... what it takes to become an artist? My fiancee Matilda has just started a blog over at Wordpress where she will blog about her struggles to become a glass artist. Currently, she's studying at the Bornholm Glass and Ceramics School in Denmark.

One of her more interesting projects to date is this "diptych" on luxury that started out as an assignment to redesign a 19th century fruit bowl and ended up as two 24 inch by 24 inch glass cubes, one on Paris Hilton and the other on Guantanamo.

Please join me in wishing her good luck with her future career.

This June, I'll be part of the Jury for the Swedish Game Award, a game development challenge for students at the universities in Sweden. It will be absolutely great fun! I was in the jury last year as well, and it's definitely one of the best times I've ever had. The number and quality of the submissions are stunning and we in the jury get to spend both pitching sessions with talented game developers and one very hectic jury weekend playing about 50 games.

This year, Sun is sponsoring a new category: JavaFX. The only rule for the category is that your game has to run on the Java Virtual Machine, everything else is open. Of course, we expect a number of entries written in JavaFX Script, others to be JavaME games and some games to be something completely different like PulpCore or Scala, that could be fun.)

Anyway, to kick-start the category, we're holding a Game Developers Evening tomorrow night (Tue 10th of February) where I will introduce the JavaFX Script programming language, and talk some on writing games using JavaFX together with Phys2D, JInput, JOGL and other stuff as well as packaging the game as an applet or as a JavaWebStart application. To prepare for the talk I needed to write a couple of (very simple) games and decided that it would be a nice blog post series. So, over the next couple of weeks I will go through the steps of writing simple games for the Java platform to show you my learning path. I hope you'll enjoy it.

Congratulations America! Electing Obama as your next president is one of the greatest things you've ever done. You have shown once again that when really want, you can be more progressive than the rest of us put together. To be really honest, I didn't think you had it in you, but you proved me wrong and I stand corrected. I think I owe you an apology. This week, you made the world a little bit better.

Thanks!

MacOS.X Leopard has arrived, but alas no JavaSE 6. Worse: I can't even download the pre-release that was available earlier from developer.apple.com any longer. Which means that as I don't want to automatically transfer my four year old installation on my old PowerBook G4, I won't be able to run JavaSE 6 on my new MacBook Pro 15" when it arrives, hopefully next week. Apple: this was your chance to set things straight with the Java community. We've heard rumors of a JavaSE 6 with resolutionless support and other goodies, but no.

Instead, you've decided to pull it all together. Not even a pre-release. Not even a road map. Not even a date when we can expect some sort of version of JavaSE 6. I'm this close to canceling my order. I wonder if I can still do that on Monday.

I will run it anyway; on Solaris and Ubuntu on VMWare Fusion. But it's a hassle to have to start VMWare whenever I want to do use the Java Scripting Framework, which is one of the things I do a lot right now. And it also means that whenever I'm presenting on conferences and other events, it will be Solaris or Ubuntu that will be on the huge screen above my head, not MacOS.X.

Update: It turns out that there is a version of JavaSE 6 for Leopard, but Apple's license rules on what you're allowed to disclose when a member of Apple Developer Connection doesn't allow me to publish anything about it. According to the terms is any unauthorized disclosure of information on pre-realse software prohibited. Sometimes I think Apple is it's own worst enemy.

This has to be the best news ever for anyone using a mobile phone. Since my USB-charger that I brought for this trip was broken in Italy and I now have almost no battery left in my phone, this hits very close to home at the moment. Fortunately I'm going to the Montréal Ericsson office today and I have a Sony Ericsson phone, so I should be able to find a charger somewhere there, I guess. It amazes me, though, that it took the industry so long. Chargers are obviously a unnecessary cost to add to a phone. I think I have at least a dozen Sony Ericsson-chargers lying around in my drawers at home. If they could cut that out from the packaging, distribution and support, they could probably save a lot of money. Not to mention the environment, of course.

I've long held that the handset manufacturers should stop packaging chargers with the phones and have the phone stores hand out chargers for free to anyone that wants it, and anyone who, like me, already have a dozen chargers  wouldn't have to waste more resources by consuming another meaningless piece of equipment. This could even be a step further in that direction: only one type of charger which means even less meaningless strain on the environment. Let's also hope, since it's USB, that all data-communication with the device will be done through that plug and we'll not need a special cable for that either.

On another note, I'm now in possession of a SunSPOT-kit which I will demo at different kind of events. They are so fun much fun and really, really easy to program. The problem, though, is as always to come up with good demos. Anyone have a fun demo idea for two small Java-computers with accelerometer, light- and temperature-sensors?

This is indeed great news for the free world and international standards alike: ISO voted no to OOXML. The matter is not settled yet, but at least it means that the rather unbecoming turns around the vote didn't pay off. It's not that I want to deny Microsoft their standard, but OOXML just isn't very good (6000 pages) and there already is a standard: ISO/IEC 26300 - ODF.

Read more here: noooxml, and here: ISO.org.

I had a really weird dream yesterday: I dreamt that Kesuke Miyagi tried to convince me that classed based languages is better than prototype based. He didn't tell me straight out, of course, being all old and wise and Karate and all. Instead he showed us a way to jump, a certain way to position your feet when doing a long jump that enabled you, once you've trained for at least 30 years, to jump at least 20 yards. "Just follow this form," he said, "and you'll be able to jump like me." Naturally, when I tried, I jumped ten inches. So I interpreted that as an argument for class based languages.

In my second dream yesterday a cultist tried to convince me that prototype based languages is better than class based. I was in this magical ritual, probably trying to conjure up an old monster of some kind, when I suddenly realized that the form we used, all the things we said and such, was based on a copy and modify pattern, just as in prototype based languages. Naturally my choice fell on prototype based languages.

PS: Want to see a really cool prototype based language? Have a look at Io. It's one of the most curious and beautiful languages I've seen.