered from different courses and putting them together in the form of an autonomous car which had to complete several tracks, which were marked by a black strip of tape on white background.
We and three other teams of 4-5 people were given a remote controlled car, one month and access to all the components we needed. I was primarily in charge of the sensor stuff in front of the car, which told the microcontroller (an ATMega128) where the black strip of tape was located. Here's a picture of my "beautiful" work with 16 IR diodes and 5 IR photo transistors.



To avoid the sunlight, we pulsed the diodes at 40 kHz and added this high-pass filter (yes, I know it doesn't look like it's going to work, but it did!).



The object was to complete several tracks at a competition one month after we started the course. Here's our car on one of the tracks, the spiral track. It didn't do as well as we had hoped - "Muggi" apparently couldn't take the competition pressure...



We were tied with another group just before the final, so we had to race them again. Unfortunately, our car wasn't very fast on the race track, so we didn't make it to the final. The video below shows the two cars that were in the final - the "Combine Harvester" on the outer track was the overall winner.



If you have a chance to take this course (or any that have the same objective), go for it! It's so much fun and you learn a lot in that month.

(also, now Martin Morissette isn't the only ambassador with autonomous vehicle skills :) )

...that Java is used on many different devices? Well, yeah, you probably did know that part (around 2.5 billion actually)... But you probably didn't know that all Blu-Ray players include Java?

In a normal DVD, the menu system is a number of MPEGs with links between them. This approach is also used in HD-DVD (although probably improved in some way). This approach is not very elegant, so Blu-Ray has taken a different approach: The menu system is made with Java!
This means that you can do basically anything you want in the menu system. And furthermore: Combine this with an internet connection and you have dynamic content! You know how annoying it is to watch an old movie which contains trailers from movies that came out many years ago. Well, utilizing this feature, trailers are always up to date. It could also be used e.g. by movie studios, who could just release the movie and then later add the subtitles. Or you could put in a little game perhaps?

To me, that's pretty cool... And if you want to know more, have a look here.

A little more than a year ago, I bought my Macbook. Some (probably most) of my friends would say I turned into a fanboy after that purchase. Now I have changed my view to the opposite which has of course confused many of you. There are many reasons, but it wouldn't be appropriate for me to explain them here. Luckily, "7 Reasons Why Keeping the iPhone Locked Down is Stupid and Arrogant" can mention a few of them for me.

It's a great feeling to be able to do right for the world and for
my shareholders at the same time.

Just stumbled across this very interesting Q&A with Jonathan Schwartz on CNet blogs. In the interview, he explains the relations between open source and the business model associated along with other interesting topics. I highly recommend it!

(found via Terrence Barr's blog)

As a follow-up on yesterdays quest to switch people to open standards, I contacted my university regarding their use of closed formats when contacting students. And I got good news!

I really feel strongly about the fact that the university only offers MS Office on their machines. Also, when filling out forms for making requests from the university board or other parts of the university, they e-mail you a .doc to fill out electronically.
So I have to go to the university to take care of this. If I want to work on a report with my fellow students at the university, I have to go .doc. I can't go home and keep working on it because they only offer MS Office.

I won't go through my entire rant again, but... You wouldn't send out .psd files to your friends. That would require them to go out and buy Photoshop to open that file! You send them .jpg, .png or whatever open format that is best for that picture. I have no doubt that this makes perfect sense to you - do yourself the favor and transfer that analogy to documents.

So I contacted the press department at SDU to hear what they had to say on this issue. And to my surprise, they are actually already in the process of making OpenOffice available to students! And not even just as an installation on the university computers - they will be offering a remote desktop which contains OpenOffice!

This is great news. The head of IT at SDU directed me to this article (in danish!) about the plans. Hopefully the system will be working well enough for students to use the service. I'm sure that not only will this make it a lot easier for students to work on the same document at the university as well as from home, but also some kind of collaborative element will be made available for students working on a shared project. And if the project is successful, other universities in Denmark are likely to use the same approach.

Kudos to SDU for making this service available! It will be opened to students at SDU on September 1st - I'll let you know how it works.