This is bullshit too. for exactly the same reasons.

Actually, the second is even more bullshit than the first. It’s been drawn by Vic Gundotra of Google and what does it show at the top of the curve of browser innovation? Google Chrome, how strange!

To attend, please visit http://alfresco.acrobat.com/live and enter the meeting room as a Guest. The talk will start at 12PM EST. I know, it’s 6PM on a Friday for us Central European folks, but I hope you won’t be all heading for the sea-side already.

You can find more information about TTL here.

First of all, we made a big splash by being named EMEA JBoss Partner of the Year at the Red Hat Summit in Malta, last April. Quite an achievement, I’d say, fueled in a not so small part by the dedication of our colleagues Luca and Piergiorgio, who have been named committers for the JBoss Portal project.

We are also ramping up our contributions to various Open Source communities. Let me just mention our OpenSSO connector for Alfresco, a project started by Gustavo that has just gone officially live on our new “forge”: opensource.sourcesense.com.

Finally, we are investing a lot of effort into this CMIS stuff that has everybody in the content management world interested. I personally got my feet wet with a 2-day “plug fest” that was held at Day Software’s headquarters, in Basel last week. Watching all those CMS vendors getting together to test the interoperability of their systems has been invigorating. Too bad nobody from either Microsoft or Oracle was there, but I guess getting approval for travel these days is not easy, so we will probably see them at a similar event in the US soon.

We are also going to get involved a lot in the new Apache Chemistry project that has just started its incubation phase at Apache. Stay tuned!

On a related note, today’s meme is “my first message to an Apache list”. Mine was on Jul 7, 2000 (as documented here). This means that next year will mark the 10th birthday of my first participation (however minor) to an Apache project.

I wouldn’t mind also getting the just announced 35mm f/1.8 AF-S lens. At a list price of $200 (or a little more than 200€) it’s going to be the best choice for D40/D40x/D60 owners wanting a fast prime which auto-focuses on their bodies. I will buy it, eventually, but not now.

What I want now is wide, very wide. I want something that goes much wider than the 18 mm of the kit lens to take some extreme shots meant to totally draw the viewer into the picture. Also, I don’t want a fisheye.

For a while, I was eyeing the venerable Sigma 10-20mm. This has long been the default choice for people looking for an ultra-wide angle zoom to put on their low-range DSLRs. It was until recently the only one going down to 10 mm, it has an internal focusing motor, decent image quality, and an affordable price. Therefore I started saving pennies and planning to buy one as a Christmas or birthday present to myself.

But just when I was about to grab it from a shelf or order it online, there came the Tokina ATX 116 PRO onto my radar. This lens has got some truly excellent reviews. Looks like its sharpness and image quality are top-notch and its maximum aperture is 2.8 all over the range, which is unmatched and great for low-light situations.

Its main drawbacks are the lack of an on-board focusing motor (but depth of field is so large at these focal lengths that this should not be a problem in practice) and its slightly higher price compared to the Sigma. Anyway, after reading reviews like Ken Rockwell’s, the decision was made, but I soon discovered that this lens is very hard to find, unless you are prepared to spend much more than the price it would have if it weren’t in such a demand. To put it bluntly, I don’t want to spend more than 500€ on it and I have a couple of local shops who would sell it to me at less than that…if only they had one in stock!

So, while I am here hoping a Tokina turns up on a nearby shelf soon, I notice a review of the Tamron 10-24mm on dpreview.com. This looks like a sweet lens also, it has a focusing motor, the largest zoom range of them all, a decent price and shouldn’t be hard to procure. The reviewer points out that it’s a bit too soft in the corners and maximum aperture is only f/3.5-4.5, but it’s a step above the Sigma anyway. On the other hand, the luminosity and sharpness of the Tokina still make it my preferred choice, but if I have to wait too much, the pendulum might swing once again.

What would you do, dear readers, if you were me?

Unfortunately, this book fulfills this promise only partially. As a disclaimer, let me start by saying that I am not an OFBiz expert, having only had a passing acquaintance with its Persistence Engine, so I am not equipped to judge whether the content of this book is accurate and reasonably complete. I am indeed a beginner with respect to OFBiz, so I should be exactly the right kind of public for this book.

As the beginner that I am, I started reading the book, but soon found it very hard to keep on reading. For one thing, the text does not seem to follow a smooth, linear narrative. Its flow is continuously broken up by the use of very short sections with a big, bold title. Personally, I’d have saved on the ink and paper and coalesced small sections into bigger ones.

Another problem, at least in the early chapters, is the tendency to present simple concepts and examples, together with a promise to explain more in the rest of the chapters. I understand that you cannot present very detailed explanations right at the beginning, but this book goes just a bit overboard in leaving the reader hanging on.

The net effect of this approach is that it makes reading very difficult, after a while. This problem could be overcome by a reader with enough patience and determination, but in my case I soon started to skip sections and to peek ahead to see if there was something more interesting for me.

