Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

It's a big year for science, as anniversaries of major scientific accomplishments by Darwin and Galileo are set to kick off celebrations of progress in astronomy and biology.

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jtimmer@arstechnica.com (John Timmer)

What would you like to see Google (and others) do with Android in 2009? Here are some things I came up with.

• Multitouch.
• Bluetooth APIs.
• Explicit support for unit testing, with clear examples and IDE support.
• Step-by-step OpenGL tutorials, along the lines of the excellent Notepad tutorial.
• A first rate IDEA plugin.
• A damn good GUI builder.
• Winchester hard disk drive support.
• Longer G1 battery life
• The ability to install apps on the SD card, and make it obvious how to put SQLite DBs on the SD card.
• More standard actions and reusable activities. For example, make it easy to select pictures from the filesystem, crop photos, etc. These pieces are all there, but not always included as public APIs. Over time, I hope to see more reusable building blocks, making application development easier.
• A pre-built JAR file containing all the SDK sources, so I can download a single JAR and drop it into my IDE.
• Improved navigation on the Reference Information web site. There are a large number of examples, but the web site is hard to navigate. At a minimum, some kind of breadcrumbs would be nice. It’s really easy to get lost on the current site.
• Never, ever release another phone without a standard headphone jack.
• Improved contact management. My main gripe is when editing contacts, I get duplicate email address conflicts, with no smart merging of the duplicate entries.
• ** Update: Flash support (see Michael’s comment below)

I suspect we’ll have most of these items sometime in 2009.

We are excited to announce a special 1 DAY SALE! 10% Off Using PayPal, New Year's Eve Day Only! Use PayPal Checkout and Get 10% OFF Your Order of In Stock I . . .
Category: Trade(author unknown)

Media Matters has named Sean Hannity as 2008's misinformer of the year. There's a long list of examples of his rank dishonesty in the service of political ends.

By the way, I've got the perfect replacement for Alan Colmes: Hannity should just use a ventriloquist's dummy (that's all Colmes was most of the time anyway).

Hannity: "I'm Sean Hannity and this is my new co-host, Mr. Liberal Pansy. Say hello to the audience, Mr. Liberal Pansy."

Mr. Liberal Pansy, in a high pitched falsetto: "Hi audience!"

Read the comments on this post...(author unknown)

HTC CEO Peter Chou has told Chinese newspaper, the Economic Daily News, that the company expects sales of the G1 handset top 1 million units in 2008.

Chou also went on to comment about HTC's development plans for future Android handsets and revealed that the company are already developing their third handset.

While there are slightly conflicting rumors circulating that either T-Mobile is going to launch an Android-based G2 handset in January and HTC is planning the worldwide launch of a second Android handset in April, EDN said that HTC is actually developing its third Android-based handset now.

Although little detail was given about their upcoming handsets it is believed that the second Android powered handset should be available by April 2008, with the third handset not far behind.

[via DigiTimes.com + Electronista.com]

Android Phone: T-Mobile G1

HTC Forecast G1 Sales Of Over 1 Million In 2008, 2nd Android Handset By April

The GWT community is full of activity; so much so that it sometimes becomes difficult to keep track of! I thought it would be a good idea to try and gather some of this action in one place, so without further ado, here's what's going on in the GWT community!

Community announcements

Restlet 1.1.0 released: Using REST APIs with Servlets used to require wasted hours writing custom code. Fortunately, Restlet came along to take that pain away. Even more fortunately, Restlet integrates with GWT to make dealing with REST APIs a breeze. The team has recently announced their 1.1.0 release, might be worth a spin if you've exhausted yourself writing custom code and need some REST.

Hibernate4GWT (Gilead) 1.2 RC1: Hibernate is an extremely powerful ORM framework for the Java programming language. It has proven itself as an invaluable tool for those with tight data-to-domain mapping, and thanks to Hibernate4GWT, has become easily accessible to GWT application developers. Hibernate 1.2 RC1 (aka Gilead) is now available to download.

SmartGWT 1.0 released: SmartClient is a framework that allows you to not only utilize its widget library for your application UI, but also tie these widgets in with your server-side for data management. SmartGWT 1.0, combining both GWT and SmartClient, has been released thanks to the efforts of Sanjiv Jivan. Read more about it in Sanjiv's release announcement.

