Having fun at J-Fall 2011

This year’s Dutch Java Nerd event called J-Fall was held in Nijkerk, in a beautiful location called “Hart van Holland” . With plenty of sessions by speakers from all over the world it promised to be a great day for Java enthusiasts, at a great location for meeting friends and colleagues. I took a day off from work and it was well worth it.

Bill’s Mosquitoes

Bill Gates found a very good way to get the news reporters to pay attention to the malaria problem. In his talk at the TED conference, he released a few mosquitoes, stating that malaria should not be just for poor people to experience. People who did not see the whole performance may react shocked, because when placed out of context it sounds like an outrageous thing to do.

If you think that’s the case, you should maybe have a look at his talk, available (for free, without registering) at TED.com. You’ll see that the audience is actually laughing when he releases the mosquitoes, and at the end of the talk Bill gets a standing ovation.

In addition to the malaria problem, Bill also makes a very good case about how important good teachers are, and what we can do to help teachers become just that.

Remote Desktop Connection updated

“Remote Desktop Connection.app” allows you to see the desktop of a remote Windows machine on your mac. This application will not update itself automatically, unless you have it installed as part of the Microsoft Office for Mac suite. If you’ve downloaded the 1.0.3 version you probably did not notice that ”Remote Desktop Connection.app” was updated somewhere last year by microsoft.

You can find the latest version of Remote Desktop Connection on the Microsoft Mactopia site. Version 2 is an improvement over 1.0.3 (which I had). Notable differences are:

• Nicer configuration screens, makes configuring your resolution and shares easier.
• Now a Universal Binary, which should improve performance on Intel Macs. I have not noticed improvement, but that’s probably because the network is the bottleneck.
• Supports the new RDC 6.0 protocol used by Vista.
• Can do authentication of the remote machine (if it’s a Vista machine).
• Your Mac printer can be exposed to the Windows machine so you can print documents on your local printer.

I played with it for a while, and apart form the new looks I can not say it’s very different from the 1.0.x version. It could load my old RDC 1.0.3 configuration files. If you need to connect to a Windows desktop from your Mac, this does the job just fine.

Wiimote Whiteboard

For people wanting to have an interactive whiteboard but don’t have the money, Johnny Chung Lee has found the solution. Using a Wiimote, he can track an infrared lightsource (like an LED) and use that to control the mousecursor. I tried some software on the Mac and the PC, and I actually got both to work without too much trouble.

Censorship: here to stay

For those of you who think that media and information are free and uncontroled, guess again. Lately I have been seeing more and more incidents of large corporations hiding information, and even telling other people to hide it for them. I think this is plain wrong, and the guys involved should have been fired or punished otherwise.

If you have information which is of interest to the public, and somebody is making you sign a paper with which he can force you to shut up, you should think twice (and then not do it). Not because of the money, not because of the information itself, but for the sheer principle. Information should not be controled in that way. By anyone. It is dangerous.