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Is anyone going to theAustralian Open Source Symposium 2? It's location is fairly coinident with mine (ie, I live in Adelaide), so I'm tempted.

I think I get this Java->JNI->DCOM stuff now. It took long enough!

If anyone else ever has to go down this road, I recommend you try JACOB for a (Open Source) Java->COM bridge that uses JNI (rather than the MS JVM). It would also be good if you checked it out before you get two months into the project....

Got an email today asking something about one of my diary entries. It's always nice to get feedback, isn't it?

I got out of bed and booted my computer to write this entry, because I couldn't get something out of my head. I'm reading Kim Stanley Robinson's The Memory of Whiteness. In it they are discussing music, and if anything can be gained by writing about it. That got me thinking.....

Is there anything to be gained about writing about software?
Lately, I've been submitting a lot (8 in the last 2 weeks) of stories to Kuro5hin. They have generally been well recieved, and generated interesting discussion. Now, I suddenly wonder if this is doing any good. I've always participated in forums like K5 and /. to learn and to pass knowledge around. I think I have a talent for finding things out quickly, and I have fairly broard knowledge of a lot of areas.

I've always wanted to share my talents to help things I believe in (free software, and communication between people).

I can write software - in fact, I'm fairly good at it, and I enjoy that, too. However, for some reason I'm not motivated to actually complete any of my myriad of software projects (Motivation is a problem for me at work, sometimes, too).

Writing isn't like that, though. If anyone had told me at school, or even university that I would enjoy writing articles more than writing code I'd have laughed. Now I find it is true - I even have the occasional idea of writing a book (if only I was half as good at writing as I am at coding, I'd make a start). But is it useful, or is it just ego-stroking? Does anyone who reads my (hopefully thought provoking) articles actually go away and act on anything they have read, and do their actions make a difference?

Or should I go back to bed, and tomorrow start YAIMP (Yet Another Instant Messaging Program)?

guerby: I'm in Australia, and I don't know a single person who works on shrinked-wrap software. I'd say 70% of the programmers I know here work on internal IT projects(1), and the rest work on applications sold to and customized for other businesses. I don't know a single programmer who works on an application which is aimed at the home user or even small business market.

Going by some online discussions, I suspect that it must be very different in the 'States. For instance, once on K5 I was discussing Java programming, and I said a large proportion of software for business is written in Java. People thought I was talking about MS Office type software, which I hadn't even considered(2).

(1) This includes a lot of outsourcing, where a company hires an IT consulting company to come and write something for them.

(2)Perhaps that was my fault for not explaining myself better, but I honestly hadn't even considered that when I said Java software for business people would think of Office type software.

srl: With regards to Open Source version of MS's Webtool (see my last diary entry), there is the Apache project's JMeter which look rather good (it is in Java though, which may be a negative for some people). I'll try it out sometime and report.

There is at least one other Open Source Java webserver load benchmarking tool (OSJWLBT ?!?!) available. I can't remember what it is called, but I tried it, and couldn't figure out how to use it, and then I switched to MS Webtool.

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