Aehso’s Output

EC Telecoms Market Commissioner Viviane Reding:

You cannot have a knowledge based economy if large parts of society don’t have broadband.

This quote, in the context of yet another EC report has re-confirmed just how poor broadband services and competition are in Ireland. It also largely calls into question our government’s assertion that they are really building a knowledge based economy.

Who is to blame? The toothless COMREG don’t seem to be capable of doing anything to drive competition (apparently the maximum fine they can impose on a telco is 3,000 euro - is that true?) and the EU report calls for further reform.

I think the is unfair to pick on the fixed line broadband services only though. Voice services in Ireland are also crap, they should have highlighted that too. And don’t get me started on mobile data services.

No doubt the government will just rename COMREG to something else, ignore the report completely or promise that it’ll be better next year, after the election.

I just stubled accross Scribd while looking for an online copy of Isaac Asimov’s The Last Question (I found one).

Quite cool, YouTube type upload and sharing of (copyrighted?) documents, downloadable as PDF, MS Word, Plain Text or machine-generated MP3 (not the easiest to listen to it has to be said) formats.

The Nokia N800 rocks. I picked one up two weeks ago and I’m more than happy with it.

The pluses:

• Great design, great form factor. The build is Nokia quality.
• Vivid 800×480 display.
• Great WiFi network connectivity and easy bluetooth phone pairing.
• Both Opera and Minimo browsers.
• Several email clients.
• Canola media player.
• Cisco VPN client.
• VNC client (and server!).
• ssh client (and server!).
• Remote Desktop Client.
• UPnP streaming client.
• Mplayer client.
• Gizmo Project (VOIP) client.

Try that on your iPhone!  One other positive comment has to be around the user community - both maemo.org and Internet Tablet Talk seem to be busy which bodes well for future development for the platform.

There are minuses but importantly most are software issues (and are hence addressable)

• No obvious contact/calendar/task list sync app.
• RSS feed reader usability sucks - no OPML import.
• Flash video framerate still isn’t quite there, even after installing the latest IT OS 2007.
• GAIM doesn’t seem to want to install.
• The virtual bluetooth keyboard (XKbd-BTHID) doesn’t seem to want to run.

The lack of a decent flat rate data plan from my mobile provider (O2) continues to restrict my usage but perhaps that will change in the near future.

Now I’m just waiting for the GPS Navigation Kit to be released…

Ars Technica has a great review of the new Apple TV.  Quite why one would want to buy one of these things is completely beyond me:

…It cannot share an Internet connection with another device, and it cannot broadcast music to Apple’s Airport Express. You cannot attach an eyeTV to it, or any other TV tuner for that matter (and therefore it cannot record TV shows). It can’t play most codecs out of the box, you can’t buy content directly from the iTunes Store, and it has very limited tech specs…

Even ardent mac addicts must question the appeal of this.  There is nothing compelling about it beyond the improved 12 foot interface.

Meanwhile, my Mac Mini will survive only until I find a MythTV/Linux setup that can replace it in terms ease of use.  If only Apple would open up FrontRow in the meantime, the nice folks at Elgato could complete the integration that we all crave.  The big question for me at the moment is if OS 10.5 (Leopard) will contain an improved Front Row interface.

Update: In my dismay I was getting the JCP & W3C processes all mixed up - duh. It seems it was the W3C WSDL Binding specification that fell at the last hurdle, presumably causing the JAXB 2.1 and JAX-WS 2.1 specifications to be withdrawn.

Update2: Vivek Pandey’s Blog post seems to confirm the above. I’m all for blogging to get the word out to the masses but the JCP Expert Group(s) should update their official JSR pages too. Regardless, the fact that JAX-WS 2.1 JAXB 2.1 was finalized on a Candidate Recommendation W3C specification reflects poorly on the quality of specification that the JCP is producing.

Does anyone know what happened to JAX-B 2.1? JAX-WS 2.1 (JSR-224) was released a few weeks ago, but the JCP have since pulled the specification, reference implementation and TCK. The reason given is that the W3C WSDL Binding specifiication, referenced by the JAX-WS 2.1 JAXB 2.1 specification announced back in December, did not make it past the Candidate Recommendation stage and apparently needs to be replaced with an alternative specification.

Does anyone have any pointers on why this happened (and what the old JAX-WS 2.1 candidate might be replaced by or when)?

Update 3: Looks like WS-Addressing WSDL Binding is being replaced by WS-Addressing Metadata.

Not a bad one, webware, to be used instead of SaaS.

While I was on vacation last week, our Cape Clear ESB Platform scooped the Enterprise Tools Jolt Award for 2007. It’s always nice to return to work to news like that! Even better, the award was for Cape Clear 6.7 and we have since released Cape Clear 7 (hence the vacation!) which is far better in every respect so I’m already looking forward to next year’s Jolt Awards

Is 3.2 billion silly money for a technology that really just enables online demos??? It doesn’t even do cool YouTube web 2.0 demos. What the???

All I know is, every time I have had to do a WebEx in the past I’ve have always had to resort back to IE7 (from Firefox 2). It sucks, but someone payed $3.2billion for a browser dependent presentation platform? HOLY CRAP!

I still think that Jan Chipchase has one of the best technology jobs on the planet. His recent blog posts are as thought provoking as ever. Moving Atoms is just great, making me both laugh (at the sight of all those little red cases) and worry about the irony of this type of commercial behaviour.

Disappointed to miss your keynote at EclipseCon this week but as you’re probably reading this on your Blackberry I thought I’d try directly - any chance of an autographed Dilbert cartoon?

(There’s nothing quite like the direct route but I can’t have been the first person to think of this, can I?)