There are several things that Google does right when it comes to their player.

First, they understand that some videocasters may be looking to legitimately create longer form content. Sites such as YouTube (ironically also owned by Google) limit new accounts to 10 minutes of upload time only in an attempt to stop copyright infringement. All this really does is break the illegal clip up in to 4 segments, annoys users and stops nothing.

Second, Google understands that the Internet is a worldwide distribution medium. While I produce my new videocast SpaceVidcast in English, I have many episodes translated to as many languages as possible. Using the Google Video tools I'm able to upload a transcript and translation of the video to the service giving everyone a chance to view the material in their native language. Google has the ability to have multiple closed caption streams added to a single video. Check out the sample below from my Epsiode 002 SpaceVidcast (we run about 3 weeks behind in transcoding, although the larger the community gets the more we catch up).

Third, I can start playing from anywhere in the clip, but it doesn't appear to be streaming. What the heck do I mean by this? Google Video uses an advanced form of progressive download which means that no matter your bandwidth you'll be able to watch the video (it may take a while to download enough of the clip if your connection is slow). The problem with progressive download is that if you have a 2 hour clip and want to jump 90 minutes in you have to wait until that part has downloaded. Streaming video allows me to jump anywhere in the video but if I don't have enough bandwidth between the server and the client they won't be able to watch the clip. Google Video has a combination of both. I can jump anywhere in the clip even if it has not downloaded that part yet and watch from that moment in time even if I don't have enough bandwidth for a real-time stream. It is the best of all worlds.

Finally, I think the biggest and coolest feature of Google Video is the ability to send a link that allows me to start at any time in the video. I have the ability to copy the video's URL and add a time marker at the end to jump to that exact moment in time. If I want to share a part of the video that is 9 minutes in with a friend, just add a #13m32s to the end of the Google Video URL. While this feature was introduced back in 2006 it seems that most other video sharing sites didn't see the power in that feature which is really too bad.

There are disadvantages of Google Video too. The encode quality just has not kept up with the rest of the industry. The audience base simply isn't at Google Video, frankly they are at YouTube. Google seems to have mostly abandoned the Google Video project in favor of YouTube (which they purchased for a kabillion, zillion dollars). Tracking videos and plays on Google Video is abysmal (which is a big deal too). And the list goes on.

In the end I know that I have a worldwide community of people who want to see and understand my content. By using DotSub and a lot of community help I am able to make this happen with Google Video but not YouTube, Blip.tv, Brightcove, Revver, etc.

Do you have a favorite videocasting service? Do you know of a better service that allows for multiple languages, long form content and the ability to link to any moment in time for the video clip? Or do you completely disagree with my assessment of how the 2006 Google Video player trumps most 2008 players on the market today? Leave your insight in our comments!
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Best Pho: Ngon Vietnamese Bistro (Frogtown, Saint Paul)
Best Gyro: Gardens of Salonica (NE Minneapolis)
Best Tater Tots: Bulldog NE (NE Minneapolis)
Best Cold Press: Dunn Bros
Best Text/Design Conference: minnēbar (it's tomorrow!)

To be continued next week...

Apparently, there's a virus attack. Not a computer virus. A real virus. Hot zone instead of a hot spot.

From my inbox this morning:

The JavaOne conference team has been notified by the San Francisco Department of Public Health about an identified outbreak of a virus in the San Francisco area. Testing is still underway to identify the specific virus in question, but they believe it to be the Norovirus, a common cause of the "stomach flu", which can cause temporary flu-like symptoms for up to 48 hours. Part of the San Francisco area impacted includes the Moscone Center, the site of the JavaOne conference which is being held this week. We are working with the appropriate San Francisco Department of Public Health and Moscone representatives to mitigate the impact this will have on the conference and steps are being taken overnight to disinfect the facility. We have not received any indication that the show should end early, so will have the full schedule of events on Friday as planned. We hope to see you then.

Please see the attached notification from the Department of Public Health.

For further information, as well as Frequently Asked Questions related to the Norovirus, please visit the San Francisco Department of Public Health website at http://sfcdcp.org/norovirus.cfm 

The CDC description includes the phrase "acute gastroenteritis." 

Sun opened the final day of JavaOne with a general session called "Extreme Innovation". This was a showcase for novel, interesting, and out-of-this-world uses of Java based technology.

VisualVM 

VisualVM works with local or remote applications, using JMX over RMI to connect to remote apps. While you have to run VisualVM itself under JDK 1.6, it can connect to any version of JVm from 1.4.2 through 1.7. Local apps are automatically detected and offered in the UI for debugging.  VisualVM uses the Java Platform Debugger Architecture to show thread activities, memory usage, object counts, and call timing. It can also take snapshots of the application's state for post-mortem or remote analysis.

Memory problems can be a bear to diagnose. VisualVM includes a heap analyzer that can show reference chains. From the UI, it looks like it can also detect and indicate reference loops.

One interesting feature of VisualVM is the ability to add plug-ins for application-specific behavior. Sun demonstrated a Glassfish plugin that adds custom metrics for request latency and volume, and the ability to examine each application context independently.

