The Great Mall of America is nothing compared to what’s getting built in China these days. We’re talking malls over 130 acres, or 1/5 of a square mile.
A sudden outbreak of naming sanity
Two of my biggest pet peeves were recently addressed. Microsoft announced that in Longhorn, it is dropping “My” from My Documents, My Computer, My Network Places, etc. Woohoo! I’ve always thought it sounded pretty lame. I used to rename these folders myself, starting in Windows 95, but eventually I gave up.
The other one is about the names of Lotus products. A few years ago, IBM decided to rename its instant messaging product, Sametime, to “Lotus Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing.” It also renamed its team collaboration software, QuickPlace, to “Lotus Team Workplace.” No one used these awkward names, not even IBM/Lotus executives. Finally, IBM announced that it is reverting to the Sametime and Quickplace names when version 7.0 is released. thankyouthankyouthankyou
More about Borland
Today I went to a Borland presentation on its Java development tool, JBuilder 2005. I hadn’t played around with it for more than five years, so obviously what I saw tonight was dramatically different. It has some slick support for developing and refactoring J2EE programs. For example, if you rename a class via refactoring, JBuilder is smart enough to not only rename any references to the class in other Java classes, but also within XML configuration files.
I was also interested in finding out more about JBuilder’s upcoming transition to Eclipse. I asked why Borland picked Eclipse over NetBeans. It all boiled down to the ecosystem. Even though JBuilder’s architecture is more similar to NetBeans than Eclipse, it would still be painful to move the code base to NetBeans, and the payoff wouldn’t be as great, because there is less third-party support for NetBeans than there is for Eclipse. Plus, Borland was actually a founding member of the Eclipse Foundation (although it didn’t became a strategic partner until this year), so they’ve been keeping an eye on Eclipse for a few years.
A little trivia: Borland has been in Scotts Valley, CA since its founding in 1983. In 2003, it started leasing office space in Cupertino City Center. Cupertino’s city government claimed that Borland was moving its headquarters to there, but Borland denied it. However, if you look at its web site now, its Scotts Valley address is almost nowhere to be found. Instead, it lists its “executive offices” as being located in Cupertino. But the listed phone number is the old Scotts Valley number!
Talking to the folks at tonight’s meeting, it turns out that most of the developer tools are still being developed in Scotts Valley, while sales, executive offices, and development for other products are in Cupertino. As for the headquarters… who knows.
Opportunity escapes sand trap
After being stuck in the sand for almost 6 weeks, the NASA Mars rover Opportunity finally escaped. Kudos to the JPL engineers who got it out. It’s amazing that 14 months after NASA thought the rovers would be dead, they are both still going strong.
Borland switches JBuilder to Eclipse
In a move a lot less talked about than Mac to Intel, Borland announced that a future version of JBuilder will be based on Eclipse. This is good news both for Borland and Eclipse — Borland can focus its energies on building on JBuilder top of an IDE ecosystem, instead of trying to compete against one that’s free, and Eclipse gains that much more momentum. Every major tool vendor now supports Eclipse in some way, except Sun and Microsoft.
These last few blog entries have gotten quite technical; sorry to those not fluent in computergeekese.
Holymolyitstrue: Apple switches to Intel
Makes me wonder if I should buy a Mac in a few years. I could run Windows and Mac software full speed on the same box. (Writing the next version of Virtual PC for the Mac should become a lot easier…) It also makes me wonder who will buy a Mac for the next couple of years, knowing that they’re buying into a dead hardware platform. Not to say the PowerPC itself is dead — PS3, Xbox 360, and Nintendo will more than make up for the lost Mac volume. Hmmm, I wonder when Lotus Notes for the Xbox 360 is coming out…
Speaking of Macs…
The two features I find most interesting about Mac OS X 10.4 (“Tiger”) are not the ones getting the biggest hoopla, Spotlight and Dashboard. I’m more intrigued by improvements aimed at programmers. Core Data helps the developer manage the data within an application. Core Data, along with Cocoa Bindings, promises to make it much easier to write applications using the flexible model-view-controller pattern. Having just written a good-sized MVC app myself, I appreciate anything that makes it easier. The other feature I’m keeping an eye on is Automator, which allows end users to create their own scripts to automate tasks. Anything from renaming a bunch of files to rotating, cropping, and e-mailing a collection of photos is possible.
There has been a real lack of end-user programming tools built into operating systems lately; the last one was HyperCard, which was last bundled with a Mac in 1990. Windows had the primitive Macro Recorder, which simply recorded raw keystrokes and mouse events, and even that was removed from Windows when Windows 95 was released. So Automator is a welcome change. In some ways, Microsoft is moving in the other direction. It plans to include a new command-line shell and scripting language with Longhorn called MSH. That’s good for sysadmins, but doesn’t do much for end users.
Big week in information technology
It’s been a more eventful week in IT land than I expected. First, Microsoft announced yesterday that the next versions of Office for Windows and Mac OS X will use ZIP-compressed XML file formats as the default. Woohoo! No more brittle binary files. And they’re being smart enough to change the extensions so you can easily distinguish “legacy” Office documents from the new XML-based ones.
But then CNET News.com dropped a real bombshell when it reported earlier today that Apple will announce on Monday that it is switching its Macs to Intel. I’ll believe it when I hear it from Steve Jobs’ mouth. But if it’s true, that means that Apple switches to Intel at the same time Microsoft moves Xbox to IBM PowerPC. What???
Why I think there is a housing bubble in Silicon Valley
Consider this: between 2000 and 2005, housing prices have gone up 46%, or 7.9% per year. But at the same time…
- The population has gone up only 4%.
- Rental prices have gone down 16%, or 3.5% per year.
- Nonfarm payroll employment has dropped 14%, from almost 900,000 to less than 780,000.
- The ratio of buying a median-priced home to renting a place for a year has grown from 14.1 to 34.0. In contrast, in the New York area, which isn’t exactly cheap, it’s 25.4, and for the whole country it’s 17.1.
So housing has gone up by almost 50%, but rents and employment have dropped by about 15%? Does this make any sense to anyone?
The Meaning of Lah
I don’t remember how I came across this, but… Singaporean English, or “Singlish,” has various particles derived from Chinese that are sprinkled throughout conversation, like, “You see my husband’s not at home lah,” or “There’s something here for everyone lah.” Even many Singaporeans can’t explain when they use it, but Mr Brown makes a valiant attempt. The English language is more diverse and complicated than I imagined.