Kev's Development Toolbox

May 8, 2012

What did Jobs mean when he said he’d ‘cracked’ the TV format?

Apple has been rumored to be working on an Apple branded TV, and Jobs said about this new device that he’d ‘finally cracked it’, presumably meaning that he found a combination of features or new features that would make the killer Apple TV.

So what exactly did he have in mind? Most recent rumors from someone who claims to have seen an early prototype are that it’s a large flatscreen, with the Apple TV box integrated, a camera to support FaceTime, and Siri technology built in.

That doesn’t sound like a combination that would lead Jobs to say he’d ‘cracked’ it. Cracked what exactly? There must be more to it than just the combination of these components, because at face value that’s not exciting or revolutionary.

If I were to be interested in this product, it’s going to need to project a 3d hologram into the center of my living room. If Steve cracked that, then I’m buying.

May 7, 2012

Jury has partial verdict in favor of Oracle in case against Google

The Jury in the Oracle v Google case over Android has come to a partial verdict in favor of Oracle, but does not have a unanimous verdict for the other questions they were asked by the Judge to answer to arrive at their verdict.

To complicate the partial verdict, the verdict of the first question is only for 1 part of the question (“Has Oracle proven that Google has infringed the overall structure, sequence and organization of copyrighted works?”) and apparently the jury are not able to come to a decision on the second part (“Has Google proven that its use of Oracle’s Java documentation constituted “fair use”?”). Google’s attorneys are therefore asking for a mistrial stating that this question cannot be partially answered.

It’s obviously not clearcut at this point where this is heading, and I imagine this could still swing either way.

If the end result of this case is that it is ruled that an API is Copyrightable, it will be interesting to see what the repercussions of this will be for other follow-on lawsuits.

May 6, 2012

JSTL String test oddity

I’ve come across this multiple times, and for some reason this always catches me out. You’d think being that EL has ‘eq’ and ‘ne’ operators that work with Strings that this should work:

<c:if test="${hello.name ne ''}">
    Hello <c:out value="${hello.name}"/>
</c:if>

This seems to make sense that it would do what you think it should do, but no, it always returns true. The code you’re looking for is using EL operator ’empty’:

<c:if test="${!empty hello.name}">
    Hello <c:out value="${hello.name}"/>
</c:if>

May 4, 2012

Git notes

Typical add/commit/push workflow:

#add local change ready to commit
git add .

#git commit changes to repo
git commit -m "commit message"

#push to remote repo
git push [optional remote repo name here, eg origin, etc]

Find changes committed locally compared with remote repo, i.e. to find what you’ve committed locally but not yet pushed:

git diff --stat [remote repo name]

List associated remote repos and their locations:

git remote -v

Add a new remote repo to an existing local app/repo:

git remote add remotename remote_git_repo_url