Sun Opens Java

The day has finally come , Today Sun has released Java under the GPL open source license. Combined with the new JDK 6 I expect we will be seeing some great things coming out of the Java shops, very exciting!

This is one of the best steps Sun has done since changing their licensing to allow Linux distributions to ship with a JDK.

Sun Opens Java

Adobe contributes Flash Player Scripting Engine

Tamarin , the latest Mozilla project addition, is the result of Adobe contributing their Flash Player Scripting engine to the Mozilla team, A move Brendan Eich, chief technology officer of Mozilla Corporation, and creator of JavaScript said to be “the largest contribution to the Mozilla Foundation since its inception,”.
Personally I don’t feel this is all too suprising. As I have said in my post GUI toolkits for web apps? (proberly in need of an update) the Adobe Flex IDE looked to be (at the time of writing) a high candidate for the creation of interactive web applications. If the Flash support on Linux based operating systems (or anything else FireFox has been ported to) gains momentum Adobe will be in a very desirable place.

A very appreciated gesture, thaks Adobe! – Please bring us Photoshop!

Java Community News – Adobe Contributes Flash VM Code to Mozilla

Mozilla – Adobe and Mozilla Foundation to Open Source Flash Player Scripting Engine

Firefox2 and the Yahoo del.icio.us extension

I installed firefox 2 tonight and I (of course) like it. Nice, subtle but noticeable interface upgrades and of course the welcomed addition of a spell checker!

I also had a look at the Yahoo del.icio.us firefox extension. I’m not sure how long this has been around, the URL based link in my toolbar had done the job fine so far but I thought I’d have a look.

I use del.icio.us often and have always thought it’d be cool to integrate del.icio.us directly to the Bookmarks menu. In fact a friend of mine is writing a simple browser using the Mozilla active x control I have previously mentioned and this is something I said he should do. Well, the Yahoo extension does exactly this, making bookmark management that much easier and the roll back (exporting from del.icio.us to your bookmarks menu on uninstall) works perfectly.

Firefox also provides easy RSS integration to add a feed to your favourite reader. I configured mine to subscribe feeds to my blog lines account, again, much welcomed!

I havn’t had much of a change to look at any other new firefox features yet.

Gmail chat offline messages

I noticed yesterday when chatting to a friend that I could send messages to him when he went offline, previously it would tell you the recipient is offline and will not receive your message. This only works If they go offline during a chat session, otherwie the quick contact list takes you to the compose mail screen.

I got an email reply from my friend this morning containing the few messages I sent him, complete with timestamps and horizontal rule separating messages.

Very cool new feature, espcially for those chat sessions that tend to get lost when somone closes the browser window by mistake!

Torture Bill as C Code

Edit – I’ve only just realised that wordpress did not submit the entire original post, this has now been fixed. Will teach me for posting in such a rush! – 3:42 p.m. 8/11/2006 (NZ Time)
Old news I know, But I thought it was worthy of sharing as many still will not have seen it.

I finally got a change to read Bruce Schneier’s latest newsletter about a week ago which featured this small C snippet that Kevin the author felt summed up the new terrorist bill:

if (person = terrorist) {
punish_severely();
} else {
exit(-1);
}

My initial take on it was that it was a simple joke illustrating that the with the new bill anyone ‘run through’ is automatically considered a terrorist. There are no checks in place and they are punished severely. This was when I first saw the snippet over at digg.com. When I saw Bruce’s latest newsletter I read his entry on the code, in particular his blog comments where people pointed out a couple of other errors:

Punish_severely() is a black hole, it takes no arguments and has no return value. Who is being punished and how is the process being gauged?

Interesting piece of political code! All in fun of course

Edit – Another policical piece, Rumsfeld resignation summarized in Mac OSX screenshot. – 11:17 a.m. 9/11/2006 (NZ Time)