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My World66

2006-07-11T23:35:00.000+09:30

World 66 a "travel guide you write".. I don't get to travel very much anymore, but this is a map of when i did..

Where is IBM Java 1.5

2006-07-10T16:45:00.000+09:30

I used to use the IBM JVM since it performed better, but i have not been able to get a download since the move to Java 5

A recent entry in the dotnetinterop MSDN blog (of all places) talked about IBM Java 5 on Windows. From the comment section you can get the JRE for a Lenovo computer, or as part of the IBM Development Package for Eclipse.

For Linux, you can download directly from the developerworks site.

My Weather Pixie

2006-07-07T17:01:00.000+09:30

Bluetooth crack in miliseconds!

2006-07-07T16:46:00.000+09:30

I just came across an article from New Scientist that discussed how to make a bluetooth device re-initialise a pairing, and then crack the code in 60 millisecconds (0.06 s)!

Also see the Slashdot discussion here

An I just started using a bluetooth headset again...

UI design to reduce support

2006-07-05T13:47:00.000+09:30

An old (6-Jul-2004) article from SoftwareCEO titled "Clean, cutting-edge UI design cuts McAfee's support calls by 90%" provides the following 23 tips from the McAfee and thier external UI design team, mile7:

UI tip #1: Start the UI design before you build the product.

"you need to get that user feedback before you build anything real."

UI tip #2: Understand your software from a user's standpoint.

"You have to have a very clear understanding of what the product is supposed to do, from a task perspective rather than features,"

UI tip #3: Get feedback through task-oriented use.

"we asked them to answer some questions—not about functionality of the product, but strictly about the tasks they had to perform."

UI tip #4: Segment the process into logical chunks.

"the goal was to map UI feedback from users very specifically to the product's development maturity."
For Example:

Phase 1 - Overview - does it look like it will work?
Phase 2 - Operational - can you install and run it?
Phase 3 - Task-oriented - does it do what you need to do?
Phase 4 - Wrap-up & Reality Check - is it complete? is it consistent

UI tip #5: Never shut the product down.

"demo'd it to everybody who walked by"

UI tip #6: Let user demand defend against code creep.

"Our team strove to understand what is necessary versus what's desirable,"

UI tip #7: More is nearly always less.

"We try to reduce the set of nouns to the lowest common denominator."

UI tip #8: Use your UI to give the user a sense of context.

"A common failure of most software UIs is that the user is unable to derive any sense of context"

UI tip #9: Don't offer direction, and never assume.

"To keep UI design valid, it's important that users' experience is as close to reality as possible."

UI tip #10: Resist the urge to make a quick fix.

"Sometimes they'll be having a problem with a particular piece of the application, and rather than issue a quick fix, you need to step back and think about whether that's the right way to display the information or have the product function."

UI tip #11: Treat UI as an ongoing program, not a one-off.
UI tip #12: Get a manageable but representative group.

"careful about whom you're getting and you really know your audience profile, I think you can get a really good representative sampling with 12 to 20."

UI tip #13: Choose active, willing, and unbiased users.
UI tip #14: Reward your early adopters by acknowledging their role.
UI tip #15: Get your developers (and yourself) into the right mindset.

You have to break the typical mindset of features and technology," he says. "If you take those things out of your vocabulary, and focus on the user's ability to complete tasks, it makes it a little easier."

UI tip #16: Do-it-yourself design is nearly always a bad idea.

There's a huge difference between a professional graphic artist and a programmer who happens to know how to draw.

UI tip #17: Make the designers a part of the development team.
UI tip #18: Don't let technology overpower usability.

"A common mistake in the PC world is allowing technology to take the lead,"

UI tip #19: Bring the engineers into the UI calls.

You want to get the users excited about the functionality, while at the same time letting the engineers understand where the users have problems.

UI tip #20: Find an internal UI champion.
UI tip #21: Contain costs by including the designers early.
UI tip #22: For the best UI examples, look to consumer software.
UI tip #23: How to tell if your UI might need work.

Check your tech support call logs. Are there common themes and complaints? In general, are you getting too many calls?
Talk with your users. Talk with prospects. What do they say? Can they accomplish the tasks you put to them?
Consider usability testing—the real stuff, with outside experts in a controlled and objective environment.

LEMONADE Profile: The Key Standard for Mobile Messaging

2006-07-05T13:35:00.000+09:30

LEMONADE is "License to Enhanced Mobile Oriented And Diverse Endpoints" - not quite Kool-Aid, but similar...

This profile is a collection of existing IMAP and SMTP extensions intended to imporve the ability for mobile clients to deal with email by enabling "action at a distance" message handeling and composition - that is the ability to compose and forward messages with downloading them to the client, essetially by allowing the SMTP server to talk directly to the IMAP server.

IETF Documents


   This document describes a profile (a set of required extensions,
   restrictions and usage modes) of the IMAP and mail submission
   protocols. This profile allows clients (especially those that are
   constrained in memory, bandwidth, processing power, or other areas)
   to efficiently use IMAP and Submission to access and submit mail.
   This includes the ability to forward received mail without needing to
   download and upload the mail, to optimize submission and to
   efficiently resynchronize in case of loss of connectivity with the
   server.
   The Lemonade profile relies upon extensions to IMAP and Mail
   Submission protocols; specifically URLAUTH and CATENATE IMAP protocol
   [RFC3501] extensions and BURL extension to the SUBMIT protocol

Whitepaper from Isode

LEMONADE is the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) technology being standardized for support of Mobile Email. The LEMONADE Profile was published as an Internet Standard (RFC 4550) in June 2006. This paper explains what the LEMONADE Profile is about and why it will be the central specification for open standards mobile messaging.

Spam controls - maths puzzles and sender-pays

2006-07-05T13:18:00.000+09:30

A recent post to the Ferris Research blog, "Outlook 2007 Spam Control Math Puzzle" informed me of the 'math puzzle' challenge for sending email throu exchange. The talkback was interesting, in particular the comment that use of the math puzzle "sounds like a very effective way of requiring everyone to upgrade Outlook...".

The alternate Camram project looks like an interesting implementation of a hybrid sender-pays (or "proof of work" stamp) model that allows it to operating in a mixed environment so universal adoption is not necessary; kinda how you still get street delivered spam, even with a "Offical Post Only" label, but you can always look for the postage stamp to "authenticate" if it went throu the postal system.

If we all used better user authentication systems in email (such as the "The GNU Privacy Guard) then life would be much easier :)

Open Moto's Call to Unify Mobile Java Platform

2006-05-18T14:48:00.000+09:30

On Monday Motorola announced the launch of it's opensource site; opensource.motorola.com, and made a call to "Unify Mobile Java Platform":

Motorola Launches opensource.motorola.com: New Web program to feature code contributions, open source projects, information and idea exchange
Motorola Issues the Call to Unify Mobile Java Platform: Company open sources MIDP3, Java test framework & test cases to jump-start unification movement; encourages mobile industry leaders to support the effort

If they were really serious, i would have expected them to have spent sometime on the presentation of the site - maybe they wanted to let everyone that they had bought the enterprise version of SourceForge.net (maybe?), but it came across half-baked and unprofessional to me... if they aren't even going to put the effort into tailoring the site, how much effort are they going to give the developers?

Releasing test cases to JSR's to Unify Mobile Java? I thought the development and release of test cases (a.k.a. technology compatibility kit) was part of the JCP process?

The cynic in me also tends to think this move is because Motorola staff don’t have the capability to keep up with and debug the companies changing position on operating system usage (is it Symbian, Microsoft, Linux or a Motorola OS we are using this week??)

Mpowerplayer: A Java WebStart MIDlet Player

2006-05-18T11:02:00.000+09:30

mpowerplayer is a Java Webstart application that allows Web users to try J2ME applications directly from the Web before they buy, with the security to protect your midlet.

Mpowerplayer also provides a Developer Environment, claiming to be the only cross platform MIDP 2.0 SDK, offering J2ME development for MacOS.

From the site:

The mpowerplayer software developer kit includes the mpowerplayer as a standalone application. It's a pure Java emulator implementing MIDP 2.0 and MMAPI, suitable for integration with your favorite environment and IDE. Third-party integration efforts exist for Ant, Eclipse, Idea, and we hear of more efforts almost daily.

mpowerplay also provides a catalogue in their demo platform, so you can use them as a distibution channel also...

I actually found it at the Download Page for GMaps, a free J2ME application that displays Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, Windows Live Local (MSN Virtual Earth) and Ask.com Maps and satellite imagery on Java J2ME-enabled mobile phones, PDAs and other devices.

Java will be Free: Not Whether, but How?

2006-05-18T10:05:00.000+09:30

Looks like all the speculation was right - Rich Green, executive vice president of Sun Software, after being asked "Are you going to open source Java?" by CEO Jonathan Schwartz, announced "At this point, it's not a question of 'whether,' but a question of 'how'."

I am still not sure if they are talking free as in "freedom", or free as in "free beer!"...

Instant Messaging: New Developments in Presence, and Real Time Information Interchange

2006-05-18T05:36:00.000+09:30

This was a Webinar presented by Ferris Research, a San Francisco-based research institute focused on messaging and collaborative technologies.

Instant Messaging (IM) began largely as a proprietary service ...
From this beginning, we have seen: presence extended to other devices (telephony handsets, cell phones, PDAs, applications, etc.), the addition of other forms of real-time information interchange based on audio, video, file transfer, and structured text; and the support of multi-point interchanges (conferencing). We have seen the emergence of standards that define protocols for both the internal use, and the linkage, of presence and real-time information interchange systems and services, and we have seen new entrants (Skype, GoogleTalk, etc.) lead with audio capabilities.

The webinar presented three good speakers that provided different perspectives on the IM and Presence area.

Nick Shelness, Senior Analyst, Ferris Research, and Independent Technology Consultant, started with an overview of history of IM, the architecture of presence systems, and the standards involved. He mentioned the use of SIP/SIMPLE and XMPP as the standards in use now.

Joe Hildebrand, Chief Technology Officer, Jabber Inc, then discussed the approach of Jabber Inc to the IM space, and the need to incorporate capability into the presence protocols to enable the roaming of end users across multiple device endpoints. He listed 3 outstanding problems in 1) close consumer systems that will not federate, 2) ongoing changes to the SIP/SIMPLE protocol, and 3) security and trust issues

Adam Gartenberg, Offering Manager Real-time Collaboration Offerings, IBM Lotus, also discussed the need to cater for different device endpoints and the ability to select different modes of interaction. He also spoke of the move toward "2nd generation" real-time collaboration by the integration of data feeds into the interaction - "real-time as a platform, not just a communication device"

The question and answer session then bought up further issues:

Will IM replace email, including for document transfer?: Yes, the increase in spam on SMTP means IM is a more attractive interaction medium as it is protected from spam by having a ÂdenyÂ by default policy, however the major concern is from virus threats in file transfer, but IM Âservers/brokers are now addressing that with server base virus scanning. However IM is not (traditionally) a store and forward interaction, and we canÂt be online all the time!
Will we see federated communities of IM users: IM communities will have to interoperate for IM to replace/compete with email for communication. This will expose IM to the same issues of security and spam as email faces.
Application interaction through IM: I was excited by the prospect that new online applications will be proactive as a bot based interface across IM. This has been seen to some regard, and the XMPP protocol makes this very easy to implement. It was over 5 years ago that I did a paper on Intelligent Agents, and saw the promise for this interaction, once the IM client is as interoperable as a web browser we might see this promise realized.

Thanks to Ferris for putting on this webinar, I look forward to the next one: Mobile Messaging Devices, 2006-2011

It is here

2006-05-17T15:34:00.000+09:30

It is here, the moment you have all been waiting for, but never realised would be... the blog for Derek Munneke.

"Have you gone completely mad?" Mark asked me as I slipped a sixth different bottle into my hand baggage.

"I'm trying to challenge and subvert my own fundamental assumptions as to what constitutes rationally constructed behaviour."

"Does that mean yes??"

"I mean that I'm just trying to loosen up a bit," I said. "An aeroplane doesn't give you much scope for arbitrary and alternative types of behaviour, so I'm just making the most of the opportunities that are offered."

"I see."

Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See, 1990 http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0345371984