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First, Dave Winer coded NY Times River (and BBC River) to give Blackberry and Treo users a better way to get headlines. (I wish I could check them out from my mobile, but it’s a WAP phone, and the sites don’t display. What can I say–I’m a poor journalist.) And now, Dave has create a blogging tool for the Blackberry.

Nuts. I’m stuck with “moblogging” through Flickr with my webcam. And that doesn’t do very well with papercasting. I guess I gotta find a way to shake down some cash from the Internet tree and get me a Crackberry.

You can tell things are tough when all it takes is a Highway 101 billboard to elevate people’s adrenaline levels. And that, apparently, is what an Ubuntu Linux billboard has done.

From SJVN’s Linux-Watch:

The above billboard, and another just like it, were spotted by our roving reporter has he drove between Palo Alto and San Francisco on the 101 freeway earlier this week. We can’t help wondering: is it something in the water supply here in Silicon Valley? Or, is it the upcoming LinuxWorld conference that sets up shop in San Francisco next week?

Or, is it an indication that immense amounts of marketing crack are being done somewhere? Sure, Ubuntu is “increasingly popular” — for people who use Linux as a desktop. But that’s like saying that death is increasingly popular with the living — it’s a force of inevitability, given how awful most desktop Linux distros are, and how little most Linux players care about the desktop market.

There’s rampant speculation about whether Sun will announce that it is going to open-source Java at the upcoming JavaOne conference. With Scott “I’ll open-source Java when IBM open-sources DB2″ McNealy stepping aside, and John “what about the shareholders” Loiacono now safely ensconsed at Adobe, maybe this time Jonathan Schwartz will follow through all the way and release the reference implementation for Java Enterprise Edition under some form of open-source license, as Sun has done with Solaris. And who knows? Maybe Sun will do the same for Java Standard Edition and Java Mobile Edition.

There’s just one problem: open-sourcing Java won’t change anything at this point.

I’ve been beating the open-source-Java drum for a very long time. Seven years ago (back when some of the plankholders of the JCP were bitching about Sun’s grip on the process, and Sun was arguing that it didn’t want the IP corrupted), I suggested that Sun spin off the JCP as a nonprofit and retain the rights to the Java trademark for revenue-generating purposes–as sort of a half-step toward open-sourcing.

(Ironically, Sun did eventually spin off a nonprofit out of the Java community–except it was GELC, and not the JCP.)

But now that Sun seems close to actually going all the way, it’s almost moot. Open-sourcing Sun’s Java intellectual property won’t dramatically expand the reach of Java into the developer community on the middleware side–there are already open source Java Enterprise implementations that have paved the way. And with an Apache-licensed, J2EE-certified server already available, why would anyone use a CDDL-licensed Java server instead for development (aside from it being the ‘official’ reference version)?

Besides, Java Enterprise Edition has already won the war for a substantial chunk of enterprise architecture, and it did so in great part because of the success of JBoss and Tomcat as development environments (and Eclipse, and all of the other open-source tools built around the Java standard).  On the other hand, Sun has been giving away its reference implementation for free
to developers for a while now. And despite a host of curiosity-inspired
downloads, Sun Java System Application Server Platform Edition hasn’t
exactly won Sun much more market share in the enterprise application
server space.

On the desktop, there’s not much room for celebration either.  Sure, an open-source Java Standard Edition could get bundled more tightly into Eclipse–if the licensing model allows it.  But open-sourcing Java probably won’t increase acceptance of Java Standard Edition on Linux, because Sun will most likely veer away from a GNU-compatible licensing scheme. And with Loiacono’s new home making major inroads into the mobile space with Flash as a developer plaform for phones (and fragmentation of the Java Mobile code base) don’t exactly make an open-source JME any more attractive to the mobile developer community.

So, Sun won’t be giving anything up really. Except its royalties off Java certification. But there’s still an opportunity to derive revenue–perhaps a better opportunity than there is with Java’s current licensing scheme–to get trademark licensing and support licensing revenue. Sun wouldn’t necessarily lose any more control over the destiny of enterprise Java than it has already, between the Java Community Process and JBoss and Geronimo already available as open-source.

In effect, Sun has waited until there was nothing left to really lose by open-sourcing Java. As a result, the potential impact that the move could have had, say, three or four years ago has been squandered. With nothing to lose, there is also very little besides PR to gain–other than possibly hoisting off the cost of maintenance of future versions of Java onto the Java developer community.

I just recovered this server from a really hideous .htaccess failure. Since I’m hosting multiple domains on this one virtual server, I had constructed a whole bunch of .htaccess Rewrites to redirect requests to the proper subdirectories. During maintenance yesterday, the .htaccess file got corrupted, and my multidomain housr of cards fell flat–just before I had to leave the office to go visit my wife and son at sleep-away camp (a long story for a different blog).

I couldn’t figure out why the file had gone bad. On inspection, it looked intact; to be sure, I renamed the old file and saved a backup copy to the server in its place. No joy, the site was still sending everything to the root page. Fsk.

Tech support for my host, Powweb, was no help either. “We don’t support .htaccess,” they said. I said that the config had been working for literally years before the failure, and I thought that maybe there was a glitch in the server configuration or there was something wrong with the file system. They “elevated” the call — a fancy way of saying that they would eventually look at it.

So, rather than wait for them, I went back and beat on the server some more in an attempt to evict whatever demon had infested .htaccess. It took about 10 deletions and renames and reloads before I finally got a backup .htaccess file to take properly (or maybe someone rolled back a change they made in server configuration at my hosting company…I’ll never know). So at midnight tonight, I finally had everything where it should be. Sort of.

A month ago, as I was coming off a conversation about podcasting with a friend, I decided to do a little satire of the technology and created a new RSS-based media distribution technology: padcasting. I had an almost unused .Mac site that was begging to be used for something, and a mind for mischief.

As I continued the prank, I actually put some dev time into it, fiddling with the guts of Blosxom to leverage its static rendering features to automate the page generation for the “plog”. I substituted a set of scanned graphics for the usual text date headers, and *bing*, I had a completely (well, almost)scanned paper website.

What amazed me was that some people took it seriously. I had people writing me, asking questions like “what about accessibility?” and “what about search engines?” Well, duh. Those are the same problems facing podcasting and audio blogging. That was sort of the point in the exersise, no?

But then I found that I liked the format. I started playing with it some more. The great thing was that I was still getting traffic from Google–but only from people who were actually trying to find my site, not people who accidentally stumbled onto it from some stray keyword or some stupid trackback for all-nude Texas Holdem that I hadn’t deleted yet.

And I could do low-tech visual storytelling, still use hyperlinks within the content (which you *can’t* do in podcasting), and plog while totally disconnected and sync later without having to lug around a laptop or re-key.

Then these guys in Switzerland started to riff on the concept, and dedicated their site to me, “The Father of Papercasting”.

Maybe there’s something to this. Maybe it’s just a long-running April Fool’s gag gone awry. Either way, I’m sticking with it. I’m going to shift over to Pyblosxom so I can do some more automation…maybe I’ll even build a GUI.

(Apologies for the headline to anyone who hasn’t watched Mel Brooks’ History of the World, Part I. It’s good to be the king.)

Microsoft MVPs are revolting. They’re petitioning for redress of sins against VB6. There aren’t tires burning in the streets of Redmond yet, but it’s clear that some very loyal MS developers are truly torqued.

I did a lot of development in VB 4, 5, and 6, once upon a time. A set of applications I wrote in VB once for a couple of customers earned me loads of software maintenance work that got me through some tough financial times. I can understand the source of frustration that VB programmers who have a big installed base feel now that the tool they’ve built their empires with is no longer being supported.

But.

The conversation going on over at my old friend Rich Levin’s blog shows that there’s definitely more than one side to the story. And, in all honesty, I can watch this argument with total neutrality because I’ve moved on to PHP, Python and other dev tools for my programming work. (By the way, VB’rs, PyCON is coming up soon…maybe you should go.) VB.NET is pretty powerful, and VB6 makes me feel all warm and fuzzy with nostalgia, but I like to deploy things on the Web on any platform, and Python and PHP just work. They work on the Mac, which is now my primary Unix desktop. And they work on Windows.

Speaking of Windows, VB’rs, I wonder what Jim Hugunin is up to these days. I know that he went to work for Microsoft on the CLR… looks like he’s giving the keynote at PyCON. I may have to figure out a way to get down to it despite the dicey logistics of my daily life these days.

I’ve been building a wiki of press contacts for the Linux industry, and I need your help to flesh it out, folks. If you have information about who to contact regarding Linux distros, Linux-related software and other projects, please register on the site and give me a hand.

I’m going to be collecting the same information for other technology areas as well; security and app dev are next on my list.

It looks like today’s a big Sun Microsystems news day, what with the announcement of the rollout of Solaris 10. But hold it–Solaris isn’t shipping until January? They’re not announcing open-source Solaris today? What the heck are they announcing that’s news?

They’re going to make Solaris for X86 free. I guess that’s the news.

And apparently, the best news is yet to come. Next month. Sometime. I think.

OK, somebody slipped me a rumor about Sun open-sourcing a port of Solaris to IBM’s Power architecture. Another person wagged, “Well, they can’t even get Intel right; how could they have a port to Power already?” And, unfortunately, the source of the original rumor has been known to pull things out of his nether regions every now and then, so it’s difficult to even entertain it seriously. Except, that is, to consider whether this is another piece of Schwartz leakage wrapped up for a gullible reporter to run with just to create FUD.

Slashdot is dark tonight — apparently, there’s some server upgrading going on that they, like, forgot to mention.