GWT Maven heaven: The gwt-maven project developed by Charlie Collins and fellow project members provides a way for developers using a Maven to easily integrate GWT into their build system. We also have Nicolas De loof who has been working on a GWT Maven plug-in in the Mojo project. We're happy to say that Charlie Collins and Nicolas De loof are now going to form GWT Maven heaven by integrating the functionality of both plugin together and hosting them on the Mojo project.

Given the rapid advance of Moore's Law, when does it make sense to throw hardware at a programming problem? As a general rule, I'd say almost always.

Consider the average programmer salary here in the US:

You probably have several of these programmer guys or gals on staff. I can't speak to how much your servers may cost, or how many of them you may need. Or, maybe you don't need any -- perhaps all your code executes on your users' hardware, which is an entirely different scenario. Obviously, situations vary. But even the most rudimentary math will tell you that it'd take a massive hardware outlay to equal the yearly costs of even a modest five person programming team.

For example, I just bought two very powerful servers for Stack Overflow. Even after accounting for a third backup server and spare hard drives for the RAID arrays, my total outlay is around $5,000. These servers, compared to the ones we're on now, offer:

• roughly 50% more CPU speed
• 2 to 6 times the memory capacity
• almost twice the disk space (and it's a faster RAID 10 array)

Under this new hardware regime, we can expect average page response times to improve by about half. All that for less than one month of an average programmer's salary.

I'd say that's a great deal. A no-brainer, even.

Incidentally, this is also why failing to outfit your (relatively) highly paid programmers with decent equipment as per the Programmer's Bill of Rights is such a colossal mistake. If a one-time investment of $4,000 on each programmer makes them merely 5% more productive, you'll break even after the first year. Every year after that you've made a profit. Also, having programmers who believe that their employers actually give a damn about them is probably a good business strategy for companies that actually want to be around five or ten years from now.

Clearly, hardware is cheap, and programmers are expensive. Whenever you're provided an opportunity to leverage that imbalance, it would be incredibly foolish not to.

Despite the enduring wonder of the yearly parade of newer, better hardware, we'd also do well to remember my all time favorite graph from Programming Pearls:

Everything is fast for small n. When n gets large, that's when things start to go sideways. The above graph of an ancient Trash-80 clobbering a semi-modern DEC Alpha is a sobering reminder that the fastest hardware in the world can't save you from bad code. More specifically, poorly chosen data structures or algorithms.

It won't hurt to run badly written code on the fastest possible boxes you can throw at it, of course. But if you want tangible performance improvements, you'll often have to buckle down and optimize the code, too. Patrick Smacchia's lessons learned from a real-world focus on performance is a great case study in optimization.

Patrick was able to improve nDepend analysis performance fourfold, and cut memory consumption in half. As predicted, most of this improvement was algorithmic in nature, but at least half of the overall improvement came from a variety of different optimization techniques. Patrick likens this to his early days writing demo scene code on the Commodore Amiga:

In the early 90s, I participated in the Amiga demo scene. It's a great illustration of the idea that there is always room for better performance. Every demo ran on the same hardware. It was the perfect incentive for demo developers to produce more and more optimized code. For several years, every month some record was beaten: the number of 3D polygons, the number of sprites, or the number of dots displayed simultaneously at the rate of 50 frames per second. Over a period of a few years, the performance factor obtained was around 50x! Imagine what it means to perform a computation in one second that originally took an entire minute. This massive gain was the result of both better algorithms (with many pre-computations and delegations to sub-chips) and micro-optimizations at assembly language level (better use of the chip registers, better use of the set of instructions).

Patrick achieved outstanding results, but let's be clear: optimizing your code is hard. And sometimes, dangerous. It is not something you undertake lightly, and you'd certainly want your most skilled programmers working on it. To put it in perspective, let's dredge up a few classic quotes.

Rules of Optimization:
Rule 1: Don't do it.
Rule 2 (for experts only): Don't do it yet.
-- M.A. Jackson

"More computing sins are committed in the name of efficiency (without necessarily achieving it) than for any other single reason - including blind stupidity."
-- W.A. Wulf

Programmers have a tendency to get lost in the details of optimizing for the sake of optimization, as I've noted before in Why Aren't My Optimizations Optimizing? and Micro-Optimization and Meatballs. If you're not extremely careful, you could end up spending a lot of very expensive development time with very little to show for it. Or, worse, you'll find yourself facing a slew of new, even more subtle bugs in your codebase.

