gpoul's Out Of Memory Blog

Now that christmas is over I can now turn to more important aspects; like choosing a new smartphone :-)

Turns out though, that choosing a new smartphone is not that easy. Given I still haven’t decided what to buy I at least wanted to write about what smartphones I looked at and what I did and didn’t like. If there are any inconsistencies, inaccuracies, or you have a recommendation on what to buy, please help me out by posting a comment.

The following are essential smartphone capabilities that I need:

• Calling & Texting – it’s a phone, after all :-)
• Push e-Mail
• Contacts synchronization
• Calendar synchronization
• Offline Maps – to find customer sites and hotels even when roaming

The following are nice-to-have capabilities that I want to use every now and then:

• Navigation
• Tethering
• Google Reader, although this is also available as a website
• Social Media (Facebook / Twitter / Google+), also available as a website
• Google Talk / Jabber

I looked at the following phones and reviewed their capabilities.

Apple iPhone 4/4S:

- No offline maps, unless with an app like TomTom
- Google maps app is still tile-based
- Weird Google integration, the Gmail app might be a good first step to fix this
- No decent Google Talk
- Glass front & back that might easily break when dropped
+ Tethering with WLAN is now available on the iPhone 4 and 4S

Nexus S:

- No offline navigation
- It’s slowly getting old
+ Nice Google Reader app
+ Almost all apps available that you might want
+ All the latest Google apps

Galaxy Nexus:

+ Same as Nexus S
- Humongous form factor

Nokia Lumia 800:

- Weird Google integration, no Gmail app available
- No Google+ integration
- No tethering yet
- No native development environment on my MacBook Air
- No decent Google Talk
+ Offline maps and navigation built-in (Offline navigation only after an update?)

Today one of my customers had the need to add new MIME types to a virtual host because some file types were not recognized correctly by IE8. I looked around and there was nothing in wsadminlib for doing this, so I came up with my own setVirtualHostMimeTypes.py.

I’ve thought about a more open sharing of sample scripts for some time, given that our release process for wsadminlib isn’t very agile, but it never really materialized. Maybe the creation of this mercurial repository will motivate me to share a few more. It’s kind of a waste to have various customers reinvent the wheel over and over again and those sample scripts are not exactly intellectual capital; they just accumulate on my hard drive instead of helping others to use our products more efficiently. Enjoy!

I just finished reading Understanding Big Data – Analytics for Enterprise Class Hadoop and Streaming Data by Paul C. Zikopoulos, Chris Eaton, Dirk deRoos, Thomas Deutsch, and George Lapis.

I think the book was distributed to everyone in Software Group Austria and while we also certainly have exciting technology in our WebSphere part of the SWG business I must say I’m now very excited about the opportunity Big Data offers.

The book starts with explaining the business challenges Big Data can help address and then talks about the technical solutions, toolkits, and capabilities IBM brings to the table to address those business challenges. It’s a quite entertaining and interesting read and while it’s not too technical it gets you excited about Big Data and helps you identify business challenges that might be addressed by using InfoSphere BigInsights and InfoSphere Streams.

Our WebSphere Application Server V8.5 Beta is now available. It includes the liberty profile and we also made a beta of Rational Application Developer V8.5 available so you can test our new development environment together with the runtime. You can find all of these on our WebSphere Early Programs Download Site. If you download and test those new beta versions, please don’t forget to send us your feedback!

Joe Duffy ends his post about object mortality with:

After saying all of this, I hope it is just amusing trivia. I’m sure nobody is writing finalizers these days anyway.

I especially recommend to also look at the comments on that post and if you found that interesting, you might also want to read our Java development team’s take on finalizers.

After having container support for WAS 7.0 for several months we’ve now also added WAS 8.0 embedded & remote container support into Arquillian. Get the arquillian-container-was code and please provide feedback – or patches :-)

Today we make WebSphere Application Server V8.5 Alpha available to our developer community. I’ll be at the WebSphere Technical Conference in Berlin next week, so I won’t get too much time to play with it. Want to check it out? Head over to our WASdev community site and give it a try, and don’t forget to give us feedback!

Today we announced three new WebSphere Application Server bundled offerings.

The two enterprise offerings, IBM WebSphere Application Server – Tools Edition and IBM WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment – Tools Edition, will improve availability and ease of licensing for our enterprise developers as those WAS bundles include Rational Application Developer.

More interestingly we’re now offering what we call IBM WebSphere Application Server for Developers – Tools Edition for Eclipse. This combines the previously available no-charge WebSphere Application Server for Developers, but also provides you with Eclipse plugins that can easily be installed on top of your existing Eclipse environment. These plugins are a subset of what we ship with Rational Application Developer and provide the adapters you need to quickly deploy to WebSphere Application Server. While you can download and use these plugins at no charge we certainly also offer you the option to purchase support for these plugins.

Thinking about deploying WAS V8.0? Our developerWorks article on Garbage Collection in WebSphere Application Server V8.0 introduces you to IBM’s generational gc, which is now the default; and stay tuned for part 2, which will introduce you to the new balanced region-based collector.

Earlier this week IBM announced that the Lotus Symphony codebase will be opened and offered for consideration by the newly formed Apache OOo incubator project.

This is a great step for the Apache OOo project and for Symphony. Not only because we get the chance to consolidate this fork, but I really like the UI changes that have been made for Symphony and it can only be positive to make them available to a broader audience.

The announcement was sent to the Apache mailing list and the thread is well worth a read.