some pics from my run today...

... pretty nice, I think ;)

still alive

I haven't blogged for quite a long time, sorry for that. I'd like to write about so many things, but time is currently missing... Anyway, let me bring some light on some web 2.0 services I use...
First of all.... Picasa. I like the client software and the integration of it into the web-albums. Check my public pictures here.
Then... Twitter. A bit useless, but I like it. Check my profile here.
And the one I like the most is: NoseRub. "NoseRub?" you might ask, what the hell is that? I don't want to copy the pretty good introduction on their site, so check it out, it's some kind of meta-social-network. A friend of mine set up a NoseRub server on the Amazon EC2, check it out here. I linked my Twitter and my last.fm account to that server.
Oh, and of course this blog ;)

The big move...

...took place yesterday!
Many thanks to all our friends who helped us merging two homes into a one new! Special thanks to my parents who supported us during the move.
Check some pictures here, I'll update the album as we make progress......

The android landed...

... and disperse a lot of dust in the mobile world.

My first thoughts, relatively unordered and not well consolidated...

• What a cool SDK!!! Everything you need! Very cool documentation (try the search box), Eclipse PlugIn, working samples, emulator, debugging and logging, everything for free on Window, Linux and Mac. Feel free to compare that with the
  
• WTK for JME (nearly equal)
• Symbian S60 SDK (sucks)
• Windows Mobile (not free, installs tons of crap on your PC, and so on...)
  
• iPhone SDK? (We will see...;) )
• Why have those guys re-invented all the JSRs? The only reason for me is licensing issues. Too bad for the developers.
• A pretty cool concept of handling application life cycle whiting the OS.
• I like the approach of a generic data model on the phone, I also like the idea that there are no "native" apps on the phone. Everything is Java. Looks a bit like the SavaJe idea (do you remember that?) but in cool ;)
• They build in a java - browser bridge! How cool is that?
  

Let's see where Google drive this game. Many open questions.... How will Google avoid fragmentation? What parts will really become open source? And so on and so forth...
We will see... But nevertheless, this will bring again some action to the mobile world, and changes can't be bad ;)

An android comes from outer space...

Google announced andriod today. Together with an impressive list of cooperation partners (check the open handset alliance) Google created an OS for mobile phones based on open standards (as they claim) and will open source it. There are tons of rumors out there and less facts, so it's hard to come to a conclusion right now, but somehow I have the feeling that this will be a very big (and good!) thing...
Mobile developers: Keep your fingers crossed, the SDK is coming! ;)

preparing the move...

...and it's still a lot of work in front of us. We are currently
- searching for a new citchen (that can cost a hell lot of money...)
- buying a new washing machine (see above)
- disassembling furniture (not expensive but a lot of work)
- preparing the "big-move-day"
I will propably write some sentences to the one or other topic, but I'm quite busy with all that stuff ;)

time travel

Since we will move to a new apartment in November, we started to get rid of electronic equipment (or waste ;)). We found old CRT monitors, old 10Base2 and 10Base-T cards, serial and SCSI scanners, video recorders, tons of cables, analog modems, printers and so on and so forth. It was like a small time travel in the past of computer equipment...

cool runnings...

Beautiful weather this sunday! It's mid of October and we have clear sky, 17° celsius, no rain, calm winds. I shot some pictures during my training run today, most of them near or from the autobahn bridge near the airport.
Panorama from the bridge:

Run Forrest run!

Even I'm not as fast as Forrest Gump I finished my first half marathon in cologne. We had excellent weather conditions and a lot of fun. Pictures will probably follow soon ;)

Open Letter to a friend...

... is the name of the new H-Bockx album. H-Blockx (for those who don't know) is a german cross-over band and was very popular some years ago. Their last albums were very poor, but this is really a big step forward. The more I hear it, the more I like it...

build on sand

... are these sculptures. We used the sunny weekend weather to visit an exhibition of sand sculptures.

Mr. Bush is also there:

Illumina 07

This weekend we visited the "Illumina" exhibition around the castle "Dyck" near Duesseldorf. The light installations around the castle looked really beatiful. See additional pictures here.
Sorry for the bad quality of the pictures, my equipment is not even semi-pro ;)

JavaFX

Here's a good summary of JavaFX and what SUN wants to cover with it. Even that I don't believe that JavaFX Mobile as a full phone stack will be a success, there are good parts of the JavaFX program. For example the Consumer JRE initiative is more then needed now, most interesting part seems to be the Java Kernel idea here.

