Andy Hedges’ Tech Blog

Much of the excitement the technology today is what can be done with media, by combining micro formats like RSS with audio formats like MP3 and devices like iPods with the increasing high speed Internet people are empowered to broadcast and listen to anything they want. With major media distributers such as the BBC putting their weight behind podcasts and vodcasts (video podcasts) the time to start using the video support in Java is now (actually it was yesterday).

So what support is there for Video on Java? Well there is JMF (Java Media Framework), however this was last updated in May 2003 (yep it’s 3 years old). It is also a pain in the arse to install and you can forget about a good user story for using it in applets. I was considering providing the Java applet video player on my website so that I could guarantee that if Java was installed on the user machine then they could watch video (sort of like YouTube’s flash player). However these are the install notes for JMF, I can’t see Joe Six Pack or Grandma managing that and I can see why both Google Video and YouTube choose Flash now for their players.

What other video support is their for Java? There is Java QuickTime but this only supports the platforms that normal QuickTime supports because it is all backed with native calls to the QuickTime libraries. So Java QuickTime only works on Mac and Windows, not much use for me on Linux.

Also I have my reservations on what the licensing terms are on both these APIs I think it is fairly unlikely I could distribute them as freely as I would need to if I was using them in a applet.

So far these are the only two free APIs I have found for Video with Java, if anyone knows of any others then please let me know. As it is I can see this issue losing Java mind share quickly in the new world of pub/sub media on consumer devices.

Technorati Tags: JMF, freedbacking, Java

I know a few people who could use this, I’m not usually one to post short posts with just a link but this one made me laugh so much with recognition I’ll be sneezing coffee for the rest of the day.

IDE Feature Request: The Yagni Development Assistant

FYI: YAGNI: You Aren’t Going to Need It

So it seems everyone is saying it now, christ, people are even meta saying it pick one feed format and stick with it. All the aggregators worth their salt support all of them so it really doesn’t matter. I know when I add a feed to Bloglines I hate it when I get presented with 4 versions of the same thing just delivered to a different specification.

As the old ironic adage goes ‘the great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from’. Having just reimplemented The Humor Archives Feed using Rome I fully sympathise with Sam, Nick and Dion’s position. My first implementation of a feed simply cranked out RSS 2.0 directly using JDOM, however with Rome one is encouraged to use an abstraction to populate the feed and then specify the feed type. Once this is done the specific feed specification compliant XML is cranked out to a Writer. This is all very good, however, it takes the minimal subset approach, so for example on an RSS 2.0 Feed type it is impossible without going to the specific implementation to set the TTL field as it isn’t a minimal subset feature of feeds.

I looked at using just the RSS 2.0 beans within the Rome framework but couldn’t see any obvious way to write it to an output stream or writer - I only look briefly however, if anyone knows please let me know. As I only want RSS 2.0 perhaps Rome isn’t for me.

Mark Shuttleworth founder of Twarte, Canonical Ltd and The Ubuntu Foundation (which distributed the popular Ubuntu Linux) comments on his blog regarding the open sourcing of Java following from Sun license changes that make it easier to distribute the JRE with Linux. Mark was presumably involved in the license change as he was wheeled out on stage during the announcement at JavaOne. Also at JavaOne it was stated that it wasn’t a case of if Java would be open sourced but when.

Sadly, for personal reasons, I couldn’t make JavaOne this year so I wasn’t there to hear the keynotes but having read reports from the keynotes it isn’t immediately clear what they intending to open. The licensing term changes only effect the JRE (the software that let’s you run Java applications but not create them) however there are numerous pieces to the Java Platform, there is of course the JDK (which allows you to create Java apps), the Language Specification, Java EE, Java ME, the Byte Code Specification and on and on.

Anyway Mark has some interesting thoughts on this and also the damage that has been caused by not Open Sourcing Java 5 years ago.

No I’m not joking, sun have actually gone and done this! Some screenshots, but very little in the way of justification can be found here. I’m hoping it’s to try and get people away from VB6 by providing a migration path to a sensible platform, but who knows.

I can already predict what will happen. I’ll be working away happily on a client application and suddenly the Java/Groovy/JRuby/Whatever code will drop out into some VB6 code that someone thought would be a good idea to copy/paste across from their spreadsheet macro. I’ll then have to spend hours fighting my way though a never refactored, organically fudged wad of VB6 spoodge. All we need is more excuses for people to hang on to their sacred code.

“There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. When there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.” — Ayn Rand

I found this quote posted on Slashdot in connection to a story that states the UK Government is preparing to give the police the authority to force organisations and individuals to disclose encryption keys. Chilling indeed.

For the if-you-haven’t-done-anything-wrong-you-have-nothing-to-hide-brigade I refer you to a journalist more eloquent than me

Price discrimination according to my memory of A-Level Economics can only happen in a monopoly market place. So to this end Apple has a monopoly on MacBook pros, fair enough it’s their product. I’ve been thinking of buying one of these excellent laptop, however one thing pisses me off to the n^th degree.

If I buy a MacBook Pro 17″ from the Apple Store in the US it costs £1,505 ($2,799) and if I go to the Apple Store UK it costs a whooping £1,999 ($3,716). This is bloody ridiculous and as a result I won’t be buying a MacBook Pro. Firstly because my price point for a laptop of this specification is somewhere below the £2k mark and secondly I don’t like being taken for a mug.