Multiple Browser tabs and Flash

I've noticed this a few times already: If I open up 20 tabs, even in Chrome, (don't mention Firefox cause 20 tabs in Firefox means 4TB RAM and growing) in some cases the processor will just run amok and force the cooler into behaving like a V8. I somehow blame that on Flash things that animate in all those tabs even when they are not enabled/active. Couldn't we have something like "put those on hold" when the tab is not active ? I mean I don't care about them even when they run in the active tab !!? Well, of course I'm talking about ads.

Eclipse Jetty (7)

I am not sure of this but from what I found on the net it seems that due to some licensing issues JSP support doesn't work as it should on the Eclipse distribution of Jetty 7. Whatever the reasons, I wasn't able to make JSPs to work properly on Jetty 7.

If you need JSP support go to the codehaus repository and grab a Jetty 1.6 version. Works like a charm.

Terracotta is at it again

Well, I tried to tweet this but somehow the generated bit.ly link is all messed up so here it is:

http://www.processor.com/editorial/article.asp?article=articles/P3127/13ap27/13ap27/13ap27.asp&guid

Wheee ! Works.

PS. For those who don't know what Terracotta is: http://www.terracotta.org/

Amazon's International Kindle

This weekend it's been a very proficient one. I've got a MacBook Pro and an Amazon Kindle (round of applause). I've managed yet to set up the Mac and get it working with everything including Eclipse etc, but I have yet to understand why Kindle "cannot establish a connection" after I left Bucharest. Since I arrived in Cluj Napoca it doesn't go wireless, it doesn't see the 3G network, very frustrating experience overall (If anyone has an idea why please drop me a line, I'll remain grateful forever :-) ).

The feel of it is pretty nice, but from my point of view the usability, application menu design, and everything that runs it, is totally broken. It feels weird and the options that are available to you are never those that you would expect. That's weird. It's almost like it's been designed to get you in trouble.

The "international" promise is that it connects to wireless networks. Well would you imagine that you cannot chose one, and if it's protected by username/password you cannot specify them ? I mean, wtf ? Drop the thing altogether and boot a decent version of android on it. You have them all, End of story.

So far, my bet was inspired in the sense that I asked for the Kindle ONLY because it allows me to get the books from Amazon so much faster than anything else. Only if this would finally start working ... Otherwise is totally useless. I mean totally.

UPDATE:
With the new Kindle firmware update for the international version (2.3) two things happened:

1.) It now connects through wireless from my current location. Hurray !
2.) It sees PDFs

Means it does what I bought it for. I'm happy.

Tests

How many times did I hear this : "There is not time for tests, really" ? Countless times. The counter point is: "Did you ever measure the time you spend debugging issues you have created?" Always compare that with the time you need to write a test to eliminate the issue you just debugged.

And then, if you are honest, ask your boss to draw the money for the time difference from your next salary. Because he'd be paying for the time you were writing the tests anyway.

Another Google Android kickass usecase - eReaders

With the Barnes & Noble eReader, Nook, which btw looks very nice, we've got another evolution direction for the Android. I'll add it to the list I've put together in another blog post.

Those who say Android is not a market today, they prove nothing but lack of vision. Because Android is not about today's market but it is about what the future holds.

It doesn't even need to be the iPhone killer to succeed because it plays in so many other spaces. The main achievement of the Android so far is that it proved to be a viable platform for far more than a social smartphone. It redefines mobility.

SSD

A nice one on the state of SSD drives:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001304.html

Business people din Romania

Au nevoie de mult bun simt. Foarte mult. Pe langa alte abilitati de care e nevoie.

Intrebarea zilei

Noi nu vrem respect...

Noi nu ne facem, de obicei, auziţi.

Noi nu ne putem face auziti din cauza zgomotului.

Noi nu ieşim în faţă.
Noi am fi in fata daca societatea s-ar raporta la o scara de valori reale.

Noi ducem, în tăcere, România în spate.
Noi nu ducem pe nimeni in spate. Ii toleram.

Noi mergem la spital cu teama că e ultimul drum.
Noi mergem la spital abia digerand un sistem cretin.

Noi suntem mereu pândiţi de moarte pe şoselele groazei.
Noi am vrea sa fim panditi de moarte pe niste autostrazi, nu pe drumuri cu hartoape.

Noi vedem cum şcoala românească se prăbuşeste.
Noi recunoastem ca scoala romaneasca nu a fost niciodata prea sus.

