BillDay.com

The UN/ITU duking it out with ICANN? OK, this story’s got quite a bit of spin in it, but it’s worth a read anyway: “Tug-Of-War for Control of Net Set for Rome Summit“.

Interested in Linux powered cell phones? Read LinuxDevices.com ’s coverage of the new Motorola A768 to learn more about Moto’s plans.

Deviceforge.com has published an Intel whitepaper introducing Ultra Wideband (UWB) wireless. Worth a read especially if you’re unfamiliar with UWB and its possibilities.

Take the Sun Certified Mobile Application Developer exam for free on/before 7 March 2004.

Read all about it in my java.net blog.

WebServices.org has summarized several of Sun’s 3GSM announcements. J2ME related technologies highlighted in the announcements include:

• Java Technology for Smartphones HotSpot Implementation (based upon the CLDC HI), offering up to six times the speed of the previous CLDC reference implementation while supporting the JTWI and J2ME WSA specifications
• WS-I compliant J2ME WSA supporting XML processing and XML-RPC via JSR 172

Sun also recently announced that there are now more than 250 million J2ME enabled mobile phones from 31 manufacturers deployed in over 75 carrier networks in the world today.

Note: Smartphones is used here in the generic sense of the word (high end, multiply capable cell phone devices) rather than any particular mobile phone maker’s OS (don’t you wish that particular vendor hadn’t decided to abscond with the generic term to refer to their own proprietary OS?). Also, for more from 3GSM, see also my related blog entry on Intel’s and Nokia’s 3GSM news.

News from the 3GSM World Congress in Cannes on Intel ’s mobile phone designs and deals. It’s interesting to compare this with Nokia’s 3GSM messaging.

It’s been a good long while since I’ve been downhill skiing, at least five years if I’ve counted right. I’m not sure how it came to pass that it’s been that long, other than I’ve been very busy evangelizing J2ME. Anyway I’ve been getting the skiing “itch” of late and I wanted to try out some non-ski gear on the slopes, so I convinced mi esposa that the time was right and we headed up to Lake Tahoe last weekend.

We took the cable car to High Camp at Squaw Valley and the gondola up to the Deck at Heavenly, but when it came time to hit the slopes, I went with my favorite, Alpine Meadows.

Why Alpine? Great snow, nice views of the lake (from both the front and the back sides, as long as you get up high enough), $39 full day lift tickets (cheaper than many Tahoe resorts’ half day tickets), and best of all, all the skiing and boarding you want without the distractions of most of the other resorts. If all of that weren’t enough, check out how much mountain you get without the overcrowding you see in so many other places:

Alpine rocks!

Excellent news from the mobile Java front: The Register reports on Unicom’s selection of JTWI for its mobile development platform (learn more about JTWI and its relationship to MIDP 2.0, MMA, WMA, etc. here). J2ME comes to 90 million+ more Chinese mobile users!

Tips and tricks for using MIDP 2.0’s Push capabilities via SMS.

Read all about it in my java.net blog.

As I mentioned previously via jGuru, Nokia, Warner Bros. et al have announced the CMLA recently as part of their mobile anti-piracy efforts for movies and music.

Wondering what exactly the CMLA intends to do? Thankfully they’ve launched a site, CM-LA.com to help explain. Their one sentence overview:

CMLA is a licensing and compliance entity formed to provide a full solution implementation of the OMA DRM version 2.0 interoperability specification.

Whew, what a mouthful! I hope in the end this doesn’t boil down to “How the music and movie industries killed fair use.”

It’s definitely an interesting idea in theory, but will it turn out to be a good idea or bloody dangerous in practice? You be the judge.

RealNetworks adds Telefonica Moviles, Wind, TIM, 02, and TeliaSonera to an already impressive list of carriers using its mobile audio/video streaming technology.

Read the details in the Reuters/Yahoo news story “RealNetworks Signs New Carriers in Handset Battle“.

Excellent news from the ever-smaller-gadget front: Texas Instruments Sees Phone-On-Chip by Year’s End.

Confirming my ongoing suspicion that cellcams are about to go big, Canon, Seiko Epson, and HP have announced they are forming a consortium to create a standard for printing photos directly from cellcams.

Together, these three manufacture the vast majority of the world’s consumer printers. It’s a fairly safe bet that their new consortium, MIPC, will succeed. If it does, what then?

It may be a while before cellcam prints approach the quality of dedicated digicam prints, but one way or another, approach them they will. And with the “back pressure” MIPC will be indirectly putting on the cellcam makers to provide even higher quality image capture, things could get very interesting, very quickly. HP and Canon’s printer divisions may love this announcement, but I bet their digicam engineers are sweating a bit.

Canon has announced their line-up of new digicams and it includes the one I’ve been waiting for, the PowerShot S500 (aka Digital IXUS 500 or IXY Digital 500, depending or where in the world you buy it).

