It’s legal and perhaps speaks to why Oracle bought Sun in the first place. They don’t care about the community. They saw the potential ransom they could hold the big companies like Google up for and that was the whole point of buying Sun. They have zero interest in spreading or encouraging the use of Java or its open-source community ideals.

The problem? Most of these patents were originally filed by Sun to see how much they can push the limits of what can be patented in response to being sued on similar flimsy basis by another firm (forget who) – successfully I might add.

Judge for yourself. Here are the patents in question:

*************************************************

United States Patent 6,910,205 June 21, 2005
Interpreting functions utilizing a hybrid of virtual and native machine instructions
(The “Speeding Up Something Slow Makes It Faster” Patent)

United States Patent RE38,104 April 2003
Method and apparatus for resolving data references in generated code
The “Direct is More Direct Than Indirect” Patent (James Gosling’s Patent)

United States Patent 7,426,720 September 2008
System and method for dynamic preloading of classes through memory space cloning of a master runtime system process
The “Memory Access is Faster than Disc Access” Patent

United States Patent 5,966,702 October 12, 1999
Method and apparatus for pre-processing and packaging class files
The “Smells like WinZip”  Patent

United States Patent 6,125,447 September 2000
Protection domains to provide security in a computer system
The “Well, it works for Users and Groups” Patent

United States Patent 6,061,520 May 2000
Method and system for performing static initialization
The “Static Side-Step” Pattern

*************************************************

via Can Andriod Pass the Copyright Test? – TheServerSide.com.

Update: The company that sued Sun in the past that I mentioned above was IBM – weird I forgot it was them. See James Gosling’s (inventor of Java) comments here in this very informative summary of this show down – The Oracle Google Patent Lawsuit Demystified

In particular:

James Gosling mentioned that when he worked for Sun, “IBM sued over a RISC patent that asserted that ‘if you make something simpler, it’ll go faster.’ Seemed like a blindingly obvious notion that shouldn’t have been patentable, but we got sued, and lost.” I can only imagine that seeing this patent of his involved in the fray put a bit of a smile on Gosling’s face.

and

“There was even an unofficial competition to see who could get the goofiest patent through the system.”
-James Gosling

Read the whole article. Good information.

Bad? It’s open

Ugly? It’s open

Let me explain that.

I am an Android fan boy because the platform is so open that I can do anything I want with it. The U.S. Army loves it, NASA is doing things with it that are out there (literally), and most importantly I just saved 60 bucks in hotel Internet charges (boooo!) a couple of weekends ago when travelling using my Nexus One as a wifi access point – I mean what can’t it do? If you can thunk it, you can plunk it on the Android.

But as some burned soul once said evil is that which takes the good in us into the past to lesser freedom, lesser livingness, lesser intelligence, light and love. As over the top as that assessment is, that’s exactly what carriers out there do. Android is open to the extent that it allows carriers to disable all the goodness in Android and put horribly hobbled devices on the market. I bought a Nexus One a few months back and its such a dream – I can do anything with it. But I am a mobile developer and have had the opportunity (???) to play with devices that will soon be on the market from various carriers and they are horribly hobbled – you cannot download non-market place apps, the wifi hotspot function is gone, no USB tethering – everything that I take for granted on the Nexus One. Not cool.

Also not smart…and ugly as hell. Yesterday Verizon put out a statement saying that there will be no wifi hotspot or tethering on the Motorola Droid (on 2.2/Froyo) because apparently the Motorola hardware does not support it. Except that the same hardware can magically run both features when rooted. I mean come on, be outright about it and say you want to control the platform because you are afraid it will increase network load and you want to charge more for tethering and offer it as a paid-for option in the future. By lying, Verizon is saying we think you are fools who don’t know any better and forgetting that the base that goes for Android phones are usually the geekier of us.

And Google, sometimes you can be too open. Or let me put it this way – you can be artlessly open. Like when you install an Android app, the installer will show you all the permissions used by that app. This is one of the encouraging things about Android – it won’t allow me to develop an app that uses a phone feature without me explicitly declaring in the application manifest that I need those permissions. So when the end user is installing the app, he or she knows exactly what they are signing up for.

