This is enough to make me not want to go outside. And May is usually the nicest month in Boston! But I’m glad I braved the incliment weather last night to head to the Boston Java meetup to hear a presentation from Cameron at Tangosol on their “world’s most expensive hashmap”.

Great weather we’re having

I’ve converted my home phone to Vonage and so far, so good. The main motivation was the appropimately $50 per month savings over a similar package from Verizon. Plus, there is something crazy about paying ~$70 per month for the limited bandwidth a phone provides when I already have this huge bandwidth pipe via cable modem. Although I’m also paying for cell service, so maybe the better question is why I’m paying for another phone at all.

Even after reading some hellish stories about Vonage customer support, I still took the plunge and for me it couldn’t have been smoother (the hardest thing was just physically moving my phones around). Some other observations so far:

• Bought a Linksys Phone Adaptor that was completely plug and play with my Linksys router. Came with a $50 rebate on $60 item. And it has several blinking blue LEDs, so you know it’s The Future.
• Ported my existing phone number in 9 days, which is far quicker than I thought it would take. In the meantime they give you a virtual phone number.
• Voice quality seems fine. There is sometimes a bit of an echo. I’d say it is between 0 and 5% worse than a usual landline, and better than typical cell quality. The phone adaptor works well even when there is a lot of other traffic on the link.
• Web-based account management is simple to use. I generally hate the web sites of cell and phone providers, but Vonage’s is solid. Check voicemail, account history, etc. Setting up 911 service was completed in a few hours.
• Email when you get voicemail. Great for when you are at work or travelling. I don’t know why existing phone services don’t provide this, or at least I’ve never had it before.
• I’d rather give money to Vonage than existing phone companies. Hope this helps transform the phone into a more innovative platform.

If I was 10 years old and wanted my parents to get me a PS3 I would run out and buy them a copy of Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad Is Good for You. I haven’t read the book yet (who has an attention span that long these days?), but heard him on The Connection and read Gladwell’s recent review. Johnson discusses how television has changed to be harder and more complex than tv used to be, and he hypothosizes that this explains the Flynn effect. The density of a show is something that draws me in, and helps explain why I can repeatedly watch the same episode of the Simpsons, Six Feet Under or the West Wing without being bored. I’ve noticed the difference in watching any of the recent terrible episodes of SNL where they drag 3 jokes out to a 6 minute sketch. Compare that to the hilarious Arrested Development (thankfully picked up for a 3rd season!) which is both far more clever and where every line is a subtle punchline.

Steven Johnson wrote a short piece on what he calls extreme time-shifting, which should be familar to anyone who a TiVo or has rented TV shows on DVD. My only disagreement is that he writes, “you watch one show night after night until you’ve finished the season”. What? How can you just watch 1 episode? Part of the point is to gorge at the trough! For this weekend NetFlix has delivered the first season of The Wire which I’ve heard has tons of characters and plotlines. Maybe it will even make me smarter.

It looks like my employer has taken the leap into encouraging employee blogs. The guidelines they posted seem rather reasonable as they follow Sun and Microsoft into the blogosphere. At least at the moment they haven’t built their own blogging tools (other than developerWorks blogs), and suggest using popular tools like Blogger or LiveJournal (ha!). I hope IBM at least comes up with an feed aggregator/blog roller so people can easily see who the IBM bloggers are. How else will we find our Jonathan Schwartz or Scoble? Coming on the same day as IBM announces it’s internal support for FireFox and I’m impressed with Big Blue’s progressiveness.

Since I like to think of myself as a good IBMer, I’ll follow their advice to “be who you are”, so … I’m a developer on Rational ClearCase, specifically on the Eclipse-based Remote Client. Just from the number of folks out there starting to make bug trackers, I can tell there are a lot of developers who’d like to make software tools. And I know why, software tools is an exciting niche to work in! At least among developers - I just get looks when I try to explain it to normal folks.

PS - I’m supposed to add, “The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.” Just in case you were confused.

Tonight I went to hear Miguel de Icaza speak about the Mono project to the Boston .Net user group. It was held at the somewhat swanky Microsoft office in Waltham (several Xboxes on display, very modern looking etc.) The audience was mostly .NET developers which was interesting to see how the other half lives. And maybe I was being hyper-sensitive, but they seemed about 5% different than Java folks - about the same difference between Sysout.out.println
and System.Console.WriteLine. Not much, just a little.

Miguel is a very engaging speaker with heaps of energy and infectious enthusiasm. The crowd was definitely interested in learning more about Mono, and several had tried it out with their existing C# apps. Lots of questions from the crowd and Miguel is full of thoughtful answers. And he had help from his 2 mates, including a 17-year old who’s been hacking Mono for 2 years. The progress that the Mono team have made is very impressive, and something the
Apache Harmony folks should study closely. Miguel described ~30 developers from Novell and 300 (I think) overall with commit access - so lots of outside help.

The Mono technology is very cool in several boat-loads of ways. The number of languages that can work in the runtime is impressive (Java included). And, I know this antithetical to the Java credo, but I think being able to compile natively without requiring shipping a separate runtime is a good thing. Now there are plenty of cases where having a runtime is not a big deal, and that’s splendid. But there are other cases where deployment is greatly complicated. Too bad Java has pretty much elected not to support this (aside from GCJ). Perhaps this one reason we haven’t seen much Java on the desktop? (I think another has to do with fidelity to the OS L&F, and Mono has a good story there with Gtk#, Cocoa# and WinForms.)

Still, it is a little strange to see Miguel speaking to a group of .NET folks. I thought the original mission of Linux and Linux on the desktop was to get people to leave MS platforms? While you can argue that having technologies familar to MS developers will make it easier for them to switch, they aren’t the real target audience. While it’s very nice that Mono is giving companies like SourceGear ways to make their .NET apps run on Linux, that seems like a side effect, at best. And I think the jury is still out on whether the linux desktop community will write much code in C# (MonoDevelop, Beagle, FSpot are nice starts, but let’s see how it spreads outside of Novell). They stayed away from Java and used C/Python/whatever in large part because it came from Sun and wasn’t free, or free enough anyway. (I don’t think you can credibly argue against Java on technical grounds and think that C#/Mono is a win - the two platforms are too similar.) And with the reluctance of players like Red Hat to adopt Mono it might be an uphill battle. But even if it doesn’t have it’s intended goal of helping OSS/Linux desktop developers to be more productive, I think there will be a lot of positives for the broader development community. Plus, it’s just cool.