The application does not require any special instrumentation, so you can run VisualVM directly against a production application. According to Sun, it adds "almost no overhead" to the application being examined. I'd still be very cautious about that. VisualVM allows you to enable CPU and memory profiling in real-time, so that will certainly have an effect on the application. Not to mention, it also lets you trigger a heap dump, which is always going to be costly.

VisualVM is available for download now.

JavaScript Support in NetBeans

Sun continues to push NetBeans at every turn. In this case, it was a demo of the JavaScript plugin for NetBeans. This is really a nice plugin. It uses type inferencing to provide autocompletion and semantic warnings. For example, it would warn you if a function had inconsistent return statements. (Such as returning an object from one code path mixed with a void return from another.)

It also has a handy developer aid: it warns developers about browser compatibility.

I don't do a whole lot of JavaScript, but I couldn't help thinking about other dynamic languages. Ifthe plugin can do that kind of type inferencing---without executing the code---for one dynamic language, then it should be possible to do for other dynamic languages. That could remove a lot of objections about Groovy, Scala, JRuby, etc.

Fluffy Stuff at the Edge

We got a couple of demos of Java in front of the end-user. One was a cell phone running an OpenGL scene at about 15 frames per second on an NVidia chipset. All the rendering was done in Java and displayed via OpenGL ES, with 3D positional audio. Not bad at all.

Project Darkstar got a few moments in the spotlight, too. They showed off a game called Call of the Kings, a multiplayer RTS that looked like it came from 1999.  Call of the Kings uses the jMonkey Engine (built on top of JOAL, JOGL, and jInput) on the client and Project Darkstar's game server on the backend. It's OK, but as game engines go, I'm not sure how it will be relevant.

There was also a JavaCard demo, running Robocode players on JavaCards.  That's not just storing the program on the card, it was actually executing on the card. Two finalists were brought up on stage (but not given microphones of their own, I noticed) for a final battle between their tanks. Yellow won, and received a PS3. Red lost, but got a PSP for making it to the finals.

Sentilla tried to get out from the "creepy" moniker by bouncing mesh-networked, location-tracking beachballs around the audience. Each one had a Sentilla "mote" in it, with a 3D accelerometer inside. Receivers at the perimeter of the hall could triangulate the beachballs' locations by signal strength. For me, the most interesting thing here was James Gosling's talk about powering the motes. They draw so little power that it's possible to power them from ambient sources: vibration and heat. Interesting. Still creepy, but interesting.

The next demo was mind-blowing. The livescribe pulse is a Java computer built into a pen. It's hard to describe how wild this thing is, you almost have to see it for any of this to make sense.

At one point, the presenter wrote down a list, narrating as he went. For item one, he wrote the numeral "1" and the word "pulse", describing the pen as he went. For item two, he wrote the numeral "2" and draw a little doodle of a desktop. Item three was the numeral and a vague cloudy thing. All this time, the pen was recoding his audio, and associating bits of the audio stream with the page locations. So when he tapped the numeral "1" that he had written, the pen played back his audio. Not bad.

Then he put an "application card" on the table and tapped "Spanish" on it. He wrote down the word "one"... and the pen spoke the word "uno".  He wrote "coffee please" and it said "cafe por favor". Then he had it do the same phrase in Mandarin and Arabic. Handwriting recognition, machine translation, and speech synthesis all in the pen. Wow.

Next, he selected a program from the pen's menu. The special notebook has a menu crosshair on it, but you can draw your own crosshair and it works the same way: use the pen to tap the up-arrow on paper, and the menu changes on the display. He picked a piano program, and the pen started to give him directions on how to draw a piano. Once he was done drawing it, he could tap the "keys" on paper to play notes.

The pen captures x, y, and t information as you write, so it's digitizing the trajectory rather than the image. This is great for data compression when you're sharing pages across the livescribe web site. It's probably also great for forgers, so there might be a concern there.

Industrial Strength

Emphasizing real-time Java for a bit, Sun showed off "Blue Wonder", an industrial controller built out of an x86 computer running Solaris 10 and Java RTS 2.0.  This is suitable for factory control applications and is, apparently, very exciting to factory control people.

From the DARPA Urban Challenge event, we saw "Tommy Jr.", an autonomous vehicle. It followed Paul Perrone into the room, narrating each move it was making. Fortunately, nobody tried to demonstrate it's crowd control or law enforcement features. Instead, they showed off an array of high resolution sensors and actuators. It's all controlled, under very tight real-time constraints, by a single x86 board running Solaris and Java RTS.

Into New Realms

Next, we saw a demo of JMars. This impressive application helps scientists make sense out of the 150 terabytes of data we've collected from various Mars probes. It combines data and imaging layers from many different probes. One example overlaid hematite concentrations on top of an infrared image layer. It also knows enough about the various satellites orbits to help plan imaging requests.

Ultimately, JMars was built to help target landing sites for both scientific interest and technical viability. We'll soon see how well they did: the Phoenix lander arrives in about two weeks, targeting a site that was selected using JMars.

JMars is both free to use and is also open source. Dr. Phil Christensen from Arizon State University invited the Java community to explore Mars for themselves, and perhaps join the project team.

CERN
Thousands of people, physicists and otherwise, are eagerly awaiting the LHC's activation. We got to see a little bit behind the scenes about how Java is being used within CERN.