Bun Rastaman

... is a good article about the problem of homophobic lyrics in reggae music.
Read here (in german)
Found via Tropige Trauben

Mobile Trail Explorer

If you do some kind of outdoor sports like running or hiking and you don't have the money for a garmin forerunner you can use your mobile phone and a GPS reciever via bluetooth to track your trails. The mobile trail explorer as a very good software you can use for this. It exports your trails to KML or GPX which you can import in Sporttracks. That's pretty cool because you have all the data collected in on place.
Check that screenshot:

Trail in Burgh Haamstede

I'm currently on vacation at the beatiful coast of the netherlands and today I took some time to run a 16 KM trail across a recreation area and the beach. That was cool! See the trail here...

Java ME GUI APIs

This is a very nice article describing the different GUI APIs available in JME. Gives you an excellent summary about the pro's and con's.

Summerjam 2007

Was great! Even the weather was okay, most of the artists we have seen performed incredibly good and we found a good place for tents. The best artists I've seen: Sizzla, Anthony B and Beenie Man. Incredible performance. Sean Paul's performance was ridiculous, as expected. Anyway we had a lot of fun!

Chemical Brothers

...concert yesterday was impressive. Excellent sound by l-accoustics systems, beautiful LED projections and something I've not seen quite a long time: A laser show!! That was cool ;)

SUMMERJAM

Next weekend we will go chillin' and party on the Summerjam 07! Really looking forward to see Sizzla, Beenie Man, Anthony B, T.O.K. and all the others on stage. Keep your fingers crossed for jamaican-like weather in the cologne bay ;)

Placebo Concert

...was great! Good sound, nice people, a great show. Nothing more to say. I think they had some Martin TW1 on the rig. Great devices!

PS 3 HandsOn

This weekend we had the chance to try a Sony Playstation 3 and I'd like to share my view on this device.
We connected the PS3 via HDMI to a 40'' full HD LCD TV and the quality of the game graphics and the blue ray movies was absolute impressive. We played the Gran Tourism concept demo and it's really hard to tell the difference between a real race and this game.
After watching three blue ray movies, you don't want to see any DVD again. And switching back to the good old TV signal makes you feel sick.
I also liked the openness of the platform. You can install yellow dog linux on it and you can plug in nearly every USB device.
We connected the PS3 via wireless LAN, and we got demos, trailers and updates for free. Overall the hole concept feels better then the XBOX360. Unnfortunatly I had no time for checking out some BD-J examples (I've seen cool demos on the JavaOne) but I will try that next time. XBOX360 and HD-DVD: Get lost! ;)

New Toys

Last week I spend some money on fun stuff and I bought the Gyrotor indoor helicopter from Silverlit as well as the X-Twin rc-plane. I first tried the Gyrotor in my living room and it's pretty hard to control. It took roughly three hours training to get a feeling for this helicopter, but now it's really fun to fly it inside. You should have plenty of space in your room, otherwhise you will hit the walls more often then you wish ;)
This weekend I had the chance to try the helicopter and the X-Twin plane outside. It turned out that the gyrotor is a pure "inside" toy. The range of the RC is pretty limited and it's quite unstable to fly outside.
But the X-Twin is a real cool thing for the outside world. It's easy to fly, and the battery is good enough to play up to 15 minutes! I really enjoyed that!!
Upate: Check that heli flying in my office ;)

Interview about JavaFX Mobile

Here is an interesting interview with Jacob Lehrbaum about JavaFX Mobile. Besides the disturbing background noices, you can find out that Sun really wants to sell a complete integrated software stack for mobile devices to the handset manufactures. Let's see if there's really the need for another platform on heterogenous mobile market....

Street View

I just tried out Google Street View and it's pretty impressive. I found the diner where I had an excellent dinner as well as the hotel we stayed and many other places in San Francisco. Unbelievable that this runs in a browser without any additional software installation. Excellent job!

Concert in an interesting Location

Yesterday evening we got free tickets for a concert. Roger Cicero performed with his Big Band. That's definitely not my favourite music. But the location of the concert was very cool. It took place in a huge aircraft hangar on the duesseldorf internation airport. Directly behind the crowd where airplanes starting and landing all the time, the hangar was devided and on the left side was an Airbus 320 parked. Check this picture:


The stage is on the right side, in the center you can see the LTU-Airburs and on the left side there are the open hangar-doors and the runway and rollfield of the airport. That was cool ;)
For more pictures, click here!

P@rty

Yesterday we had a very good party organized by marcel, conny and myself. 40-50 people showed up and they magically let 17 crates of beer vanish ;)
We had an impressive soundsystem, pretty nice light effects (Martin Mania SCX 600) , good DJs and a lot of fun...
Pictures will be uploaded tomorrow...

Once again JavaOne...

