It can now be found at http://kuruvila.net
It’s a promotion of sorts. Got rid of that pesky blog subdomain.
I’ve also shifted off wordpress to chyrp, which is a lot easier for my little head to comprehend. I’m not moving the old posts to the new blog and I won’t be shutting this down. Would be a pain to do that, dead links and all.
Launchy is a nice little application launcher for windows. It’s not as powerfull as quicksilver, but I find it a lot more productive than searching through the start menu.
There is a lot of talk about the .net’s new Dynamic Language Runtime, but very little about what it actually does.
The little i could figure out is that it includes a new dynamic type system (what does that mean?) and an automatically resizing int type. Would it hurt to link to a white paper or some kind of documentation? I get the impression that most people cheering or dissing this have no idea what it does.
[Update: This talk A conversation with John Lam about the dynamic language runtime, Silverlight, and Ruby with Jon Udel is pretty interesting.]
Neil Gafter’s blog has a poll on whether closures should be included in
java. There aren’t that many votes but closures seem to be leading by a
large margin. Not much of a sign really, most of the people reading the blog
probably support the closures, so there would be an obvious bias in the votes.
I’m a big fan of closures in java. So you can guess what I voted.
(via The Java Posse)
http://www.langnetsymposium.com/speakers.asp
If you are into programming languages these are definitely worth a watch.
I’ve watched the talk by Gilad Bracha and the one by Jim Hugunin. Both were very interesting.
(via Sriram Krishnan)
If you get a link from a friend on Yahoo Messenger that asks to you to log into a Yahoo service it could be a phishing attack. Check the url of the page, if it isn’t login.yahoo.com be cautious.
Yahoo has opened its browser based authentication mechanism to third party developers.
Browser-Based Authentication
I really don’t enjoy having to register myself with so many services and provide them with a usable password. Since many services would end up sharing the same password this is a pretty big security problem. I already have a yahoo account so I’d be happy if non yahoo services started supporting this. The authentication service is currently free, but will it stay that way.
(via Jeremy Zawodney)
I really don’t get the HDTV vs internet video debate. But I must confess that I have been pretty impressed by the internet based video services available specifically YouTube which seems to bring a social aspect to short videos.
Being as I am in a country where HDTV is probably many years away, I guess I might not be in a situation to see the big picture here. The problem I have is that the argument seems to focus on the sort of content that actually works well on hi-res i.e. blockbuster movies and other high cost productions and sports. Programming with a lot of visual oomph. While these might be where the money is going, I don’t think that is what we’re going to be spending most of our time watching. Think MTV
Where the internet currently offers a lot of value is in the delivery of short 1min to 15min videos. Theses are usually low res and don’t take very long to buffer up even on a low end broadband connection. Many of these videos have very low production costs so I guess the producers can probably come up with smart new ways of making money out of them.
I don’t think the for-internet content is going to compete directly with big budget production anytime soon. But I do believe there is a big market for this kind of content. Whether the market is bigger than that of HDTV is still to be seen. I’m sure when that happens the big production companies will happily jump head first into it.
An interesting service worth watching in this space is Atom Films. They make money through advertising. Unfortunately the videos don’t play on my mac.
People already do a lot of file and music sharing on phones over Bluetooth. The experience can be made a lot easier and more interesting.
It should be possible to build social file sharing software. This actually makes a lot of sense given the limited memory in many phones. A big advantage with cellphones is that since most of them don’t have any licensing costs to develop for, it would be possible for individual hackers to build their own applications on top of a common ad-hoc social networking system. In my opinion this makes a lot more sense than have all new ideas come from a single source, Microsoft in the case of Zune.
The question is, why haven’t seen anything like this yet? Is there some inherent limitation to bluetooth that makes file sharing networks unfeasible?
I haven’t been to happy with the pace of Jython’s development and have been toying with the idea of moving towards JRuby for my scripting needs. Now this news makes it all the more easier. Thomas Enebo and Charles Nutter, principal developers of JRuby have joined sun. Their job, to continue developing JRuby. Apparently Tim Bray had something to do with this.
On the side, there is an interesting parallel here. Microsoft hired Jim Huginin the guy behind IronPython and C# 2.0 got generators. Sun has just hired the JRuby guys and there is talk of introducing code blocks into Jdk7.
(via Tor Norbye’s Weblog)