On the one hand, some very un-sexy business process work is being done. LHC is a vast project, so it's got people, budget, and materials to manage. Ho hum. It's not easy to manage all those business processes, but it sure doesn't demo well.

On the other hand, showing off the grid computing infrastructure does.

Once it's operating, the ATLAS detectors alone will produce a gigabyte an hour of image data. All of it needs to be processed. "Processing" here means running through some amazing pattern recognition programs to analyze events, looking for anomalies. There will be far too many collisions generated every day for a physicist to look at all of them, so automated techniques have to weed out "uninteresting" collisions and call attention to ones that dont' fit the profile.

CERN estimates that 100,000 CPUs will be needed to process the data. They've built a coalition of facilities into a multi-tier grid. Even today, they're running 16,000 jobs on the grid across hundreds of data centers. With that many nodes involved, they need some good management and visualization tools, and we got to see one. It's a 3D world model with iconified data centers showing their status and capacity. Jobs fly from one to another along geodesic links. Very cool stuff.

Summary

Java is a mature technology that's being used in many spheres other than application server programming. For me, and many other JavaOne attendees, this session really underscored the fact that none of our own projects are anywhere near as cool as these demos. I'm left with the desire to go build something cool, which was probably the point.

Two weeks ago this past Wednesday, I gave notice to my former employer that I had accepted a job from a local company as a Software Engineer. It was a hard decision to make; just over eighteen months ago I had written about getting the job which basically amounted to a “dream job” situation. I was working with Rails, doing cool stuff with weather and mapping.

The only catch was that it would be 100% telecommuting.

After eighteen months, I pretty much had it firmed up in my mind that telecommuting, and the lifestyle associated with it, wasn’t for me. Before accepting the job, I had done a ton of research into what it would take. Telecommuting isn’t for everybody, and when I would tell people that I telecommute, the usual response was something along the lines of, “Wow, that must be nice!”

It was nice, but the drawbacks didn’t really become apparent after the third month.

If you’re considering telecommuting, there are a lot of things to take into account, especially if it’s going to be 100% of the time.

Keep work and personal space separate.

This is probably the most important item here. Dedicate a room to your home office. Don’t share it with existing space if you can. Keep work and personal space separate. Resist the urge to be in the office space “after hours” if you’re doing casual web browsing, email-checking or whatever.

You never really leave work.

It’s too easy to walk into your home office after-hours and work. Bored? You can sit down and work.

You never really leave home.

The flip side of this is that you’re always around the house. Bored working? It’s almost too easy to go play some Guitar Hero or fire up the Wii. You’ll have to be immensely disciplined to get work done.

Don’t become a hermit.

Socialize. You’re around the house more, which means you don’t have a lot of people around to talk to. Not long after I started telecommuting, I noticed a shift in my personality. I’m already an introvert, but being isolated from people seemed to make it worse. I generally felt more awkward around people, and it was harder to socialize and relate to people in general.

Be aware of time shifts.

Because the home office was in Denver, I generally got started one hour later than if I were working locally. This also meant that I worked an hour later as well. Sometimes this would throw off things like eating dinner or going to bed. This can obviously affect your family, so make sure they understand why you’re getting up late and staying up late if this happens.

Get a separate phone line, and use it.

If your home phone line (or cell phone) becomes your lifeline to the office, it’s even more important that your coworkers understand this setup. They shouldn’t be calling you at home on Saturdays.

One of my bigger challenges with telecommuting (especially as a software engineer) was that much of my communication with my coworkers and colleagues was over email or IM. Looking back, I wish I had a separate, dedicated work line, and that I used it more. It’s much, much easier to communicate complex thoughts and ideas over the phone, compared to email or chat. Don’t be afraid to fire up the phone.

Get a headset for your phone.

We would have weekly engineering meetings, and status meetings with our client quite often. Having a headset that I could plug into the phone was very useful, mostly because it kept my hands free for typing on the computer.

Make your employer pay your bills.

Ideally, your employer should be paying your landline or cellphone bills. They should even be paying your cable or DSL bills. After all, they are saving quite a bit of money by not having to maintain physical office space an other facilities for you. I made the mistake of not getting my phone and ISP bills expensed, and wished I had gotten it taken care of from the start.

Investigate the tax benefits of a home office.

If you have a room dedicated to office space, I believe you can write off a percentage of your taxes based on what percentage of the house is being used. I’m not a tax expert, but I highly recommend looking into writing off what you can.

Loudclick has created a platform for collaborative web site creation that allows anyone — from newbie to designer — to quickly deliver a great looking web site for sports teams, homeowners associations, small businesses, or any group. I met with Alex Huff at a local Caribou Coffee to learn more about him and hear the Loudclick story.

Loudclick’s core value proposition is a hosted application which enables building these web sites together (i.e., multi-user, multi-admin, and/or multi-author). Inline content editing capability allows an approved user to log in and edit any “element” (block on the page) that they have permission to change. It’s an editing method that’s gaining acceptance in the marketplace and the Loudclick solution delivers in an elegant way.

As many of us know from the emerging acceptance of wiki’s in business and organizations, inline content editing is powerful but often new or less tech-savvy users struggle with the wiki paradigm and require training. Editing a wiki page changes it from a page laid out nicely to a bunch of text with tags…and many users I’ve dealt with on wiki’s freeze up and think they’re looking at code and just don’t understand what to do next, making the use of wiki’s problematic in casual group situations where easy publishing and communicating is what’s important.

