Darwin's Theories

Android on newer devices

The Freerunner is OK for its age, but it lacks a keyboard, a camera, 3G, and support from the official Android Market. Plus, it runs Android 1.6, whereas all the current phones run 2.0.1 or 2.1. So with considerable trepidation at the move to somewhat less-open open source, I broke down and bought the Motorola Milestone now that Telus has it available for sale in Canada with North American 3G frequencies. In fact, I bought the first one at one of the Toronto Telus stores, so maybe I bought the first one in Toronto. Anyway: So far so good; I hope to do a detailed writeup one of these days.

Android on FreeRunner

Android or FreeRunner, that is the question for those who want a mostly-open-source cell phone. At least it used to be. Now that Openmoko have all but discontinued development on the Freerunner hardware, the future looks more and more like Android. And while I had hoped someday to be able to run OpenBSD on the Freerunner, it looks like that won't happen. Fortunately, there is a good implementation of Android for the FreeRunner, available for free download from this Android on Freerunner site at GoogleCode. I've been using this for a few weeks and, while it's not 100% rock solid, it is very close. I think I've had to do the battery-out-to-reset two or three times in three weeks (not counting the time I used the Android as an alarm clock and woke up from such a slumber that I couldn't remember how to shut it off).

Islands in the Stream

Some will say that Apple's iPad is the be-all and the end-all of portable computing. I say nay.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of Apple. But look at the history. Datapads are not a new idea - Alan Kay's DynaBook and Mark Weiser's ideas of Ubiquitous Computing - both from the 1980's, with Weiser explicitly using the term Pad - predate the iPad by almost three decades. As much as I generally dislike Microsoft, their push for the "Tablet PC" probably led to some advances in hardware. Amazon's Kindle and Sony's reader both pushed hardware makers to build better screens and raised the bar on users' expectations.

And one important thing that Weiser advocated in the 1980's is still missing (full disclosure: I admit to being in the field long enough to have read his papers when they were originally published). In Weiser's world you could just slide a task you were working on from a handheld pad to a wall-sized whiteboard or to a wristwatch-sized device for storage, and things like active TCP/IP connections would automatically move onto the new computing platform. While you may be able to drag a project from a Mac OS application to a USB stick for storage, this is a far cry from having running applications movable from one computing device to another. People are indeed working on this problem, but a general solution is not yet at hand, as far as I know. It's not something you can buy today from Redmond or from Cupertino, at any rate.

Until this happens, our computers will remain isolated islands in the stream. Even if they are iPads.

JavaOne without Moscone Center?

After a very long and uncomfortable silence, Oracle, having passed the last(?) regulatory hurdle to their acquisition of Sun Microsystems, today announced that the JavaOne conference will in fact go ahead - this year. It will be co-located, but not merged, with Oracle OpenWorld; this year's dates are September 19-23 in San Francisco. That means there is still time for the refereed-paper approach that has been used in past JavaOnes. Partly since Moscone cannot hold all the attendees who would take part in both programs, and partly to reinforce the fact that it's not merged, JavaOne will be held in three hotels near Moscone (the huge keynotes will however be held in Moscone). I was heartened to hear Justin Kestylin of Oracle say that they want to "maintain the soul of JavaOne." We shall of course be watching to see how well they do at that.

JavaOne will also be going on the road: the "Sun Tech Days" program will be replaced by regional JavaOne conferences; the initial locations over the next year will be China, India, Russia and Brazil.

There is an FAQ coming within the next day on Oracle Developer Network. The following programs will be preserved: java.net, java.sun.com, Java Community Process, and others.

Watch otn.oracle.com for the FAQ - I'll update this with the link once it's available.

Another Top 10

Here we go again: