Wordle - Beautiful Word Clouds:

Wordle is a cool online tool to create really beautiful word clouds out of a given ... eh .. dictionary, if you will, or list of words, actually. The more frequent a word is (in this list) the larger it will be represented of course.

Here is my tag cloud for this blog (as of just before this post):



Wordle can also go directory to a del.icio.us accunt and pick the tags as input from there.
So here's my del.icio.us tag cloud:



You can change the orientation, font, colorings, ...

Quite nice, I thought.

Presentations from JavaDeus 08

The first set of presentations from JavaDeus08 are ready for download. Just follow the download link from the event homepage.

Cool gmaps // twitter mashup

Walterra has hacked a cool mash up with twitter "weather data" for select Austrian cities and google maps to present a twitter weather map for Austria.

Most probably technically not really challenging ("Done in three hours" in his own words), but the idea (to get the data from twitter) is just great.

This is just a simple example to illustrate the hidden power and possible emergence that lies within social media, presence services and livestreams.
This is a quick hack inspired by metaroll.de. Using summize I fetch messages from twitter which contain words about the weather in Austria's federal capitals. A simple algorithm measures what people are talking about and renders a KML file which gets displayed above

Thanks to phreak20 for the hint.

Tupalo badges

Tupalo (see here) now also has bagdes (i.e. widgets), which allow to embed a spot on your webpage / blog; in their own words:

The Tupalo Spot Widget code is available from every Tupalo Spot page, allowing you to embed a formatted business information widget into your posts. The Tupalo Spot Widget is perfect for those with a blog or website allowing Javascript.

Works fine.
2 minor issues, though:

1. I'd also like to have a widget that lists my favorites on tupalo (=dynamic), not only 1 single spot (=static)
2. the styles don't seem to work smoothly, see the title in the screen shot:
   I haven't looked into it with too much effort, but I guess they just don't really provide their own styles, or they are broken.
   

Apart from that, good work, guys.

If blogrolls are indeed dead ...

...as I said... why then did I still have one here, you might ask.

Fair question.
So I removed it.
I haven't updated it in years anyway...

Gone.

JavaDeus 08 was a huge success

On Thursday we [1] hosted Austria's first major Java Developer conference [2] in St. Pölten on the FH campus - as I already reported.

The event was - not only in my opinion - a great success. We had 400+ people attending (not counting the Sunnies), from students over smaller and larger ISVs to coporate developers. We had a mix of Sun and non-sun content, a mix of local and international speakers. And it was free (literally as in "free beer").

Starting with an excellent key note from Reggie Hutcherson (Manager of the Sun Technology Evangelism group), followed by the coolest demos, most importantly of the SunSPOT thingies - small Java programmable "thing" with light and 3d motion sensors and stuff... We gave on set of them away for free, and one is still to be won - or rather earned with a good idea for an application.

In the afternoon there were 4 parallel streams of break out sessions, covering everything from MySQL (were we obviously were not clear enough that the 2 presentations were not the same, sorry), openESB (excellent presentation and demo by Jason), GlassFish by Alexis (who else ;-) ), NetBeans by the Netbeans guys from Praha, SunSPOT details by Salzburg Research, etc, etc. And of course and outlook on Java 7 ...

Presentations will be posted for download on the Sun site soon (Monday, I think), I will put up a reminder here on my blog as soon as they are ready.

I had excellent conversations throughout the day and - apart from being slightly stressed - enjoyed every bit of it.

One of my favorite moments was, when - more sales focused - colleagues came almost running out of the really good jMaki presentation by Doris Chen and complained that people were talking about actualy code in there. *grin*

After that beer and BBQ were well deserved by everyone... still 200+ at the party (I guess), people only started to leave when Germany started to beat Portugal and we had to watch it...

Other reports on the conference should be searchable with the keyword "javadeus08" or "javadeus", or can be found on del.icio.us and technorati. (That is the plus side of a unique name like JavaDeus... apart from that, I still don't like it).

See y'all next year, at JavaDeus 09.

[1] Sun Microsystems, if you don't know by now ;-)
[2] well WE [1] think it was the "first major..." and people at the conference confirmed this. Sorry, if I missed someone else's efforts.

TinyURL API

Just noticed that TinyURL also has a (more or less) proper API.

http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=yoururl

with yoururl of course being your url...

Try http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=http://it-conservations.blogspot.com for your favorite blog and see what you get.

The History Of Regexps - Part 1

via m³s online Pamphlet

Firefox 3 and extensions

I just installed a Firefox 3 (rc3) (just 2 days before the big download day) in a virtual box to check how my extensions would be working after an upgrade.

The results are now in, and they are quite a disaster:

Only del.icio.us and greasemonkey continue to work...

Apart from that FF3 seems to work perfectly.
I already got used to and love the new autocomplete feature in the addressbar...

Tupalo and a search plugin for it

I just created and published a search plugin for Tupalo or to be more specific for Tupalo in Vienna.

Tupalo is a great social platform for finding, reviewing and recommending just stuff in your neighborhood - and that's also their slogan.

Unfortunately their search is limited to a location / city you have to select first... which is OK when you search on the site, but quite cumbersome for a search plugin, since it cannot know which city you are talking about.

Hence, Vienna only... you can change the city yourself... you'll figure out.
The plugin can be found here on the mycroft page. Enjoy.

Still - finally an Austrian startup again - with a great idea. Excellent job, guys.
Their progress and new stuff can be found on their blog (where else).

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.