Just lost power for about 20 seconds… it’s kind of strange when the lights go out, but the laptop stays on. Really, the biggest problem was that the net connection went down. Otherwise — the battery is supposed to be good for 3 hours or so…
Heh. Tried to post this before the network came completely back up 
http://developers.facebook.com/index.php
Facebook has once again made it the coolest platform ever by opening their API further, and most importantly supporting sessions that don’t expire every 24 hours. There’s been a lot of talk on the web about this helping them to monetize Facebook’s user base through commerce partnerships. I think that’s true, but I also think it’ll have a profound affect on Facebook’s traditional market — college students.
The breadth and volume of Facebook’s usage on college campuses is hard to ignore. In a focus group I had with our career center, a number of students told me that Facebook was basically their primary method of communications. It’s how people share photos, find study partners, blog, and watch their friends all rolled up in one.
I think the key of the new platform initiative is that integrations like Duke University’s DukePass portal integration that drive Facebook into the heart of institutional IT initiatives. There’s just too many users, and it does stuff too well.
So not only is Facebook broadening their reach — they’re also tightening their ties to their core audience. And the possibility to actually partner with institutions, as opposed to having to grassroots everywhere. Bottom line — smooth move.
At Portlets2007 I was talking with Greg from St. Thomas about Rails, and he showed me a Rails app he had deployed out using JDeveloper and OC4J — basically Rails inside a WAR file. Very cool — and apparently easy enough to do that he got it working during my session on PortletMVC. Not sure if that means it was really easy, or my session wasn’t that interesting 
This seems particularly relevant given Thoughtworks announcement that their new Mingle Agile Development product is a RoR app that they’re planning on deploying using JRuby — initially with an embedded Jetty as an app, but for 1.1 as a WAR file. Going forward, I wonder if this kind of ‘blackbox’ approach will allow Ruby to start penetrating the enterprise. Afterall, even Rutgers which likes to take enterprise apps and muck with them all over the place bought some .Net and PHP apps and treated them like appliances, which seems to be a growing trend.
Update: http://blogs.sun.com/arungupta/entry/mephisto_on_glassfish_v3#comments has a demo of getting Mephisto up and running on Glassfish — so this definitely seems to be getting traction.
This was so cool: Phil Windley’s publishing event references as microformats (hevent) in his blog posts, and NNW picked them up and created a little “add to iCal” button.
This was so cool I had to ping Phil about it:
I’m excited that it worked! I’m playing with it. I just wrote an Emacs function to create vevent microformats when I blog. It’s not done yet, but I will when it’s done.
via email from the Princeton JUG
Another interesting resource for learning about Java and programming is http://www.greenfoot.org/. It is an interactive learning tool that starts by having you build a game world with actors, using a GUI. Then, you learn how to enhance the world by using Java code. It’s worth a look. At JavaOne 2007, the Greenfoot project was awarded the Duke’s Choice Award.
This is interesting — I’ve always thought that Java was actually a poorer choice than something like Python or maybe Ruby for introducing students to programming. The syntactic requirements, compilation and other steps, and relative difficulty to get to the fun stuff seems to be a significant barrier.
One of the strong points of Java has always been tool support though, and this looks like a pretty neat tool. I have to admin, I’m definitely wondering if this could make me change my mind. BlueJ was a big leap I think in producing a simpler, learners IDE — but this just seems miles ahead in terms of making something to spark people’s interest in programming. Which considering all the concerns about dropping enrollment in Computer Science has to be a good thing.
I just got back from 4 days out at University of Montana where I presented a couple of sessions at the Portlets2007 conference. It was an interesting experience — most of my past experience has been at JA-SIG, JUGs, or other open-source heavy audiences which tend to be… shall we say… self-selected.
I did 2 sessions in the advanced track:
http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConWebDoc.9662
If the gap between public knowledge and academic curriculum isn’t large enough, the gap between academia and industry practice is a gaping hole. While academic departments concentrate on developing new computer systems in an ideal organisational environment, a lot of industry has moved away from in-house development to a focus on delivering a service.
I also wonder if the building blocks that Academic CS is focused on teaching at the entry-level are going to be relevant going forward. We seem to spend a lot of time going over fundamentals that then sit on a shelf…
The dynamics of how users interact with interactive elements within a user interface change how we must approach instruction that we deliver within user interfaces. Users skip static elements, such as instructional text, because they focus immediately on downstream actionable objects. Effective user assistance design accommodates users’ natural workflows by providing instruction immediately beside or following interactive elements that constitute points of need for more information
Sakai User Support Issues – Colin from the FLUID project is working to compile a list of outstanding UI/UE issues with Sakai, to target as FLUID gears itself up. Interesting list, though there’s a big project up ahead. Emerging themes seem to deal a lot with consistency and integration — not surprising considering Sakai’s architectural emphasis on a tool/component model.
