Niklas | 
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01 31st, 2007| 
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“In the end, of course Cheerios come out on top but it hardly tells you anything you didn’t know before - as the only solid food in the experiment you might equally read the result as, Cheerios - better for you than starvation”
Jan
31
Jan
30
Just had to try out the new blog feature in Word 2007. So far it looks good, although I’m still really confused about the new menu interface. Couldn’t even find the Open menu option until after clicking on all menu options at least twice I realized that the little circle in the upper left was slowly blinking.
Now for some HTML
torture.
Update: the simple HTML test above didn’t turn as perfect as one could wish for. A <br /> tag was inserted before “torture”, but that seems to be a bug in Wordpress rather than Word. Besides that, Word seems to create the “correct” tags, such as <strong> rather than <b>.
Jan
30
At the Swedish Grammys currently running on TV, I saw one of the most clever uses of product placement I’ve seen. Mostly, these are very in your face and annoying, like a SonyEricson phone for remote controlling your car or all good guys use Macs, all evil PCs. At the Grammys, the nomination presentation graphics is the Alt+Tab interface in Vista, you know the one with stacked windows. No logo, the only thing besides the actual stacked effect that reveal the product are the title bar buttons (minimize, maximize and close), however they are quite nicely blended into the frame.
Clever.
Jan
30
It looks like we will finally get a decent API for working with dates and times in Java. After the debacles with Date (1900-based years anyone?) and Calendar (just how complex can an API be?), Joda has been a savior. Now, a new JSR has been registred that aims to start with Joda to create a new, java.time API. Hopefully, the leads can fight to keep this one as simple and logical as possible and fight the spec-by-committee plague.
Jan
30
Well, now that both Fredrik and Mårten has reminded me that I’ve stopped cheese blogging, I should probably do something about it. It’s not like we’ve stopped doing our weekly cheese shopping, more like I’ve forgotten about writing on the topic. So, what’s on the plate this week.
- Chimay Biere: we’ve had this so many times and I’ve covered it before. Still my number one favorite.
- Montbriac: I’ve never had this one before but it was a very pleasant surprise. Pitch black rind, beatiful runny white on the inside. It’s a blue cheese made out of cow milk made in the same dairy that create another of my favorites, St Agur. While containing blue mold, you almost not even notice since the taste it blends excellent with the cheese. Montbriac is now on the top three of my favorites.
- Robiola Lombardia: described at our local cheese shop as a luxury replacement for Taleggio. We’ve had this before, but this week we got a unusually firm piece which I really liked.
If you like to read more on cheeses, I recommend reading this column in San Francisco Chronicle (also available as a feed). If you found you’re way here and are only interested in the cheese postings (who would blame you :-), you can subscribe the cheese-only-stuff here.
Jan
29
Jan
28
Thursday and Friday was the Zystems Integration Days for 2007. I think this is the fourth time we’re having them and they have grown considerably. This year, more than 180 customers, partners and internals participated. Since I’m really still on parental leave, I had a fairly easy schedule this year with only one presentation, on WebSphere Service Registry and Repository. I think it went fairly well, actually managed to stay on time and even squeze in a little demo. The only technical hickup was when switching over to my VMWare image for the demo, it changed the resoluation on the projector so that any text in the GUI during the demo was pretty much unreadable. Didn’t see that coming.
But, most fun at these type of occasions is just meeting up with people you’ve worked with over the last couple of years. It now seems to be a pretty large bunch.
Jan
28
Jan
28
Nick Gall, a Gartner VP spills it:
“Unfortunately, Web Services, at least the WS-* style, are “Web” in name only. While WS-* enables tunneling over HTTP (used merely as an XML message transport), in almost every important aspect, WS-* violates (or at best ignores) the architectural principles of the Web”
and
“It is my position that the W3C should extricate itself from further direct work on SOAP, WDSL, or any other WS-* specifications and redirect its resources into evangelizing and standardizing identifiers, formats, and protocols that exemplify Web architectural principles. This includes educating enterprise application architects how to design “applications” that are “native” web applications.”
While I certainly could not agree more, it is interesting to see that even the big-shots bow agree, in public. That W3C workshop might turn out to be a defining moment in how the web and web services are regarded among the broad base of developers and architects. I sure did not think so when the talk about it started.
