Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog

A few sites to mention in this link roundup edition .... A cool technology for finding local WiFi (Airport) hot-spots: WiFiSeeker · An effort to get Springsteen to play opposite the Repblican Convention: Draft Bruce · Some amazing technical illustrations: Kevin Hulsey · Watson mentioned in this Joy of Tech online comic · Wow, what a secret this guy was sitting on: Ancient Ruins in Utah unveiled · When will they strategically 'capture' Bin Laden?: let's play Osama Bin Lotto!

It's a bit of a relief. I am longer feeling quite as bound to avoid talking about Watson's future, now that CNET has the story that I can link to ... you can too! :-)

Sun licensed the software from a small company in Alameda, Calif., called Karelia, which worked for years on a version of Watson for Apple computers. Sun has created a new version of the software--code-named Alameda--that runs on any Java-enabled computer, said Peder Ulander, senior director of marketing for Sun's Desktop Solutions Group.

Many readers of the Watson FAQ or of this weblog figured out pretty quickly that Sun was behind this, but I didn't want Karelia to steal their marketing thunder or awaken their lawyers. Our team has been blogging about it for the last week or so, and showing it off at the Java One expo, right across the street from Apple's WWDC. Thanks to all the Mac developers who found our booth and stopped by to say Hi — a special shout-out to Buzz, Terry, and Oliver.

A bit of technical talk, now that it's clear that this application is written in Java. This means that it runs on multiple platforms. At Java One, we showed it off running Windows XP; The screenshot from my previous entry shows it running on the Mac. Since I come from a Mac background and I have lots of existing Watson customers that I want to keep happy with the new version, I've made it my personal mission to make sure that on the Mac, the application looks and acts like a Mac application should. It takes a little bit of finesse to do take care of all the subtleties, but it's not too hard. The program is really zippy. But ironically, we're noticing that on other platforms, the networking is much faster than on the Mac, whether we're talking about the new Java version or the original Cocoa version. So Apple has some room for improvement!

Below, here's a couple of pictures of me at the booth along with Kathy Brown, project manager. We both live in Alameda, hence the goofy placeholder name (not a code name!) "Project Alameda".