Noi trăim, după o viaţă de muncă, umilinţa bătrâneţii în sărăcie.
Noi acceptam sa fim umiliti, in saracie, la batranete.

Noi ne naştem cu şpagă şi murim cu ea.
Noi participam la perpetuarea shpagii ca metoda in sine, din lipsa unei alternative.

Noi vedem cum justiţia îi scapă mereu pe şmecheri.
Noi nu intelegem rolul justitiei, asa cum o percepem la ora actuala.

Noi suntem cei abandonaţi de politicienii care au grijă doar de ei.
Noi toleram la nesfarsit o clasa politica arhaica, debila.

Noi nu mai avem încredere în aceşti oameni care s-au obişnuit să ne mintă.
Noi stim sa recunoastem minciuna acolo unde o auzim sau o vedem.

Noi suntem speriaţi de lipsa lor de viziune, de voinţă şi de caracter.
Noi suntem constienti de lipsa de valoare (atat profesionala cat si umana) a clasei politice.

Noi ne simţim în pericol.
Noi nu ne simtim in pericol mai mult decat altadata (de ex acum 30 de ani). Poveste veche.

Noi trebuie să rupem tăcerea.
Noi rupem tacerea in discutiile personale, chat-uri si pe blog-uri. In Media e zgomot.

Noi trebuie să ducem România înainte.
Noi reprezentam un flux paralel cu Romania. Nebagati in seama, neauziti, mergem mult prea inainte.

Noi nu vrem funcţii şi nici putere.
Noi apreciem adevaratele valori, fie ele chiar legate de functii sau putere.

Noi nu cerem nimic.
Noi cerem, neauzit, ceea ce ni se cuvine. Totul.

Hint: a se citi in opozitie cu manifestul "acelei" campanii media. Mai multe lamuriri aici

Requesting buying and importing a SSL certificate

So here it is, I am embarrassed after a 2 days long journey to buy / import a SSL certificate from Thawte. It was not their fault, it's only me and I thought it may help people if I share:

First I want to say that I have bought a SSL123 certificate. What I am saying here may not apply to other types of certificates but it still may give you a hint. I have used Java's keytool tool for all the command lines appearing below.

So here are the correct steps:

1.) Generate a RSA type keypair. important: as of the date of this post they only support RSA

keytool -keystore path_to_keystore -genkeypair -keyalg RSA -alias jetty

You cannot secure an IP address through a certificate, only a domain name e.g. yourdomain.com. The common name of your certificate (the keytool will prompt you for your first and last name) must be yourdomain.com

2.) Generate the certificate request, CSR:

keytool -keystore path_to_keystore -certreq -keyalg RSA -alias jetty

VITAL: make sure you keep the keystore file somewhere you can get it later and don't change, tamper, delete anything from it. Just keep it safe as it is!

The CSR looks something like this:

-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE REQUEST-----
AAAAERERRRTERTDASDASYDASDMAN312312312DASDASd etc etc
blablalonger stuff here
-----END CERTIFICATE REQUEST-----

3.) Go to their site, choose the certificate you want to buy and make sure you get right at least the following options:

When you paste your CSR you may be pressing the button "test your CSR" just to make sure all the info contained in it is valid.

Choose Tomcat as the server software if you will deploy on Tomcat or Jetty. Otherwise choose the server you are using, if it's not there then ASK the support what to put in there. On the bottom of the support page you'll see a live chat button, use it, as they are very responsive. If you use Tomcat/Jetty and don't choose Tomcat as the server software they will not issue a PKCS7 but a generic certificate and you won't be able to import it later!

Tax number is the VAT number in case you're buying for a company registered in the European Union.

4.) They'll pass you through the verification process and send you back the certificate which looks just as the CSR string but with PKCS7 header and footer:

-----BEGIN PKCS7-----
blablatons of things here
-----END PKCS7-----

5.) Save that string into a certificate.txt file, and save it with Notepad (on windows), not Wordpad or anything that would mess with formatting, insert spaces or anything like that.

6.) Run this:

keytool -import -trustcacerts -file certificate.txt -keystore path_to_keystore -alias jetty

VITAL: it needs to be the same keystore from where you generated the CSR, untampered, unchanged, at least not the alias you have used to generate the CSR. So the alias you have generated the CSR from, must be there !

If you will see something like 'Certificate reply was installed in keystore' you're done.

