It’s the 25th birthday of the PC (Personal Computer) today. It was announced on the 12th August 1981 (when I was one), and its impact since is well-understood (Wikipedia has more detail on its history). As a recent Economist article makes clear, it was an unusual product for IBM, and defined part of the company’s image for a long time (the PC business is now owned by Lenovo).

The death of the PC, often seen as the thickest of thick clients, has been predicted before on several occasions. One of the more prominent was by Sun and others in the late 80s and early 90s, when they claimed that Networking computing (based on thin clients and powerful servers) was going to make the PC redundant. They were perhaps ahead of their time, probably because the network just wasn’t up to the job yet, but there’s a possibility that they may yet be right.

Java is a pretty robust language for the objectives it seems to set itself - being a clean and easy-to-learn object-oriented language - although the slippery slope towards featuritis is very apparent in 5.0. The automatic garbage collection, in particular, is a godsend for someone migrating from C++.

But there are still plenty of little niggles that could be rectified:

1. Make the structure of the program dependent on indentation, like Python, and get rid of the curly braces everywhere. It makes sense.

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In an attempt to lighten my mood from writing grumbles about big government and security, I notice that Darren Rowse at ProBlogger mentions that his local cafe has recently reinvigorated their menu, and seems to be finding more success as a result (he then creates a rather tenuous link to re-invigorating a blog by a similar method). Another vague data point for my menu study? Sadly, he doesn’t say exactly what they did to the menu to achieve this. Incidentally, ProBlogger is a meta-blog: blogging about blogging, particularly how to make money out of it professionally.

Whatever it’s possible to say about Virgin Trains’ unreliability and high prices, they have shown a lot of ingenuity today:

‘Virgin West Coast has said it will accept London to Manchester air tickets on its trains.’

Of course it is good of Virgin to do this - PR moves don’t have to be cynical. It’s also a clever attempt to persuade people that the train makes sense, though - especially for London to Manchester, where the benefit of flying has always been marginal anyway. As airline travel becomes even more awkward (even when today’s restrictions are relaxed - let’s hope they are soon), the train will become increasingly attractive. It’s a shame, because air travel could be so much friendlier if it were calibrated for a reasonable level of risk rather than zero tolerance. But that doesn’t seem realistic in the foreseeable future.

The irony is that I was discussing Shaving and Carry-on not that long ago - it turned out then that I was being over-cautious - but it now seems I was being naïve. It turns out that the UK government thinks that we should be forbidden from carrying pretty much anything on planes because of a ‘critical’ threat (Bruce Schneier has written about the stupidity of these threat levels before). All I can say is, don’t believe everything you are told. When we can hold the government accountable because they actually give us some concrete information, that might change things, but I don’t think we should expect that any time soon. This is why I’m a libertarian.

As I wrote previously, I went to see the world premiere of METRO-polis in Leicester Square recently. Dave has now posted METRO-polis on Google Video. You can see his film from last year, Undo, as well (which is even better, in my humble opinion).

Can I have my fiver now, Dave? :)

Apparently Bono wants the rest of us to fund his Make Poverty History campaign, but not himself. There’s no reason why he should pay for this, but perhaps it’s time for him to drop the lecturing and recognise that enforced charity isn’t that liberal.

I shall continue to wear my t-shirt with pride.

To recap, WebSphere ESB provides a bunch of re-usable mediations out of the box that you can use in your mediation flows to alter message content (XSLT mediation), filter on it (Message Filter mediation), and so on. However, it also provides the facility to create your own mediations, called ‘custom’ mediations, in mediation flows. Typically, you’d use these when the provided mediations can’t do something you want to do. They are SCA components implemented by a Java class, so appear in the assembly diagram for a mediation module (where you’ll see that the mediation flow component references them), but they also appear in the mediation flow itself as a mediation. They provide an execute method, which has a DataObject as a parameter (message coming in) and return a DataObject (message going out). This is where your logic goes. Normally you don’t need to worry too much about all of this, as WebSphere Integration Developer makes it easy to create a custom mediation in your flow like any other mediation, and creates a Java skeleton for you - all you have to do is define the method. You can’t specify any of your own parameters on a custom mediation, so typically you’d use these where you are doing something specific that you’re unlikely to re-use. Nigel Daniels has written an excellent article on how to implement custom mediations.

From an Ofcom letter I just received with my phone bill:

‘…on 1st August 2006, Ofcom, the UK telecoms regulator, ended the formal controls on the cost of phone line rentals and calls from BT. This will leave all phone companies, including BT, free to set their own retail prices for consumers.’

Hoorah! It’s taken a long time, but it’s good to see Ofcom finally taking this important step towards maturity in the UK telecoms market. Less government interference in such a crucial technological industry can only be a good thing. Whether they will take the next logical step and dismantle the now redundant tax-funded part of their organisation remains to be seen.

More worrying menu indicators, this time based on an actual Chinese takeaway menu that arrived through my door:

• A massive 222 items in total.

• Numbers next to the items.

• ‘Orders over £12 - Free Curry Samosa’. Hmm, how Chinese. In fact, there is an entire Curry section, including a Chips option.

• The menu has plenty of ‘Improved recipe!’ and ‘New!’. Does this come from the McDonald’s school of menu design?

But it would be unfair to mock this menu without trying it. So I have just finished eating Fried Duck with Ginger and Spring Onion (#69), and Egg Fried Rice (#143). And the verdict: 7/10. OK, but not superb - the rice was a bit dry, and the sauce a bit greasy. They also inadvertently added on one more indicator during the ordering process: I was told it would take an unnervingly precise 12 minutes before it was ready.