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.

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.

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.

That’s a nice little feature, although it’s not really useful. There are a few other things that I think would be useful:

• Sending calls from people not in my contacts directly to voicemail
• Sending calls from specific gmail contact groups directly to voicemail
• Silence calls from specific gmail contact groups
• Doing all of the above only during certain times of the day (e.g. 6pm-8am)

I’ve had a plan on writing an application that would do that for quite some time and decided to investigate this a little more.

There is a permission in android called MODIFY_PHONE_STATE that would allow an application to act on incoming calls. With commit f4ece2086f3b7060edc4b93a12f04c9af648867a in Gingerbread (Android 2.3) this permission has been marked as signatureOrSystem, which basically means that only system applications or OEM vendors can access those “internal” functions.

There is an enhancement request open to introduce this functionality as a public API available to all applications as Android Issue 54, but as it stands right now writing such an application is not possible without modifying the base android build itself.

I only did a quick google search, but this also doesn’t appear to be possible on Windows Phone 7 and iPhone.