Buying software at academic prices

Today we “ve had an interesting conversation with our colleagues. Joe has mentioned that he “s purchased a particular software on eBay. This software is available for a really low academic price for teachers and students, and his wife is a teacher. But Joe said that since he “s the one who needs the software, he “s uncomfortable using the software purchased by his wife. Actually, he impressed me even more: he “s purchased two copies of this software for both of his laptops. My other co-worker said, “I with Joe on this one. Both of us used to work for a very large software development company, and we knew how much money that company had lost because of the software piracy rdquo;.

Then I “ve asked them a question about myself, “During the day I work as a Java consultant, but I “m also an adjunct professor at a university. Can I purchase software at academic prices if it does not relate to my Java courses that I teach? rdquo; I am a faculty with a valid university ID. This is kind of a grey area hellip; Do you know the answer to this question? Do you even bother asking yourself such a question?

New Google offerings

If you think that business is primary and technology is secondary,it’s sooo pre-Googlish… Take an ounce of a great search engine, add some great mapping technology, mix it with Web Services, and this will change the way people do business, and will lead to creation of new businesses.

Check out the Google Base Beta site. First, click on Jobs link. Specify the function, geogaphical area, and here you go: the relevant ads from different search engines and the familipa google map with great tool tips.

Now select the Housing link, and search for your next home, appartment, or list yours for sale. Clean and simple interface, convenient maps, just really cool.

Need to find a blog? No problem. Search by Author, select Other, type in Yakov Fain…Oops. Not found. It’s a Beta version, you know 😦

I’ll wait…

Now let’s move to a more romantic site called Google Romance. Find your soulmate for tonight in 8 simple steps. How sweet!

The only think that bother’s me a little, is the Google Romance Press Release is dated April 1. I guess, this time they are pulling my leg. But with Google, I do not mind being an April fool.

Here’s one more: do not forget to try the new Google’s calendar.

Yakovs diet: drink beer!

I’m about 6 feet tall, and my weight was 185 pounds two months ago. During my annual physical exam, my doctor said that I need to lose some 10-15 pounds.While earning my degree in Applied Math, I studied The Law of Large Numbers, and because of this law I can’t trust any diet: the number of people participated in studies is very small. If something works for a group of 2000 people, it does not mean that it’ll work for you. But I have my little non-scientific theory that is based strictly on my gut feeling and results that I could see within the last two months.

Now about the important stuff: I like beer and Leffe beer in particular. It’s the best reasonably priced Belgium monastery ale ($8 for a six pack). So I definitely did not want to stop drinking beer to lose weight, so I did not. I’m not a big fan of working out in gyms either. Have you seen these ladies right after a workout? They look as if they were raped 10 minutes ago. Anyway, if gym works for you, great, keep going there. It’s just not my way. You heart is capable of only so many beats. Why making it beat faster in the gym and wasting the beats by moving iron from one place to another? Do you think that you car will last longer if you’ll drive it for extra half an hour three times a week ? I doubt it. Just relax, take it easy, and enjoy you life.

Here’s what I did to control my weight: I replaced my morning bagel with a small pack of unsalted cashew nuts, during the lunch I minimized noodles/pizza/rice/potatoes consumption, and I eat only healthy multi-grain bread. Chinese food and any soda drinks are our of the picture. Diet drinks are even worse – they replace sugar with some chemicals. Fat free products is nonsense.

During the dinner I eat fish or meat, a salad and either a glass of red wine or two beers. I usually have an ice cream for dessert (I like the Klondike Original bars). I eat slow. People keep feeling hungry during the first 20 minutes after they start eating no matter how much food they consume. So do not rush. Enjoy your meal.

You should eat junk food once in a while, just to make sure that your body won’t lose immunity as you may find yourself in a place where a healthy food is simply not available. Visit McDonalds 3-4 time a year, and always get yourself popcorn with soda in a movie theatre.

To make the long story short, I’ve lost 10 pounds in 2 months. Hence my little discovery: the beer belly has nothing to do with the beer! Apparently, some other people came to the same conclusion after conducting expensive studies or watching beer commercials.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot that you MUST purchase the scales and check your weight religiously twice a day. If you see that you’ve gained a pound since yesterday, just drink one beer instead of two, or rather skip the Klondike. As simple as that.

