Wow! JRoller has upgraded to the latest Roller 3.1, and got a fresh facelift which is in harmony with the lovely DZone.

The immediate difference I see with my blog is that my control panel is now partially in Chinese!:) But to my much disappointment, the awkward multi-language problem is still not fixed now. ???????????

I read in the newsletter that this upgrade also brought scalability headaches. Best luck to the JRoller folks and wish the problem can be resolved soon:)

Last weekend, Project Zero officially unveiled its community site. Project Zero is a fresh new project from IBM which aims at the agile web development framework domain which is getting momentum very fast lately with the popular RoR and the promising newcomer Grails.

Project Zero’s tagline is, “Zero complexity. Zero overhead. Zero obstacles.” “The Project Zero environment includes a scripting runtime for Groovy and PHP with application programming interfaces optimized for producing REST-style services, integration mash-ups and rich Web interfaces.”

Zero complexity or not, there are a few interesting aspects about Zero worthing noting.

1. Zero leverages Groovy.
That’s right! Probably the first time I’ve seen Groovy adopted into a project by a major company. Great news for Groovy lovers!

2. Zero supports PHP.
That’s sounds a bit weird. The fact is, Zero has implemented the support for PHP in Java. However, only a small subset of the standard PHP libraries are supported by now. Read the FAQ for more details.

3. Zero is self-contained
What that means is that each Zero application runs only by the Zero runtime. It doesn’t need to be deployed to any web server. The Zero runtime contains a minimalist server based on WAS CE. This is similar to Grails. (But Grails applications can also be deployed to any JEE server.)

4. Zero is NOT open source. But it invites the community to drive it.
Community-Driven Commercial Development is Zero’s official name for its development approach. This is already causing a lot of debates in the community. Let’s wait and see how this will work. Check out the official FAQ for more details.

Overall, Project Zero looks like an interesting endeavor from a major player in the industry to commercially challenge the world of agile web development. But judging from what it looks at this stage, I’m not 100% convinced if Zero has got everything right.

Next time, I’ll write up my first experiences playing with Zero, and putting it up against Grails.

Windows Live Writer is really quite a nice tool for posting to blogs. But despite of my effort to get it to work with jroller, I’ve always failed. I have seen someone succeeded posting to jroller, but I always get the following error. Could anyone give me any hint what I’m doing wrong?
Here’s what I did to set up jroller in WLW:

1. Start Live Writer and Add a new Weblog Account. Fill in the URL of your weblog, your user name and password at jroller.
2. Choose Metaweblog API as the type of weblog. And Type “http://www.jroller.com/xmlrpc” as the Remote posting URL.
3. Write a new post, and select Publish. The following error dialog shows up.
   

The goodness of the day isn’t over yet. The newest version of the Groovy Eclipse Plugin is also out now! I can’t wait to try out the code completion magics.

Following last year’s Callisto, Eclipse Europa is officially out on 6/29! Go get it while it’s hot!

In the meanwhile, GPLv3 is scheduled to launch on the same day! It’s reported that R.S will launch GPLv3 via a video stream on the organisation’s Web site.

What’s more, the much anticipated and crazed over iPhone will be out on 6/29! Bloggers, CEOs And everyone else’s camping lives finally come to and end. Phewww…

Oh wait. There’s also a new fight for freedom starting on this day. What a day!

其实Grails用MySQL数据源处理中文还是很方便的，基本只要注意2点：

1. 在xxxDataSource.groovy里，mysql url注意要加上参数，例如：jdbc:mysql://server?useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=UTF-8
2. MySQL数据库要用UTF-8编码

另外，gsp里要注意：

默认应该就是这样。

找到一篇古老的文章 ，终于搞定了在jroller输入中文的问题！感谢jackz！

方法简述：
新建entry的时候页面编码选择为ISO-8859-1，发表出来的内容就能正确的以UTF8显示中文字符了。

1. Make them project managers.
2. Make them managers.
3. Enroll them in all kinds of full-length time-consuming leadership classes.
4. Ask them to attend numerous stupid meetings and conference calls on behalf of the team.
5. Ask them to spend a lot of time sorting out various best practices and coding guidelines that will never be read or used by anyone else.
6. Bug them with licensing concerns with every code library they want to use.
7. Ask them to submit purchase request for software they want to use once a year. If they miss the time, they have to wait another year.
8. Lock them in the project important for your promotion and reject their requests to leave the project because they think it’s boring.
9. Reject their requests to travel to tech conferences they are dying to attend so that you can balance your quarterly cost.
10. Tell them you love them so that you can keep their pay low without feeling guilty.

