Steven Yong's Weblog

Ever suffered from the hard-to-use Date and Calendar parsing and formatting API? A new JSR has been submitted to solve this problem, which lead by Stephen Colebourne.

The main goal is to build upon the lessons learned from the first two APIs (Date and Calendar) in Java SE, providing a more advanced and comprehensive model for date and time manipulation.

Dell Inc. opened its first global business center outside the United States in Malaysia's high-tech city of Cyberjaya to provide 24-hour engineering and technology support to its branches worldwide. Dell says the center will employ 600 people by year-end and 1,000 within five years.

Malaysia was picked over other countries such as China and India because of its skilled work force, conducive business environment, robust infrastructure and the government's commitment to the information technology industry.

After defeating Kim Clijsters, whom she had never won before in two straight sets, Maria is going to meet Serena Williams in the final and looking forward to her third grand slam title.

A few days back I got a piece of instant message from my colleague: "http://chinese2.cari.com.my/myforum/viewthread.php?tid=764519&pid=23649427&page=1&extra=page%3D1#pid23649427", nothing more...

Since he didn't seem like telling the nature of the web page, therefore I asked him what's the link about and he answered "Just read it".

Now imagine your inbox consists of whole lot of emails with subject line "Just read it".

Sorry, I've already got so many junk email and sms everyday, please don't offer me any more junk instant massage. Just because he is my friend doesn't mean I have to click every link he sends me, he will have to at least tell me what is it about in order for me to click on it.

The CEO of DocDoku, Florent Garin was telling the story about his Java Web Start-based document management system using GlassFish as application server.

As a conclusion, the Java EE 5.0 + GlassFish + NetBeans package is definitely a killer platform for developing and deploying your enterprise applications and every serious java enterprise developer should give it a try!

Based on the agreement, Sun will use Intel chip in some of its servers while Sun will still use AMD chips in some products. Previously, Sun's used AMD chips exclusively in its x86 server products. On the other hand, Intel endorsement of Sun Solaris operation system is also an important victory for Sun. Read more of the story here.

The Open Source Development Labs will combine with the Free Standards Group to form a new Linux Foundation to streamline operations and represent Linux versus its challengers with one voice. Jim Zemlin, executive director of the new foundation said:

the foundation will continue to supply the Linux Standard Base, an agreed upon set of system functionality that is supported by major Linux distributions. Keeping the Linux core functionality following a standard allows developers to produce applications that will run with different versions of Linux without modifications. The foundation will also provide the Linux Developer Network, which provides information and specifications on the services and interfaces that work with Linux.

When you develop a normal Java application, make sure you beware the System.getProperty("user.home") and instruct the user properly on how you want them to run your app.

Normally, user.home on Windows XP is C:\Documents and Settings\<your user name>, where on Unix/Linux it is /home/<your user name>. But it is only true when the user is the one who start the application. If the user configure the application to run as system service, by default, on Windows XP, the value of the user.home will be C:\Documents and Settings\LocalService.

This behavior has nothing to be careful of if you as the developer tends not to make use of the user home directory for read/write purpose. Even if you read and write to the directory, it wouldn't cause you problem if you had told the users how should they run the app in the first place, i.e. always as standalone or always as service.

But things get more complicated if the app involves security certs issues. Using the keytool utility in JDK by default importing any cert into the login user home directory, without the user awareness. If the user prefers to run the app as a system service, she have to know how to import the cert into the location different from default, which requires her to do more as an user.