Travelling, and not Arriving

Landschaftspark Duisburg Nord (2)

Landschaftspark Duisburg Nord

Live from FOSDEM, Bruxelles

Today I´m in Buxelles for FOSDEM, the free and open source software developers european meeting. Here is the schedule, quite different from the usual Java conference, as you can see.
Anyway, instead of the usual wrap-up/my-impressions post, in this post I´m going to write down what´s happening here, live.

— OpenOffice extensions development in Java w/Netbeans in practise - Jürgen Schmidt

OpenOffice 2.4 for Mac looks really nice! It isn´t officially released yet, but the native interface rocks.
The presentations shows how to write you own extension for OpenOffice using Netbeans (in Java, obviously). To tell the complete truth, I didn´t know there were so many extensions for Ooo. Check this page:
http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/
In particular, some of them look very interesting:
Sun Weblog Publisher
OpenOffice SVN extension
Openoffice 2 Google Docs

– Using Rails for agile development — K.V.d.Auwera, Vandenabeele

Peter Vandenabeele explains his experience with Rais while buiding AlleJobIsLeuven.be. Allejobsinleuven.be
Uses Sphinx as search engine, and the rails plugin Ultraphinx Ultrasphinx to run and configure the search engine from Rails.

Other Rails plugin used:
- restful_authentication
- SSL support
- autocomplete
- simple captcha

The website took around 40 days to be built, from start of development to production day.

– RESTful best practices
www.frailers.net
Sorry… too boring

– Mobile Mozilla - Christian Sejersen
5 people of the Mozilla foundation are working actively on Mobile mozilla right now.
What´s a mobile browser should support
- web navigation
- widget platform
- interoperability with external devices
Platform under which Mobile Mozilla will run:
- Windows
- Linux
- maybe Symbian
The User Interface will be developed in XUL.
The goal is to have Mobile firefox at the end of 2008.

Sun Microsystems: moneys for ideas

After Google and its Android competition, now it’s time for Sun Microsystems to come up with an interesting initiative to reward worldwide developers: the Netbeans Innovator Grant.

You can submit a project proposal — your ideas of how to improve the NetBeans Project — and a panel of experts will assign to the best proposals a money grant. Once you have a grant approved, you know that you’ll receive the money if you complete the project. You can then work on a module, develop an application on top of the NetBeans Platform, fix bugs on the NetBeans IDE or even work on missing documentation or translations. Whatever you think is needed to increase NetBeans adoption and push the NetBeans Project to its next level. And you’ll get real money — at least US$ 11,500 or 2,000! — to work on your dream open source project!

What’s peculiar of this contest is that you don’t have to submit a working application, but you can propose just an idea: if selected, you’ll get the prize after the completion of the project.

If you don’t like the idea of playing with Netbeans, that’s not the only contest offered by Sun. Have a look also at the GlassFish Awards Program, at the OpenJDK Community Innovators’ Challenge and to this page for many other non-Java related competitions.

Ready to sell your ideas for moneys?

Cochem

Moon over Burg Eltz, Moseltal

How I ended up on “Il sole 24 ore”

Well, on a supplement dedicated to Lombardia (an italian Region), actually; and there’s my photo, but not my name. However, Il sole 24 ore is still the most important italian economic newspaper, so I guess it can be considered a good news for a quite and sleepy Wednesday.

That’s the full story: my friends of ExcogitaNet in Milan decided to try [Read more →]

Begijnhof, Amsterdam

Begijnhof, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

EEE: a hot niche market for software houses?

I haven´t had much time to play with the EEE yet, since I spent most part of the last week (and hundred percent of my energies) packing my stuff and moving in a new apartment.

Anyway, I´m definitely trying to think about new ways of using, and new softwares to write (or to modify) for the EEE. There´s no doubt in fact the little laptop is a real (even though simple) computer, but it´s also evident, when you use it, that most of the application aren´t intended to be displayed on a 800×480 resolution.

Have a look at two examples:

Thunderbird “account settings” contains way too much options to be displayed on the small screen, and there´s no way to access to all of them, unless you use an external monitor and switch to 1024×768. What happens if you have a dialog box with the Confirm button falling outside the screen?

Eclipse isn´t really an example of a typical application for the EEE, but it is a good example of why a big class of softwares is barely usable on this platform: if you look at the picture, you´ll notice that some 30% of the screen space is occupied by useless stuff like menu bars, icons and borders.

So, is the obvious conclusion that EEE screen resolution is not enough for real-world usage? I don´t think so; on the contrary, I think there´s enough space for doing most of everyday work.
Looking at the world from a 800×480, however ,made me realize how “noisy” are modern UIs; how much value have a menu bars, icons, big traslucent borders in my user experience? Close to zero, I´d say.

Obviously, these are only my ideas; there are, however, some facts: Asus sold out 400k EEEpcs in a few months last year, and it´s expected to sell at least 2 millions devices on 2008. Will 2M users+ be enough to convince software houses to write software designed for the little EEE screen? I don´t know what you think, but it looks like a hot “niche” market to me!

Asus EEE pc: first impressions

I must confess I was waiting for January 24th since weeks. Today is in fact the official German release date of the Asus EEE pc, the new cheap (299 €) ultraportable laptop created by Asustek.

So this morning I headed to the local Galeria Kaufhof to pay my fee to become one of the first “germans” to buy this cool new toy.

I didn´t have much time to play with it yet, but for the impatients here´s a first list of impressions:

• It feels a bit cheap (the keyboard, the plastic case and the small screen), especially compared to MacBooks, but, hey, it´s cheap!
• The operating system is nice and very simple to use. All the basic applications are already installed (Openoffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, media players..) and run smoothly… much faster then you could expect from a pc with 512MB of RAM
• The keyboard is definitely small, but after a few minutes you start to get used to it (in fact I´m writing this post with the EEE)
• I had no problems to connect to various Wi-fi (ehmmm… differently for my macbook)
• Incredibly enough, Internet from an 800×600 screen is actually usable
• There´s a Java Runtime Environment (1.5.0) installed and..
• Eclipse runs well on it!

For the first day, that´s already enough to fall in love with this little device. Even more when I realized it instantly recognized my Huawei umts usb modem!