I have been playing around with the ideas of mobile processing agents lately, and to do this I need to execute code that has been uploaded to my processing environment, rather than the traditional “deployed” code. Java has this ability built in, via ClassLoaders. At any point, a java application can create classes from byte arrays. I wanted to do this on Google App Engine, but GAE does not support the traditional methods of loading classes would work.

I'm presenting a session at EJA tomorrow, entitled "Choose Your Cloud". I'll be comparing the different cloud vendors, with a particular focus on Google App Engine. As an experiment, I've done my presentation in Prezi. I'm not sure if its cool or distracting. I'll check with my audience tomorrow to find out :) Choose your Cloud on Prezi

The local Melbourne chapter of GTUG is hosting a meeting around developing extensions for Google Wave this wednesday at RMIT.  The big presenter there will be Pamela Fox, Google's developer relations person, but I've been asked to give a quick run down at the end on my experiences developing a mind map gadget.  If I get time, I might also theorise about how wave could be used to provide ad-hoc communications focused tools inside business.

Facebook's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg recently said that privacy is no longer a social norm, Google's Eric Schmidt has also said that if you want to do things online that you want to keep private, then you really shouldn't use online services such as Google, due to laws requiring identification and retention of data. There are benefits to treating your privacy as a commodity.  The most obvious examples are the personalities that have achieved fame and riches through living their lives in a very public fashion, such as Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian, but each and every one of us makes a decision to trade our privacy each time we go online, whether we do it knowingly or not.