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

Friday, 2 August 2002

In an Ancient Game, Computing's Future. "Programming other board games has been a relative snap. Even chess has succumbed to the power of the processor. Five years ago, a chess-playing computer called Deep Blue not only beat but thoroughly humbled Garry Kasparov, the world champion at the time. That is because chess, while highly complex, can be reduced to a matter of brute force computation. Go is different. Deceptively easy to learn, either for a computer or a human, it is a game of such depth and complexity that it can take years for a person to become a strong player. To date, no computer has been able to achieve a skill level beyond that of the casual player. " [design notes] [Brett Morgan's Insanity Weblog] Go is an excellent game - a thorough mental workout. I highly recommend it to all technically minded people to learn, the rules may be simple but winning sure isn't. (For reference you can play it on Yahoo games, but to really experience Go you must own your own wooden Go box-board) Teaching a computer to play Go is a fascinating exercise - must read this article again. 5:14:40 PM  comment []      Jupiter shoots for the moon: "Named after Jupiter Jones, a character in Alfred Hitchcock's children's book series The Three Investigators, Jupiter Communications started its life as a two-person newsletter company fueled by credit cards and a lot of moxie, with a focus on interactive consumer technologies (which, in those days, were few)." An interesting old Salon article that Niki pointed me to. Who knew Jupiter wasn't named after a planet? 4:36:31 PM  comment []      JIRA Featuritis - Hey Mike, want an insane feature addition for JIRA? Here's one. Especially once we get pub/sub via Jabber. Well - Jabber pub/sub is doable under the existing architecture. You just need to write a Listener that sends Jabber messages. If the Jabber APIs (Muse?) are simple, it should be quite easy. What exactly is the feature addition though? RSS feed of 'solved' issues? You can already get that. Please explain.  [Brett Morgan's Insanity Weblog] 3:49:53 PM  comment []      Oracle9iAS is now J2EE 1.3 Certified - everyone knows that J2EE certification is a joke (in terms of compliance to the spec) but it's good for the bean counters. Hopefully if BEA has some competition their prices will become more reasonable, and they'll innovate more. (For the record, before all you Websphere addicts jump up and down, I don't consider having a few hundred thousand consultants running around selling a large, very out of date application server to be competition.) 3:39:09 PM  comment []      Tag Interface Component Library (TICL) 1.0 - it looks nice, but not nearly as nice as the .NET HTML form controls (which are awesome). To paraphrase the Joker, "When does J2EE get some of those wonderful toys?" [The Server Side] 3:35:54 PM  comment []      "You all have responsibility to be Winston Churchills, to be out there in front of anyone who will listen to say we are vulnerable. If a cyberwar comes, and come it will, we will be like the (Royal Air Force) and win." President Bush's security advisor to a Black Hat conference. I really liked the Apocalypse Now reference from GMSV too: If I had ten divisions of hackers like you, then our troubles here would be over very quickly 10:00:14 AM  comment []      Game Theory for Real People. 'Our simple models are no longer sufficient,' said an eminent game theorist, who is calling for human passions and quirks to be taken into account, too. Diana Michele Yap reports from Stony Brook, New York. In the abstract, game theory is an eccentric offshoot of mathematics that a talented undergrad studying differential equations could tackle. However, these days, game theory pops up not infrequently in published studies as a fashionable academic approach to wildly disparate fields of inquiry not known for their post-calculus math quotient, such as sports. A 1999 study from Tilburg University in the Netherlands, for example, found that the skills of soccer teams play a role in the outcome of soccer games. "Economists are renowned for stating the obvious," The Economist's discussion began, before allowing that game theory's insight that emotions unexpectedly complicate teams' strategies was "interesting." Anyone who has studied a bit of game theory will know that it's a wickedly interesting topic. I must read more on it. What books have you read on the topic? 1:28:27 AM  comment []      Dave Winer on Free Software: Dave Winer says, "Very little really usable software has come from people who are willing to work for $0." David Watson says, "Very little really usable software has come from people who are willing to work for six figures either, Dave." I think the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. 