I have received the session evaluations from the talk I did at JavaONE(TS-1669) (slides are available). Differently from the evaluation of the talk two years ago, this time it is more scientific. I guess pushing the evaluation paper on every attendee has paid of. I am quite happy with the result. The top two quartiles for overall quality were 4.03-4.29 and 4.29-4.89. My mark is 4.24. I did not make it into top 25% of the sessions, but I am somewhere in the top 30%.

Even the basic techniques from the computational linguistics field can make for interesting and intriguing applications. Gutenkarte takes public domain books, extract geographic names present in the text and plots them on the map. The result is an automatic clustering of place references, both visually and (within single click) textually. The site itself is self-explanatory, but there is a good write up on the larger context of the idea in the if:book blog entry.

If you like programming and/or pattern-based music, do not follow this link. I had ignored someone’s identical advice and 20 minutes of my life is now gone. So, I pass on the advice, in the hopes that others have more resistance than me. 🙂 If you are week of spirit however, make sure you are alone in the room or at least have the headphones on. And do try all the buttons and switches.

IBM alphaWorks has released an interesting tool called Nested Archive Tookit that allows to look inside the nested zip/jar/ear/war files. It looks to be useful for modification of config files deep inside the structure (e.g. web.xml inside foo.war inside bar.ear). It can also provide XML file with the description of the archive to the full depth. This makes it useful for postprocessing with XSLT and/or visualization tools. There is a big problem with the tool however and it is its license.

A lot of interesting questions were asked at alumni-only fireside chat with Sun team today. I am only going to mention the questions Sun did not have a good story for. JVM on PDAs - Sun is pushing Java for Mobiles quite hard. Witness the support for SaveJe. This however is a difficult road especially in North America with vendor fragmentation and difficulties of implementing full multimedia/call-handling capabilities. A question was asked whether Sun would consider implementing JVM just a basic app environment for non-phone PDAs running Windows 2003/2005 and for phone PDAs but without full integration of call-capabilities (like IBM’s j9, but better).