I recently bought my first smartphone and I chose a BlackBerry Tour because it has a keyboard and I wanted to keep up w/ my kid's SMS typing... The latest goodie for the BB is the BB Messenger 5.0 which can generate and scan PINs encoded as QR Codes. Turns out these codes seem to be extremely popular in some markets and may catch up in the others... Soo, I generated codes for GlassFish.org (QR Code) and TheAquarium (QR Code). And, if you want to generate QR Codes, I found i-nigma useful.

Yet another evidence of the value of OpenSource as a collaboration mechanism. Today was the launch for the Symbian Foundation, founded by Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, NTT DoCoMo, AT&T, LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone to unite Symbian OS™, S60, UIQ and MOAP(S) and Open Source the resulting platform (full Press Release). The group will be using the EPL 1.0 license... and they already have a Wikipedia page. Added: This story is now being carried by mainstream news: BusinessWeek, InformationWeek, NYTimes.

Rendering for HTML clients may be the most common use of JSF, but it certainly isn't the only one. In his latest blog entry, Roger shows how to use Ericsson's MobileFaces library and Mobile JSF Kit to serve mobile web applications on GlassFish. Examples like this show how GlassFish can easily serve up web content for phones. Then we have Sailfin making it possible for GlassFish to (literally) talk to a phone, and the microkernel architecture of GlassFish V3 making people wonder if they'll someday be running GlassFish on their phone. Anyone noticing a pattern? ;)

First post in a new category. Notd is like the unix motd, but with "News" instead of "Message". I'll make up the details of the category as I go, but the general topic will be a piece of daily news that seems specially interesting (to me) for one reason or another; let's see how long I can keep it up.

The NY Times has a piece on the new Bar Codes designed for Camera Phones. The basic idea is that these bar codes will be everywhere in the physical world; you just take a picture of the bar code and the software on your camera will decode it to pull the data from the web. Within this basic premise the possibilities seem unlimited: real-estate information, public transit, retail prices, driving directions, ads in print, etc, etc. Given the market penetration of camera phones, and the increased network connectiviy, this seems a real winner. As the NYTimes puts it, the cellphone as the universal control. Add some locale awareness, some voice recognition, voice synthesis... The adoption may be very quick, we will see.