Google container data center tour

Listen to the article Google container data center tour as MP3

First presented at the Google Efficient Data Centers Summit, hosted at Google headquarters in Mountain View, CA on April 1, 2009.

Google App Engine - Early Look at Java Language Support

Listen to the article Google App Engine - Early Look at Java Language Support as MP3

This video introduces the latest features of App Engine, including an early look at Java language support. Andrew Bowers will walk through the development of a sample Java application, from creation to deployment.

New transliteration bots make it easy to chat in Indian languages

Listen to the article New transliteration bots make it easy to chat in Indian languages as MP3

Have you ever wished that you could chat with your family and friends in your native language? Sometimes there's just no substitute for expressing a thought in your own language. Google Talk now has transliteration bots that will convert text from English to Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil or Telugu. Think of a bot as an invited guest to your chat session that will transliterate what you type in English to the right local script. For those who are not familiar with transliteration, it is a service provided by Google India that allows you to type in Indian languages using phonetically equivalent English script (it is also available on our labs page,orkut scraps and blogger). If you're chatting in Hindi, when you type 'haal kaisa hai janab ka?' the en2hi.translit@bot.talk.google.com bot will reply in Hindi as 'हाल कैसा है जनाब का?'

There are currently 5 transliteration bots - Hindi (en2hi.translit), Kannada (en2kn.translit), Malayalam (en2ml.translit), Tamil (en2ta.translit) and Telugu (en2te.translit), and remember that their names end with "@bot.talk.google.com". To use one of these bots follow these three steps:

1) First add the bot that you want to your friend's list. (For example, add en2hi.translit@bot.talk.google.com for Hindi). You just need to do this once.

2) Start a chat session with your friend

3) Convert the chat session to a group chat and invite the bot to it.

Read this to know more about the bots. 

See : 2 easy ways to Transliterate English to Malayalam

See : Mozhi Keyman

See : Google Indic Transliteration

See the screen shot below,

Java SE 6 Update 10 is Officially Here

Listen to the article Java SE 6 Update 10 is Officially Here as MP3

A nice article form theserverside.com , which explians some of the new exciting features of JDK 6u10.

What’s special about the 6u10 that a minor release gets this much attention? After years of failures in the client space, this release is promising to reverse that trend. The message was clear; the release number maybe minor but the changes are major.

To drive the point home, Danny’s first statement was that this release is about supporting rich client content much better than what we’ve come to expect. To this end, this update has had a major overhaul of its runtime environment. The JDK has been in beta for about a year and in that time it has been downloaded more than 1,000,000 times. Most notability, this version of the JDK will be the oldest to be accepted by Google’s new browser Chrome.

In addition to the hundreds of bug fixes, the 6u10 is being touted to be lighter and more nibble full of features that create a more consumer friendly experience. Another concern was necessary support for JavaFX.

One of the biggest changes comes with the new WebBrowser plugin, Unlike the old plugin, the new plugin runs outside of the browsers process space. The advantages of moving the JRE to run out of process are numerous. The biggest is increased stability. The coolest that you can now drag your applets out of the browser and have them continue to run even after the browser has been shutdown.

Applet startup time is improved with the new plugin. The old plugin started the JRE in the browsers main event thread. WIth the JRE running out of process, the even thread is no longer tied up. The bad news is that the new plug-in is targeted to more modern browsers such as IE 7 and FireFox 3.0.

One of the biggest headaches is how Java has been traditionally delivered to the end users. This has all changed with this version of the JRE. Updates from the browser will happen more automatically without much interactions with the end user. In addition, the JRE has been broken down into a kernel, core classes to Java Plug-In and Java Web Start, and other commonly needed client side APIs. All other bits of the JRE will be downloaded in a low priority background thread. The net effect is that a clean install of the JRE has been reduced to 4 megs.

In addition future updates will be delivered via a patching mechanism that eliminates the need to download the entire JRE.Other performance enhancements include a mechanism that attempts to keep the disk cache hot with the JRE. This can result in a significant decrease in startup time.

Graphics has also been greatly improved with the introduction of Nimbus, the eventual replacement to (still the default system) Ocean. In addition to giving widgets a more modern look, Nimbus signals a switch away from raster to vector graphics. This reliance will allow graphics to perfectly adapt to future higher resolution monitors.

If with all this news you are feeling like an orphaned Mac user or Linux user, that feeling isn’t going to get better any time soon. While one from Sun or apparently from Apple, can speak for when the 6u10 may make to Mac land, recent history has demonstrated that we could be waiting for some time. The big sticking point with Linux is the need to integrate the XRender pipeline. Until 6u10 is released to OSS, that can’t happen.

Even with these hickups, the future of the platform on client machines looks bright. My measure will be when I stop getting Java install questions from my mother. Until then, we can only hope that the realization is as good as the dream.

See JDK 6u10 Release note.

ICE JNI Registry : Windows Registry API Native Interface

Listen to the article ICE JNI Registry : Windows Registry API Native Interface as MP3

The JNIRegistry package is a Java native interface for the Windows Registry API. This allows Java program to access, modify, and export Windows Registry resources.The com.ice.jni.registry package has been placed into the public domain. Thus, you have absolutely no licensing issues to consider. You may do anything you wish with the code. The package will work with Java 1.1 and greater, and uses the Java Native Interface. The package also includes a DLL that implements the interface. The package includes the pre-built DLL (debug and release), source code (both the Java and the DLL's C code), as well as the compiled Java classes.

Downloads

Download the WinZip-ed package. (FTP)

Download the WinZip-ed package. (HTTP)

You can now directly view the JNIRegistry source code and source code documentation online.

http://www.trustice.com/java/jnireg/index.shtml

Courtesy : Tim Endres ,ICE Engineering, Inc