Speak now or forever hold your piece

listening to…..

Punk & Poetry by The King Blues (punk, ska, love songs and agitprop)

reading….

The Book of the Long Sun by Gene Wolfe (I finished reading American Gods recently and thought ‘God thats a lot like Soldiers in the Mist’ turns out Gaiman is Wolfes biggest fan)

Little known fact GW is one of the engineers who designed the Pringles making machine.

trying out…..

Protobufs
Hadoop
Different linux desktops (and despite self quite liking Gnome 3)

thinking about buying…..

a Raspberry Pi

I have been watching the fallout from the MS Windows 8 demo with some quiet amusement

Windows 8 HTML Javascript panic

With some fairly apocalyptic articles about Silverlight and even .Net being dropped.

Spreading FUD amongst your opponents is one thing, but amongst your supporters is going some.

It’s interesting to see the amount of distrust the Microsoft is held in, even by it’s developer community.

Mind you in the brave new post-Sun Java world, it’s probably something that us Java devs should get used to as well…..

Here is a very interesting article on migrating to Scala from Java, not only on the technical gotcha’s (readability, null handling and what parts of Scala functionality they avoided), but also in the route they took in getting general acceptance of the new language within the organisation.

InfoQ Guadian Scala

BTW I have read the Odersky book they mention, and it is very good.

..albeit in a cynical, barking kind of way ..  Nokia Plans A .. 9

The best being Plan R

Microsoft shafts Nokia

I’m still using (and loving) my N900 after suffering 2 consecutive HTC WinMo phone. I was quite looking forward to the Meego phone, but I’m not going to buy into another dead end.

I’ll stick with my Nokia until the contract expires then see, maybe WebOS maybe Android but definately not Nokia…..

Sad

Here is an interesting little article about the current Mexican Standoff between the various vendors in the Smartphone market , and the products that would be directly affected if the relevant complaint is upheld….

You’ll notice that there is no line between HTC and Microsoft, that because HTC agreed a patent protection deal a while back , probably with the proviso that they keep making Win 7 Phones.

Sadly this isn’t even the half of it what with the infamous Oracle/Google case.

and even Kodak(!?) getting in on the act 1, and 2

This looks like turning onto a mess of “Jarndyce and Jarndyce“-ian proportions, and you can’t help but wonder where it end up, especially as the US patent system seems to be held in such high esteem by developers.

I’ll finish up with an oldish post from Former Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz about patent wrangles, as viewed from the inside

What with all of the FUD and uncertainty around Oracle’s ongoing transformation of Java into it’s own version of .Net, and what with the, xmas book season creeping up on us, the jobbing programmer thoughts turn to what new programming book to order next for your Kindle/iPad/whatever ebook reader/dead tree edition.

Helpfully DZone has come up with a list of “up and coming” programming lanuages for 2011

9 Programming Languages to watch

* Go figures (go figure?) fairly prominently
* Inexplicably Lua (which has been knocking around for ages, there’s even a Psion version) seems to be quite popular, though I suspect a lot, of this might be because it’s the scripting for World of Warcraft

* Scala seems to be winning the battle of the JVM languages, over Clojure and Groovy
* Erlang gets mentioned, but not Haskell

Of course, for the bleeding edge of you there’s always…

* Rust from Mozilla – which is so bleeding edge it’s still in alpha
* Fantom – for meta JVM and CLR portability
* Mirah – seems like a way of writing Java bytecode using Ruby, from the chap who brought you JRuby.

Stevie J offers advice in hold phones the “Apple Way”. Is that like some sort on Masonic handshake?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8761240.stm

Note that’s not Apples fault for getting the design wrong (says Stevie J it’s “really cool engineering”), its the user (aka person who paid out their own money) fault for holding it the wrong way.

In other news Stephen Fry has Tech-related-ejaculation all over the Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jun/23/iphone4-first-review-stephen-fry

And my teenage daughter installs the new version of iOS4 on iPod, and duely notes that “the multi-tasking sucks, they haven’t done it right”

Perceptive girl.

…they both hate Flash

Stevie J relaxing at home

Time passes and tech rolls on. My little HTC Touch Diamond has just been replace by a nice new Nokia N900.

Over all It’s been quite a nice experience, a perfectly acceptable little keyboard some nice little apps and with a switch from Orange to T-Mobile RECEPTION AT HOME !!!!

I’ll post some more as I go on.