As we talked, I mentioned that, although it’s positioned as a web site/page builder, “this seems like it could be positioned as a wiki with no learning curve“. Alex didn’t disagree, but is clearly focused on their core market: groups of people who want to communicate and connect by building great looking web sites created with minimal muss-n-fuss.

This is a young company. They have three people, are virtual, and have an acting chief technology officer and a design head with four developers in Islamabad, Pakistan. They’ve raised $600k with more to come and have an aggressive roadmap and rollout scheduled.

Alex and I first met virtually when I was at the enterprise content management system (CMS) company, Vignette, and he had his design firm with a client in Iowa whom he’d recommended choose our software and they did. So we had a common understanding of the CMS space, a baseline of knowledge, and thus had quite a spirited discussion about expensive and complex CMS’es at the high end and the enormous array of solutions at the low-end.

This prompted me to probe about the market space they’re going after and it’s clear Loudclick is focusing on ease of use, social networking and the enormous pent-up demand for user publishing that is accessible, powerful and extensible (more about this below).

While we talked, I could see the clear advantages of what they’ve created with their hosted solution (and the need for easy publishing solutions is one I know intuitively!). But the competition in this space is fierce and not for the faint-of-heart.

Online participants who’d like a publishing solution for their group have many choices. From using Wordpress as a CMS (and their hosted Wordpress.com) to CityMax, Joomla, Drupal, LightCMS, and the dozens of others with an approach sure to meet the needs of just about anyone, differentiating and positioning LoudClick will be a challenge, Alex “gets it” and is up to the task, but add in all these other publishing options available to people — specifically hosted solutions like blogging engines Typepad or Blogger or social network engines like Ning with page and blog creation — and the Loudclick crew will discover that targeting an audience and messaging to them is going to be tough…let alone providing features that attract them and create a defensible position and competitive advantages for their startup.

TECHNOLOGY & FEATURES
Their current technology is built upon Microsoft .Net; a SQL Server backend; is completely template-driven; and hosted at Rackspace. They’re positioned to scale up to meet demand and could easily (though they’re not currently) offer a “white label” version of their product for an organization to brand as their own.

I was impressed with their features and their model:

• Decentralized user publishing and user management
• Indexing feature for all content within the system making it easy to repurpose and use
• The use of “elements” or regions of the screen in which content is presented and are blocks that can also have specific and defined permissions wrapped around them. This gives administrators the ability to define areas of the page that can be, for example, owned by the organization and unchangeable like a left sidebar of information, a header logo, etc.
• Domain mapping (when signing up a user is given a subdomain “username.loudclick.com” and can map any domain name to point to that subdomain) so people can have their brand or organization be what points to the Loudclick site they’ve created
• The current “in beta” model is that Loudclick use is free (though with advertisements).

There are also many new features coming and here’s a sneak peek:

• Pro version with no advertisements
• Messaging & Notifications (any user could opt-in for either)
• Facebook application: This is potentially one of the most powerful pieces of what Loudclick is delivering. Mini-Feeds show your friends what you’ve been doing in Loudclick; choose friends to invite to sites you manage and so on.
• OpenSocial: This is under consideration for delivering their Facebook-type application on other social platforms
• Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds are coming but not here yet. At first I was puzzled by the fact this wasn’t already implemented since almost every other offering I review has it, but when you consider their target market, this is NOT one comprised of people who are big RSS users and thus it makes sense it is lower on the priority list.

The Internet and Web is more important to communication, social connection, business and commerce by the day. Increasingly people are seeking out easy to use, fast to get up-and-running solutions they can deploy without a computer science degree and one where their slight technical acumen makes them solely responsible for the content and site management.

Loudclick, though even in beta, is already delivering this value and I’m anxious to see the company and solution develop.

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I’m pleased to share that I’ve been selected as a recipient of the Business Journal’s “40 Under 40″ award.

My heartfelt thanks to all of you who supported my nomination, especially to Lars Leafblad (a ‘07 award recipient himself) for thinking of me in the first place.

I’m honored, and in good company: Jamie Thingelstad’s a winner this year too.

Finally, thanks to Graeme Thickins for the kind quote featured in the article.

They're not awful because they're Christian music demos - the religious factor has nothing to do with the fact that the link contains some tremendous train wrecks. Listen to the "Awesome God" one...whoa. It's a mix of corny, terrible performances.

Jem Matzan has a damning article entitled Subject to shill: tech books as corporate marketing in which O’Reilly and Adaptive Path are panned for producing.. well, crap:

The book’s primary content reads like a marketing pitch for Adaptive Path services. It’s packed with enthusiasm but entirely devoid of substance. There are whole paragraphs that meander around non-specific subjects, one leading into another until you’re pretty sure you’ve got the gist of what the authors are trying to say, but you have no idea how to apply it to your business.

It’s too bad that the book comes out as a fairly transparent marketing ploy. Several of my friends and colleagues agree with me in the opinion that the quality of O’Reilly titles has gone down over the past few years. The last book from O’Reilly that I have bought was the Information Architecture book, but that was fairly recent.

