Interesting facts, and speculation, about Nokia’s moves outside the home country of Finland: Nokia plans up to 300 staff at New York site.
Jonathan Schwartz’s take on the Big News.
On the potential effects on open source and Linux, Schwartz says:
I’ve seen some writers suggest that this is anti-Linux. To me, this is the single biggest accelerant in assuring the success of the most interoperable alternative to the Microsoft Windows PC, called the Java Desktop System (JDS). And that is all about working with the community to drive Linux and Java.
One would have thought this was an April Fool’s joke if it had broken a day earlier: “Microsoft Makes Peace with Sun“.
The long term implications certainly aren’t clear. Much of what’s been reported will no doubt prove wrong or only partially true. Whatever comes from this, it’s definitely an interesting, if unexpected, development.
Peace for our time? We’ll see.
BillDay.com is now WAP/WML enabled.
I’ve been wanting to provide a stripped down version of my site for mobile phone users for some time. It only makes sense that a wireless guy and J2ME evangelist would have a mobile version of his site, right?
I’ve tinkered with WAP-enabling little bits of my site before, but my blogification of BillDay.com finally gave me the means to do things right. Thanks to my favorite WordPress hack, WP WAP, you can now browse my blog from a WAP phone via: https://billday.com/wp-wap.php
(You can find this link in the future from the Other Formats and Syndication section in the right gutter.)
I’ve included a couple of screenshots of the mobile version of the site to give you a feel for how BillDay.com behaves on a WAPified gadget. When you first connect you’ll see a homepage containing a listing of recent blog entries as shown; select an entry’s title to load and read the entry. If you click on either of the provided screenshots, you’ll see what would happen if you selected the first entry to read.
Want to browse the mobile site yourself but don’t have a WAP phone? Download the Nokia Mobile Browser Simulator or use Gelon.net’s online Wapalizer or your WAP simulator of choice to open the WAP URL above. And if you do try out the site via WAP, please let me know what you think.
BTW, the main site is valid XHTML 1.0, so if your mobile browser supports XHTML, you may not even need to bother with the WAP version.
Not sure how my site made it into Matt’s rarified Notables list, but I’m honored. Thanks for all the great work on WordPress and for the link, Matt!
As co-spec lead James Strachan reported in his blog, JSR 241, “The Groovy Programming Language” has been approved for JCP development. And with a unanimous vote!
What’s Groovy, you might ask? Get the answers from:
- Groovy central, groovy.codehaus.org
- Neil Ellis’ Just Groovy
- Mike Spille’s excellent overview, “Groovy: First Contact“
Interested in joining the expert group? Click here to apply, but don’t worry, even if you aren’t in the EG, James has promised a public mailing list RSN.
My take: With this JSR, Groovy joins PHP on the list of non-Java languages for which Java Platform interfaces/implementations are being officially sorted out. And of course, the unofficial list is much, much longer still. The more choice developers have, the better in my opinion. I can’t wait to read the spec and try out the RI once it’s available!
Following today’s accidental baseball theme: Reuters reports that the San Francisco Giants are WiFi enabling SBC Park. Now I’ll never have a reason to leave! 🙂
Under the “way cool” category: Major League Baseball has extended Sun’s contract for MLB.com.
MLB.com is one heavy hitting site. 2003 stats from the press release:
- 35 million page views on opening day of 2003 playoff series
- MLB.com and the 30 individual team sites registered over 4 billion page views in 2003
- Over 650 million visits during 2003
And there’s a bonus note buried down near the bottom of the release:
In celebration of the 2004 season, Sun is offering free “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” ring tones for mobile phones beginning April 5. For more information on the limited offer, visit java.com/mlb.
Russell Beattie blogged on “Rampaging Computer Science” today. As a part of his post, he mentioned my use of WordPress on BillDay.com.
I did my best to respond in the comments to his blog, in which I wrote:
Though I love Java and have been working with it professionally for 8+ years now, I try not to be too overtly religious when it comes to languages and tools. Freeman Dyson is quoted as saying “A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible” and that’s pretty much my philosophy, too.
I try to use an appropriate tool for the job at hand, whether it’s Java, PHP, Perl, C, Fortran, whatever. (OK, so it’s thankfully been a loooong time for me since Fortran was an “appropriate tool for the job at hand”, but back in my aerospace and geophysics days… 🙂
There are certainly great blogging packages for Java (and Perl, and Python, etc.). Given my needs, WordPress was an appropriate tool.
What do you think? Am I committing a sacrilege by using WP instead of SnipSnap, Roller, or some other Java based blogging package? Click on Comments to share your thoughts.
BillDay.com 