Also a company can cheat and put in some youngish person in the patent list to extend the lifetime of patents if it was implemented in the fashion you specified.
Thanks for adding to my blog opinions are appreciated:D
I actually made some comments about intellectual property rights in my blog actually. In a nutshell I am thinking that it should be removed, because having it removed benefits more people than a select few in the big picture.
Try LifeBalance, its a pretty good to-do list tool, it has outlining capability and automatically manages the task list for you. Its available at www.llamagraphics.com
I use a Nokia 6600 and synchronize it with MS Outlook and my Clie.
The OS is not too stable and I get sporadic crashes. Though it is mostly fixed in the latest firmware upgrade. Unfortunately the firmware is not user upgradable and you have to go to a service center which charges you for the service of upgrading your cellphone firmware.
The cellphone will eventually replace my PDA, but not at the moment, since it still has some useful apps which are not available in the cellphone (SecondScreen TV, HandyShopper and Mapopolis). What would eventually end up is my PDA will end up as a secondary device but no longer something I carry around all the time. If any I would be getting a GBA SP to replace my PDA because primarily I use it to play a few games on the road, the cellphone has a few games but the phone UI is not too friendly for games.
Also Nokia beats the pants off any other cellphone I have tried so far for text messaging with the keypad. For text messaging I prefer to use the standard keypad with the T9 dictionary, YMMV and most people would prefer an easily misplaced stylus and a bulkier cellphone to support stylus input. The Nokia 6600 is pretty bulky as it is, unfortunately it was the only 6000 series Nokia that had all the features I wanted at the time.
I got an old Motorola Timeport P7389 that is unlocked and a new Nokia 6600 which is also unlocked. They work well across networks, I travel to the Philippines, Belgium, US and Canada and I just get a prepaid SIM card whenever I change locations. I avoid international roaming for security purposes especially the Philippines where crime is rampant.
You can get your phone unlocked at a lot of places here in Toronto, you should be able to get your phone unlocked if you live at any urban place as well. If you are lucky to have a Nokia you can get a DCT4 calculator (googled "free DCT4 calculator") and unlock the phone yourself, I've done that with my Nokia 6600 and my mom's Nokia 6610 as well.
My parents get international roaming on their Sim cards when they come to Canada (safe place as it is) and use their existing cell phones (all Nokia world phones) from the Philippines, works pretty well.
Though the idea of having your resume ready is good.
One thing you should try to have with your managers is trust. Think of this as a test of your trust with your manager, whether it be good or bad. If it is bad, at least you'll have your resume ready.
However, DO NOT just give problems to them, that's not productive, being at the bottom line you should have some ideas on how to solve them even if / especially if you do not have the power to do them yourself but the upper management would.
For example, if I had to deal with a bad co-worker that I cannot resolve on my own (e.g. the guy is obnoxious and pulls rank) I go to the project manager and let him deal with the issues since they are the stake holders too. I also show them that I have done what I can and provided solutions and alternatives should he also fail to deal with the co-worker.
Trusting management is hard, but if you have a trusting relationship you would reap more benefits. Just don't abuse it or use it as a kiss up tool, because your peers won't respect you and they'll do the same things to push you down.
I agree with the choice Warp records have made. There will always be people who would buy the records because they really like the group. Sharing music/art is the best way to increase the popularity of an artist.
Its too bad that a lot people tend to look at the money instead of the art. Fame and respect I think are more important than money to an artist, if they have those they will have power to change the world.
I personally respect artists/singers/thespians/.../programmers that do it for the art and not from the money. The Internet is the best thing that has happened to them as it gives them a low cost way of broadcasting their talent and get themselves known and respected by their peers.
But money has its purpose too, here are somethings I would do to make money.
What warp is doing is also respecting the people. Sure some of them may be sending them out to P2P networks, but Warp save money on dealing with legal costs.
This money can be better utilized in advertising themselves.
If I was Warp, I would work with radio stations to add a blurb at the end of music radio stations use to go to their website.
Some of the lower end or archived music that is not making too much money I would put on P2P networks as long as they will provide some advertising spaces on their clients. Or the name of the song. With authorization from the artist of course. But I will not give any money to the artist at that point since its not really something that I can make profit on, but at least it will give the artist more exposure for little cost, because we'll just be putting it up on a low end, low bandwidth server probably on a home DSL line and let P2P do its work. We'll just add the ed2k hashes on the website. We would tack in information about how to go to the website within the file names and the ID3 tag.