I am also reminded of the Adaptive Crap image from 2001.

I used a little jQuery last night to clear some form fields. The basic idea was, there were a couple text inputs in the form for first and last name; rather than label the fields, I made the value of each form to be initially “First” and “Last” respectively.

Then I was requested to make it so that when the field was clicked on, the word “First” or “Last” (respectively) would disappear, so that you could then proceed to enter a value without needing to highlight and delete the existing value of the text field.

It turns out that with jQuery, this is simple enough; let’s assume your field has the class “clearme”:

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$(document).ready(function () {
  $('.clearme').focus(function() {
    $(this).val("");
  });
});

If you’re familiar with jQuery, you know that the wrapper $(document).ready() simply waits until the page is finished loading, then executes the function you’ve passed to it. In this case, the function passed looks for an item of the class “clearme” and waits for that element to receive focus. When it does, it changes the value to “”.

Simple enough… but wait! Now if the user types in “Beauregard Charles Maurice” as a first name, if he inadvertently clicks on the text box again, his name will disappear. He would need to type that all over again. What can be done?

There may be multiple ways; but jQuery has a handy method called “one” which will execute an event one time only, which sounds like just what we want. So we’d change the body of that inner function to look like:

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$('.clearme').one("focus", function() {
  $(this).val("");
});

Voila. That last code could be seen in action here. Have fun.

Well, I'm preparing my talk for the free Minneapolis BarCamp technology conference tomorrow: Communication For Geeks: How to Influence Your Boss, Your Customers, and Your Team. It will be early in the morning, 9am, so hopefully I'll still have an audience! I'f you're in Minneapolis, please show up!

Coffman Union at the University of Minnesota Campus (Minneapolis)
Address 300 Washington Ave. S.E. Minneapolis, MN 55455-0110 (map and directions)

Ahhh... the U of MN... my old stomping grounds. Almost 400 folks signed up so far, so it should be bigger than the Oregon BarCamp that Jake attended last week... There's also a pre-event mixer at The Bulldog at 8pm tonight... which is the best damn place to get Belgian beer in Minneapolis.

I like presenting first thing in the morning... then I have the rest of the conference to relax. I also enjoy presenting non-tech talks at tech conferences. Last year I talked about marketing with Derrick Shields, which was a blast. This year, I'm talking about conflict resolution with a technology spin.

Personally, I believe communication and conflict resolution are woefully overlooked skills in the technology industry... I mean, a vast vast VAST majority of software projects are complete failures... and if the statistics from the AIIM failure study still ring true, the biggest problem seems to be communication. Its not the technology, its the people. This might be more true in my industry (Enterprise Content Management) than in others (writing device drivers), but its always important.

I figure, these BarCamp folks know plenty about how to make projects successful with technology... but they have no clue how to politely inform their boss that an executive decision is threatening the success of a project. They don't know how to make such a statement, and keep their jobs, and put the project back on track.

Do you?

If not, come see me at 9am this Saturday...

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We have a whiteboard hanging on the wall near the front desk at ArcStone’s Minneapolis office. The intent is to keep track of who is offsite, telecommuting, or out on an errand. In reality, most of us never use it properly. We forget to erase our names when we arrive at the office, forget to put our names up the day before if we plan to telecommute, or neglect to ask someone else to write our status on the board if we’re out sick. And, since it’s hanging on the wall at the office, you can’t read it if you’re working offsite.

In response to the shortcomings of the community whiteboard, ArcStonians have turned to email. We often see messages to the office distribution list, announcing when a team member will be available and where they’ll be during the course of the day. I’ve never liked it; I somehow manage to miss the notifications from members of my project teams.

But, as always, there was a better solution. We recently subscribed to Google Apps, a set of productivity tools offered by Google that includes calendaring. It’s allowed us to have company-wide shared calendars without the hassle and expense of using Zimbra or Microsoft Exchange Server for our email. Google offers an API for their calendar service; you can quickly write web application code that reads data from a Google Calendar and manipulates it. And the idea for the virtual in/out board was born!

The virtual in/out board is nothing more than a ColdFusion page that reads data from a shared calendar. When someone wants put their availability up on the board, they create an event on their own calendar and invite the in/out board as an attendee. The page checks the calendar for updates every five minutes or so, and refreshes the display (which is an otherwise unused PC at our front desk). We even have the data available in the ArcWeb, our custom time tracking and business management application, for viewing by offsite staff.

I’ll never have dry-erase marker on my hands again!

I don't post music videos on this blog...often. Okay, never. But, gee whiz, a guy's gotta take a break once in a while. Or your brain gets fried.  It's late, and I just read something online where the guy says the Beatles are so great. That's the second time this has popped up outta the blue on me lately -- Brad Feld just up and said that on Twitter a week or so ago. And I don't make it a habit to be reading about music. I got tech to cover! (and surfing when I get bored)

The thing is, Brad''s not even all that old, to go back that far, I mean....and he still loves 'em. I Twittered him right back with..."yeah, Brad, but can you name your top-five Beatles tunes in rapid fire?  I can: 1) In My Life, 2) Wait, 3) It Won't Be Long ... (continued in next tweet)...4) What You're Doing to Me, 5) You Can't Do That...oh, and my bonus number is I'm Looking Through You."  (Okay, I always carry a little cheat-sheet in my wallet so I can do that at the drop of a hat.)

