Dopplr - finally - 2.4 Million Cities

Just got an email (and there is a blog post too) that I was kind of longing for for months now .... see here, here and here.

Dopplr Blog - 2.4 Million Cities:

"We’re also including destinations that aren’t cities - things like islands, national parks, and ski resorts. So in future, Dopplr is more likely to recognise names of places you’re travelling to. We’ve made other changes to the gazetteer too, tweaks to the way it guesses which destination you mean when lots of locations share the same name."

And indeed - Saalbach, Krems and Mödling are now finally searchable - or findable, rather... well just THERE.

Cool.
Finally.
Thanks.

Are Blogrolls dead ?

Well the title of this post suggests a yes and that's what I feel.
Why ?

I haven't updated mine in months (if not years). Not (only) because I'm lazy, but I did not see a point in doing so.

They used to serve as a social network (or at least some kind of social graph) amongst bloggers... but that's no longer the case. Social graphs are now in the social networks (not in twitter, though, mind you).

I guess one reason is also that links are dead - as Steve Gillmor has been pointing out for years.

Don't get me wrong on this, I still like being linked to, but not for the sake of the link, but because I get a hint that someone feels I had something important to say or report or an interesting thought. And a link is only one way to make that statement, and not more important (to me) than say a tweet or IM or email or a real chat, where she/he responds to a post.

Reminder - JavaDeus in AT next week

Just a quick reminder to everyone.

We will have the Java Developer Conference "JavaDeus 08" next week Thursday (19 Jun) in St Pölten.
Presentations and discussions will cover Glassfish by Alexis, OpenESB by Jason, MySQL, Java7, Sun SPOTS etc.
See the agenda and details here.

Register - if you haven't already.

Interesting error page

While an Apple conference (and iPhone 3G announcement) is bringing twitter down (as expected), I found a more entertaining error page:




Very helpful. Thanks.

Twitter vs WWDC 2008

So, expectations are quite high at the crossroads of twitter and the iPhone.
Not only does eveyone (kind of) expect twitter to go down during the announcement, the twitter teams seem to be prepared for it as well.
See e.g. here amongst others.

Maybe expectations are a bit too high for both of them ... the (supposedly all new and now even more exciting ) iPhone, and the twitter coverage of it.

Good color coding

I like the way SourceForge.net tells my that the password I entered was wrong:


A green check mark ...

That's how you indicate an error. Not this panicky red or yellow stuff

Glassfish configuration for DB2

I ran into this problem at least twice, so here is the solution (at least for my own reference in the future):

If you want to use a DB2 (UDB) database from glassfish v2 using a Type 2 JDBC driver [1], you must make sure that the (native) library db2jcct2.dll (or .so) is in the (native) library path. The error message usually says something like "Failure in loading T2 native library db2jcct2".

This DLL resides in your DB2 install directory bin directory, e.g. C:\Programme\IBM\SQLLIB\BIN\db2jcct2.dll on windows, so you have to add this directory (C:\Programme\IBM\SQLLIB\BIN) to the glassfish (!!) native library path in the JVM settings

In the domain.xml config file this is the
native-library-path-prefix="c:\programme\IBM\SQLLIB\BIN" option of the java-config setting.

In the admin web GUI it is on the Application Server page;

under the JVM Settings -> Path Settings you will find the option Native Library Path Prefix:

One additional note:
[1] The IBM Type 2 JDBC driver is the one that uses the native DB2 client (used to be called Client Application Enabler or short CAE at my times with DB2 UDB v5) for DB2 access and connectivity. Hence, the necessity to be able to locate the native DLLs... So when the appserver and the DB2 engine run on the same host, you should use type 2 as well.

Way out

Way out
Originally uploaded by roetzi24

As part of my ongoing service to the general public, I'll provide you with a way out today.

Print it (or download it to your mobile device) and take it with you.

This way, you'll always find a way out

NYT and the 'new media'

In today's article about Don Grantham leaving Sun for HP, the NYT writes:

Sun Global Sales Head Resigns, Bound for H.P. - NYTimes.com:

"In a blog post, Sun CEO Schwartz referred to Grantham's departure in seemingly jocular terms. [...]

Sun could not immediately be reached for comment."

Dear NYT, there is a blog post - you even quoted from it. This IS A COMMENT.
Please understand blogs... please.

Towel Day

I (again) totally forgot about Towel Day this year until just after it ended... probably because I was offline that day (in Scotland).

So in order to always remember it, I created a (public) GoogleCal entry for it. You can subscribe to it via this button ...

And in doing so, I noted that when you publish a recurring event on GoogleCal (like I did, see the Google button above) it does not carry the recurrence information with it...
Stupid.

Thank you, twitter

Another reason to like twitter ... or the guys behind twitter: in their announcement/warning of the upcoming downtime, they linked the time to timeanddate.com, so everyone can see it in their own timezone.



Since I receive a lot of event invitations from the US I know that his is quite unusual... totally the exception.
So, thank you, twitter.