I would work as the middle man between an artist and concert halls or restaurant gigs. Basically add an extranet for smaller concert halls and restaurants to request artists and artists can put their availabilities on the system, kinda like a scheduler.
I will also partner with an auction site such as eBay to sell products related to the artists.
I would also provide a utility that would provide the creation of custom made CDs which contain songs for an artist or maybe more. Perhaps release it as a Java WebStart program so I do not have to deal with a lot of bandwidth costs for running a webapp.
We would put in information about the song on moodlogic as well, its best to have the correct information from the source.
A lot of games or programs on any platform including the PC do not take full advantage of the platform. The best way to take advantage of the platform is to code in assembly.
However, this is not really the best use of time for people. Developing in higher programming language in a cross-platform way will end up with better SDKs for the game company.
Here's the priority list I would run my game company.
Focus more on developing good games first. The principal task of a game publisher should be to get his game sold not necessarilly selling the console.
Make it easy for your developers. Choose the platform where it is easiest to program your game in so you can get to market quicker. If your game is good enough, people will buy the console to play your game.
Expand your audience. You can port your games to other platforms at this point. This exercise will promote code abstraction and re-use within your development group.
This is where you start grouping your programmers into the "just-do-it" crowd and "do-it-properly" crowd. They both have their uses.
The "just-do-it" crowd will make you reach your market first. Don't put too much of into this effort. Its going to be too frustrating and boring for most of them, shove them into new development ideas.
The "do-it-properly" crowd will tend to make things slower, but should know how to group and make things better for the code base. They should be promoting code re-use and proper abstractions to help porting to other platforms easier. Don't put too much of them into new development otherwise you'll have conflict with the "just-do-it" crowd.
Learn from your successes. Focus on this one first, as its more positive to your employees. Expand your libraries. Promote code re-use. Think of the sequel.
Learn from your mistakes. Prevent problems in future projects by learning from them and removing the people that don't.
I live in the Toronto area so using Fido's network is sufficient for me. It depends on your needs. But I do not buy Fido phones, Fido was one of the first companies that supported SimCards which allowed me to use phones that I purchase and like (provided it was unlocked) and not get locked in because of the phone.
I also use the pre-paid plan. I basically pay around $10 per month, with the remaining time rolled over. Sure the price per minute is more expensive, but if you do not tend to use it much its a pretty good deal.
I've lost my machine to cheap power supplies. The first time I thought was just a freak accident (blew the motherboard, CD drives, hard drive), since then I go for the Enermax and not some unbranded power supply.
Maybe this is not such a bad idea? Although you can probably do it more peacefully than it was historically. The Philippines sorta did it when they got rid of Marcos back in 1986 I think, it was pretty bloodless revolution.
Of course you would need to know what you are fighting for, hopefully its to free yourselves from the oppression of people who try to exploit, extort you physically, mentally and virtually like these spammers, junk mailers, Bush, big corps that have no morals, and lawyers that support them.
The US basically had a fake election ending up with a fake president. Its time the US citizens start making themselves the country they want, especially when your democratic process breaks down like it did back in your 2000 elections.
Its too bad the cost to make these kind of games is quite high. Imagine in the old days when small groups of people can build games like Doom, Ultima or Warcraft.
I guess in the end it is all about money.
Though there are still some games out there in sourceforge that are done quite wellm but most of them don't look as good as the commercial games.
Wonder when they are going to make a combination of Quake and NetHack... QuakeHack.
There is a game similar to this called Dream Audition (though its Japanese songs). I was wondering if it has support to use the microphone controller used by Dream Auditionl, which is a USB microphone controller.
What I plan to do when I have some free time is to organize the CD into cases (or spindles) but number each of them and organize by using a simple data base program (e.g., Access or JBoss+PostgreSQL).
New CDs just get the next number.
We just do lookups on the database and sort them anyway we want in the database then we just find the CD by number.
Its kinda like a B-tree (like in the good old CS days), each block would be a CD case, but the lookups are done by the DBMS.
Many free, open-source applications ship with Linux distributions, but Silver raises this question: Are they the applications the enterprise needs? "Thus far, we have not heard of open-source movements to replace large enterprise resource planning systems... and most current vendors do not charge less for a Linux user than a Windows user."
There is an Open Source ERP solution http://www.compiere.org/. It was a the first entry when you do "ERP open source" on google
Its not that it is $2, its the principle of it. People should not have to pay a single penny for their privacy. Privacy should be protected by the government (within reason).
No information about a person should be made public without the person's explicit consent,
Or unless there is a possibility of harming others in which case two or more authorized representatives (judges, etc) should authorize the search of information of the person.
Or unless the party is lawfully (not commercially) authorized based on a priviledge that the person has. e.g. if you were caught for careless driving, then the officer has the right to see your record (provided you give him your card) and inform the traffic authority of your offence.
Any entity whether commercial or government should provide a lawful explanation to an authorized party what information they require or need to publish about people before they actually do so.
Of course that's if we have an ideal world where politicians are not subsidized by commercial entities.
Someone should really fix up the patent system so it does not stifle competition like it is doing now, but at the same time protect inventors.
Perhaps modify the way patents are evaluated. How about limitting it to one year max (or less) for non-physical patents.
Or even better, 6 month max before they have to allow open source implementations to come out uncontested. Then perhaps it would be fair increase it to two years max (or less) for non-physical patents.
This is a good move by ESPN. Though i don't really like the way they implemented (embedded JavaScript bad) it is still a step in the right direction.
A simple JavaScript to check if you are using a standards compliant browser and load the style sheet is a good way of ensuring your content is visible even on non-standard compliant browsers without affecting people who use the standard compliant browsers.
It is unfortunate that Netscape had released version 4.0 of their browser which is laden with badly implemented standard specifications (IE 3.0 to 4.0 was pretty bad early on too, but at least it was somewhat better than what we got with Netscape).
However, with more standard supporting browsers out there and more to come in the future since the XHTML standards are actually getting simpler (XML based parsing) instead of more complicated (like the addition of the BLINK tag thanks Netscape) we should start moving our content to be more standard compliant.
If you need a business case, throw this one to your financial rep. Say 1,000,000 web pages hits per month, each page adds 10K for table layouting (usually its more than that), that's 10 GB of wasted bandwidth that can be saved. Its also 10GB less to process through the HTTP data compression if you are keen with HTTP standards.
Also don't forget the amount of time it would take to maintain or make changes to these pages. Or worse, integrate them with JSPs.
If you are an employer, be wary of those that say they know HTML but also have Dreamweaver or FrontPage on their resumes. You may end up with a pig headed graphics artist who should've been a graphics artist not an HTML developer.
Very true, I should note next time that I meant this as the fastest way to learn a new [Algol based] programming language.
However, this is usually the best way to get through most university classes when they change languages on you. The laziness factor hopefully would kick in, you won't want to write more than you should so learning to take advantage of the language facilities will know how to learn the language effectively.
Most languages tend to have 3 basic building blocks:
1) Assignment (a = 1) 2) Conditional (if... then) 3) Loops (do while...)
Everything else around it is syntactic sugar and what really defines the language.
The syntactic sugar basically manages the complexity of the program (it does not make things less complex).
What I normally do is learn how to do those three things first and get a simple program that does something like
a = 10 while (a > 0) {
if (a > 5) {
print "greater than 5"
}
else {
print "less than 5"
}
a = a - 1 }
Then I learn how to do procedures if it is a procedural language or how to do objects if it is OO. I tend to go to procedural first if it is supported since it is easier to learn and deal with.
Next thing I learn to do (if needed) is the memory and pointer stuff. Nowadays I do not deal with it since most modern languages already handle it for you.
By this point, I now have the basic framework of the language itself. However, it does not stop there.
For any task that is given to you, you should always think that it should've been done before. So its quite helpful to get a searchable reference handy. This is basically the key thing.
For example, I won't implement sort myself, I would use qsort() in C or the std::sort() in C++. Nor would I implement a stack or other simple data structures, I usually expect them to be there now, of course I still adjust to the language and I still remember how to do it anyway, it will just take some elbow grease.
To paraphrase the Perl reference, there are 3 virtues each programmer should have... laziness (don't implement what you think should be standard), impatience (keep the reference guide with you when you are coding, its the fastest way to get at the information), hubris (well that just builds up as you get better and start getting A+'s)
Slashdot Mirror
Also a company can cheat and put in some youngish person in the patent list to extend the lifetime of patents if it was implemented in the fashion you specified.
