Must maintain a 6 month blogging average...

Wine + Steam = Good

This thread summarizes why I prefer to purchase and use games via Steam on my Mac and Linux boxes. Not only do you avoid shady patches and other questionable (legal and moral) practices, you also are providing a more predictable experience. In general Steam locks the version and patches that everyone uses forcing the application to become a constant. This means testers A, B, and C are testing the same application version on variable distributions and hardware. Furthermore, users A, B, and C will likely end up using the exact application that was tested significantly increasing the possibility of a similar experience.

Without Steam, or some other forcing function that locks application versions, testing becomes far more complex and it is harder to guarantee an acceptable user experience. In the PC (a Mac is still a PC) world and the world of Wine there are already far to many variable frames, fixing even one of them is a godsend. I would even go so far as advocating that Codeweavers focus their testing and support on the versions of games available on Steam over other variable sources. (In theory those variable sources can patch their versions to the same versions distributed via Steam...)

My £0.02

Quick plans for creating a USB to barrel plug power adapter.

While you can buy a cheap solution for this problem I'd encourage you to recycle some of your spare parts and make your own.

You can easily make your own USB power cable using a 2.1mm barrel connector and a USB Type A host cable.

The center of the barrel plug is DC_5V and the sleeve is GND. This matches quite nicely with the USB Pin 1 (DC_5V) and USB Pin 4 (GND). I will create a simple diagram and post it later today.

Wait, where did 2008 go? Oh, thats right, Facebook...

Damn, my hairline is receding. That really sucks.

Whale Watching

Lauren and I went whale watching this past weekend and it was amazing. Have a few pictures of flippers, fins, and faces. Not great pictures as most of the time I just stood amazed completely forgetting about the camera.

The previous weekend we headed to the Seattle Film Festival and watched King of Kong an absolutely wonderful documentary. It was picked up for a nationwide release and should be showing at your local theater later this year. Expect to hear a lot about this movie in the coming months.

Carbonado

Amazon persistence opensource carbonado.sf.net

Started migrating molitor.org, overcr.org, and the tuxbot.com sites. Slow progress but at least the new host is a much better box with better bandwidth.

Struts 2 History

Don Brown recently typed up a blog entry summarizing the trials, failures, and eventual outcome of trying to merge the leading open source Java web development frameworks. Sadly corporate brand ownership had a significant impact and probably has lead to the frameworks being more fractured than they need to be. The eventual outcome however (Struts 2) has the backing of Google, BEA, IBM and Apache. Interface 21 (of Spring and SpringMVC fame) while leaving the merger table is still supporting Struts 2.

Project Clarity ultimately failed but all parties continue to support one another and have united on several JSR's that might have a much larger impact to Java development as a whole. I dont think we'll see any revolutions on the Java web development front, but the evolution continues.

JSR-299 Web Beans
JSR-295 Bean Binding
JSR-303 Bean Validation

OreillyNet: Struts 2 History