Posts

Yesterday, I talked about what we might be able to infer from Apple’s decision to deprecate Java and prohibit Java applications from the Mac App Store in terms of the future of the Mac as an open platform. Today, I want to round up some links about the future of the Mac as a Java development platform and as a platform for developers. Nobody is exactly sure what to make of the deprecation of Apple’s port of the Java Development Kit for the Mac, but a lot of people are rather stressed about it, as you can see from several threads at Hacker News. I am a Java developer and I do all of my work on a Mac. Losing the ability to continue to work in this manner would be a hit to my productivity. ...

Matthew Yglesias makes an astute point about how digital technology makes it easier to create things that promote the general welfare without necessarily creating wealth: Consequently, the realm of activities with gigantic divergence between measured GDP and welfare value is vastly expanding in ways that I don’t think policymakers and civil society donors are yet responding to in fully appropriate ways. The case for finding ways to directly and indirectly subsidize the creation of such goods is extremely strong. But more generally, I think we should expect the significance of this kind of thing to expand in the future. ...

The big question everyone is asking is whether the Mac App Store is a step toward the closing of the Mac platform, making it a walled garden like iOS where you can only install applications by way of the App Store. This was the big worry when the iPad was originally released – is the closed model the future of personal computing? Migrating the App Store model to the Mac platform isn’t very comforting to those of us who like to be able to install and run any software we like on our computers. ...

Today the New York Times Opinionator blog ran a piece by Robert Wright made the following assertion about HTML5: In principle, HTML 5 will allow sites you visit to know your physical location and will make it easier for them to keep track of your browsing and shopping history. That assertion is based on this news article from the Times, which says: In the next few years, a powerful new suite of capabilities will become available to Web developers that could give marketers and advertisers access to many more details about computer users’ online activities. Nearly everyone who uses the Internet will face the privacy risks that come with those capabilities, which are an integral part of the Web language that will soon power the Internet: HTML 5. ...

Today I got to look at the user table in an application with passwords stored as plain text. Out of around 7100 users, over 170 have the password “password.” Around 10 other users had heard that your passwords should contain letters and numbers, and thoughtfully chose the password “password1.” Needless to say, this application should probably store hashes of the passwords rather than storing them in plain text and also use some basic test of strength for the passwords that requires more than just lower case letters. What the experience left me with, though, was a burning desire to thwart users who specifically want to use the word “password” or any variation thereof as a password. I even want to create a special error message just for them, just to let them know that their combination of laziness and cleverness is not appreciated. ...

I’m just linking to this because I think it’s cool. Today the White House honored students who competed in its first annual Science Fair in the manner usually reserved for champions in the world of sports.

Matt Raible takes on the argument that the age of Java Frameworks is over. One interesting aspect of the Java ecosystem is that there’s always some new thing out there that we’re supposed to be migrating to. And they’re nearly all just terrible in terms of productivity. Now apparently, we’re supposed to be looking at Java EE 6. I don’t even know what that is, but I’m sure it’s awful. In the meantime, I continue to plug along with Spring and Hibernate, using them in the simplest way I can. ...

Several voters in Sweden attempted to embed Trojan Horses in their hand-written ballots in a recent election. One tried SQL injection in the manner of this famous XKCD comic and another tried cross-site scripting. The attacks failed to cause any damage, but succeeded in amusing me. Hat tip, Bruce Schneier.

I think this is an insightful observation by James Fallows, on the effect of talk shows: Among the many things wrong with talking-head gab shows, which have proliferated/metastasized in the past generation – they’re cheap to produce, they fill air time, they make journalists into celebrities, they suit the increasing political niche-ization of cable networks – is that they reward an affect of breezy confidence on all topics and penalize admissions of complexity, of ignorance on a specific topic, or of the need for time to think. ...

Apache committer Jon Stevens says it’s time for the Apache Software Foundation to consider dumping its Java projects. Paul Querna says that developing open source software in Java is a trap because there will be no Java implementations other than the one offered by Oracle. The piece of news that is triggering this reaction is that IBM has announced it is going to work with Oracle on the OpenJDK implementation and will no longer contribute to Apache Harmony, an effort to create an open source, compliant implementation of Java. In announcing that change, IBM said that they were abandoning Harmony because they believed that Oracle was never going to give them the test tools necessary to certify that Harmony was a fully compatible implementation of Java. This announcement, along with Oracle’s lawsuit against Google, makes it clear that Oracle is not going to support third party implementations of Java. They’re going to discourage them. ...