:D
Thanks for adding to my blog opinions are appreciated
This makes sense when there is one or two inventors, but if it is a "company" that patents the process, then it will run past the original inventors.
I actually made some comments about intellectual property rights in my blog actually. In a nutshell I am thinking that it should be removed, because having it removed benefits more people than a select few in the big picture.
The article does not say anything about GSM networks. Wonder if GSM networks would be supported by someone in this fashion.
Try LifeBalance, its a pretty good to-do list tool, it has outlining capability and automatically manages the task list for you. Its available at www.llamagraphics.com
I use a Nokia 6600 and synchronize it with MS Outlook and my Clie.
The OS is not too stable and I get sporadic crashes. Though it is mostly fixed in the latest firmware upgrade. Unfortunately the firmware is not user upgradable and you have to go to a service center which charges you for the service of upgrading your cellphone firmware.
The cellphone will eventually replace my PDA, but not at the moment, since it still has some useful apps which are not available in the cellphone (SecondScreen TV, HandyShopper and Mapopolis). What would eventually end up is my PDA will end up as a secondary device but no longer something I carry around all the time. If any I would be getting a GBA SP to replace my PDA because primarily I use it to play a few games on the road, the cellphone has a few games but the phone UI is not too friendly for games.
Also Nokia beats the pants off any other cellphone I have tried so far for text messaging with the keypad. For text messaging I prefer to use the standard keypad with the T9 dictionary, YMMV and most people would prefer an easily misplaced stylus and a bulkier cellphone to support stylus input. The Nokia 6600 is pretty bulky as it is, unfortunately it was the only 6000 series Nokia that had all the features I wanted at the time.
I got an old Motorola Timeport P7389 that is unlocked and a new Nokia 6600 which is also unlocked. They work well across networks, I travel to the Philippines, Belgium, US and Canada and I just get a prepaid SIM card whenever I change locations. I avoid international roaming for security purposes especially the Philippines where crime is rampant.
You can get your phone unlocked at a lot of places here in Toronto, you should be able to get your phone unlocked if you live at any urban place as well. If you are lucky to have a Nokia you can get a DCT4 calculator (googled "free DCT4 calculator") and unlock the phone yourself, I've done that with my Nokia 6600 and my mom's Nokia 6610 as well.
My parents get international roaming on their Sim cards when they come to Canada (safe place as it is) and use their existing cell phones (all Nokia world phones) from the Philippines, works pretty well.
Though the idea of having your resume ready is good.
One thing you should try to have with your managers is trust. Think of this as a test of your trust with your manager, whether it be good or bad. If it is bad, at least you'll have your resume ready.
However, DO NOT just give problems to them, that's not productive, being at the bottom line you should have some ideas on how to solve them even if / especially if you do not have the power to do them yourself but the upper management would.
For example, if I had to deal with a bad co-worker that I cannot resolve on my own (e.g. the guy is obnoxious and pulls rank) I go to the project manager and let him deal with the issues since they are the stake holders too. I also show them that I have done what I can and provided solutions and alternatives should he also fail to deal with the co-worker.
Trusting management is hard, but if you have a trusting relationship you would reap more benefits. Just don't abuse it or use it as a kiss up tool, because your peers won't respect you and they'll do the same things to push you down.
I agree with the choice Warp records have made. There will always be people who would buy the records because they really like the group. Sharing music/art is the best way to increase the popularity of an artist.
Its too bad that a lot people tend to look at the money instead of the art. Fame and respect I think are more important than money to an artist, if they have those they will have power to change the world.
I personally respect artists/singers/thespians/.../programmers that do it for the art and not from the money. The Internet is the best thing that has happened to them as it gives them a low cost way of broadcasting their talent and get themselves known and respected by their peers.
But money has its purpose too, here are somethings I would do to make money.
What warp is doing is also respecting the people. Sure some of them may be sending them out to P2P networks, but Warp save money on dealing with legal costs.
This money can be better utilized in advertising themselves.
If I was Warp, I would work with radio stations to add a blurb at the end of music radio stations use to go to their website.
Some of the lower end or archived music that is not making too much money I would put on P2P networks as long as they will provide some advertising spaces on their clients. Or the name of the song. With authorization from the artist of course. But I will not give any money to the artist at that point since its not really something that I can make profit on, but at least it will give the artist more exposure for little cost, because we'll just be putting it up on a low end, low bandwidth server probably on a home DSL line and let P2P do its work. We'll just add the ed2k hashes on the website. We would tack in information about how to go to the website within the file names and the ID3 tag.