And then, tonight, sitting here, I suddenly remember two more. Damn, it's so hard to narrow it down to five, or even ten. The Beatles are the most awesome band ever...period. My favs tend to be from the earlier years, or mid-career. But two more Beatles numbers that I love, from the later years, just suddenly popped into my mind as I was sitting here on the couch with the ever-present Macbook staring back at me, TV volume turned down on something I didn't care about, anyway. So, I click over to YouTube to hear these two awesome, awesome numbers...

The Beatles, again, absolutely flooring me, like they always did. George's guitar, John and Paul's lyrics and melodies, Ringo's drums. They just live on and on and on.  I click play and...melt.

• Split Rock Partners raised a $300 million second fund for investment in healthcare, software & Internet companies: http://tinyurl.com/537f73 #
• more good sessions being added! https://barcamp.pbwiki.com/MinneBarSessions (scroll down to bottom) - see ya Saturday! #
• wow, Minnebar attendee list already up to 367! and many will show up as walk-ins, since there’s no pre-registration or payment necessary #

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• Seems Windows Vista likes USB printer connections better than parallel… Wish i would have known that yesterday #

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I have not even had time to play with this yet, but John Resig, creator of the excellent jquery Javascript library, has released Processing.js, a port of Processing to Javascript.

And there was much rejoicing.

• visual urban data slides (tecznotes)
  (tags: crime map data visualization)
• (The official) Tumblr Tumblelog
  (tags: tumblr weblog)
• IHT.com Developer Blog » Who says type can’t be improved on the web?
  A little regex in a template to make sure there are no text widows. Nice.
  (tags: web design typography news newspaper)

The notion of a service-oriented architecture is real, and it can deliver. The term "SOA", however, has been entirely hijacked by a band of dangerous Taj Mahal architects. They seem innocuous, it part because they'll lull you to sleep with endless protocol diagrams. Behind the soporific technology discussion lies a grave threat to your business.

"SOA" has come to mean top-down, up-front, strong-governance, all-or-nothing process (moving at glacial speed) implemented by an ill-conceived stack of technologies. SOAP is not the problem. WSDL is not the problem. Even BPEL is not the problem. The problem begins with the entire world view.

We need to abandon the term "SOA" and invent a new one. "SOA" is chasing a false goal. The idea that services will be so strongly defined that no integration point will ever break is unachievable. Moreover, it's optimizing for the wrong thing. Most business today are not safety-critical. Instead, they are highly competitive.

We need loosely-coupled services, not orchestration.

We need services that emerge from the business units they serve, not an IT governance panel.

We need services to change as rapidly as the business itself changes, not after a chartering, funding, and governance cycle.

Instead of trying to build an antiseptic, clockwork enterprise, we need to embrace the messy, chaotic, Darwinian nature of business. We should be enabling rapid experimentation, quick rollout of "barely sufficient" systems, and fast feedback. We need to enable emergence, not stifle it.

Anything that slows down that cycle of experimentation and adjustment puts your business on the same evolutionary path as the Great Auk. I never thought I'd find myself quoting Tom Peters in a tech blog, but the key really is to "Test fast, fail fast, adjust fast."

For those of you interested in the content of my talk at JavaOne this morning, here are the slides.

(They’re not quite the version I used in the talk – just the readable, context-free, usable bits.)

Much of the interest in dynamic languages like Groovy, JRuby, and Scala comes from running on the JVM. That lets them leverage the tremendous R&D that's gone into JVM performance and stability. It also opens up the universe of Java libraries and frameworks.

And yet, much of my work deals with the 80% of cost that comes after the development project is done. I deal with the rest of the software's lifetime. The end of development is the beginning of the software's life. Throughout that life, many of the biggest, toughest problems exist around and between the JVM's: Scalability, stability, interoperability, and adaptability.

As I previously showed in this graphic, the easiest thing for a Java developer to create is a slow, unscalable, and unstable web application. Making high-performance, robust, scalable applications still requires serious expertise. This is a big problem, and I don't see it getting better. Scala might help here in terms of stability, but I'm not yet convinced it's suitable for the largest masses of Java developers. Normal attrition means that the largest population of developers will always be the youngest and least experienced. This is not a training problem: in the post-commoditization world, the majority of code will always be written by undertrained, least-cost coders. That means we need platforms where the easiest thing to do is also the right thing to do.

Scaling distributed systems has gotten better over the last few years. Distributed memory caching has reached the mainstream. Terracotta and Coherence are both mature products, and they both let you try them out for free. In the open source crowd, as usual, you lose some manageability and some time-to-implement, but the projects work when you use them right. All of these do the job of connecting individual JVMs to a caching layer. On the other hand, I can't help but feel that the need for these products points to a gap in the platform itself.

OSGi is finally reaching the mainstream. It's been needed for a long time, for a couple of reasons. First, it's still too common to see gigantic classpaths containing multiple versions of JAR files, leading to the perennial joy of finding obscure, it-works-fine-in-QA bugs. So, keeping individual projects in their own bundles, with no classpath pollution will be a big help. Versioning application bundles is also important for application management and deployment. OSGi is what we should have had since the beginning, instead of having the classpath inflicted on us.

