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.

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.

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.

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.

(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.

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.

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”.

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.

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.

Notes from the session on Swing and Threads. Unchecked etc.