Andy has some words for Microsoft. You owe it to yourself to read this. Good stuff.
But Microsoft won't go for it. They have a weak position technically
and a strong one from a marketing standpoint and not the stones to
answer OUR questions. (And oddly I was semi-favorable to .NET at the
start of this).
So what of it? Are you men or are you microSOFTies. Lets face it, you
couldn't stomach a fair fight.
I did some research this morning to see if I could figure out how to connect to the internet using my laptop, Bluetooth and my phone. My hope is to not use an ISP, but rather to use the built-in connectivity of AT&T's mMode service. I found these comments that include links to some articles on how to do this. I might have to try this tonight or at least preserve it here for future reference.
I also wanted to find out how to upgrade my phone's firmware so it could support zoom for it's camera. I was disappointed to find out that I have to go through the following seemingly painful process:
- Call Tech Support at (800) 374-2776 and get a reference number.
- Call the Sony Ericsson Repair Center at (651) 229-5862 and schedule my phone for repair.
- Send them my phone. Turnaround time is 3-5 business days once they receive it.
Ugh, granted I don't use the thing much, so living without it for two weeks wouldn't be too bad - but it is nice to have it around. Too bad I can't just download the software and upgrade - I wonder if they're physically replacing some embedded hardware? I asked if I could take it to an AT&T Store, but no dice - this is the only way to get zoom. Damn.
Last night's meeting was great. The first presentation on TINI was very cool and showed how you could telnet/ftp into this SIM (RAM-style) device and run Java on it. Granted, it only supports JDK 1.1 and lacks some cool stuff, but it can run a servlet engine and even serve up web pages through a servlet. This was all designed to demonstrate how Java can run on embedded devices. The speaker thought that embedded devices would be the next big thing for Java. IMO, he has to - especially since he seems to have dedicated a lot of work to learning about it. In reality, I hope it is the next big thing, Java (and our job market) could use a real boost.
The second preso was by our good friend Erik Hatcher. It was the first time I've met Erik in person, so that was definitely the highlight of the night. He's a very down-to-earth fellow and gave a great presentation. If I didn't learn so much about XDoclet in the past couple of months, I would've been wowed. I did learn that I should replace my // TODO: comments with @todo in the JavaDoc so I can use XDoclet to generate a JavaDoc-like website of my todo list. I'm definitely looking forward to the next time he speaks at the NoFluff Symposium.
Moblogging went fairly well as you can tell from the pictures. These photos look pretty awful on the camera, but turned out decent on this site. I'm heading off on a trip to Chelan, Washington this weekend and will hopefully snap some more pics (pending connectivity).