Dezentralized Twitter

A couple of recent Gillmor Gang episodes were dedicated to the concept (and necessity) of a decentralized twitter, and/or opening up twitter...

At one point, Marc Canter says:

"But there could be technically 100 Twitters, each controlled by different vendors, and we could have a backend kind of DNS thing to federate users. So if I registered with Pownce or Jaiku, my handle would work on Twitter, or vice-versa. And that’s what I’ve been saying."

More of Marc's reasoning on his blog here.
I don't think this can ever happen - as a DNS like infrastructure.

DNS might be a nice model of decentralization (in probably most ways), but to me it is a very one-way model of propagating data ...
You don't have to push data through DNS... it get's pulled by a host lookup... that's why I say "propagate".

But you have to push tweets. You cannot have every possible Twitter-Clone instance (and there would be hundreds, if you really open it up) pull data from every other clone... no way. And DNS is not a model for pushing data...

To make one thing clear: I agree with Marc that twitter needs to be decentralized in some way... I just don't feel that DNS can be the model for it.

Restore Natural Order

I just noticed that Thunderbird saves the world.
Really.

If you click on the column selection button in one of the table views, e.g. Inbox, or the Lighning event list
you get a "Restore Natural Order" action.

Cool.

If only we had that in the real world.

X.500 ?

Today I saw (quite an expensive) a car with the vanity license plate "X 500" on it.

The owner is most definitely not from IT or any tech business, since no one here in their right mind would choose to associate themselves with "X.500"...

Skype, Google and YouTube for fun and profit

Just noticed that I had some dust on the sensor of my DSLR (Nikon D70). And while I was IM'ing with a friend (Max) on how to get rid of it, I googled for "nikon d70 sensor clean" and the first hit I got was this video on YouTube, showing how to clean the sensor of your D70 from dust.

I then only needed Max to tell me that I could use any straw instead of that blower thingy (provided that I don't spit through it)...

e voila: I followed the instructions, did not spit, and the sensor now is clean again.

Thanks, Skype, Google and YouTube.

Stupid UIs

Another addition to the collection of stupid user interfaces.

This week's award goes to Nokia for replacing a YES/NO dialog with two buttons (green checkbox for YES, red crossy thingy for NO).
Well, it is intuitive, but keyboard shortcuts (Y, N) no longer work.

Well done.
Thank you.

Why OpenID should have relevance for the enterprise

As with federated identities, I thought that OpenID had no space in the enterprise.

The main thought was, that OpenID make me the owner of my identity, and lets me choose where to use it. This is usually not what the enterprise wants. My enterprise identity, i.e. my accounts and profiles with the IT systems of my employer, belongs to my employer, not to me.
So, why should an enterprise care ?
Well, there are people who use their corporate account names and passwords on external sites as well.
They might use it for their email account, or eBay, ... Or they use their corporate email address to register with amazon and others who base an account on a email address. And usually, people tend to use the same password as well.

Bad idea.

But this (mis)concept exists, since there are "external" account, CompuServe, AOL, fidonet, whatever... and of course all those fancy sites on the web. And this behavior could never be eradicated. Because people (and therefore users) are lazy bastards.

Well - you can write and publish policies that forbid this (and all enterprises have those), but frankly, who cares. Who even reads them.

So why not turn 180° and actually allow this... even more: encourage it.

Become an OpenID provider and let users use their corporate account to login at your openid provider site. That way, the can stay lazy, but never give a password to other sites... They only enter it at your site(s).

The only drawback right now is, that there are still not enough openid enabled sites... but they are growing... rapidly actually.

New StarOffice/OOo language feature

Just noticed that OpenOffice 2.4 and (therefore) StarOffice 8 Update 10, have a new faster way to select/change the language for the spell-checker - right down in the status bar (where you actually expect it).

A click on it, and you can change the language.
Fast. Intiutive.

Finally.
Thanks.

A case for Identity Federation for the Enterprise

When it comes to identity management enterprises today tend to only care about user provisioning, compliance and (worst of all) single-sign-on.

Identity Federation - like Liberty - is usually not really considered. And I neglected it, too, since customers were not really interested in it, or asking for it.

However, there is a good use-case for federated identities across within enterprises... I choose to say "within" because the case I'm about to make is when the user should not see enterprise borders:

Consider an outsourced process - like HR in our case at Sun - where your employees have to access an application that is outsourced as well. People then have to sign on to computers that are not being operated by you (your IT).

Big deal... those application can easily access my directory (LDAP or AD)... so why should I need identity federation there?
And you might even trust those external application to securely access your directory this way.

But you don't want your users to enter their corporate userid and password at any remote site - even if you trust that company.

If you do, you open up big potential for fishing... By using federation you keep the input mask for your userids and password within your IT, operated by your staff, transported only over your network. There is no chance that the password can get intercepted... or at least the risk is not higher than within your own network.
That's the point.

SourceForge.net supports OpenID

Just read on SourceForge.net: Community Blog that they now support OpenID for login.

Excellent !!