Fabrizio Giudici's Blog @ OPEN SOURCE MAGAZINE

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Microsoft Ads: First Phase To “Engage Consumers, Spark Conversation”

So the tech and geek crowd is a little underwhelmed by the new $300 million Microsoft advertising campaign featuring Jerry Seinfeld that kicked off tonight. It’s mostly content free, with just one mention of Microsoft near the end. It’s a far cry from the brilliant Microsoft v. mac ads that Apple has run over the years. So what’s the deal? In an email we’ve obtained from Microsoft SVP Bill Veghte to all employees, he talks about the goals of the campaign. The overall goa

Sep. 4, 2008 11:30 PM

Jules Joseph Merholz

Among the challenging decisions new parents must make is the name of their child. It’s a lifetime commitment, and not something to be taken lightly. We very quickly settled on his middle name, Joseph. It’s my dad and brothers’ middle name, and Stacy’s grandfather’s first name and brother’s middle name. So, a family name on both sides. Done. The first name was trickier. Early on I proposed David, my middle name. I’ve always liked the name David (and when

Sep. 4, 2008 08:28 PM

440,000 Sony VAIO Recall

Comcast tells FCC to pound salt. Sony VAIO 440,000 machine recall. Yikes! New Tivo to have a terabyte. Yay. Hard disks down to $189 for a terabyte. Michael on Facebook. Better than a blog? Or no? The little Dell laptop is out for $349. Huge patch Tuesday coming [...]

Sep. 4, 2008 08:14 PM

TIBCO acquires Insightful

Per a recent press release, TIBCO has completed its acquisition of Insightful, known for its S+ statistics language (and with a common ancestry with the open source R langage) as used, amongst others, in the financial industry. S+ and R have had a few mentions in recent CEP blogs: Marc Adler commented on the initial TIBCO Insightful announcement [*1], and the potential for S+ queries in CEP (which is probably true at some level) Hans Gilde commented on improvements to R and responded to Mar

Sep. 4, 2008 07:56 PM

Today's links and ideas

It's super-hot here in Calif today. Oy! If you read one political article today, read this explanation of community service by Time's Joe Klein. Yesterday two Republicans, Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin, mocked Obama for giving three years to community service betw college and law school. I wondered too what it meant, when I read this piece I couldn't believe how sloppy the Republicans were. This is exactly what McCain says people should do, and we all agree that giving to your country is a very

Sep. 4, 2008 06:31 PM

It's easy to mistake what's

It's easy to mistake what's interesting for what's important.

Sep. 4, 2008 04:06 PM

Missing the Convention

(From my Blackberry. Pls forgive the typos and abbrevs.) I watched the Rep conv from my hotel room in Norway. It was 4:30 am when Polin came on. I saw ten mins, enough to see that she’d become a cultural stand-in. She is now not what she is but a symbol in our ugly, perpetual cultural war. (As Jay Rosen has sais.) Then I had to get into a cab, so I watched the rest via twitter on my phone. Fascinatingm A play that consisted solely of reactions. The O fans were reacting to her content, as i

Sep. 4, 2008 12:04 PM

The Art of Raising Venture Capital

These videos are my recent attempt to explain the art of raising venture capital. They are part of the Montgomery & Hansen online learning site and conference. For example, to learn about financing agreements and the term-sheet process, click here. Click on these links for up-to-date information about venture capital, startups, and pitching.

Sep. 4, 2008 11:40 AM

Resuming work on jrawio

jrawio is an ImageI/O plugin for "camera raw" image formats. I've started writing it a few years ago for my Nikon D100, and later extended it for working with a larger number of formats. As far as I know, it...

Sep. 4, 2008 11:27 AM

Do you have an impedance mismatch problem? Users speak up! Second series of user reports published.