That's why I recommend the following approach:

1. Throw cheap, faster hardware at the performance problem.
2. If the application now meets your performance goals, stop.
3. Benchmark your code to identify specifically where the performance problems are.
4. Analyze and optimize the areas that you identified in the previous step.
5. If the application now meets your performance goals, stop.
6. Go to step 1.

Always try to spend your way out of a performance problem first by throwing faster hardware at it. It'll often be a quicker and cheaper way to resolve immediate performance issues than attempting to code your way out of it. Longer term, of course, you'll do both. You'll eventually be forced to revisit those deeper algorithmic concerns and design issues with your code that prevent the application from running faster. And the advantage of doing this on new hardware is that you'll look like an even bigger hero when you deliver the double whammy of optimized code running on speedier hardware.

But until the day that Moore's Law completely gives out on us, one thing's for sure: hardware is cheap -- and programmers are expensive.

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Jeff Atwood

Google have today published a roadmap for the new 'Cupcake' development branch of the Android platform. The roadmap details a whole list of bug fixes and new features that will be made available to G1 owners in January 2009.

“The cupcake branch will be merged into the master branch… Due to the United States’ holiday season, though, this may not be finished until early January.”

The new update will include the ability to record video, support for stereo Bluetooth, onscreen keyboard functionality and more.

Key features include:

• Option to save attachments and pictures from text messages
• Option to view what applications and processes are running
• Updated Webkit browser
• the ability to copy and paste text within the browser by holding the SHIFT key and sliding your finger across the text you want to copy
• Ability to search for text within the browser using a FIND feature
• New SquirrelFish JavaScript engine
• New kernel based on Linux 2.6.27
• Dial pad can no longer be single tapped open but needs a finger slide motion
• Video thumbnails and playback functionality
• Stereo Bluetooth support
• Ability to have an onscreen keyboard for typing

More information is availabe @ source.android.com

Android Phone: T-Mobile G1

Android Update 2009 - Video Recording, Stereo Bluetooth, Onscreen Keyboard And More

Shared by Charlie Collins
Precious

I THINK U GUYS ARE DECIEVED BY THE DEVIL AND HIS SPIRITS. MAKING THIS STUFF UP IS MERELY CREATED BY SOMEONE AND ITS AN EXCUSE TO HAVE AND DO WHAT UWANNA DO AND I FEEL THAT SOME SPAGHETTI MONSTER CANT EXPLAIN THE UNEXPLAINED AND CANT HELP ME SPIRITUALLY AS I COME TO REALIZE CHRIST HELPS ME MENTALLY AND PHYSICALLY AND I HAVE EVIDENCE THAT THIS IS TRUE AND TRY HIM CHRIST IS REAL AND PERSONALLY THATS MY EVIDENCE. PEOPLE ITS ALL MADE UP THE SPAGHETTI MONSTER ISNT REAL
-kathleen

Precious

Android offers a very powerful and yet easy to use tool called intents. An intent can be use to turn applications into high-level libraries and make code re-use something even better than before. The Android Home screen and AnyCut use intents extensively to create shortcuts for instance. While it is nice to be able to make use of a loosely coupled API, there is no guarantee that the intent you send will be received by another application. This happens in particular with 3rd party apps, like Panoramio and its RADAR intent.

While working on a new application, I came up with a very simple way to find out whether the system contains any application capable of responding to the intent you want to use. I implemented this technique in my application to gray out the menu item that the user would normally click to trigger the intent. The code is pretty simple and easy to follow:

/** * Indicates whether the specified action can be used as an intent. This * method queries the package manager for installed packages that can * respond to an intent with the specified action. If no suitable package is * found, this method returns false. * * @param context The application's environment. * @param action The Intent action to check for availability. * * @return True if an Intent with the specified action can be sent and * responded to, false otherwise. */ public static boolean isIntentAvailable(Context context, String action) { final PackageManager packageManager = context.getPackageManager(); final Intent intent = new Intent(action); List list = packageManager.queryIntentActivities(intent, PackageManager.MATCH_DEFAULT_ONLY); return list.size() > 0; }