If you get something like

"keytool error: java.lang.Exception: Input not an X.509 certificate"

then it may be that you didn't save the certificate correctly, or that you tampered with the keystore. However this error can appear for 1000 reasons other than the type of your certificate.

Take this information more as a guide then as "religion", use it w/o any guarantees, and whatever you do not understand or are not sure of, contact their support otherwise you may find yourself in the situation of buying something totally different than what you actually need or want.

Innovation gagged ?

Here you can read the entire article which I consider to be a brilliant piece. Thanks to Alexandru Popescu for twitting it (I've made a habit thanking him for sharing so I'd better set up a daily cron job to do that for me :-D ). What hit me very hard and almost made me feel bad (heaving a 6 years old daughter) was the following bit which I find to be astonishing:

If you look at 4 year olds, they are constantly asking questions and wondering how things work. But by the time they are 6 ½ years old they stop asking questions because they quickly learn that teachers value the right answers more than provocative questions. High school students rarely show inquisitiveness. And by the time they're grown up and are in corporate settings, they have already had the curiosity drummed out of them. 80% of executives spend less than 20% of their time on discovering new ideas.

I always though that lack of innovation is deeply linked to the social factors as poverty in under-developed countries where 80% of the time you must actually think of how to survive. Instead I learn it's very deep in our "organization" as a species. SCARY !

What do you value ? The right answers or the atypical / provocative questions ?

Most people ...

... never learn.

Android

I asked a very talented friend of mine to do a drawing for me, called suggestively "Android". Here it is. You've got to love this guy, really:


Here are few other works he's done, enjoy :-)

Interesting Android / iPhone stats and charts

Here it is

Android in "exotic" usage scenarios

I've seen some very cool usages for the Android so far, let aside the mobile phone platform:

1.) Business Desk Phone/Organizer looks really good !
2.) Video / Gaming platform , needs a lot more work but hey ! At least it's something
3.) Not that exotic but still kickass :-D - Archos internet tablet, eat that Apple :-D
4.) Barnes & Noble eReader - Nook
5.) M Tube MID anyone ? MID shares media with TV set via gestures.

Anyone knows of any other usages ?

Android vs iPhone success - phone producers are not getting it

When designing a smartphone you should look at the most simple, stunningly obvious fact: that it lets you build something soooo far from a PHONE. Fuck the phone! It's an aged, expired concept. It's dead !

The iPhone's success is due to the fact that it is NOT a phone. Let aside the design of it, which is brilliant just as most of Apple's designs, I won't write a 500 pages paper about why the hell it's so nice. It just is ! And still Motorola Cliq is nowhere near it. And so is the LG GW620 (Btw could LG have found a name that is harder to remember ?! Hardly !). Hell, even HTC models, aside Hero, are not getting it entirely. However, from all the Androids out there, HTC Hero "gets it" the most.

So all Smartphone designers out there please stop embarrassing yourselves and stop designing Phones ! Yes. Drop the Phone concept altogether because the most successful Smartphone(TM) out there, the iPhone, is not a phone. Just as iPods are not mp3 players ! Ah, another example at least by the looks, Zune is stunningly beautiful.

Just go out there, find some punks in the streets, catch them graffiti-ing the walls and ask them what would they like at a device that would, amongst others, allow them to socialize online, listen music, twitter, face-book, or look fancy. And they will not point to any Cliq or LG GW 620 ppx trgg 55.

Android is a platform that you can build upon. It's been proven. Use it but for fuck's sake STOP DESIGNING PHONES ! The iPhone showed you all that people want much more than a phone. Give it to them. And something beautiful will arise finally. The days of the phone are over. Let there begin the days of the smartphone, call it the Phone 8.0 (Laugh, Mr. O'Reilly is gonna come after me =)) ) or whatever you want.

Aside design, iPhone is about the way you interact with it. It allows grown-ups to be children again, be able to play again. You touch it, slide it, zoom it, talk to it. Nevertheless they may do useful stuff but it lets you play, relax, feel good when using the device. The virtual keyboard is something that should be embraced, stop designing phones with touch screen AND QUERTY or whatever fucking sliding keyboard ! You are defeating the purpose of the touch screen. Why do you have it if you don't use it ?

In the iPhone / Android era, which started a while ago and is happening right now, the phones are all free. Cause nobody will buy them anymore. You'll get a bag of phones with a $4 subscription (massive laugh here). If you want just a phone, the chip and the battery fits into the volume control of your headphones.

