Wednesday June 30, 2004

Swing vs. SWT

I am blogging at Moscone, waiting for our i18n BOF session to start...

One of the interesting sessions I saw today was the Swing vs SWT panel session (well, title may be different, but something like that). Both creators of Swing and SWT were there, and gave their toolkit explanation in 10 minutes, and then the users for those toolkits (NetBeans for Swing, and another IDE for SWT) expressed how they think about those toolkits. After that, they answered the attendee's questions and they went into an endless battle, well not really.

I expected more like a heated battle, but it was kind of a cooperative discussion. One phrase they said that I liked most was something like, "The concepts of those toolkits are different, Swing focuses on the cross platform compatibility, on the other hand, SWT focuses on exploitation of the native platform functionality. They are complementary to each other." I think this explains all and let the developers decide which toolkit they think it is suitable for their applications.

Monday June 28, 2004

It's tough to keep a secret...

I don't have the exact number, but I think this year's JavaOne is well packed, compared to the last year's one. In today's keynote, Graham announced that the upcoming J2SE's version number now changed to 5.0! I knew this change a couple of months ago, but of course I have not been able to mention that. In fact, we had to use the phrase "version 1.5" when we updated the Tiger related documents (such as my article about input methods), despite that this would be a false version number soon... BTW, I like the acronym "JDK" alot more than "SDK". This is a good change. (2004-06-28 23:36:12.0) Permalink

Friday June 25, 2004

Off to JavaOne

I am off to JavaOne next week, so probably will not update this blog often. One panel session I do not want to miss is Sun General Session, where they will discuss the open source possibility of Java. Rod Smith of IBM and Rob Gingell of Sun, who are the sender and the recipient of the controversial open letter about the Java open source. I'd also very much like to hear what Lawrence Lessig will say about Java open sourcing.

I wish I could moblog from JavaOne..., which is impossible because a) I don't have a mobile phone with a camera integrated, and b) this blog system is not capable of moblogging :(

Wednesday June 23, 2004

JavaOne 2004 is just around the corner

At JavaOne 2004, We will hold the annual BOF from the Java internationalization team. Of course I will be there. We will be presenting the new features that are introduced in the upcoming J2SE version 1.5, such as, Unicode 4.0 support including JSR 204 - supplementary character support, multilingual text rendering, Vietnamese locale support, and more!

This is a good opportunity for the people who are interested in the internationalization field, to hand us tons of homework in person ;) Your opinion matters. So come and join us! (2004-06-23 19:31:35.0) Permalink Comments [2]

Monday June 21, 2004

Just IPO'ed at BlogShares

I happened to find my site out on BlogShares.com. According to the site, my blog valuation is currently priced B$16,543.01, which has jumped from B$1,000.00 just 10 days ago! I wish my real stock holdings rallied like this :) (2004-06-21 18:49:42.0) Permalink

Friday June 18, 2004

A hectic day

Murphy's Law: High priority bugs come in late product cycle, and several at the same time.

Thursday June 17, 2004

The Late Ray Charles

Ray Charles died of complications from liver disease a couple of days ago. I am not so familiar with the songs he sang, but I have always thought his voicing was incredible. He was in the movie "The Blues Brothers", which is one of my favorites, and there I remember he played Fender Rhodes piano so emotionally.

It's kind of sad to see that those people in my favorite movie die one by one, John Lee Hooker, Cab Calloway, and not to mention, John Belushi. Oh don't forget, my favorite actor John Candy. (2004-06-17 15:41:50.0) Permalink

Tuesday June 15, 2004

GMail

Recently, I've got my GMail account. By now, most of people know what it's like, such as providing 1G space freely, searching with Google engine, and the last but not least, the controversial advertisement policy.

But among those, what I like it most is its UI. The first impression of it was just "cool", but as I keep using it, I tend to think that they aim the email paradigm shift to the instant messaging. They don't call it "mail" or "email", but they call it "conversation", which sounds close to the IM.

The other thing I've been impressed was its "label" functionality. Traditional MUAs create so-called "folders" to store emails in, but GMail's "label" has completely blown "folders" away. You can specify as many as different "label"s to a single "conversation", so that searching/managing "conversation" will be much easier and faster.

It seems that Google has decided to increase the number of the beta testers exponentially, maybe to do stress testing. I've got a couple of invitations already. I noticed that their servers were down this morning, so I guess their purpose (to stress the system) may have been achieved :)

BTW, It would be nice if this blog system would adopt GMail's "label" like capability in its "Category".

UPDATE

The reason that GMail site was down this morning may not be the result from the stress testing, but might be due to the following:

The attack caused problems for more than two hours--from 5:30 a.m. to 7:45 a.m. PDT. Many of the world's most popular sites suffered from widespread outages, according to Keynote Systems, which compiles statistics related to Web surfing. On a typical day, the top 40 sites measured by Keynote rarely dip below 99 percent availability. On Tuesday, however, Keynote saw availability drop to 81 percent.

Blackout hits major Web sites

Monday June 14, 2004

Picture taken for a demo

Sherman just stopped by my office and took a picture of me, which will be used in a demo for the upcoming JavaOne. Hope it looks decent at least :) (2004-06-14 11:18:34.0) Permalink Comments [3]

Thursday June 10, 2004

Lost in Technical Translation?

Recently, I had a chance to review a Japanese translation of a technical document written by my colleague (yes, I'm a Japanese). It may be because I have never done a translation to make my living, but every time I review those technical translations, I realize it very difficult to select the most proper Japanese word for a new technical terminology.

For example, we have introduced the Unicode 4.0 in J2SE 1.5 (still in beta 2), there are a lot of new terminologies such as "supplementary character" or "surrogate", and simple translations of those words are not very familiar to most of the Japanese people. So when we translate those words, we have to carefully choose (or even weave) Japanese words that represent the new words most properly.

On the other hand, we Japanese have a handy work around to import those new words, Katakana. Katakana is one of Japanese scripts, which mainly is used to loan foreign words. It's a phonogramic script, so that it can just import foreign word just by how it sounds. For example, "keyboard" is spelled (in Katakana) as "ki-bo-do" (where '-' denotes prolonged sound symbol). We do have an equivalent pure Japanese word for keyboard, but that is rarely used. We could use this work aound for those new technical terminologies, but those do not convey any meanings. That's why we should avoid this work around where possible. Since this is a technical translation, it may not be very useful unless the translated word has a meaning.

Yes, it's a tough job. We don't want to be blamed that we are the one who introduced those weird translations in the first place :) (2004-06-10 16:48:25.0) Permalink Comments [1]

Monday June 07, 2004

Just wanted to say "こんにちは"

I am Naoto Sato, working in the Java Internationalization team at Sun.

こんにちは。 (2004-06-07 14:38:44.0) Permalink Comments [5]