... is over. And once again I picked up many interesting things; things I will have a closer look on, things to tell other people, things to be observed in the future, and hopefully things I will use in real projects. I also met several nice people there and had interesting discussions. Thanks to SUN for this event ;)

JavaOne and "crisp"

I've been in several sessions right now and one really good thing I recognized is that terms like "user experience", "user interface", "rich graphics", "crisp", "shiny" etc. are mentioned quite often. Not only JavaFX but several other developments reflects a new thinking in this "gray" java world. People have understood that a good, compelling user experience is mandatory for a good product. Thanks to the iPhone and other products, java will hopefully loose the old image of heavy-weighted, boring, gray and not compelling user interfaces.

JavaFX script...

...is more then a pure scripting language. Looking at the examples, and listening to Christopher Oliver at the JavaOne today, JavaFX script looks like a combination of a classic scripting language like ECMA script and UI descriptive elements as known from SVG. To give an example you will find things like

Rect {
arcHeight: 30
arcWidth: 30
stroke: black
strokeWidth: 3
transform: translate(10, 0)
height: 300
width: 330
fill: Pattern {
content: picks()
}
};

which reminds me somehow to SVG, as well as things like

operation MotoProducts.doDrop(yStart, yEnd, f(y), delay, bounce) {
for (b in [false, true]) (dur delay linear){
if (b) {
var d = if bounce then 1000 else 800;
var ys = if bounce then [[yStart..yEnd], [yEnd..yEnd -10], [yEnd-10..yEnd]] else [yStart..yEnd];
for (i in ys) (dur d) {
f(i);
}
}
}
}

which reminds me to... mmmmmmm.... ECMA script?

JavaOne and JavaFX

JavaOne is on the second day and JavaFX is still the "big" thing. To correct my previous post, JavaFX is not just the scripting language, but JavaFX script is the correct term. It looks like JavaFX is mainly the so called F3 project. You can already get demos and source code for JSE 6 here: https://openjfx.dev.java.net/
More infos on JavaFX are listed here: http://java.sun.com/javafx/
Additionally to that, there is the Term JavaFX Mobile. It looks like this is a full JavaOS for mobile devices including a JavaFX script runtime. SUN showed some demos on linux based mobiles. Probably this is based on the SavaJe technology, but this is just a guess from my side.
How JavaFX Mobile is fitting to the CDC / CLDC and MIDP roadmap, and how it relates to JSR 226 and SVG is still a mystery for me. If anybody has ideas around this, feel free to comment!

JavaOne KeyNote

Just a short note from the JavaOne: SUN announced JavaFX a script language for java based, "flashy" user interfaces as far as I understood.
But there are 1000 of questions open, especially when it comes to mobile devices... I will recap that later.

Marathon Update

Just an update on the marathon tomorrow: One of my teammates has serious problems with his knee, so I have to run his part addtionally to mine. 19 KM instead of 9. Nice. I'll keep my fingers crossed to survive that ;)
Again, check our runners page to see what's going on!

JavaOne and Marathon

Next week I will attend JavaOne and I'm really looking forward to this. But right before that I have to finish my part of my relay team on the Düsseldorf Marathon.
You can follow our activities on the marathon on sunday on this page.

SportTracks

I use SportTracks to log and analyze all my running activities. Great Software! I can strongly recommend it for hiking, running or cycling. Works great with a Garmin ForeRunner, but also accepts manual input.
Pretty nice statistics and analyze functionalities:















Get a free copy here:
http://zonefivesoftware.com/SportTracks/index.html

Firefox extension

..just a quick remark: I love this Firefox extension, even it's just Windows compatible:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4258
Check it out if you like nice UI-effects ;)

Excellent weather on the 3rd run...

... of the Nike "Winterlaufserie" in Duisburg...

pro light and sound

Nice fog effect on pro light and sound fair in Frankfurt

Stockholm at night

View to Gamla Stan from our hotelboat.

Stockholm

First day: beautiful weather!

NiN

Extreme good lightshow!

Handball

My 1st international handball match. Pretty impressive :)

Bad weather on our run today.

But we all started and we all finished!

Rainbow

...from my office in Düsseldorf...

Aerogramme

Massive sound!

HDTV

Yesterday I coupled my laptop to a 40'' Samsung LCD Panel with full HD (1080p) resoultion. It's fun to have a desktop with a 1920 x 1080 native resolution.

We watched some IMAX-HD movies and the picture quality is really great! Switching back to PAL signal afterwards makes me feel sick. HDTV to the masses!!

Düsseldorf in 3D

A few days ago I found out that Düsseldorf is no longer a "plain" field on Google Earth!
See here or klick this link if you have GE installed.

Java

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