Matt Ingenthron's Stream of Consciousness

Thursday July 29, 2004

Cosby's Tributes at the Pacific Amphitheater

I went to see Bill Cosby at the Pacific Amphitheater last night, right on top of the OC Fair. It was a good show.

He opened saying he used to always want to give a tribute to Fred Rogers, who by all accounts was a great man. This time, however, he opened offering a tribute to four groups (paraphrased):

1. To the people who've served in these last two military conflicts and lost their lives, as they've given everything they had for freedom, both here and abroad
2. To those who are still serving on a daily basis
3. To those serving domestically (in the US), working to keep us safe in every aspect of our daily lives
4. To the families that support all of these people

Cosby has been both praised and villified in the press recently for some of the stands he's taken. Regardless of what you think of that stuff, I think it was a really good thing for him to offer this kind of tribute. You definitely get the feeling that he means it when he says it.

There was one other thing that occured during the show; a younger guy came up to the stage and gave him something and said "many of us in the African-American community support you" and indicated that the support message wasn't getting out in the press.

I don't know if it's accurate or not, but I could definitely see a situation where the true story isn't coming across in the press. I listen to NPR in the morning, watch Fox News in the evening, and read/listen to BBC world news online and on the radio. Sometimes I'm amazed at how different the perspectives are.

Author's note:I'd originally started this entry some time ago, but didn't finish it until today, 7/29.

Monday July 26, 2004

Lexus Taste of Luxury

One of my colleagues here at Sun invited me to the "Lexus Taste of Luxury" events this weekend. It's one of those things where you are told how cool the Lexus's are compared to other vehicles. Lexus did a nice job hosting this event. Good food and great driving. I drove, in no particular order:

• BMW 745i
• Lexus SC430
• Lexus LS430 (sport edition, who knew they had one?!)
• Jaguar XJ8 convertible(?)
• Cadillac XLR
• Mercedes ML500
• Cadillac Escalade
• Lexus RX330
• Lexus IS300
• BMW X3

and possibly a few others....

I have a few rants, but overall it was a lot of fun. I think I only knocked over three pylons (cones for the rest of you) the whole day. They didn't take times or anything like that, but I was consistantly catching up to the car in front of me. :)

Inaugral Automotive Entry

I'm getting ready to make a quick entry about my automotive pursuits from the weekend, but I decided first I should explain this category and why I created it.

There are certain things that go together with computer geekyness. A computer geek need not have all of these traits, but the correlation between these items and computer geekyness is high. Examples are:

• Enjoying mathematics
• Being very practical in things financial
  (with the requisite areas of weakness of course)
• Being practical in things automotive
• Enjoying taking things apart and figuring out how they work
  (I think this trait leads to computer geekyness, because it's not a secret that these things haven't evolved enough to make sense to most people)
• Finding out where the limits of things is
  (ex.: overclocking, racing, not working on things until up against a deadline)
• Enjoying automomobiles and motorcycles
• Having an ability to work very well with people of a similar mindset

You'll note that two of those are mutually exclusive. Or it could be said they share a mutex which is locked by one or the other interest at birth or shortly thereafter in early socialization. But I digress...

Anyway, automotively speaking, I'm in the latter category. I've always been interested in cars. I don't know why this is. When I was young I watched a lot of CHiPs, and my mother reports that I would have a HotWheels^TM car in both hands at nearly all times. I don't quite know why this is, as my parents weren't overtly automotive enthusiasts. Pehaps with enough data, some kind of explanation would emerge, but I don't have that data-- so I'll just blame it on genetics.

I'm slightly different in that I don't pledge allegiance to any one particular brand or type of vehicle. They all have their merits (with the occasional exception).

I've done SCCA solo in the past (and want to do more), I currently drive an Infiniti G35c and I enjoy carving up the Santa Monica Canyon roads on the weekend. I wish I had more time and money to persue this stuff some more-- I just haven't had it.

That gives you a primer. Now you can listen in on any of my rantings/ravings in this area as time goes on. It is, afterall, called a stream of consciousness.

Thursday July 22, 2004

Java's future according to Jack

If you missed JavaOne, then you missed this quite humorous flash animation.

One of the neat things about vectored graphics is that they showed this on the BIG screen at JavaOne (those who were there know how big a screen it was). I used to work quite a bit with graphics long ago, so I'm glad to see things like SVG and TinySVG coming along. This thing just proves how cool such stuff is. Some of our J2ME guys showed SVG scaled down on devices at JavaOne. Cool stuff.

It's a bit Sun oriented, but anyone who follows Sun/Microsoft should at least get a chuckle out of it.

Wednesday July 21, 2004

First Custard

Okay, I know most of you don't care, but the custard place on Main Street in El Segundo has free WiFi. The net result is I can sit here and update my blog, work on my Creator demo and consume mass amounts of calories all at the same time.

My only concern is whether or not the place stays in business. So if you're looking for free WiFi and custard, go to LickitySplit in El Segundo.

Personally, I'd come more often, but I just can't consume that many calories every day!

Friday July 16, 2004

Mono's .Net late because it's free, or late because it's a copy?

Over here you'll find an interview with Miguel de Icaza about the recent release of Mono. In it, he asserts, with Alan Cox's backup, that free software is always late.

I have a lot of respect for Miguel and what he did at Ximian and with Gnome, but I have to respectfully disagree with what he says about "free software".

In Mono's case, they're chasing a spec that someone else went through the iterative cycles of prototyping, getting feedback and implementing. Chances are, Microsoft doesn't seek any kind of participation or input from Novell when deciding where to take .Net. It would seem to me the Mono guys have to wait until MS gets it to the next level, then work to catch up.¹

This is how things worked with IBM and OS/2's support of Windows, Sun's old WABI project, the current Wine project and even things like codeweavers. Does it mean you can't run stuff on these things? Absolutely not. But that doesn't mean that it's anywhere close to a level playing field for Novell.

Contrast that with Java. In Java, it's very very difficult to say Sun has tilted the playing field it's direction. Especially in the J2EE space.

I also have to respectfully disagree with Miguel on J2EE. He suggests that it's too complex and .Net is so much easier that companies are choosing it. He also suggests that technologies on top of Java just don't have the ecosystem around them that can make it part of a platform, like there is in .Net.

The last year or so has given us a release of JSF, which lead to a product like Creator, many ease of use features in Tiger, and even the most complicated parts of J2EE themselves, namely JDBC and EJB, look to be leveraging these coming features to make it drastically simpler to write this kind of code.²

Wednesday July 14, 2004

Hey Jonathan, ZD Net gets JES!

There's an interesting blog entry by some ZDNet folks over here.

They've noticed that those guys in Armonk have a bunch of software that promises to solve problems for customers, but it doesn't all work together. They also seem to think that said company makes up for this bug in their products by injecting services.

Great, now that they get that, maybe they'll take notice of Sun's Java Enterprise System!

Tuesday July 13, 2004

My Pseudo Famous Brother

Google searches are interesting things.

You can apparently request an autographed headshot from my brother here. I had no idea!

Monday July 12, 2004

Sad State of Local News

So, I'm driving home from work at the unusual hour of 10 minutes to 6pm (unusual for me, but not unusual for most) and on my way home I drive past city hall in my little city of El Segundo.

It's rare that anything too newsworthy happens in El Segundo (I almost saved the "Herald" where they had a car accident between a street sign and a vehicle on the front cover) but this evening all of the local network affiliate newsvans were out in front of city hall. Pretty weird, right? Something must be going on. KABC had two vans there. And they all had those little microwave dishes up in the sky so they could broadcast their images wherever for live coverage.

Since I was going to be arriving home early enough to actually be able to see the local news, I figured I'd tune in and see what was going on. All I saw was:

• Some local city official is involved in something that is designed to get juveniles who have committed crimes onto a work track
• Someone is possibly poisioning cats at UCLA, as three ferrel cats have been found dead in recent days; the woman who has been putting out food and water for these cats has called some local organization to try to catch the person committing this felony act
• It may rain this week
• There are wildfires in the area
• Shaq is moving on
• ...

Anyway, my frustration is that local news never seems to be very good. Most of it is "why you may be killed by xyz disease, news at 11" or "the new diet you have to hear about" or other various things that get people to tune in, but aren't really news.

I remember some time ago seeing a story about a house where a woman had died and the house was filled with cats and their excrement, amongst other junk to be carried out by the dumpster-full. It's always sad to me that it's that kind of thing that gets news coverage, rather than other local happenings. It seems to be the Jerry Springer approach to news: you need some kind of shocking event/pictures to run a story. The things that actually affect my life aren't covered at all.

Update: Apparently all the news vans were there for a press conference about a woman abducted from her home. I hope they can find her. She lives about 3 blocks from my home.

Tuesday July 06, 2004

No Horsing Around Here

Yeah, I'm on vacation, but I couldn't resist reading the tech news. The Register has such great writing! Take a look at this article for an example of what I mean.

"What says cheap software better than an attractive woman birthing a farm animal? It beats the hell out of a tubby man in a butterfly costume."

Updated wirelessly from my Treo... ( Jul 06 2004, 02:21:13 PM PDT ) Permalink

Thursday July 01, 2004

JavaOne's SWT and Swing debates Now I see how we got to where we are in the debate titled above.

I already knew that IBM's old tools were smalltalk based, but I didn't know the group that had built those IDEs was also the one that had originated SWT.

Now that I know that, how SWT came to be makes sense. Basically you have a company that had an interesting (elegant?) solution for the lack of anything even close to portability standards for UI toolkits. In building their next generation of tools, they were faced with the same problem in using Java to develop their IDEs. They used a solution they already knew well.

I personally (not that my opinion matters much) have only two quarrels withthis:
- When buying into Java, there are times to conform and help push something everyone benefits from forward, and there are times to mutate in multiple directions until the harsh realities of the 'real world' show the best choice. Was this even considered when spending a substantial amount of effort on SWT? Probably not, and IBM (if you could personify a company) should have thought about it a bit more.
- Why did IBM latch on to it big time and use it as a way to market themselves and fragment the community? Specifically by building the whole thing and then plopping it on the world, calling it Eclipse (come on guys!) and then flinging the open source term about, as if Sun wouldn't take help from a licensee in improving Java's Swing for all.

Anyway, the deed, be it damage or not is done. We now have two toolkits. It sounds like it's IBM and the eclipse org who will keep SWT moving forward (and constantly chasing the platform changes), and it's the rest of the world, including Sun (remember, all of the other major IDEs are swing based) will be keeping Swing going. Plus the latter group will be getting better and simplifying with stuff like JDNC, JDIC and Project Looking Glass.

Disagree with me? Please, post me a comment.

Trivia for the day: Where did the name Swing come from? Same place as Duke! The Jazz theme of course.

Updated wirelessly from my Treo... ( Jul 01 2004, 05:38:55 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [1]

More on Hibernate

For those who may have read my earlier post on JBoss and Hibernate (anyone out there?), I just attended a session that included hibernate. I have a couple of thoughts based on what was presented.

- Hibernate has explicit calls for controlling the object cache; seems like this is the opposite of what you want in the container model. Shouldn't this be someone else's problem? Won't it lead to people doing things similar to calling system.gc? Maybe I need to look at it more closely.
- It uses native sequence generators if avail, otherwise it emulates. pretty cool way to help people develp code easily and remove even more plumbing. - It appears to be pretty flexible on db schemas. But it does submit you to some XML mapping that doesn't look too bad. From what I've seen, annotations in J2SE 5.0 will clean that up for EJB 3.0.

I wish I had the time to play with it, but I don't really these days. So much to do and so little time. Anyone else ever feel like that? ;-)

Updated wirelessly from my Treo... ( Jul 01 2004, 04:58:22 PM PDT ) Permalink