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KDE 4.2 Released

KDE 4.2?  Does it matter to you?

I recently tried KUbuntu live CD (8.10).  After being a KDE fan for a long time I figured it would be great to try the 4.1 version and see how it worked.  

Unfortunately, I found some of the basic things I wanted to do very confusing.  Not impossible, but after trying Ubuntu and seeing the simplicity I love in my Mac I was a bit underwhelmed.  Taking the 4.2 release for a test ride should be interesting.  There has been a lot negative press on the 4.x release – maybe 4.2 will address some of the problems.

Here is one of the big reasons I think KDE 4.2 might matter.  Each release there is a little better support for Windows.  I think a lot of Windows users that are using open source applications would love the opportunity to have a new window manager (a popular thing among us theming geeks for years [Sorry Frank, I know you don’t get this part]).  Ars Technica has a very interesting review / test drive of what worked, and what didn’t.  It’s a very interesting option that I think I’ll go try for myself.  If you are on Windows XP and planning to skip Vista but would like an eye-candy upgrade this might be the free ticket you were looking for.  I’ll add a comment on my results…

Lotus Connections 2.5

LotusSphere 2009 is going on this week in Orlando. I was unable to attend, but I am very excited to see some sneak-peek announcements this morning about the only Lotus product I care about, Lotus Connections.

Picking a base product for any service offering is a lot like jumping on a train. At the end of the day it’s a leap and if you make it, well, you probably got lucky. I’ve been busy working with the 2.0 version of this product and it seems at every turn I’m having “close but no cigar” moments. I’ve found myself adding patchwork to get some of the capabilities and look I want, often saying, “darn it’s so close!”. From what I’ve seen on this blog, the 2.5 version will add many of the things I’ve been hoping for.

It drives me crazy when systems organize information on a web site by functional views rather than usage scenarios. Can you imagine when you went to Facebook if you had to see “Picture updates” then go to another location for “Status Updates”, and then another for “Profile Updates”? You want to see everything happening, and in Facebook that’s called the “News Feed”. Looks like LC 2.5 will be adding that and we can leave behind the individual widgets on Homepage. Unfortunately it looks like the Community pages are still grouped by system, but we can easily write a widget to work off of a custom aggregate feed.

Communities is picking up a lot of much needed functionality from the screenshots. File sharing, Wiki, smells like Quickr. I’m not sure why the two products haven’t merged yet because they are so complimentary. If the Wiki is the Quickr wiki I really hope there will still be an integration plan for Confluence. Confluence is the leader in this space and many people have huge installations they won’t migrate. A simple way to map a community to a Confluence space + some member management would neatly fit the bill. Now that there is widget support I could create a widget for displaying Confluence content (oh, I have one…)

Not much information on the new forum support in Communities. The current forum isn’t really much better than FB and is too light for serious use. It needs to be top-notch. It needs to have Feed support by community, not topic centric.

Profiles is getting a “wall” which I guess in the corporate world will be called “Buzz”. There is a “status” but I wonder how Twitter-like it will be. Seems more like facebook status than twitter. I feed Twitter into FB and use it to update FB but also use it for conversations in twitterland.

Thanks Luis for the sneak peek, we’ll be waiting for a beta version 🙂

Buzzwords Can Hurt

You’ve heard the old saying about “Sticks and Stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” right? I think we know that’s not true, but it’s also wrong when it comes to buzzwords in the Enterprise. Want to see your corporate leadership and legal department run to the hills and prepare for war? Say these words together, “social, media, intranet”.

“Social Media” is a buzzword. Essentially social media sites are just web applications that allow people to interact by sharing. The sharing may be in many forms (just a few for example):

• Conversations – Forums, Blogs, Twitter
• Web Site Links – Bookmark sites (delicous), News sites (digg, reddit)
• Documents – Wikipedia, WetPaint, Google Docs
• Personal Information – Linked in, Facebook, MySpace
• Pictures – Flickr, Picassa

So choose your words wisely, especially the buzzwords! Another term your leadership and lawyers might find far more palatable is “employee contributed content”. Enterprise Social Media could be called “Collaboration 2.0 – Employee contributed content that drives knowledge management. Just makes you want to puke and go work for a start-up? Dittos. 🙂

Do you know your co-workers?

As I’ve started to follow my co-worker’s life data feeds (blogs, twitter, facebook) I find myself enjoying people at another level. Someone who was just “another person” on that “weekly call” is now a person that did something interesting, or just had a baby, or ___________.

Think of the opportunities, and the scary things.

