burek for breakfast

Like Mark said, what Mark did last night, is the ideal crash.

I'm having a very good time here at JAX in Wiesbaden, enjoying the sessions and the conversations, and going over my keynote talk tomorrow, i.e. on Thursday, April 24th, on "OpenJDK and the Future of Open Source Java on GNU/Linux".

On a side note, if you're at JAX, and want to chat in real life, ping me on IRC on #openjdk on irc.oftc.net.

Anyway, it feels a bit different to be introduced as "he is from Sun", then the "he is Kaffe guy", as there is a very different set of expectations that's being projected on oneself. As I suspected, working for a large company also offers a different kind of access to users of technology, and colors conversations with other communities, like the Eclipse devs, in fascinating ways. Like with any other community, there are a lot of good lessons to be learned from the way Eclipse works, and how long some wisdoms that now appear as self-evident, took to become a part of the way things are done. I had some nice conversations with Wayne and Jeff about Eclipse and Equinox today, and the whole week has been like that, with good sessions and fun keynotes being followed by interesting hallway conversations.

to support the Libre Graphics Meeting:



On to you, dear reader ... time is running out to get on bolsh's list of people famous for donating to the good cause!

I am looking forward to the dEUS concert on Wednesday in Saarbrücken. It's been a while since I saw them perform live, way before I got involved with the whole Free Software movement, and Java, in particular. They matured well.

Between arguing and struggling for Java to become Free Software, I grew up, too, and learned a lot from many great teachers. And eventually I had to start thinking about the next big step in my life. Fortunately, we've done a pretty good job of turning the Java world on its head over the past half decade in the Free Software community, so there is an increasing number of companies working on projects around GNU Classpath, OpenJDK, IcedTea, Apache Harmony, etc. I was lucky enough to have a few very good conversations with a bunch of them in the weeks since FOSDEM.

To cut a long story short, I am very excited about joining Sun Microsystems on April 15th, as a Java F/OSS Ambassador, following the path of the magnificent Tom Marble. I was looking for a job that would let me influence the future direction Open Source Java is taking more directly. Sun has made a lot of progress in the past couple of years, both as a good corporate Free Software citizen, and as an Open Source company, and I think it's the right place and time for me to do my next little bit to keep pushing Java Libre forward.

I will continue to contribute to the Kaffe project, of course, and I'll continue to be passionate about JCP reform, the ubiquity of the Java toolchain, and growing the pool of projects and contributors around and within OpenJDK.

Now more than ever!

I ran into an instance of Vista WTF earlier today. Fortunately, using my super powers to "Run as administrator" the Cygwin shell, the installation of the dot files actually completes, and I can get everything back on my PATH.

Funny enough, I have to run the Cygwin shell as admin every time I want it to actually be able to use ls, gcc, and so on. Needless to say, it just works without all that nonsense on another Vista SP 1 machine.

Oh, Microsoft, ...

Terrorists use surveillance to help plan attacks, taking photos and making notes about security measures like the location of CCTV cameras. If you see someone doing that, we need to know. Let experienced officers decide what action to take.

The Metropolitan Police Service, in an advertisement campaign that seems to cry out for a collaborative Web 2.0 community mashup application to collect CCTV camera pictures and locations.

Metropolitan Police service's audio advertisement for London's volunteer surveillance force sounds great over Nine Inch Nails Ghosts I-IV release, too.

Thank you, everyone, for coming, presenting, chatting, socializing, and all that packed into a great weekend, and in particular thanks to Pascal Bleser and others on the FOSDEM team for having us in a developer room, and putting another great conference together. Special thanks to tmarble, mjw, gnu_andrew. lillian and David Delabasse for organizing the Free Java track and its 'social event'.

Friday

At first, I was a bit afraid that I had started this FOSDEM on a wrong foot, coming late to our BrandWeg hacking session at the Cafe de BXL on Friday, and spending most of it not hacking on it, but discussing ways of implementing it with minimal effort with IanR and gnu_andrew. Having wrapped up the Kaffe 1.1.9 release in the early hours of that morning, I was pretty tired and looked forward to just socializing with the amazing OpenJDK, GNU Classpath & friends crowd, and catching up on anecdotes from all the projects in the community. I managed to miss neugens' Cacciocavallo (aka Качкаваљ where I grew up) adventures, being immersed in the discussions across tables.

But the evening ended up being great, and I enjoyed debating anything from OpenJDK's IGB to the future of Kaffe as one huge configure script, introducing new friends to old ones and vice versa, and meeting a lot of people for the first time.

Microsoft is providing a covenant not to sue open source developers for development or non-commercial distribution of implementations of these protocols.

