Adam Bien's Weblog

An interesting URL: http://www.sun.com/ponytails. It gets resolved to: http://www.sun.com/software/opensource/. Now the question - why ponytail? :-)

Posted at 12:51PM Mar 06, 2010 by Adam Bien in Fun  |  Kommentare[4]

[my tweets]  Rss My book: Real World Java EE - Rethinking Best Practices

The new Sun + Oracle logo was revealed. Somehow aquarium / oracun and sparky related :-)

Posted at 09:06PM Jan 22, 2010 by Adam Bien in Fun  |  Kommentare[1]

[my tweets]  Rss My book: Real World Java EE - Rethinking Best Practices

Ekspos is a nice, free image viewer written in Java. WebStart install is available as well.

Posted at 05:44PM Jan 02, 2010 by Adam Bien in Fun  |  Kommentare[4]

[my tweets]  Rss My book: Real World Java EE - Rethinking Best Practices

Roomba is an autonomous vacuum-cleaning robot - it cleans all rooms, then returns back to the docking station for charging. It works remarkably well - even cats love it. You can just give it as christmas gift to your mother, girlfriend or wife, without mentioning it real capabilities :-).

Although it comes with a remote control and it is fun to observe it - the fun part starts after reading the Hacking Roomba: ExtremeTech book. A hint: you should not order both at the same time, otherwise your girlfriend / wife *will* become suspicious. 

You could pimp-up your vacuum cleaner with WI-FI, Bluetooth, even Linux etc.

The only problem is to find useful use cases for hacking it. Some ideas:

1. Vacuum-cleaning robot swarm :-)
2. Peer-To-Peer communication between Roombas. Having a certain Roomba density one could even built an alternative ad-hoc network :-)
3. Roomba has a remote control, so after equipping it with a web cam, it becomes a perfect spy toy / drone.
4. ...any other ideas? 

Posted at 04:26PM Dec 22, 2009 by Adam Bien in Fun  |  Kommentare[10]

[my tweets]  Rss My book: Real World Java EE - Rethinking Best Practices

A nice homepage - it explains what JavaOne actually is. You can even buy one.

Posted at 12:00PM Oct 11, 2009 by Adam Bien in Fun  |  Kommentare[2]

[my tweets]  Rss My book: Real World Java EE - Rethinking Best Practices

After a serious refactoring, a SPARCStation was (re)used for a geek funeral (see picture). I'm just wondering what a serious iphone / nano geek will do...

Posted at 10:03AM Oct 03, 2009 by Adam Bien in Fun  |  Kommentare[1]

[my tweets]  Rss My book: Real World Java EE - Rethinking Best Practices

What does the number 42 mean for you?

The funniest answer I got so far was: "I heard about that already"

You can directly google for 42 and will get the correct answer.  Interesting: if you search for "Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything", you will get an interesting reaction from google (a small calculator).

Posted at 09:48AM Aug 22, 2009 by Adam Bien in Fun  |  Kommentare[5]

[my tweets]  Rss My book: Real World Java EE - Rethinking Best Practices

Java is the most popular language in July. ActionScript (22) is tightly followed by Fortran and COBOL (what a nice neighborhood :-)). Scala is actually doing well (32) and Java FX Script (44) seems to be more popular than Groovy (47) - what really surprised me. An excerpt from the index:

21 Objective-C 
22 ActionScript 
23 Fortran 
24 COBOL 
32 Scala 
44 JavaFX Script 
47 Groovy 

Posted at 10:21AM Aug 02, 2009 by Adam Bien in Fun  |  Kommentare[2]

[my tweets]  Rss My book: Real World Java EE - Rethinking Best Practices

The registration is fast - not even an email-address is required. After choosing your username and password (it takes about 20 seconds), you can immediately start to play runescape. Runescape is applet-based and runs directly in a browser. Even more interesting: runescape was designed with self-created Java tools what is remarkable. I tried it on a mac - everything worked perfectly. Enjoy your weekend! :-)

Posted at 11:10AM Aug 01, 2009 by Adam Bien in Fun  |  Kommentare[1]

[my tweets]  Rss My book: Real World Java EE - Rethinking Best Practices

Probably not. Although there is a nice and fast XML / JSON parser with the name Jackson. It is especially useful for fast XML parsing and JSON processing with JAXB support. ...and one of the developers first name is Mike :-).  

Now let see, whether Glassfish v2.1 behind this blog will be able to handle the load, and whether this post will make into the top five :-).

Posted at 11:36AM Jul 14, 2009 by Adam Bien in Fun  |  Kommentare[4]

[my tweets]  Rss My book: Real World Java EE - Rethinking Best Practices