Occasional Thoughts

Yesterday I and a couple of colleagues held a couple of Pecha Kucha sessions. Pecha Kucha is a presentation methodology that limits the presentation to 20 slides where the next slide is displayed after 20 seconds automatically. During the preparation and for the presentation session we felt the lack for a decent timer that counts down from 20 to1 for each slide and gives a clearly visible feedback before the time for the current slide ends.

Some thoughts of what could happen if that headline above could become a reality.

Most probably you've already heard about Steve Jobs dislike of the Adobe Flash Player. A War that started when it was announced that the iPad will not support Flash and his claims that HTML 5 is superior to Flash (I already blogged about this topic). The current climax is the change in the famous section 3.3.1 of the Apple developer contract that forbids the use of any programming language which is not approved by Apple directly targeting towards the Flash Packager contained in the Creative Suite 5 (CS5). This Flash Packager can create a native iPhone application from Flash code.

This change in the Apple developer license domination eventually forced Adobe to throw away their work in the Flash Packager shortly after its announcement and a refocus on other platforms as written by Mike Chambers.

Understandably this caused quite some uproar and finally Steve Jobs has felt the need to comment on this on the Apple web site. However his Thoughts on Flash contain several falsehoods and half-truth. Jesse Warden has written a long post commenting several of such points. I recommend reading this for the details and I do not want to repeat this. Just some points I would like to highlight and add.

There are already some documented methods on how to access your Google Calendar with KOrganizer.

In case you really want to have a (almost fully working) 2 way sync, you may check out the solution using the GCALDaemon that is described here. The GCalDaemon is a server that runs locally on your system that serves as a kind of proxy to Google Calendar. However it's major drawback is that it is written in Java. Thus you need to have a JVM running all the time just to be able to access the server. Well, I don't want to waste these resources on my Laptop.

Another possibility is to simply access the ICal address using a remote calendar directly. Well, this has the drawback that you can just access the calendar read-only. But for me a read-only access is OK. Google Calendar provides a nice web UI to enter events so I am fine with that restriction. I am more interested in getting Reminders for my events as I tend to forget the time while I am working.

But both solutions mentioned above have a major drawback: They only work while you are connected to the Internet. There are so many occassions, when I just wanted to check my calendar when I don't have an internet access like on the hallway when I just would like to see where the next meeting is located. So for me it's more important to have a calendar synchronization that syncs with offline data. But the solution is simple and may work not only with just KOrganizer, but with every application that works with ICS files. So here it is:

...and brought many new ideas home. JAX 2008 was a great event, but also very exhausting. There were a total of 211 sessions from which to choose from starting at 08:30 in the morning with session until the late evening.

Main themes as I have collected them where:

• Dynamic Languages
• Spring
• SOA
• Eclipse
• Architectures
• Web frameworks and RIAs
• Complexity of the classic JEE offers. I would even say that I heard of a severe crisis of JEE and I doubt that a radically simplified EJB 3.1 will change peoples mind on that.

I used FreeMind to collect notes and here are the unedited notes I took during some of the sessions:

General Notes abut JAX 2008

In general JAX 2008 had more than 2000 participants - a record in the history of this conference. There where 211 sessions, 22 workshops and 10 short talks presented by 178 speakers. In my opinion JAX 2009 should rather try to reduce the amount of sessions and given the presenters more time. Most talks had to rush through the content as the time was limited to an hour and there was so much to say.

Here is the list of sessions from the time planer that I plan to attend: