This is one of those Wired articles that talks about stuff “3 to 4 years in the future” that I am a little doubtful of. Through the Solar Looking Glass talks about translucent solar cells that sit where you would normally have window shades.
Dyson said a single solar cell will cost about 25 cents. The cells are situated about a square foot apart and will have a “way more than 50 percent” energy-conversion rate, she added.
Technology
Scott McCloud follows up on a piece by Clay Shirky in which Shirky shoots down micropayment systems, specifically talking about BitPass. McCloud’s article, Misunderstanding Micropayments is great, as I think his other essays have been, and he really hits on the proof that micropayments can work:
Most users are neither Saints nor Sinners. If getting it legitimately is just a few more cents, while getting it for free is just a little more work (or even risk), a significant number will “do the right thing” at the drop of a hat. At a time when 1% of computer users (Mac owners running OS X) just bought 10 million songs in four months
Music
Back in May, I had figured that Apple Computer had worked out the legal issues in their deal with The Beatles’ Apple Music. It turns out that I was wrong and Apple has been sued by The Beatles over iPod, ITMS
“When it first happened with the iPod, we said, “What could they be thinking?” said a Beatles legal insider, who agreed that posters announcing the iPod from “AppleMusic” were among the most egregious violations. “They knew we had the agreement, and that we’d won a lot of money from them already.”
Music
Fred Kaplan writes Bush’s Many Miscalculations - On Sept. 11, the president was handed a historic opportunity. He ignored it.:
An American leader could have taken advantage of that moment and reached out to the world, forged new alliances, strengthened old ones, and laid the foundations of a new, broad-based system of international security for the post-Cold War era—much as Harry Truman and George Marshall had done in the months and years following World War II.
Politics
The Seal Player offers access to a bunch of Seal music including all of his new Seal IV album. I’ll have to give this a listen later, because I like a fair amount of Seal’s earlier work. Apparently, this album is actually his 5th, because he created an entire album that he threw out before releasing this one.
Music
Markus Krätzig has created JHelpDev, which is possibly the only open source JavaHelp authoring tool. It relies on you creating HTML pages however you normally do that, and then provides tools for creating table of contents, etc.
Software Development
Yesterday, I was looking at Swing GUI frameworks. I got two comments, one from Klaasjan Tukker regarding the UIC project, and the other from the ever-diligent Gerald Bauer about XUL-based solutions. There are a wide variety of things that fall into the category of “framework”. Both of the commenters presented GUI widget assembly solutions. I’m looking for something different than that.
Using Eclipse, I actually don’t find it that difficult to hand assemble my widgets into panels, particularly using something like JGoodies Forms. Eclipse saves on the typing, and makes it so that I don’t really need to remember what things are called.
What I’m looking for in a framework is something like Werx or ObjectScript’s Chimera framework. These provide interesting ways to bind the GUI with the system’s backend. If the framework also provided a collection of commonly used UI goodies (like multi-window management) that would be a bonus.
Update: Somnifugi is a single-JVM implementation of JMS, which the author has had good success using in a similar fashion to Werx’s ReflectionBus.
Software Development
I’ve been poking around today to see if I could find good, general code that glues together Java GUIs. One of the first things I found was Java For U.com, which has a nice directory of a whole bunch of Java packages. It’s basically just someone’s bookmarks file, but it’s a good collection of bookmarks!
I came across the Explicit Layout Manager, which sounds like it warrants further investigation. I’ve been using the JGoodies Forms layout manager, and that’s pretty nice.
Werx is a Swing framework that uses a message bus to separate the front end from the back end. The nice thing about this model is that the framework automatically smooths out the Swing “freezing” problem for long running commands. LGPL.
ObjectScript appears to have a nicely constructed GUI framework as part of its IDE, Chimera. Unfortunately, Chimera is released under the GPL (the ObjectScript compiler is LGPL).
Wotonomy aims to be an open source implementation of WebObjects and JavaClient.
Software Development
In case you still think there’s nothing wrong with Java, take a look at Groovy. It’s not Groovy itself that shows what’s wrong with Java, so much as the fact that people have gone and created yet another JVM-based language. I’ve been using BeanShell a bit over the past few days, and it certainly makes some things easier. From what’s described on their wiki, I do think that Groovy will make things easier still, which is the whole point of such a language.
Personally, I’d like to see the Java language evolve to have a bit more useful syntax. They can keep their cherished static typing, but add convenience syntaxes for dealing with hashes, named method parameters, making it easy to pass methods around, etc. If they’re not going to do that for Java, I’d then really like to see Eclipse support something like BeanShell or Groovy.
It would be nice if the Groovy site mentioned the status of the Groovy language and compiler. BeanShell is quite mature and ready to use in projects. Is Groovy?
Software Development
Parentstages talks about offbeat kids music. Looking at their selections, it looks like they may be talking about music that I can actually stand, as opposed to some of the stuff you see on TV. Those commercials for CDs that have a bunch of kids singing nursery rhymes make me want to gag. They’ve got real kids singing those nursery rhymes, so they’re way off pitch. Call me a snob if you will, but I don’t want a CD like that. Live school musicals are one thing, but a prerecorded CD should at least be on pitch.
Music
