Sun’s financial troubles meant that selling to Oracle was a proposition very difficult for the former’s shareholders to resist. Oracle’s products have a strategic dependence on Java so it also made a lot of sense for Oracle to do the acquisition (ownership of MySQL just made the whole package an even sweeter deal.)  However, I don’t see how Oracle’s corporate culture can be compatible with Java’s future as a general development platform.  Oracle is focused as a database company and will most certainly drive Java’s development in directions that mainly benefit the Oracle product ecosystem. This can’t help but be to the detriment of the Java platform’s abilities in areas that don’t directly have to do with these ends.  Many have blogged about the exodus of Sun’s top architects post-Oracle. This, to me, just paints a pretty clear picture of the overall trend.

It’s going to be a long time before Java completely fades away, and it is going to remain entrenched in the “enterprise” sector, but as a platform for all-purpose development, Java has been losing appeal for sometime now and I think this is the final nail in its coffin.

This  clears the way for Adobe’s Flash/Flex and .NET to duke it out in the desktop space. Nibbling at their heels (more like slithering up their feet already), are Apple’s iPhone/iPad OS and Android. Android developers can take heart in the fact that Android is only Java in the slightest sense such that Oracle owning the standard will barely matter to them. But of course, at the same time, Android is so barely Java that the ecosystem of the latter only has the slightest intersection with and of  benefit to Android. If a technology like Clojure for the CLR  eventually overtakes the maturity of Clojure for the JVM, I’d consider the prediction - and the fate of Java’s relevance to general computing - sealed.

The most likely reason you are getting billed for internet usage that you don’t believe you’re using is actually rather simple but easily overlooked, and it is: ADVERTISEMENT SERVED BY FREE APPS! Whenever an application shows an ad it loads it from the net and if you do not have wifi turned on, it will do a data connect using either 3G or GPRS (so turning off 3G will not help).  One way to make sure you don’t connect is to just stick an invalid Access Point Name (APN) in Settings -> General -> Network -> Cellular Data Network. If you have SBSettings, you can enable toggling of 3G and EDGE and toggle both off which is a more elegant of turning your data connection off as well as making it faster to turn on as well.

But… the withdrawal has to take place in PHP, which means your USD will be converted into PHP before being deposited to your account. Currently, you cannot withdraw USD even to a Philippines based USD account. Unfortunately, the exchange rate Paypal uses is terrible (2% supposedly). See http://www.yugatech.com/blog/the-internet/the-mysterious-php200-paypal-withdrawal-fee/

So how does one get around this? Well, what you can do is withdraw your Paypal balance into a USD account in a US bank. But how does one get a US bank account?? Ever since 9/11, opening a US bank account if you are a non-US resident has become very very difficult. If you do a search for “non-resident US bank account”, you will get a LOT of shady sites offering the info on how to do this (if you pay them). I ignore them all. Instead some more diligent searching reveals the following articles on how to solve the Paypal to USD withdrawal problem:

Opening an Etrade account is a widely suggested method:

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2008/03/19/how-to-add-etrade-investment-brokerage-trading-account-as-paypal-bank-account-for-withdrawal-and-deposit/

http://moneyblogger.net/blog/three-methods-to-withdraw-paypal-fund/

There are caveats to Etrade however, one of which is a USD40/quarter “Account Service Fee”, which is waived based on the following conditions:

https://us.etrade.com/e/t/estation/pricing?id=1206010000#AAF

Opening an E*Trade may be considerably easier than opening a US bank account but it supposedly serves as the same thing for the purposes of Paypal withdrawal.  Since this might be a loophole, I’m not sure if they will eventually close it.

If you don’t mind withdrawing as PHP, a list of banks and their bank codes are shown here: http://pages.ebay.ph/bankwithdrawal/bank_codes_ph.html and replicated below

ALLIED BANKING CORP 010320013
AUSTRALIA NEW ZEALAND 010700015
ASIA UNITED BANK 011020011
BANGKO SENTRAL NG PILIPINAS 010030015
BANGKOK BANK 010670019
BANK OF AMERICA 010120019
BANK OF CHINA 011140014
BANK OF TOKYO 010460012
BANCO DE ORO (& EPCIB) 010530667
BANK OF COMMERCE 010440016
BANK OF THE PHIL ISLANDS 010040018
CHINA BANKING CORP 010100013
CHINA TRUST COMML BANK 010690015
CITIBANK N.A. 010070017
DEVT BANK OF THE PHILS 010590018
DEUTSCHE BANK 010650013
EAST WEST BANK 010620014
EXPORT & INDUSTRY BANK 010860010
FUJI BANK 010640010
HONGKONG AND SHANGHAI BANK 010060014
INTL COMML BANK OF CHINA 010560019
INTL EXCHANGE BANK 010680012
JP MORGAN CHASE BANK 010720011
KOREA EXCHANGE BANK 010710018
INTL NEDERLAND BANK 010660016
LAND BANK OF THE PHILS 010350025
MAYBANK OF THE PHILS 010220016
METROPOLITAN BANK & TRUST CO 010269996
PHIL BANK OF COMMUNICATION 010110016
PHIL TRUST COMPANY 010090039
PHIL NATIONAL BANK 010080010
PRUDENTIAL BANK 010150018
PHIL VETERANS BANK 010330016
RIZAL COMML BANKING CORP 010280014
SECURITY BANK & TRUST CO 010140015
STANDARD CHARTERED BANK 010050011
UNITED COCONUT PLANTERS BANK 010299995
UNION BANK OF THE PHILS 010419995
UNITED OVERSEAS BANK 010270189

I was able to find an article on the net (forgot the link, unfortunately), explaining why and how to deal with the problem.  It turns out that if the Apple Wireless Keyboard got paired with OS X, it needs to be unpaired from OS X first.  Otherwise, for some reason (it keeps wanting to be with OS X ?)  it will fail to pair with Windows 7.  Remember, this means that the Apple WIreless Keyboard not only needs to be disconnected but also unpaired.  You should be able to do this by clicking on Bluetooth in the System Preferences, selecting the Apple Wireless Keyboard and clicking on the “-” button at the bottom.  This should both disconnect and unpair the Apple Wireless Keyboard.

Driver-wise, you should ensure that you use “Apple Built-in Bluetooth” under “Bluetooth Radios”, and then install the Apple Keyboard Driver from Boot Camp in that order.  If you can’t get them work, uninstall these drivers and reinstall them in the proper order.

1. Play the video
2. Press the power button.  The screen will go blank.
3. Double click the Home Button.  You will get the iPod controls onscreen.
4. Press play to start playing the video’s audio track only.
5. Wait for the screen to go blank automatically or…
6. Click the power button to make the screen go blank, but this time the audio will continue playing.

The first front is the desktop OS where Windows competes with Linux and OS X.

The second front if I recall correctly is the mobile devices / mobile OS front where Microsoft competes with iPhone OS X, Symbian, Android, etc… (and not doing a very good job of it by the way)

The third front which was I was going to lead into is the runtime front where .NET/Silverlight competes with the Flash/Flex platform and Java.  This, I believe is the most important and exciting front and the unnamed third competitor is, of course, Adobe.  And in fact, since then a fourth platform is slowly emerging as credible challenger going forward - JIT-compiled Javascript plus HTML 5’s Canvas and Canvas3D (WebGL).

( In this blog post, the author clearly spells out a future where browser-centric standards - and NOT RIA plugins - serve as both the delivery and execution platform for just about all applications. )

This is where I believe Microsoft should be setting their strategic sights on.   While .NET is an awesome environment, by going the RIA route with Silverlight, Microsoft has shown it still hasn’t gotten the Web yet.  It has to do a far far better job of embracing web standards if it wants to dominate the future rather than Google.

( In this other blog post, the author explains why RIAs, among other things, destroy some of what is good about the web - in particular, the REST principle. )

The browser platform, with JITing VMs for Javascript and the incorporation of Canvas/Canvas3D/WebGL will give us most of what RIAs have to offer (performance + rich graphics) but preserve the URL-based REST nature of the Web.  The only problem with this is that we are still limited to just one language - Javascript - for creating such applications. Flash, which is Actionscript (the statically typed Javascript which resembles Java more than browser Javascript ) only, has the same limitation.

With IE becoming more irrelevant and Google pumping up Chrome aggressively, we are going to see people increasingly have the option to use the above as a runtime platform instead of RIA-oriented  technologies like Flash or Silverlight.  However, Microsoft currently has the very important Ace up its sleeve which is the fact that neither Google nor Adobe have a CLR that can run multiple languages.

The solution seems clear.  Side-by-side with Silverlight, Microsoft should start offering a browser - (probably) not IE - with the CoreCLR as its JITting VM engine plus proper Canvas/Canvas 3D/HTML5/CSS support (heck, just dump Trident and use WebKit).  The browser DOM would then be programmable using any CLR language and in fact integration with Silverlight could potentially be even more seamless.  Most of the infrastructure for this is actually already in place since the browser DOM seems already fully (?) exposed  in the System.Windows.Browser API.  All that would be needed would be to ensure that the CoreCLR-based Javascript running in this browser emulates traditional Javascript perfectly (down to the DOM API) - and since it’s a new non-IE browser, you can also throw away all the old IE4 era DHTML stuff and ActiveX support (also increasingly irrelevant except the IE development team probably still doesn’t want to acknowledge this yet) and just concentrate on supporting true web standards.  The point here is that while Silverlight / XAML in particular enables some truly awesome capabilities that HTML tags, even with Canvas, are going to take a long time to match, the RIA model breaks REST and this is a huge liability in the eyes of many people.

If Microsoft wisely chooses such a move, it could potentially do an IE4 all over again.  IE4-6 dominated by partly embracing some web standards and extending it with its own rich DHTML object model (now dead in favor of W3C DOM).  This new CLR-based browser can embrace Javascript, JITing VMs and then extend it by allowing people to directly script DOM with IronPython, Boo, VB.NET etc…  <SCRIPT> tags already support specifying the language and presumably, you would want to extend it with attributes that specify loading of CLR assemblies, for example.

Because the CLR is an open standard, such enhancements to the <SCRIPT> tag to support assembly loading wouldn’t (shouldn’t) be considered proprietary and such extensions would (should) be embraced by the standards bodies.

If ever I find myself wishing for Embrace and Extend, THIS is it.

The other thing to understand are that the interaction between GPT/MBR (the new and old style partition tables) and EFI/BIOS (the new/old style firmware) makes things very tricky if you don’t understand the issues.

Several issues to know:

1) Windows 7 (and Vista too I believe) WILL install on a GPT partitioned drive and can also be booted from EFI firmware.

2) When the Windows 7 install DVD boots on a Macbook though, it actually boots in BIOS mode(!), this is because the Macbook will switch to BIOS mode when it sees that a DVD has a BIOS-based bootloader, which a Windows 7 install DVD of course will have.

3) When booted in BIOS mode, Windows 7 refuses to install on a GPT partitioned drive (this is what leads people to mistakenly think that Windows 7 does not support GPT installation)

4) However, and this is the kicker, even if you get the Macbook to boot Windows 7 (whether the installer DVD or the OS itself) in EFI mode, things will not work properly because the EFI version on Macbooks is the older version which Windows does not want to work with!  #$%@#$#@^@@….!!!!!  Windows 7, etc… *need* UEFI 2.0 to properly work with GPT partitions.

These 2 pages have more to say on the issue:

http://darobins.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!C188BEF79F825945!529.entry

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=186440

So how then do we install the 2 OSes side-by-side?  We’re left with two ways:

1) Hybrid GPT-MBR partitioned disk

or

2) MBR partitioned disk

From a Windows-centric viewpoint, method 2 is probably the cleanest and lets you deal with your partitions with standard tools like Partition Manager.  In this case, you will need to hack your OS X install DVD to install on an MBR disk.  The two links below explain how:

http://blog.netnerds.net/2009/10/easily-install-mac-os-x-leopard-on-an-mbr-formatted-disk/

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=181287

But because they involve extensive tweaking on the Mac command line which I don’t currently wish to involve myself in, I will go with method 1 instead which this blog article will explain further.

Firstly, a hybrid GPT-MBR disk is one looks like an MBR drive to older non-GPT supporting OSes but which GPT-supporting OSes sees as GPT.  As far as I understand, only the Disk Utility that comes with the OS X install DVD to create a hybrid GPT-MBR table correctly (if gParted can do this, drop me a comment…)

In my case, I needed 4 partitions, 3 for Windows and one for OS X.  In Disk Utility, I did the following steps:

1) Create 4 partitions in the partition editor, 3 as FAT and 1 as an OS X filesystem.  IMPORTANT: Make the OS X partition the last one.

2) (VERY IMPORTANT) Select GUID Partition table instead of MBR type using the Options button.

3) Apply changes and then reboot into the Windows 7 install DVD.

4) When the Windows 7 installer shows the available partitions you will see one extra 200MB partition at the beginning.  DO NOT DELETE THIS!  This is the GPT protective partition, deleting it will prevent Windows 7 from booting correctly afterwards.

5) The free space you allocated for OS X will show up as “unallocated free space”.  Do not panic.  This is because MBR only allows 4 primary partitions and they will already have been taken up by the GPT protective partition and the 3 primary FAT 32 partitions.  OS X uses GPT aand will see this last partition correctly, however, MBR cannot show it.

6) A side effect of pre-partitioning this way is that the 200MB (for Win7 RC) and 100MB (for Win7 RTM) “System Reserved Partition” will no longer get created.  Some people consider this an annoyance so this would be a good thing for them.

7) You can now proceed to format one or all 3 partitions via the Windows 7 installer.  This will turn them into NTFS, and allow install of Windows 7 on them.

8 ) NOTE: If you had installed OS X in Step 3, before booting into the Windows 7 Install DVD, the machine will default to booting in OS X, so you should hold down the Alt/Option key to see the Windows partition and boot from it instead.

http://blogs.msdn.com/ashishme/archive/2009/04/01/32-bit-vs-64-bit.aspx

In a nutshell, what this means is that on 64-bit Windoze, you should copy your 32-bit dlls into \Windows\SysWOW64 rather than \Windows\System32 otherwise, your 32-bit programs will never find them.  Why?  This is because all 32-bit programs running on Windows x64 are handled by the WOW64 emulator which transparently maps all access to \Windows\System32 to \Windows\SysWOW64.  \Windows\System32 on Windows x64 is, ironically, reserved for 64-bit dlls.  MS claims this had to be done for compatibility reasons.

So anyway, one of the priorities was to get Windows working on this machine.  Since the Modbook has 4GB on it, I elected to install a 64-bit Windows OS on it to make full use of the RAM.  Even though some of the info out there may lead you to think that only 64-bit Vista is supported, it turns out that Windows 7 x64 RC installs and works great on the Modbook (and of course on the Macbook as well).

Just so we’re clear on the hardware environment, the Macbook base for this machine I have is the 2Ghz Core 2 Duo with the Nvidia 9400M graphics chipset and it comes with the Leopard OS X 10.5.6 DVD.  Following are the steps I took to get things working.  Steps 1-3 are covered in the Boot Camp Setup and Install Guide although Step 3 will be a bit different.

Step 1. Use Boot Camp Assistant to create the partition for Windows 7

Step 2. Boot from the Windows 7 DVD and install Windows 7 in the usual manner

At this point, after the stock Windows 7 install, the modbook’s digitizer and WiFi actually work without worrying about drivers, a very pleasant surprise!  However, there are certain glitches you may encounter.  The optical out on the left side of the modbook will turn on which may be a battery drain.  No sound even if sound drivers seem to be installed already.  These two are easily fixed it turns out by installing the drivers from the Mac OS X Install DVD - Step 3.