The problem is that the permissions listed for the end user state the “what” (what permissions are needed) but there is no framework to explain the “why’ (why does this app require these permissions?). The result is that an end user either gets frightened away from installing an useful app after reading the frightening text during installation that this app needs access to your phone information including your number – when in reality the app probably is using your device id to identify you as a user so if you are to accidentally delete this app and reinstall it, your data would not be lost. Agreed that there are better ways to do it but my point is that brutal transparency is not as helpful as toned transparency. The impact at the other end of this kind of openness is that users become so used to seeing the permissions page during an install that they soon become immune to it and stop reading it all together. The boy who cried wolf thing.

There has to be a solution somewhere between the Android’s brute force openness and Apple’s now clichéd walled garden. But if it was a choice, I would never give up my Android for the iPhone. Thankfully I live in a world where I can own and enjoy both .

I’ll just have to try to remember them going forward. For now, here’s one that might confuse you especially if you are debugging your Android app on both emulator and the device..or maybe multiple emulators.

Android debug, error,or log messages can be tracked through LogCat which looks something like this:

Now, while in the midst of happy debugging , if your log messages suddenly stop showing up in logcat – basically nothing is showing up in logcat – then it basically means that Android has for some reasons lost “focus” on your current emulator. This will most likely happen when you are triggering a debug session.

You fix this by opening up the devices view (Window->ShowView->Others->Devices) and selecting the emulator for which you want to see the debug messages. In the screenshot below, I’ve selected the device instead of the emulator. Now go back to the LogCat view and your log including what flew by before you selected the device should show up.

—–

Server Error in Application “Default Web Site/WebOrb30”

Error Summary:

Http Error 500.23 – Internal Server Error

An ASP.NET setting has been detected that does not apply in Integrated managed pipeline mode.

I am working on Windows 7, so I am dealing with IIS7, not IIS6. I suspect you would face this issue on Windows Vista as well.

This happens because IIS7 hosts ASP.Net Applications using the ASP.NET Integrated mode by default. ASP.NET Integrated mode provides applications with a lot of very useful and efficiency-boosting features such as

• ASP.NET services such as Forms Authentication, URL Authorization, Output caching etc. are not available to all content types – where they were previously available only to ASP.NET content types such as .aspx pages.
• IIS7 has tighter unified configuration for IIS and ASP.NET modules/handlers.
• IIS’s modules were traditionally developed using the C++ server API and server extensions previously needed to be (not always but most of the time) developed in the ISAPI filter or extension extensibility mode. This is no longer the case and ASP.NET modules can now talk to the server pipeline directly.

A good detailed explanation of the ASP.NET integration architecture and advantages can be read here:

http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/243/aspnet-integration-with-iis7/

However, this also means that applications, such as WebOrb which were not developed for IIS7 in particular and don’t use ASP.NET Integrated mode will break as shown above.

The solution is easy enough however – we basically take the first option listed in the “Things you can try” section of the error page. However, because the option text is a little cryptic, I thought I would list the specific steps:

1. Open up command prompt in the administrative mode. (Make sure you are in admin mode else you will get an insufficient permissions error)
2. Go to C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv directory – assuming C:\Windows is your system root.
3. Type in
   appcmd migrate config "Default Web Site/weborb30”
   This is assuming you deployed WebOrb under “Default Web Site” during installation. If not, just replace it with the name of the website you put WebOrb under instead.

You should see something like this:

Go back to the page where you got the error and refresh. You should see the management console which looks like the screenshot below. If you have already closed the window, just browse to http://localhost/weborb30/ assuming that’s where you put WebOrb. Your URL should look similar.

We are set!

I have been exploring the best ways to enable remoting of a Flex / Papervision3D project we have been working on. My goals were to avoid XML based RPC communication as that would mean having to write XML-to-Object mappings on both the Flex and the ASP.Net end.

Several options emerged but in the end, WebOrb for .Net seemed to be the most endorsed and robust option. I think a lot of headache is pushed out of the way when you enable your Flex and ASP.Net teams to work with their own Object models without having to worry about a communication XML Schema. WebOrb also seems to be strongly endorsed by Adobe considering the remoting posts written by Adobe Engineers use WebOrb – at least for ASP.Net remoting. Of course if I was on a Java/J2EE backend, I would probably go for BlazeDS.

I work for a company that has built Flex applications from back in the day it was called Flash MX and we have always defined our own XML-based remoting mechanisms. In fact I think we built one of the first truly enterprise scale, fully Actionscript based applications when we put out IRIS Process Author.

