Friday June 24, 2005 An Army of Dukes
As you can see from the photo the Java Army is ready to go into action next week in San Francisco for the 9th JavaOne and the Java Platform's 10th birthday party. Seems only yesterday I was persuading my colleague Gabriel at IBM to spend his budget to buy IBM's place at the first JavaOne. I must be getting old.
The photo, incidentally, is from the new JavaOne group on Flickr - if I find time to take any photos I'll post them there.
Posted by webmink
( Jun 24 2005, 11:12:08 AM PDT )
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Biting into OpenSolaris
As I've been touring this week speaking about Sun's open source strategy and OpenSolaris, one of the things that plenty of people have been excited about is that the OpenSolaris developers have been looking for ways to help newcomers to get started with the OpenSolaris source code as easily as possible. For example, there's the very cool Source Browser that Chandan built, which provides searchability and syntax highlighting with a speed and ease of use that I have not seen in a source project before.
Probably the most interesting idea though is one Sean caught me mentioning at the inaugural London OpenSolaris User Group meeting on Monday. If you want to get involved with the OpenSolaris source, search for "oss-bite-size" in the keyword field of the bug database. All the bugs so marked are suitable for an experienced programmer who wants to get started on OpenSolaris programming - a great idea.
Posted by webmink
( Jun 24 2005, 06:16:08 AM PDT )
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Tuesday June 21, 2005 Free As In Beer at JavaOne
OK, with great help from Jim Grisanzio I've booked the Thirsty Bear from 6-8pm on Monday June 27th for a Java Bloggers social - I'll buy you a beer if you're there by 7. Look for us to the left as you enter. Apologies to those who voted for another night, this was the best option with all factors considered. Please comment below if you'll be there, I have to give them an idea of numbers around Monday lunchtime. Posted by webmink
( Jun 21 2005, 06:20:56 PM PDT )
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Friday June 17, 2005 Bearish on OpenSolaris
One of the longest threads in the OpenSolaris pilot program was a discussion of what the best mascot for OpenSolaris would be. My proposal was a polar bear, and Chandan has drawn the most superb polar bear. My vote is of course firmly for the bear - I missed the Slow Loris in Singapore's Night Safari this Monday (the rest of it was superb - highly recommended, especially the creatures of the night show) but I can confirm that it's not a mythical beast!
Posted by webmink
( Jun 17 2005, 02:02:30 PM PDT )
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Tuesday June 14, 2005 Real Unix, Real Open, in a Real Torrent
Today is the Opening Day for OpenSolaris, the open source community project seeded with the source code to Solaris. There are plenty of OpenSolaris engineers blogging about the code itself and they make great reading, but the thing about the opening of the new community that really excites me is that OpenSolaris.org is offering BitTorrent downloads of the source tarballs. I am currently grabbing the 44Mb of source for OpenSolaris and I see seeds all over the world
I've been an advocate of using BitTorrent since I first got involved in OpenSolaris and I am thrilled to see it happening. It took a lot of work by a number of people, including particularly Derek Cicero who did the hard work of getting approval from our lawyer, our export control department, executive management and a host of others. Not least it's setting the precedent that BitTorrent is just a protocol and not inherently a tool for bad behaviour. I hope plenty of others join in to help pioneer the participation age of software downloads - I'll be leaving my seed online as much as I can here in Singapore to help the many Singaporeans who expressed huge interest in it during my speech this morning (for which my slides are available).
Posted by webmink
( Jun 14 2005, 08:15:00 AM PDT )
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Monday June 13, 2005 Chronicle and Blogging
I actually like the article in the San Francisco Chronicle on blogging today, even if Ben didn't actually link to my blogs despite the long interview! Key quote:
"The blog-and-lose-your-job (scare) is vastly exaggerated," Phipps of Sun said. "If someone is dumb enough about blabbing about company secrets, it doesn't matter what medium you give them. They'll still blab about company secrets."
Credit for the "don't be stupid" summary ought to go to Scoble by the way, not me (still, he got a link & I didn't...)
Posted by webmink
( Jun 13 2005, 09:27:18 AM PDT )
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Friday June 10, 2005 London Calling
I'm delighted to be able to announce that there will be the first ever OpenSolaris User Group meeting in the UK, on June 20. I'll be speaking at it, explaining the stucture of the OpenSolaris project and the role of the CAB, and I know that the hard-working event organiser Ulf Andreasson is lining up a set of other (mainly non-Sun) speakers. If you can be in the City on Monday June 20th in the evening, we'd love to see you. Here's the invitation:
This is an invitation for our very first UK OpenSolaris User Group meeting in London. Yes we know it's with short notice but we wanted to do this as soon as possible! The idea is that we will have an introduction to what OpenSolaris is all about, meeting people both being part of the pilot program and not, looking at what the CAB[1] will do and maybe even see some source ;) So if we can ask you to try to make the meeting, we will promise to give you an exciting insight in that OpenSolaris is all about ! Place: Sun Microsystems City Office [2] Customer Briefing Center 45 King William Street London EC4R 9AD Date: Monday the 20th June Time: 18:00 - 20:00 Hopefully we will see you there ! reg//ulf[1] http://opensolaris.org/cab
[2] http://uk.sun.com/aboutsun/location
Posted by webmink
( Jun 10 2005, 01:12:35 PM PDT )
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Friday June 03, 2005 Defining "Open Standard", Simply
I was going to write a long piece about Microsoft's announcement that they are copying all the design points of the OASIS OpenDocument format and using it in the next version of Office, but I don't need to because Stephen O'Grady has. I asked a whole load of European Commission folk about it this week and no-one is fooled - they want a genuinely open standard, please.
An open standard is one which, when it changes, no-one is surprised by the changes. Admittedly I'm not surprised when Microsoft repeatedly and apparently arbitrarily changes its interfaces and formats and jerks developers around but I meant "not surprised" in the sense that the change process was open to involvement and contribution by all, not in that way. The OASIS process by which OpenDocument was defined is such a process and indeed Microsoft, being an OASIS member, did visit and could have easily steered the format to suit their legacy needs - the format is in fact vendor-neutral. Instead they chose to read the overview and then re-implement it. Jean Paoli's comment "Sun standardized their own. We could have used a format from others and shoehorned in functionality, but our design needs to be different" reeks of NIH and lock-in when you take that fact into account.
Posted by webmink
( Jun 03 2005, 12:01:08 PM PDT )
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