Step 3. At this point, if you were installing one of the “supported” OSes (e.g. Vista or XP), you just have to click on Boot Camp\setup.exe in the Install DVD.  Under Windows 7 however, the setup.exe refuses to run complaining about incompatibility.  You can be sneaky about it and just directly run \Boot Camp\Drivers\Apple\BootCamp64.msi which will work.

Step 4. For my particular Modbook model, I also had to separately run \Boot Camp\Drivers\NVidia\NvidiaMobileSetup64.exe and \Boot Camp\Drivers\NVidia\NvidiaChipset64.exe to get the graphics and chipset drivers installed.  If you want even newer graphics drivers, you can download the latest Nvidia mobile drivers from nvidia.com itself.

At this stage, everything should be pretty much working except in my case, I had one additional important hurdle to overcome.  By clicking on the Boot Camp icon in the notification tray, you will be able to boot back to OS X from Windows 7.  The reverse was, however,  sadly not possible.

You are supposed to boot back to Windows 7 from OS X by clicking on System Preferences | Startup Disk, but in this case, the Windows partition wouldn’t show up there.  You can still choose which OS to boot by plugging in a USB keyboard and holding down the Option key (equivalent to Alt on a PC keyboard) or using rEFIt, but these are very suboptimal solutions for a keyboard-less tablet.  It turns out the way to get around this and have essentially the same function as Startup Disk is to manually bless the Windows partition instead via the command line:

sudo bless --mount /Volumes/NameOfWindowsHD --setBoot --legacy

You should be able to put this in a clickable script (haven’t figured out how to do that in OS X yet).  Now we are in computing nirvana.

Gout Herbal Treatment

http://slackware.com/getslack has a list of mirrors where you can get slackware packages. Packages will be found within a directory named slackware-VV/slackware/X where VV is the Slackware distribution version and X specifies the package category.

The relevant package categories for VPS hosting are as follows:

a - base packages (VPS templates will already have installed most of the needed packages here)
ap - common applications
d - development (gcc, python, perl, ruby, etc…)
f - faqs and how-tos
l - libraries
n - networking (includes networking utilities and daemons such as Apache)

The file slackware-VV/Slackware-HOWTO will have more comprehensive info on this.  What I recommend doing is to create a directory downloaded-packages/ under /root where you store all your downloaded packages.  Once in there you can execute wget to fetch the packages you want.  For example, if you choose to download the mysql package from the pair.com mirror listed at http://www.slackware.com/getslack/list.php?country=USA, you can type:

wget http://slackware.mirrors.pair.com/slackware-12.2/slackware/ap/mysql-5.0.67-i486-1.tgz

Installing the package is as easy as:

installpkg mysql-5.0.67-i486-1.tgz

It just unpacks the .tgz file and puts the package’s files in the correct directory locations.  It doesn’t check for dependencies and generally doesn’t whine or try to be smarter about it than you.  Just the way the gods intended it to be.

Two additional files you should know about are slackware-VV/slackware/PACKAGES.TXT and slackware-VV/slackware/MANIFEST.bz2. PACKAGES.TXT contains a description of the each package you might be looking for together with the directory it is under.  MANIFEST.bz2 is a complete list of every single file in every single package.

Possibly the most important Slackware tip to know is: If you see an error message complaining that so-and-so file is missing or cannot be found, you can search for it in MANIFEST.bz2 to know which package you need to install. *This* is *the* most educational and satisfying way to learn about what packages depend on which other ones, and in practice it has yet to fail me. The catch here is that you should be able to know where such error messages may be found (which will be dealt with in a later post of this blog series).

A quick way to search inside MANIFEST.bz2 is to do: bzcat MANIFEST.bz2 | less or bzcat MANIFEST2.bz2 | grep xxx.   See this for a walkthrough on the process.