I would work as the middle man between an artist and concert halls or restaurant gigs. Basically add an extranet for smaller concert halls and restaurants to request artists and artists can put their availabilities on the system, kinda like a scheduler.
I will also partner with an auction site such as eBay to sell products related to the artists.
I would also provide a utility that would provide the creation of custom made CDs which contain songs for an artist or maybe more. Perhaps release it as a Java WebStart program so I do not have to deal with a lot of bandwidth costs for running a webapp.
We would put in information about the song on moodlogic as well, its best to have the correct information from the source.
Its Artists "on demand"
A lot of games or programs on any platform including the PC do not take full advantage of the platform. The best way to take advantage of the platform is to code in assembly.
However, this is not really the best use of time for people. Developing in higher programming language in a cross-platform way will end up with better SDKs for the game company.
Here's the priority list I would run my game company.
Focus more on developing good games first. The principal task of a game publisher should be to get his game sold not necessarilly selling the console.
Make it easy for your developers. Choose the platform where it is easiest to program your game in so you can get to market quicker. If your game is good enough, people will buy the console to play your game.
Expand your audience. You can port your games to other platforms at this point. This exercise will promote code abstraction and re-use within your development group.
This is where you start grouping your programmers into the "just-do-it" crowd and "do-it-properly" crowd. They both have their uses.
The "just-do-it" crowd will make you reach your market first. Don't put too much of into this effort. Its going to be too frustrating and boring for most of them, shove them into new development ideas.
The "do-it-properly" crowd will tend to make things slower, but should know how to group and make things better for the code base. They should be promoting code re-use and proper abstractions to help porting to other platforms easier. Don't put too much of them into new development otherwise you'll have conflict with the "just-do-it" crowd.
Learn from your successes. Focus on this one first, as its more positive to your employees. Expand your libraries. Promote code re-use. Think of the sequel.
Learn from your mistakes. Prevent problems in future projects by learning from them and removing the people that don't.
Yup I am definitely thinking about it. Any recommendations/suggestions on selecting a good UPS?
I live in the Toronto area so using Fido's network is sufficient for me. It depends on your needs. But I do not buy Fido phones, Fido was one of the first companies that supported SimCards which allowed me to use phones that I purchase and like (provided it was unlocked) and not get locked in because of the phone.
I also use the pre-paid plan. I basically pay around $10 per month, with the remaining time rolled over. Sure the price per minute is more expensive, but if you do not tend to use it much its a pretty good deal.
I've lost my machine to cheap power supplies. The first time I thought was just a freak accident (blew the motherboard, CD drives, hard drive), since then I go for the Enermax and not some unbranded power supply.
Maybe this is not such a bad idea? Although you can probably do it more peacefully than it was historically. The Philippines sorta did it when they got rid of Marcos back in 1986 I think, it was pretty bloodless revolution.
Of course you would need to know what you are fighting for, hopefully its to free yourselves from the oppression of people who try to exploit, extort you physically, mentally and virtually like these spammers, junk mailers, Bush, big corps that have no morals, and lawyers that support them.
The US basically had a fake election ending up with a fake president. Its time the US citizens start making themselves the country they want, especially when your democratic process breaks down like it did back in your 2000 elections.
Its too bad the cost to make these kind of games is quite high. Imagine in the old days when small groups of people can build games like Doom, Ultima or Warcraft.
... QuakeHack.
I guess in the end it is all about money.
Though there are still some games out there in sourceforge that are done quite wellm but most of them don't look as good as the commercial games.
Wonder when they are going to make a combination of Quake and NetHack
There is a game similar to this called Dream Audition (though its Japanese songs). I was wondering if it has support to use the microphone controller used by Dream Auditionl, which is a USB microphone controller.
What I plan to do when I have some free time is to organize the CD into cases (or spindles) but number each of them and organize by using a simple data base program (e.g., Access or JBoss+PostgreSQL).
New CDs just get the next number.
We just do lookups on the database and sort them anyway we want in the database then we just find the CD by number.
Its kinda like a B-tree (like in the good old CS days), each block would be a CD case, but the lookups are done by the DBMS.
Its not that it is $2, its the principle of it. People should not have to pay a single penny for their privacy. Privacy should be protected by the government (within reason).
