Reading

Oracle and Sun announced a few days ago that Oracle will buy Sun. Others are more apt than me to comment on the financial and strategic impacts of this move (for example, in the Guardian, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal or on Slashdot). I’m more interested in the potential implications this move could have on some Open Source projects which were backed by Sun. I indeed believe Oracle will continue the development of his contributions to Open Source software, whether they are notable ( Btrfs or Oracle Enterprise Linux) or less visible. ...

Congratulations to Ananda for the creation of his company, Beaming Multimedia Solutions Ltd.! This guy is like an example to follow when you strongly believe in one idea and really do everything to achieve it … Congratulations again! Domain name is registered but website is not yet active.

Brad Burnham recently wrote a post on the editorial process on the web, where the work happens after the publish button is pushed, not before it. It’s a report on a forum session and you can read some stakeholders opinions in the post. There are a serie of good points in the post and comments but, imho, there are also some questions left unanswered. Basically, blog posts are edited after their publication: if I wrote something wrong, people will tend to post comments correcting what is wrong. That’s why Robert Scoble doesn’t agree with Andrew Keen when the latter argued that “the recent rise of user generated content is lowering the overall quality of programming on the web”. I think there is a “population effect”: the more visitors you have, the more edition and discussions you can have. ...

(This post will be in French since it concerns French and French-speaking Belgians and gives links to websites written in French) Les élections françaises approchant (c’est demain !), un certain nombre de personnes ont émis de vifs doutes sur le vote électronique, doutes relayés par la presse ( exemple). Je voulais juste épingler le blog de Laurent Pieuchot, conseiller municipal d’ Issy-les-Moulineaux (près de Paris, en France). Il y décrit les cafouillages, gaffes, incertitudes et autres mensonges àpropos du vote électronique et des ordinateurs de vote dans plusieurs communes françaises. Et ils vont voter pour la plus haute fonction de l’État français … ...

Although I liked Bill Burnham’s post about the " storage explosion" I think he forgot one thing in one of his last posts. In " YahooMail, Storage, and the Battle For Personal Data" he explains the announcement of unlimited e-mail storage for free by Yahoo! is the indication of two trends: for him, the obvious one is that storage is cheap and the less-obvious trend is that there will be a battle to control the user data in such “web applications”. ...

The Belgian Justice confirmed its original judgement by condemning Google News service to remove all articles citations from some French-speaking newspapers. The Google cache is also considered illegal in Belgium (see beginning of the story here). In an interview with the " Echo" (Belgian) newspaper, Alain Strowel, lawyer specialised in authors’rights, said the judgement is correct but also raised several questions: What is exactly behind the word “cache”? If a cached document is still formatted as the original document, I understand it could be forbidden by the law. But I guess all the search engines are using indexes where they put all the words from any webpage (regular webpage or newspaper article: it’s just HTML). What about these indexes? If they are considered as a cache, then any webpages from these newspapers shouldn’t be indexed and they’ll then be unavailable. Since they also sued Yahoo! and MSN (with much less buzz), this will mean they won’t be visible on the internet, except if you directly type their URL. Is that what they want? Alain Strowel said this judgement can bring back the debate about the exceptions to authors’rights. Currently, the exceptions are those ones (in French). With all the so-called “laws against terrorism”, I fear this will mean a reduction of the number of exceptions. It’s difficult to obtain web statistics on these newspapers websites. A lot of people guessed the number of visits will go down but it’s the first time a journalist (the interviewer) said this number actually decreased (and the lawyer agreed). Finally, this whole thing won’t make me change my opinion: ...

Some interesting links for today (didn’t had time to read everything, that’s why I’m storing them here): Java boutique has a in-depth review of NetBeans 5.5 Java Practises has a small tip about implementing toString in Java A new (very important ;-) ) feature of Java 6: the splash-screen functionality. Another interesting thing is that Java DB (Derby) is integrated by default. About databases, David Coldrick’s Weblog hosts an interesting discussion about H2 -vs- Derby databases The Java Plug-in Framework Project Besides Design Patterns, OpenSubsystems released the Open Patterns, a repository of common application functionality patterns … Some links about companies: ...

While everyone (interested in this topic) is looking at internet applications, using and abusing of buzzwords like " Web 2.0", " mashup" or " Ajax", I think the next wave of cool software applications will be related to personal, local storage and organisation of documents. Of course, you have > 2Gb of storage in most free e-mail services. Of course, you have broadband access at home, at work and nearly everywhere you go. Of course, you can watch movies on the web. Of course, you can share photos on the web. Of course, you can download songs and books on the web. Etc. ...

In this article, Brad Reagan gives many examples where the use of electronic data begins to cause problem, in a preservation perspective. The causes can be a new software that is not fully compatible with previous data models, new physical formats (unable to play old formats), too much raw information, etc. For the moment, free projects like the Internet Archive or the Free Archive (a.o.) are trying to cope with this problem. Although the dangers of a “digital blackout” really exist, I think the author forgets one important aspect of information from the past: we already lost a lot of it. What is left is what time left us, often with some damages. It survived time, taking many different forms and paths, different storage procedures, different media, different locations, etc. ...

A lot of blogs, Belgian or not, are talking about the fact that the Belgian French-speaking press (lead by CopiePress, a Belgian rights management company) successfully sued Google in Belgium over indexing, author rights, content copying, etc. The full order is available on the Belgian Google homepage (in French). I am not a lawyer. So I read the order: CopiePress wanted the Belgian court to look at the lawfullness of Google News and Googgle Cache services, according to the Belgian law CopiePress wanted Google to remove all links to any data from CopiePress clients CopiePress wanted Google to publish the order in its first page on their Belgian website So, CopiePress won the first case (the case will be heard again in appeal). I assume that the Belgian justice department is doing its job. So, let us consider that Google broke the Belgian law with their services. If you want to know more about the legal stuff, P. Van den Bulck, E. Wery and M. de Bellefroid wrote an article about which Belgian laws Google seems to have broken (in French). ...