[digital:meditation]

Well, I’m in for more (though voluntary) work soon: A while ago I have offered to act as Contribution Coordinator to the NetBeans Community Documentation program, and because (or, as I shall say now, despite) being pretty much into day-to-day work at the moment, I am about to get this started on April 1, 2009 (which is rather soon). Just a couple of days ago, this project has reached its 300th contribution exactly two years after being started, to me sort of proof that NetBeans community to some extend has accepted and embraced the idea of contributing something back to the project by writing documentation, offering tips, tricks, hints, tutorials and whatever they eventually could come up with in course of using NetBeans in everyday life projects. Notably, too, is that Varun Nischal has done a great job pushing the project ahead to reach this impressive milestone, so I guess this is quite a heritage to deal with, this is something I surely have to work to be on par with. :) By now, all I eventually could offer is quite some enthusiasm about both NetBeans and the documentation project itself, and a bunch of (hopefully) good ideas on where to go from here…

Let’s hope for the best and see what will grow out of this. At the moment, I am once again planning to do something both enjoyable and (in this context) useful in travelling to Prague once again, hope to meet some of the guys over there and see what can be done. In this “new phase” of its doings, I think the Community Documentation project basically should / could aim at a bunch of interesting goals:

• Of course, it should as good as possible “spread the word”, do its part to extending the NetBeans user base first and foremost as an IDE but of course beyond that. From this point of view, one of the most important things in my opinion is to raise awareness that NetBeans IDE is a rather good foundation for virtually any developer, be that in open-source projects or wherever, to build custom tooling for her/his shiny new framework, application server, … upon, thus also extending the feature set of the IDE, making this a tool even “sharper”.
• Asides the Community Docs, NetBeans also has an excellent Knowledge Base to offer (honestly, like most of the Sun related technologies and platforms do), providing insights and documentation on most if not all aspects interesting about the NetBeans platform, partly also filled by documents off the Community Docs program, partly written by full-time technical writers. Providing high-quality “real life” documentation and tutorials eventually could be a way for Community Docs authors to actively support the NetBeans team, eventually allowing for full-time internal writers located “near” the NetBeans core team to focus on in-depth covering technical details and all these aspects that would require documentation created along with the very authors of the code, while the Community Docs folks take care of most of the “user space” work which in many respects just seems “a load of work”. Maybe this way we all could do our best making NetBeans even better by making it one of the best-documented pieces of software available out there. :)

By now, I invite anyone interested to join the project, join the program, offer feedback, hints or comments or whatever. Same as the IDE itself, or the platform at the foundation of it, the documentation only will be as good as those using it, reporting their needs, providing comments and requesting new articles. Let’s get goin’ then…

Some time ago, in the midst of migrating at least parts of our application from an all-integrated proprietary monolith to a more “open” approach, we quickly came to embracing at least parts of the SOA architectural model to do so, as, these days, it just seemed to fit. Now, few years later, it seems we already learnt something from that, a few things, to be accurate, which I want to share here for the sake of it – maybe they will provide a good subject of discussion or eventually also help others gain insights into that matter…

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Reading through the blog of Suns Jonathan Schwartz explaining the recent business strategy of his company, I see a few things to agree with, especially regarding the need to make developers merrily use Sun software and services, and I definitely support this notion as, looking at tools like NetBeans,Glassfish, OpenSolaris, MySQL and a bunch of others, I dare to say Sun at least in terms of actively maintained, community-adopted projects is one of the biggest commercial forces behind open source software these days. From this point of view, “developer recruitment” seems a sane approach…

But I also have to agree with one of the comments in there: Fix marketing. And, eventually more important: Line things up to have a homogenous, meaningful overall strategy. My most impressive experience about this is just a few months old by now, seeing the release of JavaFX happen: A shiny and interesting new technology, just waiting to be used, waiting for something to be done with it. Unfortunately – not for me at this moment: At this time I just had installed my notebook to use OpenSolaris as my only everyday working operating system, be that just for the sake of trying out whether this approach is possible. And, unfortunately as well, JavaFX in its first release didn’t provide support for either OpenSolaris or Linux. So, what on earth…? Having a shiny new technology (JavaFX) aimed at developers to adopt and use it, having a great operating system waiting for developers to adopt it, and still driving eventual adopters of both technologies away by releasing a new development tool (JavaFX) without supporting the other product even though coming from the same house? At least to me this doesn’t seem to be a proof of a good overall product strategy – from this point of view, OpenSolaris support for JavaFX should have been there from day one. So, I just hope that Sun right now with this “new focus” is likely to avoid things like this in near future…