  • Your former boss-from-hades requests access to your facebook page. Think he’ll know those point-haired comments are about him?
  • You start following a leader at your company on twitter. Now you are better prepared for that next meeting!
  • A leader at your company starts following you online! Well this could be scary but think of it as a way to look smart (if you are) to somebody that might matter to your career.
  • A co-worker tweets about some personal views. This may be a good reminder to avoid a topic – or occasion to have lunch to discuss something you have in common.
  • You are well networked from LinkedIn to twitter to ________. When the next corporate cuts come you’ll look more appealing to future employers.

JavaOne 2008 – Day 3

Session One was a loser. Automation of MDA to J2EE (TS-7466). While a potentially interesting topic it wasn’t apparent from the description that this was basically a vendor demonstration. Those things should somehow be noted better. Every five years I sit through (as a skeptic) and listen to the model driven generated application idea. I’m always disappointed, and was again. Most of the time was spent on how the tool worked under the covers without really giving us a picture of what it did. We basically never got a real idea of what the tool did so the presenter told the crowd to just visit the booth to see that part. Worst session of JavaOne for me.

Next I went to an awesome session on Mylyn (TS-6421). I think Mylyn used to be Mylar which we trialed a couple years ago. It’s come a long way and is a great platform to track what you are doing in the IDE and just show you what you need to see to complete your task. It has awesome integration with tracking systems (JIRA, etc) and even includes the ability to organize emails and more into a work “episode”. Since so many of us context switch a lot this is a huge help. We’ll be incorporating this tool into our development efforts very soon.

I was signed up for an OSGi session, but was lured to a presentation on how to create your own DSL (Domain Specific Language). It was very well done, by two guys from Verisign. I think Sun should be scheduling more talks from accomplished IT guys at different companies like this (good presentation skills). Did I mention I’m available for next year? 🙂 They covered not only how you can invoke scripting languages from Java but also how to create your own. They made a clear case for where this was useful and walked through the basics to do it with a few examples. I didn’t follow it all but I got the basics. Very useful – made me think about a card game I’ve been wanting to create.

Next I visited a session on how to choose a web framework (TS-6457). Since I am involved in a lot of technology evaluations this was actually a good session. He started out with the typical criteria (some I had not thought of) and added in some of his unique ideas. I really found this useful. Then he reviewed several of the frameworks and gave his thoughts. I think he messed up Struts 2 – he treated it like a new project. AFAIK it is just a new version of WebWorks with a new name, I could be wrong. Overall a good session but it would have been better if he went deeper on three different frameworks instead of several similar ones.

Met with JBoss on a variety of topics and then headed out to dinner with my team. Good day, I’m ready to go home, Java has worn me out and I can’t drink anymore of it! Missed Bob’s Guice BOF 🙁

JavaOne 2008 – Day 2

The day started out with a keynote from Oracle. Some interesting stuff. The mentality of Oracle hasn’t changed much over the years. They provide an IDE, runtimes, database integration that is very seamless but hopelessly proprietary. It’s all “standards based” meaning where they use standard plumbing and interfaces. However the key thing here is LOCK-IN. They have tons of Java code to make all the magic happen and it all starts with “com.oracle”. So do you use the magic (and their tool), embrace it, debug it, or just learn to use open source solutions? Very slick Oracle, but no thanks. They ran way over time too.

The first session I attended was a panel (PAN-5435). This was a fun idea for a panel. They had 4 script language presenters (Groovy, JRuby, Jython, and Scala). They had 3 rounds to show similar features with demos and you voted on your cell for the winner in each round and a final winner. I think the winners in order were JRuby, Groovy, Scalia, Jython). If all the presenters had done their labs it would have been better (some didn’t do the example they were given). I would have done JavaScript probably as well. Decent session, fun.

Next I missed the Hands on Struts2 session for a work-related conference call. After grabbing some food I hooked up with Bob Lee for some coffee and we discussed a variety of interesting topics from Android to twitter. Always fun to talk with Bob – hopefully we can get you to move back to St. Louis some day!

The next session was a JRuby versus Groovy – TS-6050 (noticing a trend?) This was arguably the best session I’ve attended. The presenter (Neal Ford) was highly knowledgeable, gave a ton of thought of how to compare, and was an excellent speaker (bring this guy back Sun on any topic!!!). Bottom line is Groovy is a lot like Java and carries some of the verbosity and restrictions. It is an excellent choice for many applications. Things I liked about Groovy: Operator Overloading, closures, ignores private (great test tool), dynamic… JRuby had a ton of things I liked but not very “Java”. The ability to layer a DSL for a framework, expressions, mix-ins (modules), mature, very cross platform (it generated a distributable exe and app file). I think the JRuby language, save the fact it is very different than Java, has a lot of things going for it over Groovy. Top notch presentation and session, I learned a ton of stuff that would have taken a lot of time to sift through on my own.

The next really interesting session was something I deal with a lot in my job – open source – and the politics of it. What really is open source? How do trademarks affect it? Is M$ shared source really “open source”? What is OSI and how do they categorize open source licenses? Those were some of the questions I got answers for at TS-7064. Great advice to corporations participating in open source. Anytime you can see Simon Phipps speak it is worth it.

We spent some time in the Pavilion with some vendors, one interesting tool was project Wonderworld. They have some very interesting ways to use SecondLife type of environments for corporate/business collaboration and visualization. Very great ideas but I think a bit before their time.

We were fortunate enough to have dinner with some of the JRE engineering team (compiler, gc, and other developers). That was very interesting. I got to ask a java compiler guy all my crazy stupid questions (well a few of them). Very interesting to hear some of the guts of how the new JRE (6 update 10) works with the smaller JVM bundle you can bootstrap with. Some of this is way overdue and exciting to see it happen. My own company is so far behind the latest releases I know it will be a while before we can use it.

Time for a Flogging

Ever feel like you are wearing the corporate version of a “kick-me” sign? I’ve found it very interesting dealing with the legal/management concerns some companies have about concepts like blogging. Most companies have knowledge management tools that allow for searching, searchable repositories (often web accessible), and gads of Intranet pages created by goodness-knows-what (you’ve heard of Sharepoint right?).

It’s all okay, just don’t use the “b word”. Don’t understand? Watch the video.

I love the last idea – let’s implement that in every corporate blog across the country!

I can see the pointy-haired boss inviting Dilbert to his office. He asks him to implement “flogging”. Dilbert smiles wondering if it could be true.

Where to be Social?

Social networking tools are becoming a commodity. Look at the script panel of any Internet hosting company and you’ll see blogging tools, interactive content management systems, wikis, and more. There are also a host of free software service sites. Blogger.com and wordpress.com are just a couple examples in the blog space. These online services offer something more than software – they provide an audience!

Through the front page of these sites, taxonomy, and search people can find your content. These sites also are starting to provide integration with other social media through open APIs like OpenSocial.

So given the option of self-hosting a site or using online services what should a person or organization choose? While there are a lot of variables to consider, I think integrating online services into a hosted community is a great option. Maybe your thought leaders should have a blog on blogger.com and incorporate that into your website with RSS/Atom. That gets your organization a place on the larger internet but still allows the content to be part of your custom website.

I think smaller organizations and communities can greatly benefit from hosting a package that best fits their needs. That might be a wiki, SN Site (PHPzabi, Dolphin, etc) or CMS (like Drupal or Joomla). Using blog feeds, IM presence indicators, and flexible profile options allow for the greatest community customizations while embracing what is already available as a service on the web.

This opinion is subject to change next week 😉

Stupid Google Map Tricks

I’ve seen all these great applications of google maps, read a bit about the API, and think someday I’ll try that out. Well I got a key and started playing around with it. Quickly I was overwhelmed with JavaScript. I’m a Java programmer and we just don’t get along with JavaScript (well I don’t). I do a bit of research and uncover an easy to use JavaScript library that does everything I need AND more with NO programming. Part of me says, “what’s the fun with that?”. The other part says, “Where is the download link?”

Check it out, neat tutorial format too.

Cingular 8125, A2DP, Stereo Bluetooth headsets

I recently got a really great set of Bluetooth stereo headphones. I have a bluetooth PocketPC Phone (Cingular 8125) loaded with Yahoo Music (The online music rental plan for $9.99/mo). Sounds like I’m heading for a great thing…

I did some research on this setup. I found a few people in newsgroups saying it worked great. The headphones arrived. I had the latest ROM from Cingular, but I couldn’t get the headset to work for music. Back to the forums to figure out what is going on.

Turns out there really isn’t any ROM support for A2Dp, except some custom ROMS (no thanks). The folks at HTC (the manufacturer) provide a A2DP stack for M$ bluetooth – for the Tornado phone. It is a few DLL files and some registry changes. It also “works” for the Wizard (8125). Works, just like “Greatness” is a relative word.

After resolving I was going to have to use a hack I made the updates, and it worked. I tuned into one of my favorite bands, David Chowder Band – sounds great. Then I head over to some instrumental music. Hmm… What’s that instrument in the background? Is that some kind of modulating electronic HISS? Yup. Back to the forums.

The hiss is apparently some sort of byproduct of the Microsoft bluetooth stack as other PocketPC devices with the Widcomm stack can tweak the sound out. Do I keep the $100 headphones or … ebay them!?

Here is the place to get the A2DP hack ->
http://www.htcwizardweb.net/node/304
This is a CAB with all the registry changes and DLL’s. Just register first, otherwise you can’t download the file in the thread.

Here are some tuning tips, YMMV ->
http://www.firstloox.org/forums/showthread.php?p=60192

Last bit of advice? OVERCLOCK! I run mine at 240Mhz and it makes up for the bluetooth stack CPU usage.