ZD's random thoughts

A lot of you have been using Confluence from Atlassian, which is a great tool for content collaboration. In order to get users involved in the process of collaboration, the system has to be made simple enough to use. Cumbersome software drives normal people away.

One key point is the ease of editing wiki pages. Few of us can remember all the wiki markup tags correctly. Atlassian has addressed this problem by introducing the office connector. With the help from this connector, you could use your native Office editor to edit wiki pages. To make things even better, Confluence provides Office connector support on multiple OSes, including Windows, Linux, and Mac, which talks to Microsoft Office, Open Office, and/or NeoOffice.

Sounds exciting? Yes, except the default WebDav Launcher plug-in from Confluence does not work under Firefox 3.5 (I am using 3.5.7 as of this writing). Luckily, there is a fix for it. You can download the latest Firefox add-on from here.

Another issue for Mac users. Apparently only NeoOffice is support in Mac OS X. Microsoft Office for Mac 2008 does not work. I tried to change the doc handler to Office for Mac in the WebDav Launcher, but Word always open an empty page. Could this mean WEBDAV is not directly supported in Office for Mac?

RESTEasy, CXF, Jersey, or Restlet?

Sometimes people are confused over the currency names from east Asia – Chinese Yuan, Japanese Yen, and Korean Won. These names sound similar.

They do sound alike for a reason – they came from the exact same Chinese character 元(everyday form)，圆(simplified Chinese)，or 圓(traditional Chinese). In Japan, the corresponding Kanji has a new form of 円.

As of today, 1 Yuan (Renminbi) = 12.94 Yen = 168.55 Won = 0.1465 USD

Image via Wikipedia

Google Chrome for Mac’s recent dev update 4.0.249.30 was promoted to Beta today. This means you can directly download Chrome for Mac from Google’s main Chrome site instead of dev channel.

I have been using the dev version since it was out. There have been a lot of issues in the beginning but the Chrome team has managed to get rid of major ones. I would recommend Chrome for Mac for everyday work.

According to TechCrunch, Gizmo5 is part of Google now. That implies Google Voice will have more features.

Yes, it also means I might be able to make VoIP calls on my Droid soon.

Image via Wikipedia

This morning I picked up a Droid from my the local VZW store. My iPhone was out of contract and I have been looking forward to an android phone.

Overall, I like this phone

• It seems to be more responsive compared to my iPhone.
• Plus it has two apps I have been wanting – Google Voice and Google Maps Navigation.
• I like android os.

Issues I am having:

• Verizon Wireless’s 3G coverage is worse than AT&T in my basement, contrary to what they claimed in the commercials.
• It seems only one Google calendar is supported (sync-ed), although multiple gmail accounts can be added into the phone.
• (normal) Yahoo mails are not supported by default.
• On iPhone, you can see the number of unread emails, texts, etc, in a red circle attached to the application. There is no such information on Droid.
• I actually do not need the built-in keyboard since I have been used to iPhone’s software keyboard.
• Lack of (other) decent apps, compared to what I had on my iPhone.

I will try it for some more time and decide whether to keep it.

One of the major offerings from Amazon Web Service (AWS) is Simple DB, similar to Google’s bigtable, which is not a relational database. Some people have managed to migrated their applications to SDB in order to move their application to the Amazon cloud. Many other people who could not/would not convert their relational DB back-end to SDB installed MySQL on the EC2 instances instead, then again, they started to worry about how to persist the data directory on Amazon EBS. It was some additional pain indeed.

Nice thing is that Amazon today announced Amazon Relational DB Service(rdf), based on MySQL. Now people do not have to google the “best practice” to persist on EBS without compromising performance. Hopefully this will drive more people to Amazon’s AWS.

If you are on the dev channel, your Chrome will be upgraded automatically.

There are some new features as well as some bugfixes. New features include enabling “Edit Search Engine” menu item,  and “default browser”.

Performance-wise, it seems this version has a smaller toll on the CPU compared to previous ones.

I test drove the latest nightly build of Chrome/Chromium for Mac dev version. Interestingly, the version number is 4 now (4.0.202.0 to be exact).

Apparently there are improvements over the previous versions. Noticeably, Flash player is getting better – now I can see Flash animations on most sites. And the IME problem was fixed, too. I can input other languages in text box now!

Still, it is not quite there for production. For example, a process called “Chromium Helper” is using 99% of CPU when I was on gmail. After playing around it for a while, I decided to stick to Firefox and Safari.

That is exactly what Chrome team has been telling people. Let’s hope the next version will be better.

Since I got my first Macbook Pro one week ago, the overall experience has been pretty positive. One of most impressive feature I like is quick switch from/to sleep mode. In Windows (and Linux) it usually takes more than 10 seconds but it takes than 1 second on Mac OS. When I touch the touchpad, the computer wakes up from sleep and becomes up-and-running almost instantly.

Apple computers are great. But sometimes you just could not find your favorite app on a Mac, MS Visio being one of them. When you do not want to switch to a different machine, you have options – visualization. There are several different products on the market – VMWare Fusion 2 and VirtualBox 3 being the most popular.

Both of them have some nice feature sets. I like “Unity” mode in Fusion (the counterpart in VirtualBox is called “seamless mode”). VMWare has more interesting integrations, such as mirroring Mac home directory, iSight under Windows, to name a few. VirtualBox, on the other hand, is more configurable via the command line.

However, VMWare Fusion does not support Windows 7 yet, at least officially. The official Fusion blog suggested to use “Windows Server 2008″ as the profile when installing Windows 7 beta and RC. As a result, the above nice features are not available – home directory mirroring and iSight under Windows. In this case, Dropbox will be helpful if you want to share documents between these OSes.

Performance-wise, VirtualBox seems to be the winner. Windows applications in VirtualBox (MS Office 2007 and Visio) are more responsive and the host OS is not slowed down by any means. Windows apps in Fusion feel a little bit sluggish, given the same configuration (1G of physical mem). Please note, these are not really scientific performance analysis – they are totally my subjective feeling of “responsiveness”.

In summary, Fusion 2 and VirtualBox 3 are both great products. I am hoping when Windows 7 is officially released, VMWare Fusion will have more integration with it. Oh BTW, Fusion costs $70 and Virtualbox is free for personal use.