OpenStreetMap is a project to build a free (unencumbered) map of the world, similar in scope to the various commercial web-based maps that you might have used. They're making good progress in some areas and, in fact, the outlines of Toronto are now pretty well fleshed out. Some of the local open source people are having a Toronto mapping weekend centered on the LinuxCaffe and, of course, I'm giving one of the presentations (Saturday at 11). If you're free for even part of the weekend, why not join us?

Gavin King is often thought of as the developer of Hibernate, but he deserves as much credit for making Seam, the web framework that unifies JSF and EJB3. Now he's going for the standards hat, making Seam into "Web Beans", a Java Community Process standard (JSR-299) that should get incorporated into future releases of Java EE. Check out this Web Beans Manifesto, which I agree with and which pretty much sums up why Seam/Web Beans, as it is now almost trite to say, "matters".

The Thecus N2100 whose untimely demise I blogged recently is now, I'm happy to report, back to life, thanks to some help from the folks at Thecus in Taiwan. I'm putting some finishing touches on the OpenBSD install notes that should be ready in a few days.

This would seem surreal to a mainframe programmer of 20 years ago. Bloggers are putting the string 13949712720901ForOSX into their Blogs so that a Google Blog Search/Count can be used to show that a lot of people want Apple to release Java 6 for Mac OS X. Bring it on!!

My colleague in communications, Jason Brittain, has finished revising Tomcat: The Definitive Guide. The Second Edition was just released (October/November, 2007) and covers Tomcat 6.0.  Coverage has been expanded in almost all areas; the first edition's 295 pages are dwarfed by the second's 462 pages.  If you're using Tomcat, this is the book you should have to help you along!