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Showing posts from February, 2008

A(ir) solution in search of a problem

Adobe has just released Ait, its technology supposed to merge the offline/desktop world and web applications, bring the best of both worlds, etc yadda yadda. I found it interesting to watch the comments in various forums. There was some interest, but also concerns (e.g. about security, Air being a vendor lock-in, desktop apps becoming obsolete anyway). However, what struck me most was this: some geeks seem to like Air because it is a cool technology. But hardly anyone seems to like Air because it solves a real problem that someone actually has . There was little talk about real use cases, but rather talk about that Air will create a new way of thinking and incubate apps that we do not even know about, yet. Well, maybe. If you consider Google Gears, which can be considered a technology that solves a similar problem: who is really using it? I never heard of anyone apart from Google Reader. To be fair, I can think of some use cases that actually make sense to me, e.g. combining your deskt

72 characters should be enough for everyone

I just spent valuable minutes of my life wrestling with Java's classpath. One notable finding: no line in a jar file's manifest can be longer than 72 characters (at least until and including Java 5). See here : No line may be longer than 72 bytes (not characters), in its UTF8-encoded form. If a value would make the initial line longer than this, it should be continued on extra lines (each starting with a single SPACE). Oh, boy. And a single space at the beginning. Remember FORTRAN ?