Almost two years ago, maintainers of the Columba Mail mail client announced the end of their project due to obvious reasons (lack of time, being busy in “real life). Looking at some screenshots and the overall maturity of this (Java/Swing based) application, seeing this one being passed away that soon is rather sad – there’s a lot of good functionality in it already, and the world surely could benefit from having a cross-platform mail user agent written in plain Java not JavaScript. ;) So… I wonder whether there is a good way of acquiring people in order to revive an open source project like this, and be that just for maintaining the code base, fixing basic issues, keeping the project alive. Of course, then again integrating it with, say, the NetBeans RC platform surely would be a nice thing… :) Comments, anyone?

Vor einiger Zeit schon bin ich über den Schockwellenreiter und das Brights-Blog auf eine Kampagne gestoßen, die den Atheismus zugunsten religiöser Ansichten und Werte propagiert in Anlehnung an eine ähnliche Aktion in Großbritannien. Nun ja… An sich könnte es mir ja egal sein; ich habe zum Thema Religion und Wissenschaft meine eigenen Standpunkte, die ich mir schwerlich von jemandem (ganz gleich, ob “dogmatischer Theist oder dogmatischer Atheist”) vorgeben lassen werde. Ein paar Fragen dazu stelle ich mir dann allerdings doch…

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An sich bin ich bekennender Unterstützer der Idee öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkes, weil ich der Meinung bin, daß auch in der Welt von Radio und Fernsehen, die ja als Medium immer noch vorrangig die Masse der Menschen erreicht, neben dem allgegenwärtigen geisttötenden Schwachsinn zumindest im Hinblick auf Nachrichten noch ein Gegenpol existieren sollte, der Ansprüchen wie Seriösität, Objektivität oder Vollständigkeit genügt. Trotzdem bekomme ich im Hinblick auf etwa ‘mein Drittes’ regelmäßig Krämpfe, wenn ich mir vergegenwärtige, mit welchen Inhalten der zahlende Nutzer die ganze Woche über bisweilen konfrontiert wird. Insofern finde ich die aktuelle Initiative von fernsehkritik.tv voll und ganz unterstützenswert – Dafür Zahl’ ich nicht! Aus der Infoseite:

FRÜHER klärten die Öffentlich-Rechtlichen die Jugendlichen auf und sorgten für deren politische Bildung. HEUTE setzen sie ihnen, genauso wie die Privaten, eine Daily Soap nach der anderen vor.

FRÜHER war die Samstagabendunterhaltung geprägt von kreativen Ideen und Köpfen wie Rudi Carrell und Kulenkampff, HEUTE gibt es Schunkelshows mit Silbereisen & Co. sowie unkreative Frage-Shows, vorgelesen von Jörg Pilawa.

FRÜHER faszinierten ARD und ZDF mit tollen Tierdokus von Heinz Sielmann und anderen, HEUTE werden in Deutschlands Zoos Kameras aufgestellt und weltbewegende Bilder gezeigt, wie etwa ein Elefantenkäfig ausgemistet wird.
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Deshalb:

* Schluss mit jeglicher Werbung und jeglichem Sponsoring bei ARD und ZDF.

* Schluss mit Quotenmessungen bei ARD und ZDF – öffentlich-rechtliches Fernsehen darf sich nicht nach Einschaltquoten richten

* Schluss mit Krawalljournalismus, Daily Soaps und hirnlosen Heimatschnulzen. Jedes Programm von ARD und ZDF muss einem Mindestmaß an Anspruch unterliegen. Anspruchsloses Fernsehen bieten uns die Privaten genug – und zwar kostenlos.

* Schluss mit immer mehr kostspieligen digitalen Sonderkanälen, in die Kultursendungen und Dokumentationen abgedrängelt werden. Wir zahlen dafür, dass ARD und ZDF selbst ein tiefsinniges Programm bringen.
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Kann ich nur kommentarlos unterschreiben. Hoffentlich genug andere auch… Mehr hierzu auch bei telepolis.de.