Somewhere deeply hidden in the release notes of the recent Java for Mac OS X update, our friends from Apple have announced that they deprecated the Java runtime for Mac OS X and that “developers should not rely on the Apple-supplied Java runtime being present in future versions of Mac OS X”.

Read that as: Mac OS X 10.7 won’t have Java (by Apple), maybe we’re lucky and get the 10.6 update 3 thrown into OS X 10.7, but maybe not. To be fair – Apple was never a big and fast supporter of Java on OS X, for them to release Java 6 and 64-bit versions of the runtime was apparently a major drama so that a lot of Java developers on the Mac at some time just switched to SoyLatte, a FreeBSD port of Java 6. That worked and still works fine for a lot of server applications such as Tomcat.

Ok, as everyone was able to see, my participation in “30 days of me” has somewhat stalled. Here are days 12 to 20 – just for the sake of getting a bit further towards completion…:)

Animals are my friends too. Here’s a photo of Lamb, Max (also known as @karoricat on Twitter) and myself.

Songs you listen to when you are Happy, Sad, Bored, Hyped, Mad – this is easy:

Today’s topic is “Something I’m proud of in the past few days”… Probably the thing that comes to mind was pulling off Flash Platform Camp for the second time now in 2010 about two weeks ago together with Diane and Ross. Other than that in the last few days and weeks – lots of business as usual – as boring as it might sound

This morning I posted a “Friday challenge for Vodafone NZ, Telecom NZ and 2degree Mobile”. The idea was for the three large mobile networks in NZ to come up with a response to a typical scenario of a mobile device user looking for a good and reasonably priced plan/package structure. Everyone had time until 5:30 pm today (with a potential extension of 15 minutes or so because the server had an issue) to come up with something.

New Zealand is a small country in the South Pacific. We’re far away from the rest of the world, have a quite large landmass (about the size of Germany) and very few people to fill it with (about 4.5 million compared to Germany’s 80 million). This setting creates an interesting scenario for a bunch of industries, among them the telecommunications sector.

One of the most expensive services in New Zealand (compared to pricing in other countries as well as the average income and cost of living) is using a mobile phone and in particularly data on a mobile phone. At this stage New Zealanders can use three mobile networks, provided by Vodafone NZ, Telecom NZ and 2degrees mobile. There are also a few virtual network operators like Orcon, Compass Communications and others who pretty much re-bundle offerings from one of the three large players under their own brand – I’ll keep them at the side at this stage.