I have started a new series of interviews with users of technologies for storing and handling persistent objects, around the globe.6 additional user reports (12-17/08) have been published, from the following users: • Ajay Deshpande, Persistent • Horst Braeuner, City of Schwaebisch Hall • Tore Risch, Uppsala University • Michael Blaha, OMT Associates • Stefan Keller, HSR Rapperswil • Mohammed Zaki, Renssela

Sep. 4, 2008 08:03 AM

Adding custome query argument support to jQuery Autocomplete plugin

I have been playing around with the jQuery Autocomplete plugin to get it working with the ActionScript 3 documentation API that I posted about earlier today. The Autocomplete API is really nice, and pretty flexible, but one issue I ran into is that the query argument containing the user input that is passed to the server is hard coded to “q”. For my api, I needed this argument to be “api”. The fix is actually pretty simple, although it does require a slight modification

Sep. 4, 2008 12:49 AM

I like Google Chrome

I like it - it's simple and minimalistic, has a small memory footprint and is easy on the CPU. Flash player works fine on my Windows XP box. I'm sure, Mac and Linux version will be available soon too. The absence of the I like the fact that t

Sep. 3, 2008 11:12 AM

Ajax-heavy Applications on Google Chrome

“This is the best browser so far” is that I can say after being a Chrome user for one day. First of all, I was glad to find out that I haven’t found Chrome breaking any web application yet, especially Ajax applications. I was a little concerned about this, given that the Chrome cartoons say “Javascript runs in its own thread”, which is different from the threading model today. For example, Razor Profiler is a fairly Javascript-heavy web application that I wrote

Sep. 3, 2008 09:02 AM

Google releases Chrome... and there was much rejoicing. yay.

Google hath descended from the mountaintop and hath delivered unto us the Chrome browser. Wow, just what I wanted... yet another browser.

Sep. 3, 2008 08:09 AM

Question: how to bind SOAP <-> ORM JPA ?

Few days thinking about the best way to copy values between the objects representation of SOAP message elements and JPA entities. I couldn't find a good answer, so I am sharing the question.

Sep. 3, 2008 05:57 AM

Forrester's Five Step Model - Balancing the Strategic and Tactical Aspects of SOA

I had a chance to look at Forrester analyst Randy Heffner’s report on the best way to build SOA (via Joe McKendrick’s Forrester's Five-Step Path to Building SOA). Joe provided a link to the complete report, How to Build Your SOA Platform on ebizQ. Randy writes in the summary, “Building an eﬀective service-oriented architecture (SOA) platform requires cohesive integration of both new product categories, such as SOA repositories and enterprise service buses (ESBs), and existing produ

Sep. 3, 2008 01:28 AM

Half a Million Thanks

A big thank you to all the people who read my Blog for now over a half a million visits ...

Sep. 3, 2008 01:00 AM

The browser war III

Google Chrome, a new open-source browser from Google that builds in parts on Apple's WebKit and in parts on Mozilla Firefox, was announced yesterday and just launched today at 3:02 pm EDT. Here is an interesting twist: most of the technical details about Chrome cannot be found in blog postings or technical web documentation, but rather in the form of a comic book. Talk about weird! But the comic is actually full of very interesting details - definitely worth reading, especially if you are a we

Sep. 2, 2008 03:27 PM

Sprechen Sie Deutsch?

In September I’m heading to Germany to present to the German PowerBuilder user group. I’m also working on arrangements to go back over to Europe in November for other locations as well, including (hopefully), England and Switzerland. If

Aug. 29, 2008 05:17 PM

Mashups in Action: A Better Way to Trade

In past 'Mashups in Action' blog we have described mashups used in intelligence analysis, medical research, and most recently a dual-purpose community-building/data-sharing effort for a scientific community. So mashups can help make better spies, better doctors and better scientists. But other than the occasional flu shot, I don't expect most of us have much exposure to these professions.Today's Mashup In Action story is about trading, a profession you have better odds of encountering in yo

Aug. 28, 2008 02:56 PM

StackOverflow Podcast #19

This week's StackOverflow Podcast is up: episode 19. Jeff and I spent some time talking about the home page for StackOverflow. What goes there? What does it mean to vote on a question? We also talked about Aaron Swartz's article on How to Launch Software. Big-bang launches can be disasters (viz.: cuil); quiet, gentle launches without announcements where you slowly build can work a lot better (viz.: Gmail). Will StackOverflow's launch overwhelm our servers and underwhelm our audience? Not