I predict that we'll see more production operations moving to hot deployment on OSGi containers. For enterprise services that require 100% uptime, it's just no longer acceptable to bring down the whole cluster in order to do deployments. Even taking an entire server down to deploy a new revision may become a thing of the past. In the Erlang world, it's common to see containers running continuously for months or years. In Programming Erlang, Joe Armstrong talks about sending an Erlang process a message to "become" a new package. It works without disrupting any current requests and it happens atomically between one service request and the next. (In fact, Joe says that one of the first things he does on a new system is deploy the container processes, at the very beginning of the project. Later, once he knows what the system is supposed to do, he deploys new packages into those containers.) Hot deployment can be safe, if the code being deployed is sufficiently decoupled from the container itself. OSGi does that.

OSGi also enables strong versioning of the bundles and their dependencies. This is an all-around good thing, since it will let developers and operations agree on exactly versions of which components belong in production at a given time.

Move over Betty Crocker, there’s a new Sara Lee in town.

Today, ArcStonian Pamela Schott brought in a batch of what she calls Oh! Henry bars. They should be called Be-Still-My-Beating-Heart bars because I’m in love.

I want to be locked in a prison made out of Pam’s Oh! Henry bars so I can eat my way to freedom.

I want to collect them like baseball cards, only to eat my whole collection and start all over again.

I want a device hooked up to my desk that rewards me with a bar every time I click my mouse.

I want Steve Nash to practice his free throws with them, shooting at my mouth.

I want to travel back in time so I have more time to eat them.

I don’t want to write anymore because it means I’m not eating.

Welcome to stimulus season. If you’re stumped for ideas, check out what your fellow Americans did with it on How I Spent My Stimulus. You can even add your own stimulus story…

See excerpt below. (Thanks for the tip, Pam.)

Continuing in the spirit of Conference-Driven Development, I’m happy to announce the first public release of JRuby-Rack! You can use it to run Rails, Merb, or any Rack-compatible application inside a Java application server.

Also released today is Warbler 0.9.9, which has been updated to bundle JRuby-Rack.

In addition to providing as seamless a connection as possible between the servlet environment and Rack, JRuby-Rack (along with Warbler) is also bridging the gap between Ruby and Java web development. Some of the things it does are:

• Makes the Java servlet context and servlet request available to Ruby through special variables in the Rack environment
• Servlet request attributes from Java are passed through and available in the Rack environment. Request attributes can override Rack variables such as PATH_INFO, QUERY_STRING etc.
• Configures Rails deployment options such as page caching directories and session handling automatically and optimally for the servlet environment.

I’ve also included the beginnings of some extensions that should help integrate Rails with existing Java web frameworks, servlets, JSPs, and other code. For example, you can invoke a Rails request from within a JSP with a tag:

<jruby-rack:rails path="/projects/activity" params="layout=none"/>

You can set servlet and session attributes and forward to other servlets and JSPs from your Rails controllers:

class DemoController < ApplicationController
  def index
    servlet_request["hello"] = "world!"
    session["rails"] = "Visible to java!"
    forward_to "/attributes.jsp"
  end
end

and read them from within the servlet or JSP:

<dl>
  <dt><tt>servlet_request["hello"] | request.getAttribute("hello")</tt></dt>
  <dd><%= request.getAttribute("hello") %></dd>
  <dt><tt>session["rails"] | session.getAttribute("rails")</tt></dt>
  <dd><%= session.getAttribute("rails") %></dd>
</dl>

This is just the beginning of this kind of integration, and I’m interested where people take it. I think this provides a nifty way to start integrating Rails bits into existing applications or reuse existing Java web application code.

I’ve tagged the release with an 0.9 version number. I believe the bits are ready for serious use, but could use some help pounding out a few more bugs before calling it 1.0. So jruby -S gem install warbler today, try it out, and bring plenty of feedback to the JRuby user list!

MinneBar – one of the largest BarCamps in the world – is being held this Saturday at the University of Minnesota.

Several folks from the Rail Spikes/Slantwise/Tumblon orbit will be presenting.

• Jon will be speaking about Consulting for fun and profit based on his experience with Slantwise as well as demoing Tumblon.
• Norm will be sitting on the Design Coding Panel as well as leading a session on CSS frameworks
• Dan Grigsby (Rail Spikes alum) will be sitting on the State of the State: Technology in Minnesota panel and giving a talk called Screw You LAMP. Plus Virtualization.

Me? I’ll be helping run the thing and maybe giving a demo.

There’s 360+ people signed up already. If you’re in the area, you should definitely come. It’s going to be awesome.

Stumped for a last-minute Mother's Day gift? Here are two tech-type options I like:

"Blush"-colored earphones. These V-Moda Vibe earbuds sound great and create a good seal in the ear canal for use in a noisy environment. They are sold in lots of colors (I tested a "midnight blue" set; see red above); a feminine "blush" set went on sale at Apple retail outlets this week -- just in time for gift giving.

Pocket photo viewers. I spotted these in Target's Sunday circular. For $20, buy pocket viewers with space for dozens of photos. Keychain and card-like versions are available for Mom to throw in her purse and gape at pictures of her little darlings whenever she likes. Trying to get review units; stay tuned.