Here is how I use it:

@Override public boolean onPrepareOptionsMenu(Menu menu) { final boolean scanAvailable = isIntentAvailable(this, "com.google.zxing.client.android.SCAN"); MenuItem item; item = menu.findItem(R.id.menu_item_add); item.setEnabled(scanAvailable); return super.onPrepareOptionsMenu(menu); }

In this example, the menu is grayed out if the Barcode Scanner application is not installed. Another, simpler, way to do this is to catch the ActivityNotFoundException when calling startActivity() but it only lets you react to the problem, you cannot predict it and update the UI accordingly to prevent the user from doing something that won’t work. The technique described here can also be used at startup time to ask the user whether he’d like to install the missing package, you can then simply redirect him to the Android Market by using the appropriate URI.

KidZui is a child-safe internet front end that calls upon an enormous whitelist of websites, pictures, videos, and games that have all been reviewed by a group of volunteers composed of parents and educators.

The KidZui experience is available in two forms: a stand alone browser on Windows based machines or as a Firefox extension on any system that can run Firefox. The experience with both is very similar. The installation process is kid friendly, with children able to directly participate in the process if the parents desire. Kids can create an avatar for the social network side of KidZui, which is like a slightly more detailed incarnation of the Mii avatars found on the Nintendo Wii video game console. Interaction between the child's avatar however is very limited, from a safety standpoint. No personal information is ever or can be shared, children are limited to exchanging information already approved within the KidZui network. For instance a child could send a link to a funny Sponge Bob video or article on trains to a friend, but couldn't send them their home address.

Once an account is set up for the child an email is sent to the email address the parents provide. From there you activate the account and set up a parent account to be linked to your child's account. The parent control panel for KidZui is polished, even in the free version—there is a pay version of the service that adds some bells and whistled but the free version is entirely functional. From within the control panel parents can get all sorts of feedback. What has their child been searching for? What have they been spending their time doing in the KidZui system? Lists of search terms, games played, time spent on various tasks and on browsing in general broken right down to the minute, are all available. While the the content of KidZui is really air tight when it comes to kid friendly content, it's enlightening to know that your 8 year old is already scouring the interwebs for boobs, even if he isn't finding anything.

The principle difference between the stand alone installation and the Firefox plugin, cross platform compatibility aside, is the level of security available on the computer itself. When using the stand alone browser, the child can close the browser out and return to the desktop of the computer they are using. The Firefox plugin essentially locks the web browser to full screen and it cannot be taken out of KidZui-mode without a parent keying in a password. Essentially the entire computer is locked to the KidZui network and has become a kid-friendly internet station. Note: if there is anyway to lock the stand alone browser in full screen mode, please share how in the comments! I wasn't able to find a way to do so in my test run with the browser. Thanks helpful readers! You can enable the same level of password locking in the stand alone as the extension, by going into the parental controls menu of the stand alone browser and enabling it under the KidZui Settings.

A nice touch is the ability to add to the white list on a case by case basis. If your child wants or needs to access their school's website or another safe website that has not yet been reviewed, you have the ability to add it to the list of sites your child can access. You'll be warned when you do so, once a website is added to your child's personal white list any link on that site becomes fair game. Add http://www.google.com as a white list site, and anything Google can find so can your child.

While there isn't any real substitution for direct supervision and parent interaction, KidZui is a really helpful tool for introducing your child to the amazing amount of information and interesting things that can be found online— minus the therapy-inducing moments of stumbling down the dark alleys of the internet. KidZui is freeware, available as both a stand alone Windows based browser and a cross-platform Firefox extension.

KidZui Stand Alone and KidZui Firefox Extension [via Webware]

Jason Fitzpatrick

Pastafarian Craig spotted this display at his house:

It is fantastic. Who knows how many passers-by have been converted.

Sharps :

Q. Does RedHat offer support for GWT today ?
A. Not yet – the plan is to offer full support in the first half of 2009 as part of a larger initiative.

Q. Is there a commercial relationship between Google and Red hat ?
A. No - this is purely about open source collaboration.

