Screaming Penguin

So I guess the buzz, pun intended, is about Google+. GOOG's boil the ocean, pun intended, social product code named Emerald Sea. Steven Levy has a huge write up at Wired about the product. He is a good story teller, but I think he misses the point. He misses a lot of stuff. He talks about the failure of Wave and Buzz to set the world on fire, but he misses WHY exactly. On Wave he says:

So HP CEO had this quote making the rounds today:

We didn't buy Palm to be in the smartphone business. And I tell people that, but it doesn't seem to resonate well. We bought it for the IP. The WebOS is one of the two ground-up pieces of software that is built as a web operating environment…We have tens of millions of HP small form factor web-connected devices…Now imagine that being a web-connected environment where now you can get a common look and feel and a common set of services laid against that environment. That is a very value proposition.

I completely agree with him. The thing is, in the "PC" market (read: Win32) HP is a dominant player now. They have locked up the the consumer market, and the shift in the whole world is that the consumer market is now the driver in technology, not the "Enterprise."

Big news out of the OHA (the organization that Google is in that drives the Android mobile device platform). Open Handset Alliance gains 14 new members

So this weekend I was doing a bit of research and ended up on a tangent into exactly how GPS works. I get the basics, sure, but wanted to dig into the details a bit more. I didn't have to look any further than the Wikipedia GPS article for an excellent source of information. While there one of the many resources that caught my eye was the fantastic little "how GPS works" GIF:

I know they are well aware that people check their feeds, and have manipulated the listings accordingly, but that only makes it a bit more shockingly clear: John McCain is officially way beyond losing his sanity (Drudge, and Fox News), and Barack has a brain (Chicago Sun Times, and The Daily Show). Explore news sites read by McCain, Obama and political journalists

I will be buying a new phone soon (the old employer's BlackBerry is going away) and have been looking at getting an iPhone. I am a notorious hardware holdout, rather than an edge cutter (I like the 2 gens ago chips, they are fast *and* cheap - still typing this on a MacBook core duo I got a few years back, still works fine). That, combined with the fact that the company decided for me in the past, is the reason I don't have an iPhone already.

As an aside, the reason I noticed this is that Cooper twittered it (I am one of those Dvorak style Twitter curmudgeon holdouts, but I do see the tweets from time to time on Facebook ;)).

Decent tutorial by Stephen Callaghan at Shinetech. Walks through start to finish, setting up Maven, configuring GWT-Maven, building a separate service JAR (for DTO support), building GWT services using Spring, creating a GWT client for it all - and lastly, running it via Maven. Article states that GWT Maven integration is "in it's infancy," which frankly is unfair, but all in all it's a very good - albeit not perfect - example.