Aehso’s Output

Google have just lost a landmark trademark case in the appeals court in France - LVMH (Luis Vuitton Moet Hennessy) claimed Google were unfairly selling their trademarks to 3rd parties (including counterfieters) via AdWords:

Vuitton’s efforts are aimed at making the search engine more of an advertising/marketing service for the merchant than a research service for the customer. The Web’s roots suggest it’s intended to be more of a populist tool.

This is a pretty far reaching verdict, even if it was in a French court. What happens to search result quality if Google cannot sell trademarked keywords to third parties? And how many words does that leave? Given AdWords contributes most to Google’s overall revenue I’d be nervous if I held Google stock now.

It’ll be interesting to see how this one pans out. Can/will the big brand owners follow suit in the US courts? How can Google accomodate this ruling given the vast sets of trademarked words in different jurisdictions?

So ApacheCon Europe ‘06 has been on in the Burlington for the past few days )anyone wandering around Donnybrook/Leeson Street in the mornings/evenings over may have noticed a “geek increase”. It was a bit smaller than I expected but the quality of the content was superb if one bears in mind that these guys are doing this stuff part time (well, some of them!). The sessions I attended were all SOA/OSGi centric and all were worth attending, from an educational point of view. A very partial summary:

• The OSGi/JSR#291/JSR#277 issue is still very much alive although some efforts are being made to try achieve some degree of compatibility by using a common subset of Manifest headers. However differences apparently already exist in the drafts (such as the version range specifier format used) It is pretty sad to see such open (or should I say JCP-closed) disregard for interoperability between two overlapping JSR. Both are due for delivery in Dolphin (Java 7), perhaps by then the whole Java platform will have been rendered unusable by the plethora of other overlapping JSRs and we (the users) will all have moved on to coding in Ruby.
  Actually, by then, it may not matter - OSGi seems to be gaining considerable traction. Tuesday afternoon had a whole afternoon of talks and discussion from Richard Hall (Felix), Peter Kriens (OSGi Alliance/aQute), Marcel Offermans (Luminis) and a round table discussion involving folks from Apache Maven, Felix, Harmony, Directory Server projects. It seems some efforts are being made to try get Apache Jakarta projects to OSGi-fy their Manifests (via capabilities built into Maven)
• Woden looks good. It’ll be the WSDL2.0 processor that all Java folks end up using (if you need to parse WSDL2.0 that is!). It replaces WSDL4J which is being put out to pasture (it must be, I logged a bug against it over a year ago and still no feedback!)
• Axis 2 apparently has WSDL2.0 HTTP binding support with some restrictions (messages must be “IRI style” compatible). I’m not sure if one even needs to declare a HTTP binding in the WSDL, it seems to be automatically available for all services that have SOAP endpoints.
• Apache Synapse looks nice, in a cute kind of way. I’m not sure I’d call it an ESB since it is really just a very thin routing framework that runs on top of Axis 2 - it doesn’t have any management interface per say and the overview might have been a bit forward looking with regard to the capabilities of the current implementation Synapse looks more like an endpoint intermediary that you one might use to implement specific tasks (XPath/RegExp based routing, binding conversion, logging, endpoint authentication & authorization, transformation (XSLT, E4X, POJO based). I’m not sure you’d host your service implementations on it.
• Apache Tuscany work is ongoing and I bet it will be for some time yet! I’m not certain of their claim that it will simplify the development of business solutions, if only because it is based on SCA which is turning into an absolute beast of a set of specifications - think “one spec to rule them all” type big, and with big specifications comes complexity, not simplification. From an implementation point of view, a huge problem is that the SCA specifications do not have either a reference implementation nor a compatibility test suite and according to Simon Nash and Jeremy Boynes (both of IBM) there are no current plans to develop either. Also it seems curious that the SCA specifications are not being developed under the auspices of an open body like OASIS, W3C or the OMG - why not? Some would say the overall approach seems incredibly vulnerable to repeat the mistakes of CORBA. It will also be interesting to see if any convincing response is given to Ron Ten-Hove’s recent critique of SCA.

I spent an hour today installing Second Life and even managed to wander around Dublin:

Wow, pretty impressive, me flying over O’Connell Street Bridge at night, I have always wanted to do that! I also checked out the virtual view from the top of the virual spire (or “Berties Pole” as it is called in-game)
Dublin is even near Las Vegas on the SL world map - if only!

Tim Berners-Lee weighs in on the net neutrality issue with a beautiful opening line:

When I invented the Web, I didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission.

Well worth a read.

Although the current debate is centered on what is happening in the US remember most of the valuable content on the internet flows from the US and those US telcos have to interconnect at some point with international telcos…

[Update: Fixed - the link to metrics.apple.com seems to have been updated to a correctly configured server, securemetrics.apple.com. Shame they didn’t bother testing it before putting it live…]
Deciding to comment on the Apple Discussion about the Front Row DRM issue I’m having, I tried to log onto Apple Support and but my browser immediately warns that while trying to connect to https://metrics.apple.com it was presented with a certificate owned by *.112.207.net. 207.net, despite the alarm bells it might set off, is owned by Omniture (cookie monsters - read the privacy statement here, for what it’s worth)

Does anyone bother test this stuff before it goes live or is gathering those metrics far more important? If I am Joe Mac User and I want to log a support issue with Apple what would my reaction be? Umm, panic, followed by the old “should-I-shouldn’t-I” OK/Cancel button shuffle. Incredibly shoddy, for any commercial website, let alone the website of the shining light of computer usability.

Try it yourself.

<rant>
I fired up Front Row this morning for some background tunes to my Saturday-morning-flaffing-about routine and discovered to my shock that suddenly my mini is “not authorized” to play a significant chunk of my DRM-free MP3 files. My mp3 files, that I ripped from my CDs and I’m not authorized to play them on my computer. My microwave never tells me that I am not authorized to nuke my food.

It turns out others have recently encountered this issue with FrontRow too yet there is no admission from Apple (that I can find) that this is a bug they will fix which begs the question- was this implemented in the latest updates by design? Meanwhile I have to either move my mp3 files onto the Mini’s internal hard drive (where there is no space) or mess around with ID3 tags in the files. Baah!

I started buying Macs because I was sick of this sort of low level mucking around on machines running the Windows. I do enough of that at work every day, I don’t want the hassle at home.
I’m beginning to sympathise with all this talk of switching.
</rant>

Bugzilla 106176 (Provide more flexible workspaces) documents the evolution of Eclipse 3.2 Flexible workspaces:

…a project can now be created whose files and directories are stored on a network, in a database, or any facility capable of storing hierarchies of files and directories. This new ability to decouple resources in the workspace from the local file system is called flexible workspaces.

This should be interesting! Projects containing resources that are stored in databases, WebDAV servers and all sorts of other hierarchical repositories. I’m sure the Visual Age veterans out there are already dreaming of the return of the Code Repository Looking around, I don’t yet see any alternative extensions of the underlying org.eclipse.core.filesystem.filesystems extension point but I am sure they will appear with time. (The CVS team plugin provides one that seems to handle the cvs scheme although I havn’t yet found any documentation on using it directly.)

In the meantime, I think I’ll knock up a provider for resources stored at “http” URIs - we need one for our product (so we can link remote WSDL files directly into projects). More when I have an implementation to speak of…

(JM, you’ll love this one)

Peter Thomas has an interesting stack diagram of a Sprint/Hibernate web application in action. No, honestly, there is no recursion in there.
Maybe, just maybe, this is why Ruby on Rails is grabbing so much mindshare amonst Java developers these days. If you havn’t see the RoR “Create a weblog in 15 minutes screencast” yet, do not pass go, do not collect €200.

(via ongong)

Are PaddyPower taking bets on when Martin O’Neill will lunge across that glass table at Gary Lineker (or Ian Wright the next time he is on)?

With the regular look of distain on his face for the comments from Lineker, Hanson & co, they should be - almost as entertaining as watching Dunphy when he got going on Keane!

Great to see a great short story translate into an award winning short film directed by an Irishman, Stephen O’Regan.  (via Terry Bisson’s site)