Any weight loss programs exists for only one reason: they want your money. But the ultimate recipe is very simple: keep your mouth shut. But if you can’t zip it up, just use my diet. I do not sell you anything, but rather share what I’ve learned. Will it work for you? I have no clue as I am not a dietician. But it’s definitely worth trying!

Todays morning commute

I got goose bumps at 7AM while walking to the bus stop. Did I charge the battery yesterday? Of course not!

My laptop was dead, and I had an hour to kill on the bus. I have the Newsweek magazine, but it was meant to be read on the subway in the City…

To make things worse, this business lady took the seat next to me… She had a purse, a second bag and a paper cup with hot coffee in one hand. Actually, business women in NYC often carry a third little paper bag from Gucci, Prada or Chanel : they keep their sandwiches there. During the next ten minutes this lady was trying to settle down. Remember, all this time she kept the coffee in one hand, while the other hand was scrolling through the emails in her blackberry, five times wiped off some invisible coffee spills, found the reading glasses somewhere deep in the bag standing on the floor. How these ladies can find ANYTHING in these bags with one hand? Finally, she extracted one of these books by Danielle Steel that are being sold in every kiosk, and calmed down.

The Newsweek magazine has the right mixture of the info and mercial. This issue featured an article on Web 2.0. It looks like the .com era is coming back. These young kids keep coming up with simple but bright ideas, create web sites and in no time millions of users supply content for them.

This got me thinking again… I have so many thought in my head each morning, why none of them turns me into a millionaire? Maybe its the age? My 40+ brain keeps running one thread in the backgrownd all the time. Here’s the code snippet from this thread:

public void run(){

feedYourFamily();

theNextVacationIComing();

yourYongerSonNeedsMoneForCollegeInSixYears();

}

If you remember, Sun Microsystems has deprecated the Java method Thread.stop() long time ago. You know why? Because you can’t just kill this freaking thread! But young guys who did not even start it, have a better chance of generating new ideas.

The other article was about illeagal immigrants in the USA. Some crazy congressman Tancredo is offering fighting with 12 million of illegal immigrants (mainly from Mexico) who are routinely crossing the border to work in the USA. Someone suggests to build a 700-mile fence on the border with Mexico…You can’t be serious! It ain’t Israel and these guys are not coming to our country to blow themselves up in a supermarket! They come to work for us, just leave them alone…

Since I finished the magazine on the bus, I picked up this free newspaper at the subway entrance, which also had a piece on illegal immigrants. New York City’s mayor Bloomberg is Jewish, which often mean smart and pragmatic. Here’s what he says about these politicians, “I wonder what world they live in? You’re not going to deport 12 million people, so let’s stop this fiction. Let’s give them permanent status “.

This reminded me an old joke:

God calls in a Catholic priest, a Russian Orthodox priest and a Jewish rabbi and tells them, I do not like the way your people live. They molest kids, drink too much, cheat on their wives… I give you two months. If I do not see improvements, I’ll flood the Earth with water. After that one priest gathered his people and asked them to stop cheating and molesting, the other one asked his followers to stop drinking, and the rabbi gathered all the Jews and simply told them, “People, we have only two months to learn how to live under the water. ”

TGIF!

Ive invited Joel

I’m a tech. chair of the SOA and WebServices conference that will take place on June 5-6 in New York City. Last week I’ve invited Joel Spolsky to make a keynote speech at this event. Guess what, Joel has accepted my invitation! If you have a chance to attend this talk, you won’t regret it. Joel is one of the most respected people in the software industry. He is a brilliant writer and speaker. Try not to miss this opportunity.

NetBeans gift to Eclipse

Arthur Ryman has attended EclipseCon 2006, and he writes in his blog:

“Finally the Ugly. EclipseCon attendees were cheerfully presented with bottles of NetBeans water as they entered the conference. I guess this is not so much Ugly as Pathetic. ”

I would not call this ugly, it’s just funny 🙂 I like Eclipse, but I’m wondering how Sun Microsystems was able to pull off something like this? Can’t wait to see attendees of the main Microsoft’s conference wearing t-shirts with the picture of Duke or a steaming cup of Java 🙂

Congrats to Sun’s marketing team!

