The latest release of coolest newest slickest RSS news aggregator, Beggregator is out. The 0.2 release includes tons of new features and bug fixes. You have to check this out, even if you are happy with your current RSS reader. JIRA for tracking features and bugs for Beggregator @ http://jira.eugenebelyaev.com.

Great job Eugene. Can’t wait to try out the plugin version of IDEA 4.0 🙂

Looks like a pretty good week for BEA Systems. The stock (NASDAQ: BEAS) is up a lot in the recent day and I caught a few decent press releases about Portal and JRockit.

Saw this article about the eWeek Portal article. Also caught the JRockit JVM Benchmark on TSS.

I know from personal experience that JRockit totally rocks. We just migrated our production applications to new servers running RedHat Linux Advanced Server 2.1 and WebLogic 8.1. The performance improvement that JRockit provides is just amazing. I am also trying to convince our JBoss folks to run it under JRockit instead of the Sun JVM. Will be interesting to see if BEA provides a JRockit implementation for Solaris. Talk about a hot political potato. 🙂 If I had anything to say about it, I would recommend BEA release a Solaris version of BEA. Sun has done nothing but screw BEA, specially when BEA is or was responsible for tons of Sun hardware sales. Another reason Sun will not be a factor in the next few years.

My MSNBC News Alert starting flashing, and my Pavlovian response was to click the little red blinking icon in my system tray. The first article that caught my eye was titled ‘Outsourcing to usurp more U.S. jobs‘. A lot of us in the IT industry are dealing with this reality. Most of us work for companies that are either looking at or have already started outsourcing development offshore.

The CNET article quotes a Gartner study and states that one out of every 10 jobs at information technology companies and at companies that provide IT services will move to emerging markets. It also forecasts that one out of every 20 jobs within internal IT departments will shift overseas by the end of 2004.

I guess this is just another reality that we will face in the next few years. Many of us may be replaced or outsourced to some offshore development shop that will do the same job for cheaper. The manufacturing sector faced the same problem in the 80’s and 90’s where a lot of blue collar jobs went to third-world countries for purely economical reasons. I’m sure the same thing will happen to the technology industry as development is slowing becomes a commodity. Companies will look for the cheapest option and that is just a reality of this global economy.

I like Dave’s take on this whole issue. In an article entitled, How To Keep Your Job, Dave Thomas talks about how we need to reexamine our position in the face of these changes and figure out how we add value as individuals, and how can we position ourselves to be effective and attractive in the new marketplace.

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Mozilla Firebird 0.6.1 has been released and here are some reasons to switch to the Mozilla Firebird browser.

If you ask, as I did – ‘What’s the difference between Mozilla Firebird and Mozilla?’ The FAQ answers: Mozilla (Application Suite) is a complete suite of web related applications, such as a browser, a mail/news client, a chat client and much more. Mozilla Firebird is just a browser, which makes it a better choice if you already have a mail client for example. Also, since Mozilla Firebird is smaller than the whole Mozilla suite, it’s faster and easier to use.

Just caught this article this article about Sun proposing a new Web services specs on CNET’s News.com. Looks like Sun, Oracle, Iona Technologies, Fujitsu Software and Arjuna Technologies will submit the specifications, the Web Services Composite Applications Framework (WS-CAF), to W3C or OASIS for acceptance. Never heard of WS-CAF before.

To quote the article, “WS-CAF, which compromises three individual specifications, proposes a mechanism for coordinating transactions across many machines in multistep business processes. The authors of the specifications hope simplified interactions between Web services will allow companies to assemble business applications with Web services more quickly“. That sounds interesting.

What’s even more interesting is the absence of BEA, IBM and Microsoft from this process. Apparently Microsoft and IBM were invited to participate but decided to decline. I wonder if this is going to be another WS-I like mess.

O’Reilly has just released iPod: The Missing Manual. Written by New York Times tech columnist J. D. Biersdorfer, this book is a collection of useful tips, tricks, and shortcuts.

This book covers all iPod models for both Mac and Windows, including the new 15/30GB iPods. It is also a guide to iTunes, MusicMatch Jukebox Plus, and even the new iTunes Music Store. The book is also supposed to highlight the versatility of iPod where you can use it as a PDA, hard drive, e-book reader, and game platform. Can’t wait to get my copy and learn more about my shiny new iPod.

Found this on TSS — TSS is hosting a Tech Talk with Gregor Kiczales on Aspect Oriented Programming.

Gregor lead the PARC team that developed AOP and AspectJ at Xerox. In this interview, Gregor looks at the history of AOP and the current challenges it faces moving forward. He discusses the meaning of crosscutting structure, the standardization of AOP, how AOP and OOP fit together, and addresses syntactical issues surrounding AOP. He looks at the current state of AspectJ and predicts the impact AOP will have on software development.

Great interview – Check it out: Interview on Aspect Oriented Programming.

I have used FeedReader as my default news/feed aggregator for a while now. FeedReader works just fine and is a pretty decent product. But I had to switch when I first discovered Beggregator. Beggregator is a great feed reader written in Java by Eugene Belyaev, President and CTO of JetBrains – the makers to the BEST DAMN JAVA IDE IN THE WORLD, IntelliJ IDEA.

Beggregator is totally under construction and Eugene is looking for feedback on additional features. Please check it out and offer him feedback on features, enhancements, etc. One of the neat things about Beggregator is the much talked about ‘three-pane layout‘. Check out the latest version or check out the screenshot.

I saw this on Cedric’s blog first – BEA has released a WebLogic Aspect Framework that is based on AspectJ and is made of a set of predefined pointcuts that WebLogic users can simply reuse and write aspects for. You can download the framework at the dev2dev site

I haven’t kept up with the AOP ‘revolution’ and so can’t really comment on it. I have been trying to learn more about AOP to see if it really lives up to the hype. In fact, Merrick was blogging about this and had a great article titled Understanding AOP. Very concise article that really does a great job about explaining Aspect Orientated Programming. In fact, he sums up AOP as ‘fundamentally about separation of concern‘. Love that. Great way to describe AOP. The Spiders were also talking about AOP in their Geek Book Club, but I couldn’t make any of the sessions due to work conflicts 😦 Sorry Dave, Rossi and Vibhu.

Just caught this on CNBC Squawk Box this morning — Buy.com launched a new digital music download service called BuyMusic.com. My first reaction was finally!! A solution for us non-MAC (i.e. non cool) people. Here are some basic facts about this new service. They will charge 79 cents per song vs. Apple’s 99 cents. The major problem is that BuyMusic.com only supports Windows Media format of audio and NOT MP3. This makes my shiny new iPod useless.. 😦

If this service is only going to offer WMA files, what makes it different from Pressplay that offers that same thing and is much cheaper? I think Pressplay offers unlimited downloads for $9.95 per month. I know Microsoft is also working on a similar service, which will also offer WMA files as well. I just wish Apple would start supporting the Windows users with their music store.