The S500 is the 5MPixel follow-on to the S100/200/400 series cameras. After reading about the announcement and its stats from Digital Photography Review, I’m ready to buy one. My problem: they won’t be available until late April according to Amazon.

I’ll guess I’ll just have to wait. Hey, maybe I should buy some accessories to pass the time(?). A car charger might come in handy…hhhmm…

PalmSource has joined palmOne in licensing IBM’s J2ME implementation.

Read all about it in my java.net blog.

I adapted the J2ME Archive (and also my copyright notice and Grid Archive, btw) to use the new BillDay.com v2.0 look and feel. I’ll continue tweaking this in the coming days/weeks, but the basics are ready now.

Previous update: Dec 2003-Feb 2004

Must read History Of The Internet. Brilliant, especially for us old timers that have been around on the Net for a while…or anyone who’s wished a pox upon AOL for all of those annoying CDs!

Following up on my previous post of recommended reads, here’s a list of recommended movies including why I like ‘em:

• Casablanca, 1941, is my favorite movie. The plot is amazing, the villains conniving, and each character has that certain depth that makes them seem realistic. The Marseillaise scene gets me every time!
• La Femme Nikita, 1991, gets my nod for best foreign language film. Of course, it helps that the language is French, which I just so happen to be conversant in. Nonetheless, the curves which this flic throws the viewer continue to reveal new detail across many showings.
• The Ghost and the Darkness, 1996. Ever dreamed about a trip to Africa for a big game safari? Then you should check out this harrowing true tale from the late 1800s. Based upon the true story of British engineer Lt. Col. John Patterson and his bridge workers at Tsavo, Kenya, as recounted in his autobiographical book, The Man-Eaters of Tsavo.
• Lawrence of Arabia, 1962. Another fantastic movie based upon a real life epic, this one the story of T. E. Lawrence. Read his first person accounts in the widely acclaimed Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

I’m finding that I can place many sections of BillDay.com into a better location within BillDay.com v2.0. One of those sections, my “favorites” page of recommended books, sites, movies, and more, should now be much easier to search since I’ve created a Recommended category in my blog for recommended items.

I’ve included previous recommendations below, all lumped together. In the future, I’ll link to/recommend things as I encounter them.

Previous recommendations:

• Selling the Dream: How to Promote Your Product, Company, or Ideas And Make a Difference Using Everyday Evangelism, by Guy Kawasaki. Guy’s book has a lengthy title but succinct delivery: It goes a very long way to explain what evangelism is and why it is increasingly important in our technology-driven world. An oldie but a goodie, highly recommended to anyone who asks “What is a Technology Evangelist, anyway?“.
• The Mythical Man Month, by Fred Brooks, published by Addison Wesley. This is a classic tale of managment philosophy and software engineering. It contains some of the best descriptions of human behavior and engineering intuition ever distilled into book format. A must read for anyone managing, or working on, complex projects of any sort.
• Know Your Enemy: Revealing the Security Tools, Tactics, and Motives of the Blackhat Community by The Honeynet Project et al. Ever wondered how people actually break into computers and networks? Read this and you’ll have a good idea. A practical, hands-on oriented book.
• Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier. If you’re only going to buy one book on crypto fundamentals, this should be it. A great book, and a great door stop: Yes, it is very bulky, but in a good way!
• A Technical Introduction to Digital Video, by Charles Poynton, published by John Wiley & Sons. A thorough reference book. Covers a variety of computer graphics as well as analog and digital video topics. Includes a very good chapter on filtering and sampling, giving an in depth explanation of aliasing effects. If you deal with computer graphics or video, this book is strongly recommended.
• Introduction to Computer Graphics, by Foley et al, published by Addison Wesley. This abridged version of Computer Graphics: Principles and Practices (from Addison Wesley’s Systems Programming series) is an outstanding introduction to both 2D and 3D computer graphics. There are plenty of equations and theory for the mathematician, but even better for folks like me (hackers), there is a nice sprinkling of C code and example images. If you need the most comprehensive reference, go with the unabridged version (all 1175 pages of it!), but if you are looking for an introduction, I
  recommend this book.
• A Programmer’s Guide to Sound, by Tim Kientzle, published by Addison Wesley. Covers the basics of the generation and perception of sound, then shifts into a discussion of the various formats in common use by software engineers and hackers. This book serves well as a compendium of audio knowledge scattered around in specs, standards, and papers. An excellent audio intro.
• Freedom in Exile: The Autobiography of the Dalai Lama, by Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet. Published in the US and Canada by HarperCollins. This look inside the mind of the spiritual and temporal leader of Tibet provides the best lesson in human compasion and dignity that I have ever read or seen. Recommended for anyone, anywhere.