Q. What is Red Hat’s current involvement with the GWT project ?
A. We have a number of people in Red Hat developing with GWT and as we earn our stripes we’ll start to increase our contribution the GWT community; beyond that we’re open to ideas – but obviously Google will continue to lead the project.

Q. Does this mean that Red Hat doesn’t care about Rich Faces / ajax4jsf anymore ?
A. Not at all – for many Java developers - GWT is a complimentary technology for others it might be an alternative. We’re not prescribing one particular approach – we’re supporting what we believe are the best technologies for developers. Our commitment to Rich Faces and ajax4jsf continues.

JBoss adopts GWT (Google Web Toolkit)

Pastafarian Damon has put us all to shame with this stunning FSM Holiday light display. Behold:

I think we could all learn something from Damon. Well done, sir.

Rintcius Blok

I have been developing a GWT-on-grails site and thought it may be interesting for onGWT: Lenzcape.
Here's a short description of the site:
Lenzcape combines the power of bookmarking and searching. It can manage your bookmarks, but at the same time uses them as building blocks for specialized search engines (using google cse). In this way the search engine becomes fully personalized and the pages of your bookmarked sites become fully searchable. It's also very flexible. You can search e.g. all your bookmarks at once, only bookmarks with a certain tag or just certain parts of bookmarked sites.
The GWT part of the site is at http://lenzcape.com/app (after login you can manage and use your bookmarks).
And I have just created a blog entry with an example that shows the advantages of using Lenzcape compared to general search and bookmarking.

http://lenzcape.com
http://wordpress.rintcius.nl/post/using-lenzcape-to-make-search-more-efficient-and-effective

It's time for another Boing Boing seasonal tradition: our charitable giving guide, a list of charities we personally support and want to give more attention to. And as in previous years, we invite you to add your own favorite charities to the list in the comments section. This is going to be a rough holiday for the charitable sector -- we're all tightening our belts. Don't forget the charities that keep the world fair, free and healthy this holiday season.

US Charities

Electronic Frontier Foundation: Once again, my largest donation for the year goes to EFF. They're suing GW Bush and Gonzo over warrantless wiretapping, seeking DMCA exemptions for video remixing and phone unlocking, working to keep e-voting honest, busting the phone companies and fighting against telecom immunity; overturning crappy patents -- the list goes on an on. Architecture is politics: the structure of the net will determine the structure of the society it underpins. If we lose the net's freedom, we lose everything. I've worked for EFF in the past and I know exactly how far they stretch every dime. It's magic.

Creative Commons: Five years in, and CC is better than ever. Governments around the world are releasing their material under CC; it's become the norm for science, documentation, fan-media, and many kinds of literature, as well as podcasts. The launch of ccLearn for schools was a huge step this year, and the organization keeps on doing fantastic work on a shoestring budget.

Youth Radio: Pesco sez, "Youth Radio is an afterschool program that teaches journalism, media, and audio production skills to underserved young people, mostly high school age You can hear their stories on National Public Radio, local airwaves, and of course online. A lot of the graduates stick around for a while as paid writers, producers, engineers, and teachers."

Xeni sez, "Fundacion Sobrevivientes (In English, "Survivors Foundation") works to end "femicide" in Guatemala. They provide legal aid, psychological care, and protection for rape victims -- including children. They assist women whose children have been snatched from them to be sold illegally into adoption. They provide support for families of female assassination victims. Founder Norma Cruz was featured in the documentary Killer's Paradise. Her work links the murders of thousands of Guatemalan women to the country's 36-year civil war. She, her colleagues, and family are frequently targeted by those who seek to prevent the center's work. Contact: asobrevivientes@yahoo.es or info@sobrevivientes.org Tel: (502) 2285-0100 or (502) 2285-0139"

Free Software Foundation/Defective By Design: It's wonderful to see a campaigning group based on fighting DRM. Defective by Design has pulled off a number of audacious and clever actions that have raised public awareness of DRM. The fight starts here.
a

The Internet Archive: What would we do without it? I use it every day. Its mission: Universal access to all human knowledge. What could be more noble?

The Gutenberg Project: The world's leading access-to-public-domain project. They have truly created a library from nothing, and oh, what a library.

The MetaBrainz Foundation: I'm on the board of this charity, which oversees the MusicBrainz project. MusicBrainz is a free and open alternative to the evil (dis)Gracenote, which took all the metadata about CDs that you and I keyed in and locked it away behind a wall of patents and onerous licensing deals. The org that controls the metadata controls the world -- this needs to be in the public's hands.

Last year: The Participatory Culture Foundation: I'm on the board of this charity, which produces ass-kicking media software in the public interest. The best-known of these is Miro, an Internet TV program that just works -- add feeds based on YouTube keywords, or published feeds from creators, and new video arrive automagically and just play. Because TV is too important to leave up to Microsoft and Apple.

The Clarion Foundation: I'm on the board of this charity, which oversees the world-famous Clarion Writers' Workshop, a bootcamp for sf writers that has produced some of the finest talents in our field, including Octavia Butler, Bruce Sterling, Nalo Hopkinson, Kelly Link, and Lucius Shepard. I'm a graduate myself, and an instructor (I taught in 2005 and I'll be back in 2007) -- I received a substantial scholarship to the workshop in 1992 and it changed my life. I will pay that debt forward every year.

Amnesty International: Just famed for their principled, effective campaigning for justice and fair treatment under the law, Amnesty has its finger in every pie -- freeing Gitmo detainees, defending jailed journalists, fighting torture and human trafficking, and standing up to bullies wherever they find them. They deserve every cent we can give them.

Hospice Net: I make a donation to this charity every year in memory of my dear friend, former Boing Boing guestblogger Pat York. Pat was killed in a car accident, and her family nominated this charity for memorial gifts.

ACLU: For the liberties the EFF doesn't cover, here in sticky meatspace, we have the ACLU. Fearless upholders of the Constitution -- an org that knows that you have to stand up for the rights of people you disagree with, or you aren't in a free society. Unwinding the violence done to fundamental freedoms over the past eight years will take time and money. The number of bad laws and regulations to overturn is staggering.

Public Knowledge: Public Knowledge are the best copyfighters on the Hill, real DC insiders who know the ins and outs of fighting in the halls of administrative agencies like the FCC. We never could have killed the Broadcast Flag without PK, and I'm grateful that someone else is willing to be the person who puts on a suit and explains things in plain language to Congressional staffers. It's a thankless task. This year, PK was instrumental to opening up America's "white space" spectrum -- fallow radio frequencies hoarded by broadcasters -- in order to allow for thousands of times more WiFi-style bandwidth for us all to use.

Child Rights and You: I travelled to Mumbai earlier this year for research and was overwhelmed by the terrible, ubiquitous child poverty -- thousands and thousands of children, barefoot, disfigured, begging. I asked my Indian friends about it and was told that it was endemic to Mumbai and India in general, and that many children are exploited by desperate parents or criminal "pimps" who muscle them out of the majority of their earnings. As a new parent, I couldn't help but wonder again and again how I would feel if it were my child living in those circumstances. I'm no stranger to poverty -- I helped build schools with Nicaraguan refugees in Central America, worked to set up an NGO in sub-Saharan Africa -- but I'd never seen anything to rival this. On advice from my Indian friends, I investigated and made a donation to CRY (we also nominated them as a charity in lieu of presents for people who came to our wedding). CRY works to remedy the root causes of child poverty in India, in cities and the countryside, with a special emphasis on protecting girls from exploitation. The problem is deep and huge, but the solution has to begin somewhere. CRY also maintains a UK site for British donors.

Canadian Charities

Youth Challenge International: YCI sends young Canadians abroad to work on sustainable, community initiated development projects. Challengers work in international teams that include Costa Ricans, Guyanese, and Australians. I'm an alumnus, having done a hitch in a Nicaraguan squatter village in rural Costa Rica when I was 21, and it changed my life forever.

Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation: My aunt Heather died of breast cancer when she was only 41. My whole family is now involved with the society. I don't live in Toronto and can't join the annual run for the cure there, but at least I can donate to the cause.