:-)
No information about a person should be made public without the person's explicit consent,
Or unless there is a possibility of harming others in which case two or more authorized representatives (judges, etc) should authorize the search of information of the person.
Or unless the party is lawfully (not commercially) authorized based on a priviledge that the person has. e.g. if you were caught for careless driving, then the officer has the right to see your record (provided you give him your card) and inform the traffic authority of your offence.
Any entity whether commercial or government should provide a lawful explanation to an authorized party what information they require or need to publish about people before they actually do so.
Of course that's if we have an ideal world where politicians are not subsidized by commercial entities.
Vote Trajano!
It would be nice if C-JDBC was built into the J2EE spec so all J2EE containers can support this facility.
It may also have the advantage of using the transactional, load balancing and clustering facilities of the J2EE container as well.
Someone should really fix up the patent system so it does not stifle competition like it is doing now, but at the same time protect inventors.
:-)
Perhaps modify the way patents are evaluated. How about limitting it to one year max (or less) for non-physical patents.
Or even better, 6 month max before they have to allow open source implementations to come out uncontested. Then perhaps it would be fair increase it to two years max (or less) for non-physical patents.
Vote Trajano!
This is a good move by ESPN. Though i don't really like the way they implemented (embedded JavaScript bad) it is still a step in the right direction.
A simple JavaScript to check if you are using a standards compliant browser and load the style sheet is a good way of ensuring your content is visible even on non-standard compliant browsers without affecting people who use the standard compliant browsers.
It is unfortunate that Netscape had released version 4.0 of their browser which is laden with badly implemented standard specifications (IE 3.0 to 4.0 was pretty bad early on too, but at least it was somewhat better than what we got with Netscape).
However, with more standard supporting browsers out there and more to come in the future since the XHTML standards are actually getting simpler (XML based parsing) instead of more complicated (like the addition of the BLINK tag thanks Netscape) we should start moving our content to be more standard compliant.
If you need a business case, throw this one to your financial rep. Say 1,000,000 web pages hits per month, each page adds 10K for table layouting (usually its more than that), that's 10 GB of wasted bandwidth that can be saved. Its also 10GB less to process through the HTTP data compression if you are keen with HTTP standards.
Also don't forget the amount of time it would take to maintain or make changes to these pages. Or worse, integrate them with JSPs.
If you are an employer, be wary of those that say they know HTML but also have Dreamweaver or FrontPage on their resumes. You may end up with a pig headed graphics artist who should've been a graphics artist not an HTML developer.
Very true, I should note next time that I meant this as the fastest way to learn a new [Algol based] programming language.
However, this is usually the best way to get through most university classes when they change languages on you. The laziness factor hopefully would kick in, you won't want to write more than you should so learning to take advantage of the language facilities will know how to learn the language effectively.
Most languages tend to have 3 basic building blocks:
... then) ...)
1) Assignment (a = 1)
2) Conditional (if
3) Loops (do while
Everything else around it is syntactic sugar and what really defines the language.
The syntactic sugar basically manages the complexity of the program (it does not make things less complex).
What I normally do is learn how to do those three things first and get a simple program that does something like
a = 10
while (a > 0) {
if (a > 5) {
print "greater than 5"
}
else {
print "less than 5"
}
a = a - 1
}
Then I learn how to do procedures if it is a procedural language or how to do objects if it is OO. I tend to go to procedural first if it is supported since it is easier to learn and deal with.
Next thing I learn to do (if needed) is the memory and pointer stuff. Nowadays I do not deal with it since most modern languages already handle it for you.
By this point, I now have the basic framework of the language itself. However, it does not stop there.
For any task that is given to you, you should always think that it should've been done before. So its quite helpful to get a searchable reference handy. This is basically the key thing.
For example, I won't implement sort myself, I would use qsort() in C or the std::sort() in C++. Nor would I implement a stack or other simple data structures, I usually expect them to be there now, of course I still adjust to the language and I still remember how to do it anyway, it will just take some elbow grease.
To paraphrase the Perl reference, there are 3 virtues each programmer should have... laziness (don't implement what you think should be standard), impatience (keep the reference guide with you when you are coding, its the fastest way to get at the information), hubris (well that just builds up as you get better and start getting A+'s)
Good luck!
JBoss comes with a JMS component and a MOM server with it.