There’s a cheap bookshop at the end of the Devonshire tunnel near Central station. They seem to specialise in books that are close to end of life (i.e. the book covers the previous version of … or the title just didn’t sell well). A couple of guys from work went there at lunch to get some books. The store rarely has books I’m after so I decided to skip the trip. After seeing what they returned with and how much paid I stopped in on the way home and picked up the following Apress titles:

• Beginning Java SE 6 Platform
• Pro Apache Struts with Ajax
• The Definitive Guide to Grails
• Begining EJB 3 Application Development
• Begining JBoss Seam
• Begining J2ME Platform

Total cost: < $40

I’m still trying to decide exactly which Java framework I’m going to use but at these prices I thought I’d pick up the books for all the frameworks they had. It’s a shame they didn’t have anything about Spring and that Theo got the last one about Hibernate.

I’ve been at the Open Source Developers Conference for the last couple of days. Late this afternoon Adam Kennedy made two major announcements about Perl:

1. The first Perl 6 distribution (it’s still Beta) was created at 5am this morning. A CD with the distribution burnt on it was presented to Larry Wall who was the keynote speaker on Thursday. Just prior to the announcement he said the beta would be publicly available later this month with the final Perl 6 expected at Christmas 2009.
2. Microsoft is providing hosted access to all supported versions of Windows for everyone with an @cpan.org address so they can test their modules.

I’ve recently started looking at developing a mobile application. Looking at the popular platforms it seems that I’m going to need to write the same application multiple times if I want to support

• Android,
• iPhone,
• Symbian, and
• Windows mobile

Is there a cross platform development environment that will allow me to write my application once and compile it for each of these platforms?

For the last year I’ve been involved in organising this years Open Source Developers Conference with a really great bunch of people. This years conference is almost here leaving me both excited and glad that we’ve made it. On Tuesday we’re hosting the Google Hackfest Day (free to OSDC attendees who registered for the hackfest too) with the conference itself running from Wednesday to Friday. If you’re in Sydney and into Open Source then you should really consider attending.

This year our keynote speakers (sorted by last name) are:

• Anthony Baxter (Python release manager)
• Chris DiBona (Google Open Source Manager)
• Andrew Tridgell (rsync, Samba)
• Larry Wall (Creator of Perl, patch and rn)
• Pia Waugh (Waugh Partners & OLPC Australia)

The full program is also available online if you still need a reason to attend.

Almost three months ago I decided to learn Java. Over the last few weeks I’ve finally found the time to start reading about Java, J2EE, Servlets, etc. Today I ported the MVC component of my custom PHP framework to Java. I decided to do this so I could get a feel for both how to perform common tasks in Java and how fast it is. The results surprised me:

PHP 5.2 without APC – 350 requests/second

PHP 5.2 with APC – 1,300 requests/second

Java using Tomcat 5.5 – 3,500 requests/second

I finally gave in a joined Twitter. http://twitter.com/richbuggy

Those people who know me know I’m fairly passionate about PHP. As a solution for developing web applications it’s pretty good. While I can program in a number of languages none of these are at the same level that I can with PHP. Lately I’ve been feeling the need to add another language at or close to that level.

The decision about which language was quickly narrowed down to three choices:

• C#
• Java
• Python

After thinking about it for a while the clear winner, for me, is Java. Why?

• The syntax is similar to PHP so the learning curve is lower
• It’s compiled (I already have PHP if I need a scripting language)
• I can use it to develop mobile applications (something I would like to try)
• With SWT I can build desktop applications that look native
• I’ve been wanting to experiment with the Google Web Toolkit and Google Gears so this is a way to ease myself into Java without completely switching
• It’s a highly marketable skill for a professional programmer (no, I’m not looking for another job)

Dear Google….

About a year ago I upgraded to a 3G phone (Nokia 6110 Navigator) so that I could start to take advantage of the mobile internet. One of the first sites that made it into my bookmarks was the mobile version of Gmail. While sending email using it was never very successful that didn’t matter because I could read my email on the way to work.

A couple of months ago I noticed that I was having a lot of issues logging into Gmail from the phone. For the last two month it’s been a pointless exercise where, 5 times a week, I try to login and each time I end up with a blank browser page after being redirected a couple of times. I’ve tried the usual tricks such as clearing the entire browser cache, history and cookies. While that gets me to a Google login screen once I enter my username and password in I end up with the same problem.

I even tried the Gmail application for my mobile phone but it freezes the phone so often that most sessions end with me restarting the phone.

It’s not like I have some strange phone that didn’t sell well…. PLEASE HELP!!

Yesterday a new search engine, Cuil, was launched with much fanfare. It was promoted as a “Google killer” created by founders who’s previous company was sold to Google for its search technology. The site had huge problems with the load created by the launch hype and the search results are nothing short of craptacular. I thought I’d give it a go by searching for myself. On the other major search engines this returns a link to my blog while on Cruil it links to LinkedIn, a previous employer and random posts I’ve made around the web but not to my blog.

Today I heard that if you search for “cuil” you don’t even get a link for the search engine itself. I guess next time they’ll try opening it up for beta testing first…

If you’re involved in technology startups then you might want to check out TechNation Australia. They’re a recent blog covering the Australian startup scene. Kim’s doing a great job at building this into an Australian version of TechCrunch.