I've wrtten here before about Asterisk, the open source PBX telephone system that runs on generic PCs (among other platforms). Now there's an open source cell phone! OpenMoko is the software project (see their wiki page first; the home page is kind of restricted); the hardware is custom-made by FIC. The phone runs Linux, has GSM, GPS, and a nice UI. It will be shipping soon to developers and aims to be on sale in a retail products in September of this year. US$350 gets you an unlocked GSM phone.

Interestingly, at JavaOne sun showed this same phone running (presumably) the same Linux, but a totally different - and all-Java- UI called JavaFX Mobile, based on technology they got by acquiring Savaaje. Sun have said they will GPL this code.

Looks like this phone is going to be very open; maybe mine will have a boot-up option to choose between OpenMoko and JavaFX Mobile. How much more open can you get than having multiple free interfaces?

In the bad old days of computing - the mainframe era - it was common for IBM to try to prevent customers from using cost-effective third-party solutions in conjunction with expensive IBM mainframes by spreading "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt" about their smaller competitors. While it may have stopped some IBM users from going with more open solutions, it largely blackened IBM's reputation among the compuscenti of that era.

Ironically this year the shoe is on the other foot - Microsoft is spreading "Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt" about Linux and other cost-effective open source solutions which IBM is a leading user and promoter of. The latest round of this FUD is their assertion that "open source software violates 230 Microsoft patents" while refusing to state what the patents are or what they cover. This disgraceful conduct is yet another reason not to send a single penny in Microsoft's direction. Every time you buy Microsoft Word or Microsoft Windows, or even use a "free" product that displays banner ads - you are contributing to this highly immoral behavior. Please don't do that. Friends, in this day and age, do not let friends use Microsoft.

Let me further point out that even if part of Microsoft's claims ultimately are proven in court, this is not really a condemnation of open source software. It is first and foremost a condemnation of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which for decades has been allowing "software patents", which are illegal in some parts of the world such as the European Union. PTO has also awarded patents without reference to who actually invented the techniques, which is clearly not what the Founders intended. It is ironic, again, that the United States was once the bastion of innovation and free society but in our lifetimes has morphed into the bastion of mind-numbing bureaucracies and Big Government.

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After I wrote this, CBR published an article that Novell is making amends for its patent deal with Microsoft by helping to discredit bogus patents.

OK, it seemed like a good idea at the time. I was in San Francisco a few weeks ago now for JavaOne, and I bought a Thecus. If you don't know what these are,  find out before you read on. I wrote this blog entry at the time, but am just now catching up; I'm backdating the post appropriately.

So. I bought the Thecus on eBay for US$200, which is about half of the MSRP. With the cooperation of my eBay seller, I had the unit shipped to my hotel during the week of JavaOne. It arrived on Thursday - I had unchangable airline tickets for Friday afternoon, so this was a bit closer than I might have wanted. But OK. I opened the huge cardboard box and found lots of bubble wrap and this dinky little Thecus cardboard box with an even littler Thecus inside it. No drives, but it powered up, responded to pings, and even made some response to the web browser.

Friday comes. Put my mostly-empty JavaOne backpack into the cardboard box so I don't have to carry that home, tape it up, and head to the airport. The cab driver lies to me about what terminal to get off at, so I'm honking this great hulking cardboard structure from terminal to terminal. There's a shuttle train but you still have to wind up walking through a parking lot, which is pretty weird.

Get to the Air Canada counter to check in. Since I went on the web and printed up my boarding pass earlier in the day, I go to the "web bag drop" counter. Just as I get there, the employee serving the person in front of me wanders off. I wait for 10 minutes and nobody even pretends to ignore me, so I go back to the main line. Finally get a live person. Neither she nor the supervisor can tell me what the limitation on liability is in case they lose the sucker, and they don't offer insurance anyway. The super gives me a number to call that they've contracted out their insurance; when I call on my cell, it turns out to be RBC Insurance,  and they don't do anything out of the ordinary, and they won't insure you after you've left on your trip anyway. Then the counter people eventually figure out that the liability limit is about $9 per pound, and the box weighs about 9 pounds (including the backpack and a bunch of printed matter). C$81 is not enough coverage on a US$200 machine.

So I get disgusted, rip open the cardboard box, put the Thecus with some of the bubble wrap into the backpack, and abandon the cardboard box (I folded up the little cardboard box and put it in there too).

