rebelutionary
Mike Cannon-Brookes on Java, J2EE, OSX, Open Source, Australia, Atlassian, Bug Tracking, JIRA and more...

Tuesday, 28 May 2002

Handspring: Treo 270 - wow, now imagine blogging on the run with this! (if only they sold these in Australia for a reasonable price and we had a pervasive wireless Internet connectivity) One can dream. 10:40:34 PM  comment []      The Dickens of EBay. "The goal, simply put, is to disguise content in marketing, via eBay," Thompkins said. [Wired] 10:32:15 PM  comment []      Well, I have a live Internet connection, here on the Pacific waters of British Columbia. It's real slow and kind of iffy, but hey: it's over wi-fi on a cruise boat, so it's kind of like the dancing dog: what's remarkable is that it works at all. [Doc Searls Weblog] 6:31:03 PM  comment []      The discussion is now raging - it looks like I've thrown a lot of shit at the proverbial fan. <ian> we should devangelize tomcat <BookMkMan> devagelize! I love it! what a word! :) <ian> I know, I just came up with it :) <ian> fitting, dont you think? What do we think of Ian's new word? Can technologies be devangelized? Or do you really just need to evangelize something else? 12:52:41 PM  comment []      Tailoring Java Applications for Mac OS X. Apple Technical Note TN2042: "This Technical Note describes techniques and methods that Java developers on Mac OS X can employ to provide a 'complete Macintosh experience' in their Java applications on Mac OS X. It is also intended for Java developers from other platforms looking to bring their existing applications to Mac OS X as flawlessly as possible." Someone send this to IDEA! [ranchero.com] [Mac Net Journal] 10:14:16 AM  comment []      Doing a Backflip. It's basically an online bookmarking service.  You add a button to your browser tool bar which you click when you want to grab a page.  You can then describe and categorize the page in your BackFlip directory (kind of like your own Yahoo directory). Wow - how the world turns full circle. I was one of the two founders of The BookmarkBox which I would like to say pioneered the online bookmarking space. Backflip came on the scene later, as one of our largest competitors - before we sold out to Blink.com (which used to be good, sadly now it is popup-riddled and unusable). [Curiouser and curiouser!] 10:09:13 AM  comment []      Why is it called Radio? [Curiouser and curiouser!] 10:05:53 AM  comment []      Matt Mower has some interesting ideas about relating blogs together. [Curiouser and curiouser!] 10:04:32 AM  comment []      David (the Roller one - there are too many Davids!) emailed to thank me for taking the time to write up Is Tomcat Crap?. Re-reading it this morning, I seem to have focussed on raw performance more than I wanted to. If you want to look at it another way, forget performance! The speed of development with Orion or Resin blows Tomcat out of the water for me. To continue the metaphor - imagine a modern, nuclear powered submarine versus a mid-1940's U-boat. I think the problem may be that Open Source fanatics (and don't get me wrong, I am one) often don't take the time to try other products, or perhaps don't have the balls to admit that their product is sub-optimal and needs a serious kick in the pants? (After all it's Open Source - it must be good right? Wrong.) Writing a web container is not about complying with the specification. You need to do that just to get to the starting line. Finishing the race is about developer productivity, tools, and overall niceness - and it's here is where Tomcat is most lacking. Raw speed can be easily improved - run a profiler and fix the 20% of your code which takes 80% of the execution time. Making people who use your software productive and saving them time each day? This takes much longer. Want to prove me wrong? Take a challenge - go download Orion and use it for a week (it's free for evaluation so don't worry about licensing). Then come back and tell me you still would use Tomcat if all else were equal. 9:31:34 AM  comment []      David has done some analysis and found that Yahoo's search results are more useful than Google's. (Note that he's not saying more relevant, just more useful) 9:21:20 AM  comment []      Apple 'iBrowser' insurgency denied by AOL techs. They save the most interesting piece of analysis for the end: And integration costs are the most underrated in the industry. Integration costs are why Microsoft won't win corner-stores over to make smartphones (see here for more detail) that overthrow Nokia, Ericsson and Sony, and why Dell can't make a huge SMP that challenges Sun, HP or IBM, even though they've got scale, and a hundred other reasons to succeed. But nonetheless I'd love to see an iBrowser and I hope Chimera succeeds. [The Register] 9:15:30 AM  comment []      Laptop with crabs? El Reg always brings humour to the news, that's why we love him (it?). [The Register] 9:09:02 AM  comment []      Well it's been a long day so I don't have a lot of time / energy to respond to David but here it is - Is Tomcat Crap?  12:53:59 AM  comment []      Home / Mono: "Jesus has contributed the beginning of the SoapFormatter." I know there's a perfectly rational reason for this, but it just struck me as poetic that He might be helping Mono over Microsoft. (Oh, and clearly He's a SOAP guy not a REST one - that should settle a few arguments) 12:04:46 AM  comment []