Usually, when I complete a program, not matter how small, I experience a fulfillment of having done something. Everyone knows that it feels great to build things, may it be a Lego town, a Snowman or a simple program to upload blog articles.

This time the only thing I felt was nothing but a hollow emptiness. I’ve spend a good week to understand Enterprise Java Beans. Now I’ve completed a huge part of the requirements and was watching the debug output of my program, waiting patiently for some kind of satisfaction… nothing.

Before working on the EJB assignment, I was working on a password cracker. It took me several days to discover that I had a silly bug and my program from the first day would have done well. Even then I had a feeling of satisfaction. It was fun building the cracker, I could play with a bunch of nice algorithms and do some bit-fiddling. It kept me working for hours without noticing it, even the completion of a small part (a nifty loop for example) gave me the motivation to dig deeper and solve the riddle.

Often the source of this kind of fulfillment is not the end-product itself but the way to get to it, or the way it was build.

I don’t know why it’s completely different with the EJB assignment. One guess is that the whole thing is so complex that I don’t have the feeling of understanding. I could not explain (in great detail) how Enterprise Beans work, not to speak how to implement them. It’s a pity, the aim of EJB is to ease the programmers tasks, now the programming is really easier (but counterintuitive in some cases), but the configuration of the whole thing is insane. I’m pretty sure that I spent 80-90 % of my time figuring out how to write the deployment descriptors and the configuration.

Addendum: I’ve been talking to Ben about this issue. He, as always a step ahead, said that the upcoming EJB 3 specification simplifies the whole story. It’s funny to see the typical complexity curve – at first it goes up until the users don’t get it anymore, then it goes down to an acceptable level. Why don’t we throw out the complexity at first? Ahh, no – that would be too good… .

Time to quote my favorite again:

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The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay. —Sir Antony Hoare (oh so true!)

A while ago I started reading Russell Beatties Weblog so, obviously mobile applications caught my interest.

According to his post here 800 million mobiles were sold this year alone, (500 million with camera) – compare these values to 800 million internet PCs (absolute value)!

So it’s pretty much obvious where the next big thing of information technology is: Mobiles!

A lot of products and services got published lately, here a list of interesting and cool applications and services. The list is pretty much Nokia – especially Series 60 – biased since I own a Nokia 6680

Apps:

• Geominder is one of the most innovative applications I found! It reminds you at a specific location instead at a specific time! Cool idea – it doesn’t even need GPS.
• Nokia Sensor it’s a nice demo for Bluetooth applications. While reading their intro I thought of a small Webserver with my personal homepage available via Bluetooth – nice idea!
• KHTML (Safari) Browser for Series 60 3rd ed. mobiles I’m pretty jealous of the 3rd edition of the Series 60 mobiles (mine is a 2nd ed.), but the browser is so cool – you have to watch the demo.
• Nokias Mobile Search is a simple meta search engine.
• There is even a Python implementation available!
• Romeo is a plugable OS X Application. It allows controlling your Mac via a compatible Bluetooth enabled phone – you can also define actions if you come into Bluetooth availability or leave it (eg start playing your favorite music).
• Virgin Radio free for your 3G phone! I wish data would not be that expensive (1,5 Euro per Megabyte – crazy!) now with the ability to use bluetooth as internet connection it’s a semi mobile radio :-).
• You don’t like these Java games? Me too, so go out and grab a GameBoy emulator :-) (somewhere is a free version of this emulator, but I couldn’t find it – only it’s source ).
• Now something completely useless (or is it?): a real HTTP Server for your mobile! Incredible!

Here is a larger list of free mobile apps.

Services:

• Google Search for mobile devices.
• Google Maps is nice, but due to the lack of maps for Vienna pretty useless :-(
• Bloglines/AskJeeves has a mobile version of their online RSS reader.
• Technorati is also available as a mobile version.

Mobile Series60

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The future is so obviously in mobiles, why the hell are so many startups still screwing around on the desktop? Morons. —Russell Beattie