Brian Levay: October 2006 Archives

Each year at JavaOne there is a company called SavaJe that always seems to make a big splash. They sell a Java Platform based OS for mobile phones and they also sell a mobile device branded as a SavaJe product.

At this past JavaOne they announced on stage that the new Java Phone by SavaJe was the Best In Show for devices on display and everyone should buy one before they were all gone. I think most people understood it was a marketing/sponsorship ploy (they would do this every year). But heck, they even suckered Tim Bray into buying one.

Now eWeek is reporting that SavaJe has finally gone down in flames. JavaOne just won't be the same.

I never really understood their model. Their goal should have been to standardize the OS on all mobile phones and that would have meant getting Nokia, Motorola, LG, and everyone else to license their product. They may have had more success by following the Linux model; give the code away and attempt to start something grass roots with the developer community. Now that they have gone under it is about the only thing left to try.

There was an interesting piece in a recent Java Lobby Newsletter on Java IP Caching. The basic story goes something like this. Two servers each running a Java Process are communicating with each other. Server #1's IP Address changes and Server #2 will only reconnect after a JVM restart.

Digging into the javadoc for InetAddress makes it real easy to explain this behavior. And I'll be the first to admit that I had no idea this was the default behavior. Java's default is to cache IP addresses!

Java's IP caching behavior can be controlled by two system properties:

networkaddress.cache.ttl (default: -1) Indicates the caching policy for successful name lookups from the name service. The value is specified as as integer to indicate the number of seconds to cache the successful lookup. A value of -1 indicates "cache forever".

networkaddress.cache.negative.ttl (default: 10) Indicates the caching policy for un-successful name lookups from the name service. The value is specified as as integer to indicate the number of seconds to cache the failure for un-successful lookups. A value of 0 indicates "never cache". A value of -1 indicates "cache forever".

Remember this the next time you are playing Java Trivia, or if you want to be really devious, put this on a interview questionairre.

Each technical company has their own mechanisms of knowledge sharing. For a technical contributor though, publishing a whitepaper is the ultimate goal. At HP we realize how hard that can be for consultants working 40+ hour weeks delivering for our customers. Our attempt to solve that problem is with an internal publication process called Knowledge Briefs. They are short papers, written and reviewed by the technical staff, and can be published fairly quickly by anyone in the company.

This year HP took four of the top Knowledge Briefs and publsihed them externally on hp.com. One of our very own received this honor. Way to go Chris!

If I was selling a product and I was the inventor, founder, and CEO of the company I think I would hire a professional to handle the marketing video. This guy definitely didn't do that, but The Nutty Buddy is still funny to watch.

If you do end up buying one, make sure you tell everyone that you got the "El Jefe"!

This week it is time to show a little company pride (IDC). HP competes intensly with Dell in the PC market and having the #1 title belt around our waist is an accomplishment to celebrate. Now we just have to take out Big Blue as the #1 technology company and I think we'll be looking down on everyone else. The only bad thing about being on top is everyone is then gunning for ya. But thinking back to the playground days, I liked being the one that was chased.

Thanks to the power of Wikipedia we now have a comprehensive list of all the baseball metaphors we used to talk about in our younger years. Some are quite amusing.

If anyone has a good definition for "Rounding Third" go ahead and edit the page and make your contribution to the greater good.