December 2004 Archives

My brother-in-law gave us a TiVo for Christmas (Thanks!)

I've always wanted one, but always resisted, because a) I can never buy anything for myself and b) I can never buy anything for myself. We also don't watch much TV. But when we do, there are things we are looking for, and the TiVo is the perfect device for us - it can record every "As Time Goes By" that comes on [we're convinced there must be an episode we haven't seen yet...].

There were a few interesting things from this. I'm sure all of these are obvious and old hat considering the TiVo's been around for years now, but I figure there are some luddites out there w/o one that may find this interesting.

1) We just put in a large built-in in the family room. Cabinets on the bottom, about 25" high, and then shelves in sections above. Very nice work by Marcus Carpenter of Redding CT. We put in a 52" Sony TV, the LCD flat-ish thing, and had the built in designed to hold it. We laid out power, cable and speaker wire (the house is wired) into the back of the cabinets, and had the electrician make it so. Phone? Doh! Never thought of it until reading the TiVo box, and the Tivo needs it. So to get things going, I took a long 50' phone cable across the room, but that wasn't going to work. Then I discovered that the TiVo could connect via wireless, so found a compatible USB WiFi dongle, shoved it in the back, and it found it and self-configured. I told it about the airport Wifi, and that was that - the TiVo can connect to the TiVo mothership via broadband, and I don't have to worry about crawling around the basement running a phone wire into the back of the cabinet.

2) I know it's obvious, but the whole idea of timeshifting the programs so you can watch them at any time, and more importantly, be able to stop, go back, and forward past commercials is fundamentally interesting. It took about 2 days before it became natural, then then I found myself irritated when watching live TV that I couldn't go forward.

3) Finally, you can use it to display pictures and music. A little app running on my mac, a quick setup on the TiVo, and there be the baby pictures. My wife says I'm too much of a 'slideshow dad' with the powerbook and the pictures, but wait until she sees this...

Why?

In a nearby town, we have a small kitchen store that I tend to go to when needing kitchen stuff. It's in Ridgefield (they have another store in Greenwich), and they have that amazingly noxious policy of only allowing for "store credit" for returns. Why? I tend to buy things for my wife there and I'm never sure if it's what she needs, asked for, or will like. I've asked, and gotten a bizarre array of answers such as "our business plan states we'll move items in 60 days on average", which to me sounds like an argument they are working up for a "no return" policy. Also, "we're a small business and there can be cash flow issues" was a goodie, given that their stuff is expensive and the cash tends to flow to them, not away from them, and after all, with a return, they do get the item back after all.

I understand not wanting to take back unsalable merchandise, but that isn't their argument. I'd accept a "satisfaction guarantee" that if you *use* the item and it doesn't meet your expectation, you can bring back for store credit, although I can't rationalize that position and am probably just being charitable.

The answer to this problem is "competition"...

Two days ago, in their unrelenting quest to completely cover the three-letter-acronym-that-starts-with-J namespace, Sun announced the JCK, or "J2SE technology Compatibility Kit", which appears to be the actual J2SE 5 TCK. Why it needs this new TLA instead of "TCK" is somewhat baffling, since I'm sure we'll need "JCK" for a JSR at some point in the near future...

All joking aside, this is a really cool development. This is a source release of the J2SE 5 TCK made available for inspection under a new "Read-only" license, something I assume was part of the IP asset agreements recently completed between Sun and Microsoft as it reminds me of MSFTs "source available" program. (That was a joke too...)

The license is interesting - you are free to inspect the source and included materials, but not compile, execute, modify, spindle or mutilate, and there appear to be no limits on residual knowledge. I'll leave it up to lawyers to quantify the goodness, but it seems reasonable.

This is going to be of significant interest to open source developers, as they can sort of use it to figure out where work needs to be done on their independent implementations of J2SE 5. I say "sort of", as I'd have much preferred to see that Sun allow people to execute the code, so that teams could work on being compatible, but Sun fears that such availability would allow implementations to determine if they are "close enough", or compatible in a limited way, and that doesn't serve the Java community very well. However, this is a great step forward for Sun in Java-land. On one hand, I do think that Sun gets shortchanged when it comes to credit for open source, but on the other, the open source community has done a tremendous amount of work to make Java successful (see everything at the Apache Software Foundation, for example) and we are a little behind in making Java and OSS as compatible as could be. We are getting there - I'm eternally optimistic.

That said, I don't think they did a great job of announcing this. Graham Hamilton announced it on his blog and gives a good bit of background on the issues. I know Graham, and he's not "a deranged lunatic" as he suggested but "The Deranged Lunatic" when it comes to compatibility. Of course, I didn't even know Graham had a blog, so I didn't read it there, but heard about it in a private email. I realize that there are probably 0 dedicated readers of this blog (as there are clearly 0 dedicated writers...), but I'm hoping this gets the word out.

Now I need to figure out what the real TCK license is for J2SE 5....

[2004-17-12] Update : friends at Sun tell me that it's always been called the JCK. Just like the J2EE TCK is called the "CTS", the J2SE TCK felt neglected and needed it's own alias too....

Item #10 of v1.9 of the OSD says :

10. License Must Be Technology-Neutral

"No provision of the license may be predicated on any individual technology or style of interface."

Now look at the LGPL, and we find phrases in section 5 like "linking", "executable", "material from a header file", "object code for the work", etc....

I'd be interested to know how the OSI explains this...

lalalalala land.

I work in LA. I live in CT.

I had two weeks at home, and it really was great. Now back for a week, and I'm looking forward to it.

Ok, no one will care, but still.... my 18 month old daughter gave her first kiss today, and to me. I know every child does it, but still, it's just simply amazing, just amazing.

when sys-con has to report on themselves. Particularly amusing was the shocker at the end (forgetting the questions about grammar) :

"Our lawyers, Jones, Waldo, Holbrook & McDonough, a Salt Lake City firm experienced in First Amendment matters, is prepared to argue our case in court."

I mean, why would you hire them if they wouldn't, and where else would you argue it?