八卦天地 — 文学城精选

Forbes reports that CDC Corps China.com will be running Google’s click to play video ads on its English Channel service. Fang Donglei, COO of China.com said in a statement; "Google’s click-to-play video ads and China.com English Channel, working together, represent a significant opportunity in servicing the needs of the foreign community in China."

Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is a control (signaling) protocol developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to manage interactive multimedia IP sessions including IP telephony, presence, and instant messaging. The SIP Servlet Specification (Java Specification Request 116), developed through the Java Community Process, provides a standard Java API programming model for delivering SIP-based services. Derived from the popular Java servlet architecture of Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE is Sun’s new name for J2EE), SIP Servlet brings Internet application development capabilities to SIP solutions.
IT and telecom are converging. Network-IT applications, typically data oriented, are merging with communication applications. The increasing number of Call Me buttons appearing on Webpages is an example of this integration. The SIP Servlet Specification brings a familiar programming model to Java developers for building converged applications. This article gives a step-by-step introduction on how to use SIP Servlet to build a simple echo chat service.

Title of this post will take you to the article "SIP programming for the Java developer" at JavaWorld.

Here is an excellent page where you can find out the capabilities of (almost) all MIDP devices in the market.
If you are using one which is not listed, you can simply download their test client and check the capabilities yourself.

Great link and a must bookmark for the J2ME developers.

Exceptions in Java provide a consistent mechanism for identifying and responding to error conditions. Effective exception handling will make your programs more robust and easier to debug. Exceptions are a tremendous debugging aid because they help answer these three questions:

What went wrong?
Where did it go wrong?
Why did it go wrong?

Here are the three rules for effective exception handling:

1. Be Specific (i.e. Define your custom exception to give more precise information about the exception that has occured).

2. Throw early (if you find an errorneous piece of information/code, throw the exception then and there instead of letting it flow to the next level). e.g. before opening a file check if the fileName string is null and throw an exception before a NullPointerException is thrown with a trace of FileNotFoundException.

3. Catch Late (if you encounter an exception, do not proceed with the remaining tasks if they are related/dependent on the earlier ones).

To read the full article, point to the title of this post.

SysML that stands for Systems Modeling Language grabbed my attention when I was searching for some UML related tools. Sparxsystems has a tool that supports SysML.

If you have ever heard/learnt about it before, you may want to stop reading further

For me, after reading about SysML, it looked like an elder brother of UML and in fact they have similarities in their genes.

Now, what the heck is SysML?
The SysML (Systems Modeling Language) is a domain-specific modeling language for systems engineering applications. It supports the specification, analysis, design, verification and validation of a broad range of systems and systems-of-systems. These systems may include hardware, software, information, processes, personnel, and facilities.

SysML was originally developed as an open source specification project initiated in 2003. The SysML specification is publicly available for download, and includes an open source license for distribution and use.

Wanna learn more? SysML FAQ (linked at the title of this post) is the right place to start.

As for a software engineer, it may not interest much but whats wrong in learning a thing a day

TechCrunch is a blog that introduces cutting-edge web2.0 services and websites. It is subscribed by over 100,000 users on FeedBurner. Cool!

To see what happens right now and also in the future, please go to www.techcrunch.com .

Husband and wife team Edwin Ong and Alex Vikati first met at Stanford, and then founded a company together called Filefish in 1999. They raised $4.6 million in venture funding in 2000, and the company was acquired by Oracle in 2003.

Now they are preparing to launch their second company, CastTV. It is an ambitious effort focused entirely on video search. And that’s not a bad place to be. As we’ve recently written, rich media search is a very hard problem to solve.

A notable success in video search is Truveo, which launched in 2005 and was acquired by AOL in early 2006 for an estimated $50 million or more. Truveo had a unique way of searching video content. First, finding video can be hard, and Truveo does a good job of locating video on indexed web pages. Second, Truveo looks at text surrounding video links, as well as metadata included in the video file itself, and makes intelligent assumptions about the video.

CastTV is taking many of the successes of Truveo and building on them. Search itself is significantly better than any other video search we’ve seen, and the user interface, which includes really smart filters (more on that below), makes it easier to find what you’re looking for, fast.

Edwin and Alex won’t disclose all of the technology behind the service, but part of the trick is that they are able to track videos through multiple links on a site, collecting metadata along the way. And they also parse the code on the video files as well, gathering additional information about the content. If tags are available for the videos (such as YouTube tags), these are indexed as well. The final step is actually even more interesting - CastTV will take the data they are able to collect about a video and search the web in general for additional data. If there’s a close enough match, CastTV adds that information to the content metadata. And unlike other video search tools, CastTV indexes movies and shows from iTunes and other for-pay services.

All of this doesn’t mean much unless the search performs well. In tests I was able to find full versions of movies and tv shows that simply didn’t show up in Yahoo, Google or Truveo search. A free episode of 24 at a Myspace Burger King page. Full versions of Pirates of the Caribbean 2 with price comparisons ($14.99 at CinemaNow, $9.99 at iTunes), as well as available formats (WMV and Quicktime). Searches for trailers, movie and show clips, and user generated stuff all yielded equally impressive results.

Results can be sorted by shows (to weed out non-relevant stuff), host (such as itunes, CBS Innertube, etc to focus on a favorite service provider), by date, relevance, prices, etc.

Look for CastTV to launch sometime in the Fall, and in my opinion be acquired shortly thereafter. In the meantime you can sign up on their home page to be emailed when they launch. If you’d like to see founder Alex Vikati demo the product in person, make sure to attend Jeff Clavier’s Search SIG event next week in Silicon Valley. She’ll be there, along with other hot video startups.

Additional screen shots below.