UK Charities

Open Rights Group: Danny O'Brien and I co-founded ORG a couple years ago and I continue to serve on its advisory board. ORG has done stupendous work since its founding -- this year, they helped reverse an EU initiative force ISPs to disconnect their customers on the basis of unsubstantiated accusations of infringement. In 2009, we need them to help us fight off the national ID card, increased Internet surveillance, and a mad proposal to give the major record labels another 45 years' worth of copyright on existing works, despite the unanimous opinion of the government's own experts saying that this will be bad news.

NO2ID: As the UK sleepwalks into a surveillance state, NO2ID stands as the nation's best, last bulwark against an Orwellian nightmare of universal tracking. NO2ID has won substantial victories against the New Labour's compulsive move towards a national ID card, keeping it at bay for years. The government wants to issue me (and other immigrants) one of these when my visa next renews, in two years. If they try to, I'll leave and take my family with me. My grandparents fled the Soviet Union rather than live under a ubiquitous surveillance system -- I'm not going to be enmeshed in one two generations later.

Liberty: Britain's answer to the American Civil Liberties Union. Every single time I read or hear a news-story about incursions on human rights in the UK, there's an articulate, knowledgeable Liberty commentator countering government's flimsy arguments and campaigning for our freedom. In an era where politicians spy on us seemingly through naked instinct, like ants building hills, it's groups like Liberty that present our best bulwark against tyranny.

MySociety: Software in the public interest -- it's a damned good idea. MySociety produces software like Pledgebank ("I will risk arrest by refusing to register for a UK ID card if 100,000 other Britons will also do it") and TheyWorkForYou (every word and deed by every Member of Parliament). It's plumbing for activists and community organizers.

By Andrew Bowers, Google Web Toolkit Team

A lot of discussion occurs in the Google Web Toolkit contributors forum about development progress, feature requests, and the roadmap. We realize that many of you are very busy and would like to see a simple roadmap on the website, so we've updated "Making GWT Better" with our current plans.

As with any development work, its hard to exactly predict when things will land, so we've stayed away from specific dates and releases past the next one. You'll be happy to know that release 1.6 is well underway and on target for Q1 of 2009.

You can check for future updates in the Making GWT Better section of our website.

Release 1.6

Anticipated Time Frame - Q1 2009

• New compiled file deployment structure
• Easily compile into a war file structure, making it easy to deploy your compiled GWT application into standard servlet containers
• Migration from Tomcat to Jetty hosted mode server
• A more pluggable architecture for the hosted mode server will enable developers to use servlet containers other than Tomcat with the Hosted Mode browser
• Uniform event handlers
• Event handlers will be implemented in a uniform fashion across all widgets, with listeners deprecated
• DatePicker, LazyPanel migrated in from incubator
• New widgets from the incubator
• String performance improvements
• StringBuilder uses deferred binding to optimize string appends per-browser
• Compiler performance improvements
• 1.6 will introduce parallel permutation compilations and other performance tweaks for faster compiles

Post 1.6

The following are features that are on our roadmap for releases post 1.6, but are in various states of development. As we reach the end of the 1.6 cycle, we'll update the roadmap with which features we are targeting for the next release.

• Developer Guided Code splitting
• Developer guided code splitting is a mechanism that allows developers to specify asynchronous split points in their code where the code base can be split and downloaded in different chunks. This is currently an R&D project but looks promising.
• Analysis of compiled code, aka Story of your compile (SOYC)
• Aims to give developers concrete information about their compiled JavaScript, such as which Java classes are generating the most JavaScript code.
• In-browser hosted mode, aka Out-of-process Hosted Mode (OOPHM)
• In-browser hosted mode will allow GWT developers to debug their apps within a browser rather than GWT's hosted mode browser
• UI Binder
• The UI Binder will allow the creation of UI elements in a declarative fashion. Watch for UI Binder to land in the GWT incubator soon.
• Client Bundle
• Client Bundle implements the power of deferred binding used in Image Bundle in a generic fashion so that it can be used on many resources. These include TextResource, ImageResource, and CSSResource
• RPC performance improvements
• Ongoing work to improve the performance of RPC

Submitted by Deb A

YTMND version of this fail.

      

Submitted by Deb A

YTMND version of this fail.

      

Google has released an early technical demo of an experimental new browser plugin called Native Client that allows web applications to leverage portable native x86 code. Ars takes a close look at the new plugin and its security model.

Read More...

segphault@arstechnica.com (Ryan Paul)