Visible Tweets

Not that we internet junkies need more stuff to waste time on, but "Visible Tweets" is a must-see for all twitter fans. Enter any search phrase into the app and watch as it pulls up all related tweets in a dazzlingly animated way with cool, color-changing backgrounds. It would make a very nice and impressive screensaver if they can turn it into one.

No cupcake yet?

Well, T-Mobile has really messed it up this time. I was not around for the RC33 update for G1 so I cannot speak for it, but this has been too much. Cupcake, the much-touted 1.5 version of Android has been out for a while now for dev phones and as a stable release. T-Mobile customers have been eagerly awaiting cool new updates for the G1 like stereo blue-tooth and video recording.

T-Mobile had announced that cupcake will be provided as an OTA update for T-Mobile customers in the week of May 11th (checks date - yep, this week). Soon, the information changed to "end of the week of May 11th". So far, it is not here yet. How hard is it for a company to set a hard date - say, May 15th - and stick to it for the update? By making vague predictions, they are really making their customer anxious and run the risk of losing them if they make them too mad. Hopefully, they will learn from this and not repeat the process.

update: Looks like the rollout has been pushed back by another week now. Hopefully, T-Mobile has learned their lesson and will manage expectations better for the next rollout.

For Geek Eyes Only!

A love story starring my ex, Singleton!

Book Review: Harnessing Hibernate

Harnessing Hibernate is the latest in a series of books I got recently to review (I have been a little too busy to read through all of them...). The book caught my interest right away since I have used Hibernate on a pretty big enterprise project a while ago and was involved in the solving of some performance issues faced by another large project due to their mishandling of some Hibernate code.

I like how Hibernate makes building data services a cinch - but more often than not, it worries me that a lot of people don't really understand Hibernate the way they need to before they can use it in large-scale applications with emphasis on scalability and performance. Understanding what goes on under the hood of Hibernate fetches goes a long way in avoiding silly mistakes like loading a set of large, linked objects into the memory when you probably needed just the top-level object or a couple of properties.

Also, a lot of books seem to focus on working code and simple samples - prototypes that work, but are ultimately not much of use in a real-world situation. I consider it a strength of this book that it doesn't take the readers for granted. The authors do a great job of explaining all concepts involved in getting a Hibernate application to run - including build tools like Maven. It has clearly defined examples, possible errors and ways to get around the errors. Of course, that doesn't mean there isn't much here for experienced developers - there are some really neat tips and tricks that might go over the heads of those that are not advanced enough to understand the concepts.

I would recommend this book readily whether you are a beginner looking to learn Hibernate or an advanced devloper hoping to refresh their knowledge or find something they might have missed before.

A comparison and listing of RIA frameworks

This blog post contains a very good and comprehensive listing of currently available RIA frameworks - a good reference for anyone researching or evaluating RIA frameworks for their current project.

Out of the technologies mentioned, EXT JS has been my favorite to work with - just the amazing number of widgets available and the fact that it is so simple to integrate it with Spring MVC and other Java-based MVC frameworks. 

Flex on the other hand is currently making me bang my head against the keyboard - but the worst part to me is the really steep license fee if you want to use the Flexbuilder GUI or even the Weblogic Workshop with bundled Flex. 

Voice Analysis to Figure out Lies

RealScoop (via Techcrunch) is an interesting software - claiming to be a wedding of voice analysis technology to Web 2.0 - by which means it figures out if someone is lying or telling the truth based on audio of the speech. The software attaches a believability meter to the videos on the site that rate the audio portion's "truthiness". Interesting and innovative though it seems, I can see too many variables going wrong with something like this - audio interference, difference between voices and modulation of men and women, other emotions coloring the voice, etc.

I don't think there can be objective analysis of the truth behind a speech without appropriate visual cues to aid the analysis process. I guess we can judge for ourselves....RealScoop plans to cover the VP debate and release believability meter readings for it. 

Quick, learn some Cobol!

I got to learn some Fortran and BASIC in my days, but was never brave enough to tackle Cobol. Looks like it might be my next thing to learn for job-security ;) Per this article from Dr. Dobb's Portal (via Slashdot), come these really interesting nuggets - 

Cobol: 1) is the most widely used language in the 21st century; 2) is critical to some of the hottest areas of software development today; and 3) may be the next language you'll be learning?


In 1997 the Gartner Group estimated that there were 240 billion lines of Cobol code in active apps. Something like 90 percent of financial transactions are processed by Cobol code, and 75 percent of all business data processing is Cobol. Merril Lynch reports that 70 percent of its business runs on Cobol apps.

More interesting and possibly horrifying information (if you are like me and not really looking forward to programmingin COBOL for the rest of your life) at the link...