De Alante - My favorite source for news on Panama's night life has a great photo report from Cable & Wireless's latest attempt at competing with the all powerful Cable Modems in Panama.
Besides their beautiful ADSL girls, they also had the great Panamanian boxer Roberto Duran and Baseball star Roberto Kelly as specially invited celeb's for the evening at Stones (great place btw.)

Relating to my last entry on 3G in Panama, I just saw an article about this ITU report on The Register.
The Report is the Internet for a Mobile Generation and has quite a few interesting items.
In particular this graph showing the growth of Mobile Subscribers in Chile and Venezuela:

Bell South Panama will be launching their new 3G service in December. Their FAQ is available here in Spanish or in English via Google. This will be a CDMA 1XRTT based network, which I'm not really familiar with. Cable & Wireless will be rolling out a GSM based system. I'm hoping GPRS. However the CDMA one is bound to be very fast.
I guess this means I can sit in Manolo's on a nice hot afternoon and work while drinking my Coffee. Who needs Starbucks now?

Got a bit confused for a while, until I realised that they've merged the project, classpath and source browser.
The XML editor now verifies and does tag completion based on DTD's and XML Schemas. It is superb. I was able to quickly find loads of different problems in some of my own schema files.
The local VCS is great. I had forgotten how usefull it was in Visual Age. The user interface for it is great. With a very cool built in Diff viewer.
JSP's can be compiled, so you dont have to deal with compile time errors when you've deployed your webapp.
Tons of more stuff. I have no idea how I ever coded before IDEA, and now it's even better.
If you haven't tried it yet go to IntelliJ EAP and download it.

I just downloaded my first Ariadne (Beta for you non IDEA users) release. I've been using version 2.6 since june and love it.
My first impressions are that there is so much new stuff in there. Like local VCS, I've missed that since I moved away from IBM Visual Age.
I will try it as my main IDE for NeuDist and see what happens.

I've been cleaning up the distribution and got it set up more or less properly under SourceForge now. There are still a few things lingering around from my last couple of experiments with this technology. In particular I need to clean up CVS. I do tend to cock up a bit to much with CVS I find. I cant wait for some of the other CM tools to be a bit more stable (I do like the sound of OpenCM and SubVersion). I tend to refactor my code alot (Thank God for IntelliJ IDEA) and cvs is terrible at handling changing directory structures and renames. It appears that both of these will handle that. We'll probably swap over later.

Please join the mailing list Neudist-Discuss if any of this interests you.

NeuDist is the Open Source Java framework behind the Neubia platform of distributed financial applications that I'm working on.

I'm finally releasing the first version of it. It is still very much in development, so be patient. No live applications yet, however it shouldn't be too long.

On the site there are a few pages missing and documentation is generally a bit sparce, but check it out and email me any questions you have.

I finally got Maven to do my builds. I had setup a my local dependencies in the local repository, but had done it wrongly. Now, it works beautifully.

I'm working on packaging up the first release of my Nebia project. I use a combination of IDEA and Ant to do my building.
I've liked what I hear about the Apache Groups Maven tool.
I like the general idea of it, but just like Mike Cannon-Brookes I have had some problems with it.
My main problem is integrating dependencies that aren't in ibiblio.org
I don't have a lot of time to play with it, so I've come to the compromise that I use Ant to build it and maven to generate the documentation. Its not ideal but I'm sure I'll get the rest working at some point.

Just wrote a piece over on Econofist about the Costa Rican governments $40 Million plan to improve telecoms in the country.

Just discovered this article in FinExtra.com about the UK's new rules for Electronic Currencies by David Birch from Consult Hyperion one the UK's leading consulting firms on advanced payment systems.
The UK is the first country to actually have rules regarding eCurrencies. These were created to promote the usage of private electronic currency schemes. They will be regulated by the Financial Services Authority who have quite a bit about The Regulation of Electronic Money Issuers on their site.
They key rules are that there has to be a minimum of 1 million Euro's or 2% paid up capital (whichever is lowest). The 2% level at first seems quite low, but I guess you wouldn't necessarily need more for things like Frequent Flyer miles etc.
Another issue is that there is a maximum purse size of 1000 Euro's, which can be extended with various safeguards.
When it comes to consumer safety there is the purse size mentioned above and the requirement of issuers to publicize all risks. There is no compensation scheme if the system goes under, but there will be an ombudsman scheme.
I'm not a big fan of legislation, but it does seem quite cool to actually have something like this on the books.

Russel Beattie says he's glad I'm playing with SimpleWeb and he will work on some of the new features. Thanks, I like what I see so far and I'll be sure to flow some suggestions your way once I'm a bit more into it. In particular I like the fact it uses HTML and not that wierd Wiki markup language most systems use.
Anyway Russel also discovered an article on IBM's Developer works about Object Prevalence as a method of doing object databases. I experimented with this a while back and I agree that it is very cool.
There is a great java implementation Prevaylor that is so small you can hardly believe it when you first try it. But it does work really well. You just need to change the way you write your code abit.
Any thing that modifies the data has to be done through a serialized action object. These actions are serialized exactly like a transaction log in a RDBMS. Snapshots are done on a regular basis, where the entire VM is saved. Everything is in memory. The theory is that memory is cheap now a days etc.
Try it out. It's cool.

I've been playing around with different kinds of wiki's for documenting Neubia. So far my favorite is Russel Beattie's SimpleWeb.
There is no documentation, but it's quite easy to configure. Most things are in web/WEB-INF/global.jspf if you're in doubt.
I haven't customised it much yet, but will do so eventually.
You can see what I've got so far at Neubia Wiki. Currently it's running on a built in hSQL database, but I will move it to mysql or postgresql before I get too far.
Just saw from Russel's WebLog that he's thinking about adding Simple web logging capabilities as well. Which is cool. Keep up the good work.

Patrick Lightbody and Mike Cannon-Brokes have written a piece called Is EJB Always Necessary?
They make a lot of great points. While I like EJB's for many things (in particular as tools are getting better), I don't like them for such things as reports and browsing. Straight forward SQL is much better for that. EJB's are excellent for transactional applications.

At last years Edinburgh Financial Cryptography Engineering Conference we all received a bit of a suprise when suit was brought against Systemic's Ian Grigg by DigiGold.

Basically DigiGold wanted an injunction against Systemics to continue to provide service for them. Systemics ran the technology behind the DigiGold currency using their WebFunds technology. To find out more about the case see Ian's Summary of Facts.

Anyway the case went to an arbitrator who has now given their final award - DigiGold lost. This is good news. Ian is one of the most prolific developers of financial cryptography software. Now, he will be able to put all his energy back into it.

Ian's mail:

In the matter of DigiGold v. Systemics, the Arbitration (AAA) claim brought and filed in May 2001, at EFCE, by DigiGold.net Ltd, the Final Award was delivered this last Wednesday, 28th August 2002 by the Arbitrator.

We have not had much of a chance to analyse and form conclusions on the long document delivered, but the headline is very clear:

None of the claims brought by DigiGold was upheld.

That is, DigiGold's claims were denied by the Arbitrator.

I offer my thanks to all those who supported us in the tough times of the last couple of years. We were lucky to have such a wide body of strong supporters, and also doubly lucky to find ourselves with counsel capable of absorbing and dominating the first test case in the now mature field of Financial Cryptography!

Notes:
* Some claims by DigiGold were earlier dismissed early for lack of jurisdiction.
* Systemics did not file a counter-claim.
* Arbitration has no appeal, hence the title of "Final Award."

--
iang