Now it turns out my return routing is a little convoluted, to say the least. When you book late,  you often get the butt end of routings. Think San Francisco-Vancouver-Montreal-Toronto when all I wanted was San Francisco-Toronto. So I check to see if there is any room on the direct flight, but am told it's full.  I check my suitcase and wander off with the two backpacks, imagining that the U.S. security people are going to have a total hairy bumble about this little computer that has no monitor or keyboard so they can't see what it is.

I needn't have feared. I take it out of the backpack and put it in the gray tray, but SFO security doesn't blink (though they do examine the X-ray scan). I guess they get a lot of computer gear heading out from Silicon Valley via that airport.

So I get to clear Canada Customs at Vancouver. I write on the form that I have $250 worth of stuff, when I'm allowed $200, but the agent is in a good mood and we wind up talking about conventions instead of Thecuses. Then I find I've lost my pre-printed boarding pass, so I stand in line for half an hour to get another.

Then I see another direct flight to Toronto, and ask if I can get on it. Well, no, you see, "because you have checked luggage". Sigh. I wouldn't have checked it if they'd told me there was a direct flight to Toronto leaving just before my stupid jaunt to Montreal. If I go to Montreal I want to have time to explore the town, not rot in the airport for an hour or two.

Anyway, eventually we leave Vancouver.  The plane is an Air Canada A320 with the new all-electronic entertainment system. Perhaps the electronics are jealous of the  Thecus' ability to serve up iTunes content, because it just keeps saying "Not available" after making people navigate through 4 or 5 choices. Two of the stations near me just hang completely. Finally enough people complain that the purser reboots the whole system. When it finally starts working (about ten minutes after the first complaints), I flip to the movie "Bridge to Terabithia" - which my kids have seen but I haven't - and hear the character "Leslie" say that TV "rots your brain". Well, that's what you need on a long flight.

Eventually get to Montreal, after midnight. I don't even have to go through security here, because arrival and departure are in the same area. My ears are going crazy from all the upping and downing, but I'm almost home with my Flying Thecus.

Almost in a daze from this long day's journey into night,  I find my car and drive home. Then I have to sleep for a few hours, and see if I have the right bits to make up a serial cable for the Thecus so I can convert it from Linux to OpenBSD.  This machine will store "all" my files, so it needs to be "stable and secure". But that's a tale for a later blog...

P.S. This post has nothing to do with Monty Python. Name used under "fair use" as a title parody only.

P.P.S. Monty Python is a trademark of, well, Monty Python.

This has been a very busy week at JavaOne, with lots of new announcments but few major ones. One of the largest announcements was a small but powerful technology called JavaFX, which is potentially very significant because it provides a compositional API for Java 2D, similar to that for Swing. Java 2D has always been powerful but underused because  of its programmatic API. JavaFX aims to make this capability available on the client side of the web, to compete with technologies like Adobe Flex and Microsoft's Silver-whatever. It looks promising, and the all-Java PDF reader they showed was nice, but I fear it may be "too little, too late" in the web market. JavaFX will certainly shine where people are already using Swing. The current version is interpreted but there are plans to compile it to Java bytecode.

Also announced was the "Java Kernel" and new deployment. Many other major vendors had things to show: Ricoh was showing off their JavaME-powered printer/copiers; lots of cell-phone companies; lots of software tools vendors. Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and other companies adorned the trade show.

The session schedule was brutal; there were few times when I didn't want to attend three or four talks at the same time. Maybe I'm interested in too many different topics. Some sessions filled up and people were turned away. The one talk I gave ran at full capacity, but they gave me a tiny room with only room for about 250 people; the talk seemed to go well and I got very positive verbal feedback from a dozen or so people after.

All in all, a really good show with few unexpected major announcements but a lot of incremental growth.

At this week's JavaOne, Sun announced that they have uploaded more pieces of the JDK to the open source repository.  At the same time, they announced that there are some big missing pieces that will not be available under GPL until somebody replaces them, which may take six-twelve months. There is a binary workaround - for some platforms only; Mac OS X and the BSD's are left out - in the interim.  They also announced a semi-independent body to manage the development of the open sourse project known as OpenJDK...

Read more...

I'm on-site at JavaOne, finalizing my talk on Checking Java Programs. The conference seems as big as ever, to judge by the lineups for everything. Lots of good sessions.

Read more...

Since I hope someday to release a third edition of the Java Cookbook, I've been thinking about what recipes need to be replaced, added, removed. I've set up a directory with some new/replacement recipes. Some are complete but some are just placeholders. Feel free to look and, as always, comments welcome.

As usual with O'Reilly, the text is copyright but the code is free to use.