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I use Amazon S3 for delivering content and as backup. Today I was introduced to an improvisation to the cloud storage model (offered by DiomedeStorage): demarcating the storage into different types:

1. Online: The content is available immediately on request.
2. Nearline: The content is made available within 5 minutes of request.
3. Offline: The content is made available within 4 hours of request.

Advantage?

When you are storing content primarly for backup, you don’t need the backup system to be online. Files such as these can be moved to a disk which is later powered off: this benefits huge cost saving and is a greener approach.

Due to this innovative model, DiomedeStorage is able to offer services which are fraction of the cost of S3. Beautiful innovation

I was reading the book Beautiful Teams. There is an essay by Cory Doctorow titled The Copyfighters Take Mordor. In this essay Doctorow recounts how a set of sparsely-funded freedom-loving individuals fight the might of Corporate funded copyright groups from passing a new international law to curb freedom in the UN. If freedom-fighters had not succeeded, the present world would have been different. Even distribution and editing of Creative Common licensed media work would be controlled by the broadcaster (even if the author of the digital work gave permission otherwise). Thankfully the freedom-fighters won!

The hightlight of this fight is a tool. The tool is a collaborative text editor for the Mac called SubEthaEdit. During the boring and tedious meetings in the UN where the Corporates were selling their idea, our own set of free-individuals recorded the transcript, collaboratively-edited (using SubEthaEdit) and posted the information for the world to see in various blogs. This had caught the attention of the world, and now, the world is a better place.

SubEthaEdit interested me. I wanted to try it. Unfortunately, SubEthaEdit is available only for Mac. I was disappointed. Then I searched for OpenSource alternatives. This lead me to Gobby. Gobby is a GTK+ application which can run in Linux, Mac and Windows. For example, in Ubuntu I installed it thus:

$ sudo apt-get install gobby

Gobby is cool. Checkout some of the screenshots I took. Gobby could prove to be a powerful tool for code-review and collaborative document editing/review.

The Alchemistby Paulo Coelho is one of my favorite books of all time. Today I dropped by a blog which I consider has the most beautiful review of the book. This particular blogger, Nubby, is also one of the finest designer and blogger in the blogsphere.

IntelliJ IDEA 9.0 will be OpenSourced under Apache 1.0 License. There will be a fully-loaded commercial edition also available. Check out the feature differences between the Community Edition and Ultimate Edition.

Discovered from a blog post Apache Commons-like Java library from Google: Guava Libraries. Check out their presentation which briefs the functionality.

There have been some prominent releases in the past few weeks:

• Apache POI 3.5-FINAL: For reading/writing Microsoft Office format files from Java.
• Jetty 7.0: A servlet container akin to Tomcat. Easily embeddable and ideal for use in testing.
• XOM 1.2.3: New version of the XML parser written by Elliotte Rusty Harold.

There is an amazing Dilbert cartoon which beautifully describe the pettiness of some bosses. These type of people believe more in processes and policies than on their people.

We all hate the verbocity of Java. We all hate getters and setters and toString and hashCode and equals. We also hate the lack of closure support for proper resource handling. Now you can still love your favorite language without doing these manual chores!

There is a fine OpenSource project, oddly named as Project Lombok which fixes the boiler plate code writing (or generation) using annotations. Beautifully designed, this is some thing which could save you lot of time. Checkout their video (available in the home page).

My favorite UML tool, Jude UML (I use the free community edition) will be renamed to astah* UML. I don’t know why this difficult-to-remember and difficult-to-pronounce change in name for an established brand. The name change is scheduled on Oct. 19^th.