1:23:12 AM  comment []      WebGain seeks buyer for Java tools. The maker of Java development tools is hoping to sell off its technology before shutting down. An analyst says software developers should consider competitors' products. [CNET News.com] 1:17:35 AM  comment []      Attractive people planted in bars are being paid to chat you up...about the New Sony Ericsson phone. [MetaFilter] [Adam Curry] 1:17:13 AM  comment []      Motley Fool: "In 1999, Microsoft spent $2.9 billion in stock buybacks; in 2000, $4.9 billion; and last year, a whopping $6.1 billion, all of which intended to hide the dilution from stock option grants." Ooops. [Scripting News] 1:16:29 AM  comment []      10 Reasons We Need Java 3.0. It's now seven years since Sun posted the first public release of Java, and it is showing its age. There are many parts of Java that everyone agrees should be fixed, but can't be for reasons of backwards compatibility. Elliotte Rusty Harold imagines a "Java 3" that jettisons the baggage of the last decade, and proposes numerous changes to the core language, virtual machine, and class libraries. [O'Reilly Network Articles] Fascinating read - I would dearly love Java 3 to be free of all the cruft. I doubt it will ever happen though, too many people would bitch and moan. 1:13:53 AM  comment []      commons sql is hopefully gonna be a little tool that given a relational schema model, specified in XML like this can then be parsed into beans and used to auto-generate SQL DDL for different databases, generate HTML documentation, Java beans and OJB repository files etc. Then tools like Velocity or Jelly can be used to do the code generation. [james strachan's musings] So just to check I'm not confused - you're using a Java bean to generate an XML file that represents a set of SQL statements, which are then generated into HTML, more Java beans or OJB files using Velocity templates or a Jelly Script. Does that seem overly convoluted to anyone else? Flexible and cool maybe, but complex. I still think the problem with most SQL-Java-XML-Object frameworks is that they don't handle multiple databases very well. OFBiz field definitions and entity aliases are a very neat way to handle this IMHO. 1:05:46 AM  comment []      Axion. Spotted Axion today for the first time (thanks for mentioning it Jason!). I've always used Hypersonic or these days its new incarnation, HSqlDb, up to now. It turns out that Axion will be moving to Apache in a few weeks at db.apache.org so I think its time I tried it out... [james strachan's musings] I'm not sure what is scarier - that there is yet another Open Source embeddable Java RDBMS (can't they all just co-operate and move three times as fast?), or that db.apache.org exists at all. 12:59:47 AM  comment []      Same Job, Different Cubicle chronicles the rise and fall of VA Linux / VA Software. One side of options you didn't consider - tax! "Arden estimates it cost him $25,000 a year to be a VA Linux employee." 12:49:36 AM  comment []      XWT. XWT. Josh Points to XWT, the XML Windowing Toolkit. It lets you write remote applications -- applications that run on a server, yet can "project" their user interface onto any computer, anywhere on the Internet. It already speaks XML and uses XML-RPC and has a mail client already written, modifying it to interface with the XMT API (or, the SOAP version that will emerge from it) should not be too difficult and would get us a quick cross platform client. The only problem is that XWT is significantly slower than an app already on your computer, and, on my mac at least, it tends to just open blank windows from jar files that I can only kill from the command line. ew. [weblog.masukomi.org] XWT looks like it could be very sexy. The example mail webapp thingy works very well. Looks very XP'ish (don't know if thats good/bad/indifferent). Unfortunately the example widgets demo seems to be frying. I suspect that java 1.4 running through mozilla is just too much for the little blighter. Oh well. [Brett Morgan's Insanity Weblog] XWT is very cool stuff. It's like applet-meets-webstart-meets-activex client that communicates via XML-RPC or SOAP to create a native GUI with a web backend. It reminds me of Sash but a little more cross platform (and without the awesome Sash IDE). 12:36:35 AM  comment []      Oh man The Ellen Feiss store is going too far [dive into mark] 12:12:43 AM  comment []      Expect More is Sam Ruby at his best: Given the distributed nature of the internet, what is of paramount importance is that systems be designed and implemented in manners that enable change to be accommodated in both upwards and downwards compatible manners.  12:06:15 AM  comment []