Archive for November, 2006

Two things I learned today

  • JAR file indexing. If you ask it, jar will examine your jar files and create a text file called INDEX.LIST, which contains a list of all the classes and the jar file where they can be found, which can speed up class loading. This feature has been in Java since… the JDK 1.3!

  • Mercurial, a GPL source-control system, which I wouldn’t care much for if I didn’t just learn that it will probably be used to open source the JDK..

In the blog entry linked above, Mark Reinhold spends a great deal of time discussing source control systems, but he fails to really explain why they picked this odd choice. And just to make things clear: the assumption that there will soon be 10,000+ developers checking in code into the JDK is ludicrous, if the Netscape story taught us anything.

Personally, I’d like to read a good reason why they ruled out Subversion, which has the merit to be widely known and supported by most developer tools out there.

Anyway, I feel less stupid after learning these two things, so I thought I’d share.

Google vs. Yahoo

Yesterday, Google and Yahoo decided to settle their differences in a big
tennis event appropriately named

"Battle over the Net"
.

The two companies fielded an impressive 20-30 players each, and started
playing doubles at 9am in the beautiful Stanford Stadium.  The format made
for quick and deadly games (eight games total, no ads) and at the end, the
referees tallied the total number of games scored by each side.

Yahoo won this round by a short margin (163/157), but discussions of a
recount…  sorry, I mean "a rematch" are already underway, so Google
hasn’t said its last word just yet.

Big thanks to the organizers on both sides:  this event was an absolute
blast and a great opportunity to meet new and friendly faces.

 

Gmail for Mobile!

Apologies for the lack of posts these days, but we’ve been pretty busy
over here, and we
just launched Gmail for Mobile
.  It’s a Java ME application
that lets you access your Gmail account from your cell phone.
 It looks like Gmail, it feels like Gmail, it’s super fast and
it shows you that you can really do a lot of cool stuff with Java ME,
after all.

It’s been a tremendous experience to get this project out of the door,
maybe I’ll share some details  about it if there’s interest.

Try it and join the Gmail revolution, because we’re just getting started!