Read my lips: The phone (as we know it) is dead. Sooner you realize, better for your sales.

The (short) quest of Speech Recognition on Android

Well yeah, speech recognition is possible BUT apparently it is handled by default by the Google Voice Search package (I am not 100% sure but it's all I have learned till now, read this for example) which is available only for the brave :-D. And I am weak.

So I am currently investigating other ways of implementing it. There would be two main directions to investigate:

1.) Perform the speech recognition on the device - I'm not sure how practical this is, would certainly eat up a lot of CPU/battery, if possible at all. However I didn't find any resource on this, at least not yet and not for Android.

1.1) As an intermediary step maybe it would be easier to implement recognition for a limited vocabulary for which you would store sound/text values, record voice and try to match the recorded sound against the existing entries. This may work, the issue here would be analyzing/matching the two sound samples.

2.) Capture a sound file/stream, upload it to a server, convert it to text and get the text back. I found Sphinx as a possible server side package to do the speech recognition and get the text back, but there are some drawbacks to this approach: you need a server, you need bandwidth (3G, Wifi I'd say) and you need to convert from the capture format on Android (3GPP, mpeg whatever) to the formats supported by Sphinx which is dependent on JavaSound (cringe!), these being aiif, au and wav.

However for the 2.) point there is a slight advantage in being able to choose the server platform/package which would not need to be Java (I specifically looked for Java, Sphinx 4 is Java) and I assume that speech recognition efforts have been made in other languages too.

Has anyone else tried/thought of doing something similar ?

The danger of becoming "social"

I've been working on getting up to date with the "social web" lately, you know, twitter etc. And I realized this morning that I checked twitter and another dozen of social or news sites before starting work (well I always do that, nothing new here) but something was missing ... umm what ? And then I suddenly realized. I forgot to check email :-D . That must mean something.

Amongst others, it means Google Wave launch is long over due as it will, hopefully, allow to see them all in one place, and not only see them but also collaborate, share, whatever, not sure of all this 2.0 thing :-D. And if it doesn't, well, we'll see how we can help it :-D

Vacanta in Romania

La Felix cu nevasta si copilitza:

1.) Romanii au descoperit un nou mod de a sta in apa: Multi si in picioare. Multi multi, desi si in picioare. Mai si umbla. Da' nu inoata. Defel. Ne-a salvat nenea de la pensiunea unde eram cazati ca avea piscina. Am facut acolo cateva ture bune.

La Costinesti, tot cu familia:

1.) Poate Silviu Prigoana sa trimita o flota de masini sa stranga peturile.
2.) Oamenii, nu inoata, stau in picioare, ciotca. De data asta in apa alburie (de la jeg banuiesc) si plina de alge.
3.) Salvamarii salveaza fetele de aglomeratia de pe plaja si le duc in larg fluierand stavrizii umblatori
4.) Ala de la Aqua Park de la tobogan zice: Cat are fetita ? Eu: 6 ani. Ala: Ia pune-o langa perete. Eu: De ce ? Ala: Sa vedem cat e de inalta. O pun langa un marcaj de 1.20 m, e mai mica cu un cap, ce sa-i fac daca maica-sa care e mare deja si are doar 1.50. Zice geniul ala: Nu are domne' 6 ani, vad dupa expresia fetzei. Ma gandesc (ma al draku, or fi angajand astia numa paranormali sau cu studii superioare sa sufle in fluierele alea, ma prinse asta furand 6 luni din varsta lui fiica-mea) . Degeaba. Nu ne lasa. Sotia are o tentativa de a fi un pic mai dura da dupa atatia ani de Cluj Napoca s-a inmuiat samanta de cearta, nu le mai are. Coboram jos la alea pentru fraieri ca aia sub 1.20 platesc degeaba. Bine ca acu' un an in Antalya au lasat-o turcii pe toboganele de adulti pe gratis. N-avea nici un metru. Da aci e lumea civilizata ma. Nu e Turcia. Da banu' si du-te stai in ploaie daca vrei baie.
5.) Stam la pensiunea Golden Pearl. E in Costinesti in zona primariei. O recomand. E cel mai bun lucru de anul asta pe litoral. Totul e pe fatza, totul e cinstit, ce platesti aia primesti, camere curate, dencente, mancare BUNA, da BUNA, nu ca zic eu asha. Gatita calumea, e prima data cand nu imi merge burta la draku de cand merg eu la mare in Romania.

Vine si continuarea ...