Aug. 28, 2008 10:02 AM

Early Draft OSGi V4.2 Docs Available

As of this week you can download an early release draft document containing 11 design documents we've been working on for the past year or so as the result of the OSGi enterprise initiative. This is important because according to OSGi Alliance rules, only members are allowed access to working drafts of documents. This is the first time we've released any of these drafts publicly. As a board member and EEG co-chair, I'm very pleased to see this happen because (a) I often get asked about what's

Aug. 26, 2008 06:20 PM

Rodrigo Y Gabriela

They were amazing at the Outside Lands Festival yesterday.

Aug. 26, 2008 03:19 AM

Flex Builder 3.01 and Flex SDK 3.1 released

With no fanfare, or even mention on adobe's website, Adobe has officially released Flex Builder 3.01 and the Flex SDK 3.1. Prior to the 3.01 release of flex builder, developers building AIR 1.1 applications had to go through a series of ext

Aug. 18, 2008 06:11 PM

Twitter kills inbound SMS to UK.....

I received an email in my Inbox today to say that Twitter had killed off inbound SMS updates to the UK.The whole raison d’etre for my subscribing to and using Twitter was to get real-time updates. If I have to login to a Twitter app then what’s the point ? It’s no better, and actually worse than reading RSS. The guys at Twitter twitter on about it being costly, yada yada yada. Well they knew this when they started the service. The challenge for their exec team was to

Aug. 14, 2008 09:34 AM

Fabrizio Giudici's Blog

Resuming work on jrawio

Posted: Sep. 4, 2008 11:27 AM

A better way for UML management

While aiming at blueMarine 1.0 for the end of the year, the effort is being put not only to stability and performance, but also on cleaning up the APIs in order to have a polished and stable version that others...

Posted: Sep. 3, 2008 03:22 AM

Service communication: mail crash

This is not a technical post, but a service communication for people that might have contacted me recently.During August I've experienced two crashes of Mail, the latter a few days ago and the worst one, since it happened while the...

Posted: Sep. 1, 2008 05:45 AM

Brainstorming, italian style

While I should be officially on vacation since ten days, some job troubles have pursued me for a few days. Nevertheless, working in an enjoyable environment definitely boosts your productivity. In these days I'm pushing hard on fixing bugs and...

Posted: Aug. 12, 2008 07:23 AM

The OpenJDK mistery (probably) solved

If you have read comments to my previous posts, you should have understood what happened. For people not reading them, I'm posting a recap. For details, please refer to previous posts.In a few words, I've discovered that running my application...

Posted: Aug. 6, 2008 06:47 PM

NASA World Wind and the Wii remote control

A few days before the summer break, at JUG Genova I was able to attend one of the most amusing meetings of the year. Gianpaolo Melis showed how to control NASA World Wind with a Wii remote control (not used...

Posted: Aug. 6, 2008 09:07 AM

Still problems with OpenJDK...

After fixing my trivial but severe error described in my previous post, other problems occurred with OpenJDK and blueMarine.One turned out to be a third party library (svgSalamander) using some com.sun.* classes - this has been fixed by replacing it.

Posted: Aug. 4, 2008 06:35 PM

OpenJDK is a very good thing - but you have to test for it

When one month ago it has been announced that OpenJDK had been freed by the last encumbrances, I said I was happy: it was really great news, an important milestone in the opensourcing of Java. A proof of the important...

Posted: Jul. 29, 2008 06:18 PM

Various updates from me (J2ME, JSON, travels - and blueMarine, of course)

Ok, you haven't read new posts here for some time now. I've been pretty busy: an important deadline first and later five consecutive days of holidays (!) chasing the Rhône river from the glacier to the mouth - my first...

Posted: Jul. 14, 2008 07:34 AM

Why didn't they use NASA World Wind for Java?

I've been just notified that the Italian Ministry for the Environment has just introduced a 3D viewer of italian cartography. The main features are: "fly over the terrain; fluid motion between two points; path tracking; popping up 2D maps related...

Posted: Jun. 26, 2008 08:53 AM