Update: Target sent me samples of the two pocket viewers and, well, I guess you get what you pay for. They aren't bad, but an iPod nano makes a better photo viewer with more capacity, if you can afford it.

I had to poke around in Windows Vista settings for the viewers to be properly recognized by their own software, too, which is kind of a hassle for any kids trying to set this up for their mothers beforehand.

There's apparently Macintosh software on the discs that come with the viewers. But these are mini-CDs, meaning they can't be used with the slot-loading optical drives in MacBooks, MacBook Pros and iMacs.

It's also a shame the drives don't just mount as USB volumes so you can add photos via drag-and-drop.

For about $20 each, though, the viewers do make a nifty gifts once you get pics onto 'em. Try cropping first, roughly to the dimensions of each viewer -- square for the one below, say -- for the best results.

A while back I mentioned my current project uses an p/invoke API that has literally hundreds of parameters. I'm trying to put a friendly .NET wrapper around it to make it easier (for lack of a better term) but it's been slow-going. My original time estimate is still doable, but it's such grunt work. This puts the Office APIs to shame. The design I'm putting together puts data together in classes (novel concept :) ) and makes the call cleaner, but it's still going to have 50-60 parameters to make the call from the .NET API.

It's work...but I feel kind of dirty coding against this. Seems like the p/invoke was written years and years ago, people just slogged new arguments into it, and no one took the time to really clean it up.

• He created the best bio I've ever seen.
• His comment was awesome.
• He created the best test name for a unit test (it was so good I was crying from the laughter): Trickly Assbuckles.

Kurt, you are awesomo.

Industry thought-leader David Chappell is making a four city tour during the month of May.  He will be presenting on "Understanding Software + Services: A Perspective".  David does a  fantastic job covering S+S and gibing insights into how that influences architecture of today's software.  He will also talk about the tools and guidance Microsoft is providing in this area and how you can leverage that when developing S+S solutions, including "in the cloud" services. David is a fantastic speaker and has an engaging style that is also easy to understand.  Seats are filling fast so don't wait - register today. Friend and colleague Denny Boynton was the driving force behind this - way to go Denny.

David will be speaking from 1:00 PM to 4:00 PM in the following cities on the following dates:

Location
Date
Registration Link

Southfield, Michigan
May 13th
[register]

Bloomington, Minnesota
May 15th
[register]

Downer's Grove, Illinois
May 20th
[register]

Houston, Texas
May 22nd
[register]

David is Principal of Chappell & Associates in San Francisco, California. David has been the keynote speaker for dozens of conferences and events in the U.S., Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Australia. His popular seminars have been attended by tens of thousands of developers, architects, and decision makers in forty countries. David’s books have been translated into ten languages and used regularly in courses at MIT, ETH Zurich, and many other universities. In his consulting practice, he has helped clients such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Stanford University, and Target Corporation adopt new technologies, market new products, train their sales staffs, and create business plans.

• I’m wondering how many blog posts, twitters, and photo uploads will happen at Minnebar….guessing 5k+ #

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• Hillary Clinton does not live on the same planet I do… Not sure if that’s a good thing or not #

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• Protecting Yourself From Suspicionless Searches While Traveling | Electronic Frontier Foundation
  "The Ninth Circuit's recent ruling (pdf) in United States v. Arnold allows border patrol agents to search your laptop or other digital device without limitation when you are entering the country"

NBC got snippy with Apple and pulled all its TV shows from the iTunes Store not long ago. Now it has begun selling episodes of "Battlestar Galactica" and other programs on Microsoft's rival Zune Marketplace e-store.

This new Zune Marketplace content is part of an update today to Zune players, which compete with Apple's iPods, and the Zune desktop software for Windows.

Along with NBC Universal content (including "BG" and "Eureka" from Sci Fi Channel), the new Zune Video Store has material from MTV, Turner Broadcasting and others.

Once I heard about this, I spent the better part of a day trying to download the the awesome second-season "Pegasus" episode of "BG," but I kept getting an error message.

I finally succeeded and put the episode on a couple of Zunes. But now I can't get the video to play on either device. Hmmm.

Regardless, the iTunes Store has a lot more stuff -- including Hollywood movies, as well as many more TV shows than the Zune store offers. Video looks nicer on Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch because of a bigger, cinema-style display.

Zune, you still have a long way to go.

Update: Three Battlestar Galactica episodes now appear to be playing normally on my Zunes after syncing or re-syncing to the devices.

The apparent solution to my problem: I need to wait until the download progress bar in the PC software switches from "100 percent" to "In Collection" before attempting a sync to a Zune.

I recently reviewed Photoshop Express, Adobe's simplified, Web-based counterpart to its famed Photoshop software for photo retouching and organizing.

Now Adobe is adding new online features (you should see them sometime tonight).

The best one is Flickr integration, meaning you can pull in your pictures from that popular service for editing. At launch, Photoshop Express did provide integration with Facebook, Photobucket and Google's Picasa Web Albums.

But Flickr integration automatically makes Photoshop Express a bigger deal because so many people rely on Yahoo's photo-sharing service, and many of those folks dislike its Picnik photo editor. Having Adobe's editor as an alternative rocks.

Photoshop Express also is adding