Sampling around, I came upon Chapter 9, “The Events” and was very perplexed. This s a short chapter which only uses the “event” word twice in the first page, without even explaining what an event is in the context of OFBiz, copies some text from page 117, then switches completely to the topics of security and access control, and of localization, none of which seems particularly event-driven to me. Maybe I am completely missing the meaning of “event” in OFBiz, but this is just one more reason to explain it properly in a beginner’s tutorial.

Another aspect of the book that I was uncomfortable with is that, most of the time, the reader is treated not just as an absolute beginner with OFBiz, but as a beginner with the whole concept of developing Java web applications, to the point of showing him how to download and install the JDK. I would just state that a certain level of knowledge and past experience with the whole platform is a requirement in the preface. Showing how to install the JDK is not going to help anyone here.

To sum it up, my opinion of this book is not very good. Still, all is not bad, and I think it can be a decent tutorial for most parts of OFBiz. Since such a tutorial was definitely needed, it’s a shame “Apache OFBiz Development” succeeds only partially.

Update: “Chapter 10: the Service Engine” is freely available from the publisher’s website.

I wonder whether PZ Myers knows about it

For those who don’t know, Alfresco is the leading Open Source Enterprise Content Management system and is rapidly gaining acceptance in many enterprises, thanks to its rich feature set and ease of implementation.

Given the brisk pace of development of the product over the recent months, a new volume on Alfresco was eagerly awaited by many. This one mostly covers Alfresco 2.2, with some mentions about the new features introduced in version 3.0, whose official release happened shortly after the book was published. So it hit the shelves with a bit of unfortunate timing, but luckily none of the content of the book is to be considered obsolete, as all the APIs that used to work with 2.2 still work with 3.0. Still, a bit more coverage of 3.0 would have been great, but we can hope that maybe more will be added in a second edition.

Speaking of the content that is in this edition, readers will be able to find in-depth coverage of almost all aspects of the Alfresco platform, from a developer point of view. The target audience of the book is indeed developers who want to customize and extend Alfresco, and create new applications on top of it. Good overviews of content modeling, Web Client (Alfresco’s own web-based management console) customizations, behaviors, transformers and extractors, Web Scripts, advanced workflows, and security are provided, with plenty of detailed examples of configurations and API usage.

A long chapter is dedicated to the Web Content Management (WCM) add-on product and the book closes with appendixes containing a concise reference of APIs and configuration properties. Thankfully, the author and the publisher did not opt for including a complete reprint of the APIs in order to beef up the page count. Instead, a list of the main Java classes and Javascript root objects is provided, but developers will have to refer to the online documentation for a complete reference.

A section of this reference that many readers will find to be extremely useful is a detailed description of the Lucene search syntax. On the other hand, page 271 talks about a Surf API reference to be found in the appendix, but there isn’t one there. Surf is the new web application framework included in version 3, so they probably couldn’t find the time to provide some documentation for it in time for publishing. As I wrote above, this is understandable, given the timing, but let’s hope the second edition amends these shortcomings.

My overall judgment of the book is definitely positive, anyway. The author does an excellent job of maintaining a good balance between breadth and depth, and the narrative of each chapter manages to capture well the attention of the reader, guiding him from simple concepts to more complex scenarios in a very natural progression. Readers are expected to have a good working knowledge of Java, XML, and Java web application development. Some basic knowledge of Javascript will be useful too.

If I have a specific complaint about the content is that the index is too thin and many concepts are not referenced there. This is a defect that does not compromise the overall usefulness of the book, however.

The author, Jeff Potts, is an accomplished ECM consultant and long-time Alfresco expert. You can read more from him at his website ecmarchitect.com.

I have been given permission by the publisher to make a PDF copy of Chapter 3, Working with Content Models available for download. Just click here if you want to read it.

Vatican opposes de-criminalising same sex unions -Times Online: “The Vatican has said it opposes a European Union proposal for a United Nations declaration formally condemning discrimination against homosexuals, which it claims would ‘de-criminalise’ same sex unions.

Monsignor Celestino Migliore, the Holy See’s permanent observer at the UN, said the Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church forbade ‘unjust discrimination’ against homosexuals. However outlawing discrimination by means of a UN declaration meant that states which did not recognise same sex marriages would come under pressure to do so.

All countries of the European Union have signed a draft declaration drawn up by France, which currently holds the rotating EU Presidency, condemning “discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity”. France is due to submit the draft declaration at the UN General Assembly on 10 December, the sixtieth anniversary of the UN declaration of human rights.

Over 80 countries in the world currently outlaw same-sex relations, with punishments range from short prison sentences to life imprisonment and even death by execution.”

Let me see if I get this right: 80 countries discriminate unjustly against their citizens on the basis of their sexual orientation alone. The EU wants to stop this, at least verbally. The Vatican, on the other hand, opposes this resolution, basically because it thinks it would put pressure on some of the discriminators.

The point is that the proposed resolution does not endorse same-sex marriage in any way. So the Vatican does not want the UN to condemn states who harass, imprison, torture and kill homosexual, because it thinks doing so would put undue pressure on states who do not recognize gay marriage, including those states, such as Italy, who signed the declaration?