Microsoft, announcing yet another empty promise that covers no open source developers at all, since all open source software by definition must not discriminate against fields of endeavor.

What Microsoft's saying is: the only good open source developers are those that don't write or distribute open source software.

Since mvfranz reported a bug building Kaffe on Mac OS X 10.4 using MacPorts, I thought it should be straightforward to debug that using the open source version of Mac OS X, Darwin. Since Apple does not really appreciate it when people share their proprietary operating system on the Internet, and is not very fond of people running it in an emulator either, and I don't really appreciate throwing money away on an expensive hardware dongle to run OS X I'd use about once a year, Darwin was the only real option.

Installing Darwin from the ISO on Apple's site in an emulator is pretty easy using the guide at fink . The serial pppd hack is good enough to download the Maxxuss networking driver, after extracting the zip and the ISO contained in it into a tarball, since Darwin can't mount ISO images.

With the network set up, one needs a place to stuff software onto, so having another virtual hard disk around is a good thing, since Darwin by default installs itself on a HFS+ partition, which is not very useful for a lot of Unix-y software that doesn't care about Apple's file system's file naming limitations any more than it cares about Microsoft's 8+3 scheme, so NetBSD's pkgsrc (the only packaging system that works on Darwin) refuses to bootstrap on it.

Fortunately, Darwin lets you fdisk the other virtual hard drive and set it up with UFS, and all is well, once one figures out the magic incantation necessary to make Darwin format and see the drive.

Unfortunately, since one of Kaffe's (potential) dependencies is libffi, and building libffi requires a reasonably up to date assembler, which means rebuilding GNU binutils.

Well, that's the theory.

In practice, binutils does not build the assembler on Darwin, presumably because Apple's pile of patches to support Mach-O has never made it into binutils. Thanks to the GNU GPL, though, Apple does publish their hacked up version as cctools, so at least in theory, I could get this built some day.

Kosovo's independence is another obvious, and welcome step in the great refactoring of the crashed Yugoslav project. About time, too.

All the ongoing diplomatic dramaturgy aside, where Putin has made it clear that he expects something significant in return for keeping an eye closed on the international law shenanigans surrounding the event, it will be most interesting to watch what the EU will come up with in order to solve the dilemma now posing itself with two states, that don't recognize each other, in the West Balkans, who are both aspiring EU membership. If EU's messy Northern Cyprus status question is any indicator, whoever gets in first, gets to make sure the other party doesn't get in.

While we have time at least until 2015 to figure out how to go about it, EU's diplomatic corps' performance with respect to Kosovo's status left a lot to be desired in the past 9 years, since the UN took control of the region. It will have to improve drastically.

Thanks to the tireless work of Tom Marble, Mark Wielaard and many others, we've finalized the schedule for the dev room for FOSDEM.

Last year, we focused on planning a couple of huge blocks of content a long time ahead, and tried to make sure that both the alternative free runtimes, the distributions and the OpenJDK developers had enough time to present their work to each other, and have enough time to meet and learn to know each other. That worked out great, as far as most of the feedback went, but it made it impossible to sneak in talks at the last minute.

So this time around we decided to break up everything into small, lightning-ish sessions of up to 20 minutes, to give everyone an opportunity to speak on the fun and exciting things they do, leaving some room for breaks, discussions and 'just in time' sessions, turning the dev room into a two day 'lightning conference' with a bit of 'unconference' thrown in. Usually, the best talks at conferences are lightning talks, where the presenter needs to focus to push out their message to an audience in a short time frame. The second best 'talks' are the hallway conversations, and to seed those the audience needs to have a chance to familiarize with each other. In the end, we ended up picking this slightly odd format.

So if this time around your favorite free software JVM / Java-related project isn't listed on the schedule, and you want a slot, just show up ready to go, and we'll try to fit you in somewhere on Sunday in the 'just in time' slots.

See you at FOSDEM!

Regularly, and almost predictably twice a year, the search for the next big thing to replace Java results in some other platform being hyped up as the Java killer. It used to be PHP, then C#, then Python, then C#, then Ruby, then C#, then Erlang, then C# and I believe someone even tried to advance the cause of Ada against Java recently, oddly enough.

All of that is quite amusing to watch, in particular in light of the handy charts on actual commits per language as counted by Ohloh for Java and its 'killers' on the bazillion free software projects they track.

Whether one considers Java's continuous survival of its killer replacements to be a bad thing, or a good thing, wishing it dead won't make it so. The future, like the past is multi-language, multi-runtime, multi-execution model. In that light, John Rose's DaVinci Machine is one of Java's best tickets for continuing to be an attractive low level and high level development platform.

Update: Santiago Gala takes the numbers and wraps them in a post about the polytheistic babel.

