Next next Sunday, February 14, 2010, will be the Chinese New Year. The year of Ox ends and the year of Tiger begins.

This message comes to you early because I'm leaving for China in a few of hours. I will be visiting family in Tianjin for a couple of weeks.

I'll keep a tradition that I started two years ago going by offering a fresh English translation of a piece of ancient Chinese classics. This year's passage comes from the I Ching, which I have started studying last year (I've even quoted it several times.)

The content of the I Ching was developed over a period of over 2000 years, starting from 伏羲 (Fu Xi, mid 2800s BC) drawing the eight gua (trigrams), followed by 周文王 (King Wen of Zhou, 1099–1050 BC) arranging the 64 gua (hexagrams) and writing the decisions for each, and 周公 (Duke of Zhou, son of King Wen) writing the 387 decisions for each yao (line) of each gua, and culminating in 孔子 (Confucius, 551–479 BC) writing commentaries for all of the above. It's been another 2500 years since its completion.

I Ching (Qian, 15:1)

䷎

(King Wen's Decision)

Modesty: Progressing smoothly. The noble man attains his end.

(Confucius's commentary on the text)

Modesty, progressing smoothly,
the Tao of heaven aids down and shines bright,
the Tao of earth is humble and moves up.
The Tao of heaven decreases the full and benefits the modest,
the Tao of earth changes the full and flows the modest,
ghosts and spirits harm the full and bless the modest,
the Tao of man hates the full and loves the modest.
Modesty is noble and glorious, humble and cannot be exceeded, the end of the noble man.

(Confucius's commentary on the image)

The earth has mountains, modesty; The noble man hence decrease the many and increase the few, weigh things and gives evenly.

Responses[2]

Posted by Weiqi Gao on February 21, 2010 12:24:29 AM CST #

This has been an eventful week in the tech world. Two events stood out: one is an upbeat look into the future—of PC-less computing/entertaining with Apple's new iPad; one is a painful look back at some once also world-alteringly-new technologies from Sun—having found a new home at Oracle.

The Sun/Oracle news hits closer to home.

If you haven't been paying attention to all the accounts in the press and in blogs, all you have to do is to visit http://www.sun.com/ to realize that the world has changed.

I'm grateful to Oracle for its announced strategies for Java, JavaFX, OpenOffice, etc.

For Java, it would seem that it will be business as usual. In answering a question at the event, Larry Ellison essentially said that "Oracle is making money with Java" with it's middleware products and applications, so the pressure to make money off of Sun's Java products is an non-issue.

Oracle will also invest heavily in JavaFX. Jim Weaver has a more detailed account on that front:

Jim Weaver: In the live Oracle/Sun Strategy webcast, I heard encouraging statements like:

• We will invest heavily in JavaFX
• Significant investment will be made in JavaFX; focus on designers; fusion of DHTML, JavaScript, Java, JavaFX

The JavaPosse spells out the JavaScript link to JavaFX more succinctly in Episode #295:

Tor (17:07): JavaFX appears to have a rosy future. They said they would invest in it aggressively. It's going to be developed across all platforms, including embedded. And they also announced that there are plans to make SceneGraph access available from JavaScript.
Carl: Very cool.
Tor: That's been one of the criticisms for people who haven't learned JavaFX the language. You don't want to learn the new language. You don't see the point, right. So the idea here is that you can still take advantage of the APIs in the SceneGraph, even from JavaScript.
Carl: That's wild. That really gives it an advantage over all of the competition.

If you come here for the Friday quiz instead of all of the above, here's one:

Q: In which language is the following program written? Who invented the language? Will it compile? Run without errors? What does it print?

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
  fmt.Printf("Hello, 世界\n")
}

Responses[2]

Posted by Weiqi Gao on January 29, 2010 8:16:34 AM CST #

The St. Louis Java Users Group put on a Trivia Night 8 days ago. All the St. Louis JUG steering committee members pitched in providing questions and Brian Gilstrap put in a lot of thought and work to make the whole thing work. Since I haven't posted a Friday quiz question for a while, I'll borrow one from there:

Trivia Night rules apply: No books, no computers, no internet, just your brain! You have five minutes to write down your answer on the answer sheet.

If you enjoyed this question, you might like the rest of the questions. See how many you can get right in about an hour.

Add a comment

Posted by Weiqi Gao on January 22, 2010 7:57:06 AM CST #