Second life is a crap. Because

1. Second life is using a crappy 3D engine.
Even the Quake3 engine from 8 years ago is far superior than this crap.
Some people get excited that they can “fly” in SL. Are they kidding? If flying is a feature, then I’ll call the ability to bury my body into the earth while walking another fantastic feature.
Some people claim that SL has magical scriptability. Wait. Is 3D engines supporting scripting and custom modeling a new at all?

2. Second life is a crappy software which crashes every time I try to exit the program.
Yes, that’s true. And don’t argue with me about that.

3. Second life is pointless.
So the SL huggers say SL is NOT a game. Alright. So what? People shouldn’t judge SL with criteria for games?
I don’t care if it’s a game or not, as long as it has a point. People just get curious about this brand new 3D metaverse which others keep talking about. They want to see for themselves what it’s like. So they create an account and choose an ugly avatar. They start from the training island. They learn how to walk and how to fly. They complete the tutorial and, now what? Exactly. No point from then on. I don’t have a reason to convince myself to explore the wacky islands there and waste my 1st life.

Second life is a hype. Because

1. Grandpa/Outsider/Pretender corporations hug SL to show off their geeky side.
SL huggers claim that SL is so wonderful that the corporate world loves it.
Yes, corporates are loving SL. See who’s on the top 8 SL corporate site list Reuters, Cisco, Sun, …Wait, where’s Google, or Yahoo!, or Microsoft? Now that SL is so wonderful, why don’t I see any serious software and internet company dwelling there?

2. The huge media hype is due to the domino effect
The mass media is amateurish and has always been a pretender about technologies. Some day one press begins with SL. Its competitors have absolutely no idea about the “metaverse”. Yet they mindlessly join the hype just because they are so worried about being left behind about the new hot “techie” stuff. That starts the domino effect and after a while people forget how this began in the first place.

3. More people are not visiting Second Life after the first few times
Latest report shows that SL is losing regular visitors at a considerable rate. Sorry I can’t find the link to that article now. I’ll add it once I recover it.
SL is getting more and more one time new visitors, and fewer and fewer regular visitors. This is typical of a hype phenomenon. When the hype is fading, the long tail shows up.

To sum up, Second Life is both a hype and a crap. But don’t get me wrong. I believe the metaverse is the future for the internet. But metaverse!=SL. The mode of metaverse that I believe will dominate the future will be the one which replicates the real world instead of a pointless chaotic one. In a replica metaverse, one can take virtual tours to every other corner of the world. They do things they actually can do in the real world. At that time, surfing the internet will simply be an extended experience of real life. And there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be like that.

An IBM development VP recently answered an interview. One of the interview questions was that what suggestions he’d have for the mass of developers for them to become successful in their careers. The VP mentioned that one important factor was to become biz-savvy.

Well, I believe this holds true for the typical developers who enjoy caffeine and coding through the nights. They do need to look beyond their Dilbert stereotype and become a little bit more biz-savvy if they don’t like pointy haired bosses to rule them.

But that also depends on who you are now and who you want to be.

I have personally seen more than a few great developers who shows excellent technical potential, and yet decided to do more business. They just became mundane business people.

This is especially a problem with the highly thriving and restless atmosphere in China. I grew up as a typical technical guy. So I can understand this increasingly heavy pressure from unnamable sources to developers. There are people who are making a lot and lot of money out there, by simply doing “business” stuff. Yet, developers are required to sit in small cubicles staring at computer screens all day while their bosses often don’t show enough respect to them.

This is a different story in China than in the US or other western countries. In China, young people have to fight for existence first. Young graduates coming fresh out of school are pressed to find better paid jobs. Their families have spent years of family income for their education. The government doesn’t pay for their unemployment. Their parents have retired, with little pension. Housing price has been skyrocketing. They will have to work for almost an entire life to afford a simple apartment. Everything is about money.

Yes, and it seems that the highest paid positions are in doing business. Everyone is talking about successful entrepreneurs. Everyone wants to do management.

I have interviewed dozens of students. And I can feel that for many of them, the sheer passion in technology is the least likely reason that they choose to become a developer. The valid reason is simply that being a developer has a steady pay at the moment. And many fresh employees eagerly seek to become “biz-savvy” even before they become “tech-savvy” enough. Because they believe they see more money in that.

What’s the problem? Why are less-than-2-year-experience developers crazy about executive biographies and fancy marketing stories more than ingenious technical stuff? Why do CS majored students long for consulting jobs where software productivity is sarcastically measured by lines of code?

Someone has to fix this problem in China. And I believe it’s the employers themselves’ responsibility to do so. Treat your developers fair first, before you even dream about your master business plan. Without the tech-savvy folks, nothing will be realized.