The current project however – I can’t disclose the details as it would violate the NDA – will be our first project in which we take a different path – which will surely prove more efficient from the performance perspective, from the team separation perspective as well as the ease-of-use perspective.

I hope to write a series of posts on using WebOrb from the perspective of someone who has been used to doing things his own custom way before and is now using a standardized object-based remoting framework. I also hope to document any issues I come across that might prove helpful to others – especially considering I am on Windows 7 – uncharted territory for a lot of development tools.

If you know any other equally viable alternatives to WebOrb that I am not considering, please do let me know.

So I’ve decided to do at least some part of my dev on the Mac. Conveniently, I am currently working on architecting a Flex application for 3D modeling that uses Papervision3d. Flex Builder is Eclipse based and available on the Mac – perfect!

To keep my workspace and files synchronized between my work Windows machine and my Mac at home, I am in the process of setting up Windows Live Mesh. Live Mesh is looking amazing and works pretty flawlessly. The only problem is that their Mac client is still in tech preview and my account doesn’t have authorization yet to use it on the Mac . So I am using my XP VM on the Mac as my conduit to synch for now. I can’t wait for the Mac client to go live. More on how I use Mesh in future posts.

So I opened up my Flex project on the Mac version of Flex Builder 3. You soon realize subtle differences between the Windows and Mac versions of both the Flex Builder and the Flex compiler. Also, since I was using both Mac and Windows, I started mixing up my keyboard shortcuts – got annoying very quickly.

The first issue with using Flex on the mac was that as soon as I tried debugging my app, I got a ‘Security Sandbox Violation’. It was working just fine on Windows.
 

*** Security Sandbox Violation ***
Connection to xxxxxx_frontElev.dae halted – not permitted from file://localhost/Volumes/Anatta/work/xxxxxx/Prototype I/bin-debug/main.swf
SecurityError: Error #2148: SWF file file://localhost/Volumes/Anatta/work/xxxxxxx/Prototype I/bin-debug/main.swf cannot access local resource yyyyy_frontElev.dae. Only local-with-filesystem and trusted local SWF files may access local resources.
    at flash.net::URLStream/load()
    at flash.net::URLLoader/load()
    at org.ascollada.io::DaeReader/read()[/Volumes/Anatta/work/xxxxxxx/xxxxxxx/Libraries/papervision3d_SVN_Checkout/as3/trunk/src/org/ascollada/io/DaeReader.as:76]
    at org.papervision3d.objects.parsers::DAE/load

….

After digging around a little, turns out this was because of the sandbox settings on the Flash player on the Mac.

To fix this,

1. Go to the compiler settings in  your project’s properties via Project->Properties->FlexCompiler
2. In the ‘Additional compiler arguments:” settings, add
   -use-network=false
   
   
3. Click ok.

Should work fine. Hope it saves you some time if you are starting with Flex on the Mac.

This blog will probably have posts related to whatever I happen to be working on. I don’t think it will be specific to any technology, framework or language. At least, there are no plans to scope it right now. It may happen that I keep going back to certain languages or technologies. It may also happen that certain topics or tech domains draw more interest and this blog obeys those demands. Anything is possible and I am excited about the possibilities.

Some tags you may expect initially: Flex, Actionscript, Team Foundation Server, C#, .Net, WPF, Silverlight, Popfly, iphone.

The one reason I decided to finally start this blog was that I have been writing a lot of internal “wiki posts” and documents inside our company (We use Sharepoint a lot). I noticed how much they help me evolve an idea – more often than not, my original solutions get sculpted during that 1 hour of writing that post or document. The conclusion I arrived at was that logging even the most mundane discovery or thought – especially when I am playing with something new will help the write-to-disk process.

Also, I have some devotion worthy developers as friends – rockstar developers who somehow manage to be awesomesauce and unbelievably down to earth at the same time. I plan to have then come on from time to time and share their thoughts too. While my posts will probably be mundane and dry, I fully expect their posts to be mind-expanding.

I am unbelievably excited about The Mindful Coder. I hope I sustain it and we take off. Blogging takes a lot of commitment and I am determined to commit this time .

I work a lot with Microsoft technologies but am also a big Apple fan boy. I go both ways .

Here’s how I will probably be punching out most of my posts:

Blogging client: Windows Live Writer (The best client out there)

OS: Win XP running on Mac OS X Leopard via VMWare Fusion