John O’Conner raises a good point – Opensource projects tend to have poor documentation. Java tends to have good documentation (IMO, the best documentation I’ve seen for a programming library). Will Opensourcing Java reduce the quality of it’s documentation? The obvious response is that Sun and IBM etc will still be investing so their doc writers can continue writing the documentation just like now. Except that most of the documentation for Java is written by the same people who write the actual code within Sun – at least that’s the impression I get. If people outside of Sun are writing code it would be up to them to document it – how well would that be kept up if there was no performance review checking up on them?

Once again the Mac world has led the way in pioneering new technology – this time in an area that they are traditionally criticized for the lack of software options: security exploits. Close on the heals of the Safari URL exploits, Mozilla caught up with a shell: exploit and now at long last Microsoft catches up. (Okay it was a few days ago, but that was when I started writing this entry.) My favorite comment from the slashdot thread would have to be:

While I was away in San Francisco, my house mate was lugging all my furniture into my new house. The new place is a huge 5 bedroom place on the top of the secondary peak of Mt Gravatt so it has brilliant views ranging from the port of Brisbane and beyond over the sea right around over ANZ stadium and way off into the distance over south Brisbane. Absolutely stunning. The floors are all beautiful polished wood and the whole house is very open and spacious. I’ve still got a lot of stuff packed in boxes in the garage but I’m reasonably set up now. We put in an order for DART ADSL yesterday so hopefully that won’t take too long to come through. TV reception around here is nonexistent (the TV broadcast towers are all on the highest mountain in the city which happens to directly line up such that the mountain we’re on is in the way). All in all though I’m very happy with the new joint.

So I’m on my way home from JavaOne and thought I’d take the final opportunity to use my T-Mobile wifi account. The coverage in SF airport was great until the whole network suddenly disappeared. So much for that. Now I’m in LA airport and the coverage is awful. My flight leaves from one end of the terminal and the wireless access is at the other end. Oh well, I have another 45 mins to kill before boarding so I can sit here and rant a while longer yet….

I’ve been looking into creating an editor for the JDNC XML descriptor file using EditLive! for XML partly as a test case for ELX using a big and complex schema, partly as a way to contribute to that community and partly as a marketing effort (it would make for a good example of what you can do with ELX). Sadly, the JDNC schema is completely invalid so it causes a whole heap of errors to be output by Xerces and finally causes Xerces to throw an ArrayOutOfBoundsException. Since we use the schema heavily and use Xerces to parse it, that makes the JDNC schema pretty much a no-go for ELX right now (not to mention making it completely useless for anything else). I’ll have to check a few things before I can be completely sure it’s the JDNC schema that’s causing the problems (obviously the exception from Xerces should never happen either) but I’m pretty sure it’s missing some imports for schemas it references. The schema also seems to override types in a way that isn’t supported (attempting to change mixed content types to element only).

What the hell is a kiss and ride? I’ve heard of park and rides where you can drive a short distance from home then park and catch a train the rest of the way but a kiss and ride? I guess it’s a drop off point where you get your husband/wife (or in San Francisco your boyfriend) to drive you a short distance from home and then you catch the train and they drive home again. Still wouldn’t it be easier to call it a drop off point? Is it really that inconceivable that someone might be dropped off by someone they don’t want to kiss? Anyway, I’ve got to go find a good looking girl to give me a lift to the train station tomorrow…..

(I wrote this Thursday night but didn’t have net access on the train to post it) I finally managed to catch up with a number of Apache people tonight at the Thirsty Bear (rest assured the bear is not quite as thirsty after our beer drinking efforts). Afterwards we picked up the two new IBM servers that have been sitting at Collab.Net and deposited them into the cage at the colo facility. Since I’m not a server guy at all this is one of very few times I’ve been in a server room and the first chance I’ve had to see the Apache server setup (there’s now another colo in Europe somewhere I believe). It’s pretty small and simple but seems to do the job quite well which is what really matters. Apparently the Technorati servers are in the same colo and they look a heck of a lot more impressive with a few racks full of servers and cables going everywhere. Either way it was great to finally meet a few Apache developers and put some faces to names. My description of myself as “the tall redhead” seemed to be effective as people walked straight in the door and introduced themselves to me. Sometimes it pays to stand out a bit I guess.

Chris DeBona argues that the incompatibilities between Linux distributions don’t matter because the majority of people use RedHat or SUSE so that’s all people bother supporting. Of particular note is the quote:

In the windows world, people don’t feel the need to support every version of windows, either. In the Java world we do try to support everything. We want everything to be compatible, we raise the bar so that code should run everywhere. Sure it doesn’t always work out but that’s the aim and it’s simply not good enough to lower the standards for compatibility to what the linux distributions have – it’s not even good enough to lower standards for compatibility to what Windows offers. So Chris, you obviously need to spend a lot more time in the Java community rather than the Linux community to grasp this argument.

This morning after James Gosling’s keynote, was a panel discussion on the future of Java centering around whether or not it should be opensourced. Mostly the discussion was just a whole bunch of useless hand-waving with IBM saying we want it opensourced, Sun saying we want it to be compatible, Laurance Lessig saying don’t stuff with the open source licenses there are other legal means to ensure compatibility (he never mentioned what any of them were) and the users saying “we don’t give a damn either way”. The one stand out in the argument would have to be our very own Brian Behlendorf who pointed out that the key thing is more about allowing open source implementations of the standards rather than whether Sun’s implementation is opensource itself. He stressed a few times that this did require being able to make available implementations that weren’t yet 100% compliant but *not* claim that they are compliant (essentially you don’t do a 1.0 release until it’s compatible but you can have nightly builds and/or CVS available). I may be slightly twisting what he was saying there but that’s what I took away from it and it’s got to be pretty close to what he meant. So good work Brian!

Very incomplete notes from the XML Security using Apache session. The slides cover things better than my notes do but I thought I should save what I wrote down anyway. I gave up taking notes half way through once I realized I wasn’t really adding anything to the slides that should be available online anyway.

Ingredients A few thousand Java developers (at 8:30am no less) 1 Security Guard A selective entry policy to a keynote speech Steps 1. Gather the Java developers at the widest available entrance and pack them in nice and tight. 2. Using the security guard, try to stop them from going through the entrance. 3. Attempt to extract the conference alumni from the crowd and allow them to go through first. I have no idea whether or not the security guard eventually let us through – se disappeared from view and I haven’t seen her again. It’s quite possible she was trampled.

There’s this thing in business called competition. I know it can be annoying when it happens to you for the first time, but it’s the way it’s meant to be there. When someone enters your particular market segment with a competing product it’s not called “copying” it’s called “competition” or possible “free trade”. Browsers didn’t exist once and now those nasty opensource developers went and copied the idea and have put the original company out of business. And those damn JEdit folks blatently ripping off NotePad which itself was just a rip off of TextEdit which was just a rip off of MacWrite.