Fedora 9 alpha

So I'm posting this from Fedora 9 alpha 1 which I'm running from my USB key. Freaking schweet.

This is pretty good. a) it came up fast b) it detects hardware properly and the Intel wireless (iwl3945) driver now works (I currently use the old style ipw3945 driver under Fedora 8 - that's what Ubuntu still ships) c) The media buttons on my Dell Inspiron 6400 now work (they always did with Ubuntu, but never with Fedora).

Along with the improvements in Fedora 8 (like Codeina) - Fedora are finally on a par with Ubuntu unless you count the fact that it's a piece of cake to use less-than-legal codecs in Ubuntu, and you need some knowledge in Fedora.

Ahh - happy,

Sent using the "Blog entry poster" app on the desktop (then edited online to get the title right - darn Blogger API).

Spring, JavaScript toolkits

Went to the Spring Exchange 2008 which was great. I learned a lot more about Spring 2.5 and whats coming up in 3.0. I finally realised that Annotations might be a good idea (and can't wait to try them in the new improved Spring MVC c. 2.5.3). I also learned more about OSGi (through a talk on "Spring Dynamic Modules for OSGi") than I had before - very interesting and cool technology.

I'm happy for the Spring folks that Spring Source looks like like it has a great future. But what will happen to Java EE (previously called J2EE)? Will it wither and die to be replaced by elegant, simple POJO-based apps? And what will happen to the leading vendors? BEA/Oracle, Sun's Glassfish/SJSAS, IBM's Web's Fear, and Red Hat's JBoss? Certainly Oracle, Sun and IBM can handle the pain, but Red Hat? Hmm.

Changing subject...

I've piddled with Prototype which is really easy (mainly thanks to the $() function) and YUI which has great documentation, but started using Dojo as it's going to be included in a tag-library for Spring Web Flow 2.0.x (at some point). It's also a strong contender and like YUI doesn't need hosting at your own site. (YUI can be called directly from Yahoo!'s servers, and Dojo from AOL's CDN).

So much choice!

Liberation

Having recently switched back to Fedora (8), I thought I'd try out Red Hat's free Liberation fonts, and they are beautiful. Don't get me wrong, Bistream's fonts (which they kindly gave away freely to us Unix-heads) are very nice and set a new standard, but I'm blown away at the quality of the Liberation fonts.

They're available for most platforms, and I'd strongly suggest you give them a try.