In What does No Java on the iPhone Mean? (and the follow up More on Java and the Mac) James Duncan Davidson looks at why Apple haven’t added Java support to the iPhone. In particular he claims there’s no killer application made with Java. In the strictest sense, that’s probably true, but there is a killer category of applications which are almost exclusively made with Java – games for mobile phones.

I’ve always considered Technorarti Tags to be annoying clutter on pages because people are far more likely to search Google for a keyword than they are to look up a particular Technorati tag and the million slight variants of it. I’ve just noticed however, that you don’t actually need to clutter up you page with unsightly tags to get into the tag list. Take for instance the Ephox technorati tag. I don’t tag my posts, and yet my Oh Happy Day!

I’ve been on holidays for the past four weeks (life is tough sometimes) and away from internet connectivity so I’ve been blissfully unaware of what’s been happening in the tech world. Catching up with the RSS feeds this morning though, I’ve discovered many wonderful things: Robert Dawson has started with Ephox. I’d forgotten he was starting while I was away. Someone in the engineering team managed to work out how to add Robert to Planet Ephox.

I’ve been playing around with OpenID on the few occasions I’ve had internet access over the Christmas break and have it set up, but not ideally. Currently, everything points to http://www.symphonious.net/id/ as the OpenID URL, but server and delegate. Ideally I’d like my identity URL to be just http://www.symphonious.net/ and the server ad http://www.symphonious.net/id/ but I’m not familiar enough with the whole process to make it work. Mostly I’ve followed Sam Ruby’s instructions, but the process was done in a few different sessions following a few other explanations of OpenID, but I think it matches what Sam describes.

I found an unexpected source of frustration while getting LiveWorks! online. The site is primarily an instance of WordPress1 but the mailing lists are handled by Mailman and the archives by Lurker. All three of them are simple to customize their outward appearance, but all three of them use a different template language. So now instead of having one site design, I have to have three very similar looking, but completely different design implementations2.

It’s taken quite an effort to get everything up and ready to go, but just in time for Christmas we’re ready to announce the availability of Ephox LiveWorks! The grand plan is to give our clients and the public in general better insight into what’s going on in the Ephox labs and give them the ability to shape the company’s direction. The site is starting off small, with just a few neat little plug-ins for EditLive!

Ephox took a couple of leaps forward today in terms of being more open and accessible to our clients. Firstly the planet instance that I’ve had running as a proof of concept for a while has been moved over to an actual Ephox server and is now at http://planet.ephox.com/ If you’re subscribed to the old feed your client should automatically switch to the new domain now but please do check it as test.

I’ve learnt way more about mod_jk in the last week than I ever wanted to know. Apparently the configuration is completely different between Debian 3.1 with Tomcat 4 and the current Debian testing with Tomcat 5 (point something). Why the mod_jk package doesn’t just do the configuration for you is beyond me, or at least have a debconf wizard to do it. Anyway, with Tomcat 4, the magical directive that makes deciding what to delegate and when simple goes like:

The internet connection started working at my new unit today. Shiny new ADSL2 connection so no more 1500k connection limit for me. Technically my ISP doesn’t know it’s up and running yet so they haven’t activated the VOIP line that’s bundled and the connections capped at 3000k which is what it’s happily connecting at. In the next couple of days that should get sorted out and it will jump up to a cap of 24000k.

So Doug is excited about how we took our first steps in a new product and how well it went. Personally, I’m impressed with the way that we presented all the usual engineering setup tasks to the client in a client focussed manner. We could have done it better by not discussing up front all the engineering tasks we were hiding behind the suggested first story, but that’s okay. The first story was that we wanted to ship a distribution of the new product.

I spent some time this afternoon trying to reduce the amount of spam that gets downloaded and dumped into my spam folder. Between SpamAssassin and Mail.app’s spam filters there’s basically no spam that makes it through to my inbox, but the sheer amount of spam being sent to symphonious.net, then downloaded from their to my home IMAP server before finally being processed by SpamAssassin is overwhelming and takes up a lot of bandwidth and processing time.

I’ve long been a proponent of UI designers making decisions about what the best way to do something is instead of just providing configuration options to the user – after all, if you are a fully trained and experienced UI designer, shouldn’t you know better than your completely untrained users? Seeing some of the discussion going around about Joel’s criticism of the Windows shutdown menu, including Arno Gourdol’s comments on the Mac OS X shutdown options and they both seem to being taking it a little bit too far.