Some years ago (in 2000), the Java OLAP (JOLAP) spec. was proposed and it was finally ratified by all parties (including Oracle, Sun, Apple but not IBM and Microsoft). One point that has been puzzling me is why JOLAP wasn’t more widely adopted, at least partially. (Update: though the Final JOLAP Draft was approved, the spec. was never released and there is no license available right now allowing anyone to implement the Final Draft.) For our course CS6905 Advanced Technologies for E-Business, I prepared what must be too many slides on the JOLAP and Oracle Java API. I didn’t find a comparison between the Oracle OLAP API and JOLAP, so here’s my own analysis:

• Firstly, Oracle doesn’t implement the Common Warehouse Model (CWM). I have no experience working with CWM, but it seems like CWM is quite complex. Maybe they figured it wasn’t worth the trouble?
• Secondly, in its OLAP API, Oracle doesn’t implement the J2EE Connector model, or anything having to do with J2EE. I suspect Oracle is not eager to depend on J2EE.
• Thirdly, the Oracle OLAP API doesn’t have Cube and Edge objects. To me, this is a shame because I really like the Edge objects JOLAP defines. Anyone knows why Oracle didn’t integrate those in its revised 10g API?

So, we are left in an OLAP world where Microsoft’s MDX is the sole cross-vendor query language. How ironic!

I just stumbled on the Java 4K Game Programming Contest. This looks like an excellent contest for programmers out there trying to get into the video game industry or just trying to prove their hacking skills:

The Java 4K Programming Contest is the ultimate byte-squeezing Java challenge! Using only 4096 bytes, competitors use every trick up their sleeve to create an entire game. The current Java 4K is running from December 1st, 2005 - March 1st, 2006.

I really like the size limit. In the good old days, we really just had 4KB of internal memory. I programmed a few cool games back when computers still had green on black screens, including a full Othello implementation (including the AI), and it ran very well on probably less than 4K.

And I think 4K ought to be enough for a great game prototype. Myself, I would try to do it without using obfuscated code and try to get points for programming elegance.

According to Education Guardian, meetings are bad:

(…) having too many meetings (…) may have negative effects on the individual.

As one who goes to great extends to avoid meetings and any synchronous event, I think we definitively need to move from a synchronous culture (meeting people at fixed time, using the phone) to an asynchronous culture (such as email).

The problem, of course, is that lots of people can’t write. Even university professors, sometimes, can’t write. Sure, they wrote a thesis one day, or so you hope, but they simply can’t sit down and communicate their ideas in a written form without great efforts.

I’m annoyed and tired of these people. If your ideas are not clear enough to write them down in an email, without any fuss (read: send a word documents with carefully chosen fonts), then I have no time for you.

And no, I don’t think people are dumb. They just don’t want to have to think and work. Sitting down and chatting is so much easier than sitting down alone and having to write something coherent.

We have to move on to the next level.

Peter Turney sent me a pointer to Academic Careers for Experimental Computer Scientists and Engineers which is somewhat old (1994) book made available online.

Here are some of the chapter titles (all are available online):

• WHAT IS EXPERIMENTAL COMPUTER SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING (ECSE)?
• AN ACADEMIC CAREER IN ECSE
• EDUCATIONAL DIMENSIONS OF ACADEMIC ECSE
• EVALUATING RESEARCH IN ECSE
• A POSITIVE ENVIRONMENT FOR ACADEMIC ECSE
• SPECIAL NEEDS AND CONCERNS OF NON-DOCTORATE-GRANTING AND LESS RECOGNIZED INSTITUTIONS
• FINDINGS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
• SURVEYING THE ECSE COMMUNITY
• COMPARING JOURNAL AND CONFERENCE PUBLICATIONS

Ok, Ernie linked to the Best Blonde Joke Ever! I’ve got to say, it is amazingly funny.

I just had a look at the browser stats for the visits to my site. The results are strange. Googlebot seems to be taking up a huge share of the traffic. I think I have read an explanation somewhere, maybe it was on Tim Bray’s site. Nevertheless, these numbers are scary:

(The second Google is not Googlebot. The stats are for 24 hours. They exclude some parts of my web site.)

It seems that a large fraction of the visits to my sites are from search engines. What does this says about the current state of the web?

My French XML Course content has been updated. You can download the lecture notes for free as well as browse my version of the web site (Firefox is required). The entire content of the course is in XML, and I generate the PDF automagically by piecing together everything.

There is a lot of XHTML content in this course. People sometimes wonder why they should care about XHTML. Well, here’s one reason: the PDF file I offer is generated from the XHTML through XSL. Try doing the same with ugly HTML without going insane.

This course got a lot more interesting with the release of Firefox 1.5 which has allowed me to integrate SVG. However, the section on RDF still makes me sad: I lack a way to automagically generate beautiful SVG from the RDF data (no, don’t ask me to draw, no don’t tell me to use 4suite, no don’t tell me to use the W3C site which uses 4suite…).

Here’s the new description (in French):

Historique, motivations du XML, comparaison avec HTML et SGML. Le document XML : syntaxe, éléments, attributs et entités. Documents bien formés. Documents valables : Document Type Definitions (DTD), XML Schema, Relax NG, Schematron et Examplotron. Vocabulaires et espaces de noms. Le XML comme format de document: XHTML, SVG , MathML et DocBook. Modélisation de l’information en XML, XSLT, XPath, XLink, XPointer, XQuery, CSS. Utilisation du XML à partir de langages orientés-objets (Java ). Modèle-objet XML (DOM). Asynchronous JavaScript And XML (AJAX). Filtrage, fusion, et extraction du XML en Java. Métadonnées en XML : Resource Description Framework (RDF), Dublin Core, Creative Commons, FOAF, RSS, web sémantique.

Currently, I have 9 students. I expect to at least double or triple this number within a year. It is a fun course.