This revolutionary technology will make your life easier

This tool is designed to simplify development of…

This revolutionary technology will make your life easier in …

Our framework will increase the productivity of your Java developers tremendously.

How many times you “ve heard such promises from vendors trying to promote a Java tool/component/framework/technique?

So here “s my question to you:

Name a tool/component/framework that had a substantial effect on your work in the capacity of a Java developer. You are not allowed to promote a software piece if you are (was) involved in its development (even if you did it without getting paid). So be honest and speak up. Share with us the name of ONLY ONE software product and give a short explanation of why “it does you body good rdquo; 🙂

Eclipse to Borland: You can run, but you cant hide

Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf

Big bad wolf, big bad wolf?

Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?

Tra la la la la

Number one was very gay

And he built his house of hay

With a hey hey toot

He blew on his flute

And he played around all day

And he put a nice little plate Borland IDE, Tra la la la la

Came the day when fate did frown

And the wolf Eclipse blew into town

With a gruff “puff-puff ” he puffed just enough

And the hay house fell right down

And number one put a nice litte plate For Sale by Owner

as he’s moving in to a new spacious ALM place, Tra la la la la

Came another day when fate did frown

And the wolf Eclipse blew into town

“By the hair of your chin-ny-chin,

I’ll blow your ALM place in ”

And the Borland ALM house answered yes

Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf

Big bad wolf, big bad wolf?

Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?

Tra la la la la

No one left but the big bad wolf, Tra la la la la

Google helps Adobe, but disapoints Yahoo!

Check out another Google’s beauty : Google Finance. Guess what technology they are using for charting ?

Seems like Adobe Flex with Charting Components? Just click on the chart and start dragging the mouse?

No, this is ain’t Google maps and ain’t JavaScript either. Just right click on the chart and you’ll see that it lives in the virtual machine called Adobe Flash Player, which is part of of Flex.

Our upcoming Flex/Java book will show you what can you do by combining these two powerful languages/technologies.

Now go to Yahoo! Finance and try to do the same thing with their charts. I know, I know. This body is cold and does not move. People from Yahoo! Finance should pre-order our book ASAP 🙂

Jeremy Zawodny used to work for Yahoo! Finance, and now he’s sad… But the good news that Yahoo! has started working with Flex long time ago (Yahoo! maps Beta), and I’m sure they’ll catch up with Yahoo! Finance as well.

JUGging along in Princeton

Yesterday, our Princeton JUG has celebrated the first day of Spring with the presentation on Spring framework. The presentation was well received, and most importantly, the atmosphere in the meeting was very friendly and productive. We started with pizza provided by our host and sponsor (Infragistics). Then, I spent 10 min talking about recent and upcoming Java events followed by book raffle. I had 3 books to give away and to make the process simple, I wrote a random number generator to pick a winner for the sign up sheet. Here “s this beauty:

// Generate a random number from 0 to upperLimit entered from the command line

// The upperLimit is the number of

import java.util.Random;

public class RandomNumberGenerator {

public static void main(String[] args) {

int upperLimit = Integer.parseInt(args[0]);

System.out.println( “The winning number is “+

(new Random()).nextInt(upperLimit));

}

}

One of the books that I gave away was Pro Spring by Apress.

The main talk lasted for an hour and a half and was prepared by members of our JUG. This is an important aspect of any JUG movement: give people a chance to research and present a topic that “s interesting for the group. After this demo seven people decided to create a separate mailing list to discuss and learn the Spring framework.

The other positive thing is that our JUG helps people finding jobs. We had a vote if posting job offers should be allowed in our mailing list, and 95% of voters said “Yes! rdquo;. I “m getting lots of requests from recruiters, and post the most interesting and real ones in our mailing list. The first member of Princeton JUG is starting a new and interesting job on Monday.

The bottom line is: JUG rocks! Do you have one in your town yet?