... as now Ohloh reports that the Kaffe code base has a negative number of lines of code, -4,756 to be precise.

Knowing that Kaffe is 2954% pure Java is kind of reassuring, too.

There has not yet been any comment from Yahoo.

Yahoo, left speechless after Microsoft's $44.6B offer.

Update: Looking at Zimbra's current license, that goes into a detailed description of Yahoo's shoes in section 1.3, I guess someone will have to out and update it to reference Microsoft's shoes, eventually.

Nicos Tsilas, senior director of interoperability and IP policy at Microsoft, said that IBM and the likes of the Free Software Foundation have been lobbying governments to mandate the rival OpenDocument Format (ODF) standard to the exclusion of any other format.

Microsoft's Nicolas Tsilas, not very eloquently describing Sun Microsystems, apparently.

As the 'Free Java' dev room wiki is gradually filling up with talk proposals, I should point out that if you want to have a 20 min slot for a free software Java VM & class library related session, or to be part of the free VM rumble, you should get on the wiki about now, as we'll be finalizing the schedule by Friday, afaict from chatter on #openjdk and #classpath.

"Examples of current cross-platform layers are Web runtime, Flash, Java and Open C."

Nokia's PR department, trying to explain to investors what Nokia just bought, i.e. neither a Web runtime, Flash, Java nor Open C.

Open C, btw, is not the same thing as ISO C. Yeah, I had to Google that first.

"We do not intend to attack anyone, but we consider it necessary for all our partners in the world community to clearly understand ... that to defend the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Russia and its allies, military forces will be used, including preventively, including with the use of nuclear weapons,"

General of the Army Yury Nikolayevich Baluyevsky, at a military conference on Jan 19th.

"Everyone in Serbia has a clear choice, there is no third way: a clear European path and anti-European path,"

Incumbent Serbian President, Boris Tadic, after losing the first election round to Tomislav Nikolic, on Jan 20th.

"At present, there is no Russian military base in Serbia, and any supply lines to such a base would need to snake through the roads or airspace of NATO states or protectorates."

Stratfor analyzing the link between the two, on Jan 21st.

"Four days after signing a major pipeline deal with Bulgaria, the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom agreed to buy a 51 percent stake in NIS, the Serbian state-owned oil company. The deal was yet another blow to the European Union’s ambitions to build its own 2,000-mile pipeline to bring gas to Europe from Iran and Azerbaijan via Turkey, analysts said."

The New York Times reporting on the Gazprom deal on Jan 23rd.

"Serbia is becoming one of the key transit links in the formation of a system... that is long-term, reliable, highly effective and significantly strengthens the energy security of Serbia and the whole European continent,"

Russian President Vladimir Putin at a press conference following the visit of Serbian President Boris Tadic, and the signing of the Gazprom deal on Jan 25th in Moscow.

"If the United States deploys missiles in Europe as a counter-terrorist measure, Russia can set up a stronghold in Serbia," he said. Serbia will host Russian missiles with nuclear warheads, he added.

RIA Novosti analysis of the Russian stake in the second round of Serbian elections, quoting the less desirable choice, Tomislav Nikolic, on Jan 25th.

And that was just last week. One more week of amusing news to go until the final round of Serbian presidential elections.

Q: What do

David Bock
Stuart Halloway
Doug Lea
Ted Neward
Samuel Pullara
Apache Software Foundation
Ironflare AB
Jayasoft
SAS Institute Inc.

have in common?

A: They are all members of the JSR 277 expert group. They also haven't managed to post to its mailing list since it was opened up for public read only access in last May, more than 8 (in words: eight) months ago, as far as I can tell by searching its archives.

Suggestion: The spec lead should run a gc cycle on the inactive members, and repopulate the expert group with people who care more actively about the subject. Read-only participation for the existing read only members is still possible through the read only mailing list.

Alternatively, the inactive experts should consider resigning from the expert group, and let other, more engaged people move the JSR forward.

Update: I've sent this as a comment to the JSR 277 comments email alias. I'd be happy to add further inactive members I've missed, all I did was a quick search in the archives on gmane, and if someone didn't come up, and I couldn't find them on the openjdk mailing list archive, they ended up in the list. I'd be happy to purge entries, if someone shows me that the member has actually posted anything to the list until today.

We realized that the model for web development was really “write to the standard, then test against and fix problems in the most popular browsers.” This meant that the web developer had one crucial piece of information we could make use of – what version of IE they had tested against, and after much discussion in the WaSP-MS task force, we ended up with a <meta>-based “opt-in to the browser version I tested with” strategy.

Chris Wilson, Microsoft's Internet Explorer Platform Architect, describing what he's been up to lately.