Are you fucking kidding me? Can there be an organization which is more abject, twisted and morally disgusting than the Catholic Church?

Well, I guess one could reply that any church or any form of organized religion is similarly despicable, and one would have a point, I’m afraid.

For those who do not speak Italian, the title is a bad pun on the name of Monsignor Migliore. “Migliore” is Italian for “better”.

I am sure I will find some project where I will be able to use it again, but for now just let me extend my best congratulations to everyone involved.

P.S.: We need a logo! Anyone interested in designing one?

That seems not to be the case, if any idiot with an axe to grind, like Daniel Henninger, can simply write down a list of fallacies and non-sequiturs, depicting an alternative universe that has no basis in reality, and still get published.

Witness this column, where he can do no better than to blame atheists and secularists, and the war they are supposedly waging against Christmas, for the current financial meltdown. As if your poor, wrecked, fucked-up, war-mongering country, had not been run for the past eight years by a gang of corrupt, self-professed Christians, whose ideological pillars were evangelical faith and unbridled laissez-faire.

And now, when you are so deeply in shit because of these people and of the evangelical base that contributed to elect them, you Mr. Henninger have the gall to ask for more of the same? You are so completely out of your mind, Sir!

Also, you claim that “responsibility, restraint and remorse” were the ballast that stabilized free markets, and that somehow religious people possess these qualities in larger quantity than no-religious ones.

Bullshit! I say.

The only quality that the people governing financial institutions and big companies have ever exhibited is remorse. Naturally, some of them, show some form of remorse after the damage is done and exposed. Witness Ken Lay (a good Christian, by all accounts).

They seldom, if ever, demonstrated responsibility, and only the force of the law taught them some restraint.

Blaming the descent of secular values from the North onto the good, old religious values of the South for this situation is blaming the victim for the crime, which just adds insult to injury. The reason why restraint was lost is not because of a supposed decadence in moral values fostered by the “war on Christmas”. It’s because the gang of thugs you elected for governing your country, Mr. Henninger, lifted all forms of regulation in order to benefit their cronies, creating the biggest example of a privately-run socialist state in the process. A state where profits are private and losses are public.

And all of this while lighting up Christmas trees and going to church every Sunday.

We are going to be talking about JBoss solutions, of course, and about our approach to Agile methodologies. All while enjoying a nice meal in one of Milan’s best restaurants.

I’m sure you don’t want to miss this opportunity, so register early to ensure you can have one of the few available seats.

Thus we managed to see some new faces and refresh the memory of old ones. These two days were also filled with enthusiasm, friendship, and community spirit. Overall a very positive balance, as you can see from the number of stickers that were put on the “glad” side of the “Mad, Sad, Glad” wall we put up at the end. Most of the “sad” and “mad” cards actually had to do with the weather and general lack of time for doing all the things we wanted to do tigether. So we all agreed that we should probably repeat this event soon, like maybe six months from now, in Amsterdam.

Today’s announcement from CEO Mike Volpi marks an important milestone towards this elusive goal: you can now watch Joost in your browser, even though it still requires the download and installation of a plugin, so this is not yet the promised Flash-based version. I understand it will eventually come, but this version at least gives you a first impression of things to come. Better than nothing, I guess.

This is good, and I sincerely hope it will really make Joost popular, at last. What is less good is that the choice of programs is still quite anemic, at least in Europe (but I know it’s much wider in the US, blame the majors and their being anal retentive with rights).

Another sore point is that, even after all this time, navigation among channels still sucks. Is it really hard to present shows according to the series they belong to? Channels usually contain several series, but I might be interested in just one of them, so why is it that I can’t get, say, all episodes of Total Recall 2070 on a single page?

I hope they’re reading this and will correct this oversight soon. As for the rest, keep up the good work, as I think the idea is still cool and sound.

Sadly, Roman Catholics and their bozo-in-a-funny-hat jefe supremo, El Papa Ratzo, usually fail this test, as exemplified once again by the recent brouhaha raised around an art exhibit held in Italy, where a statue of a crucified frog is on display. The silly Pope itself wrote a letter calling for censorship of the frog and the head of the local council even started a hunger strike. Too bad for them, I guess, as the museum board voted to keep the frog on display until the end of the exhibit and not bend over backwards to please the would-be censors, as too often happens in Italy and elsewhere. Kudos to them!

I think I should petition the Italian government to prohibit the display of crucifixes in public places: seeing an image of a man tortured and killed in the most horrible way deeply offends my sentiments, so it’s my right to demand that it be censored, right?

I also would like certain vignettes that appeared in a certain Danish newspaper to be censored as well, not to mention the display of beef in supermarkets, as it deeply offends Hindu religious sentiments.

You can read more about the whole affair on Pharyngula. Minor nit: Bolzano (Bözen in German) is actually in Italy, not Germany, though in a region where the majority speaks German, so the confusion is understandable.