Though being a Finn I have not had a typical Finnish vacation (taking the whole July off) for a long time. To be more exact. Never. During the past few years my vacations have been extended weekends and taking one week off. Why?

The reason is that I am almost scared of vacations. Not the vacationing, and relaxation itself, but what it means to take time off from work when you peers are not taking time off at the same time.

First problem is the days before vacation. Of course I have promised to do way too much things before signing off. I end up working more than ever and still things are left unfinished. And then I end up stressing over the unfinished business for the first few days of the vacation.

After that stress subdues (in few days), I am starting to think about how many unread emails my inbox already has. If I had mobile email installed on my phone, I would worry even more, and check the emails constantly. Without the mobile email, I end up opening the laptop only once in 2 days. Hurrah.

And then when the vacation is over, I end up cleaning my inbox for two days and still many things are left hanging. I work as hard as the last days before the vacation. Forget the tiny amount of relaxation you were able to gather during the few vacation moments without stressing over something. All gone, faster than your vacation.

Having a mobile life means that also your vacations are mobile. Always eluding your grasp :-)

I have already touched the Java security domain/policy variations by two U.S. operators (well, we call them carriers here) namely T-Mobile U.S. and Cingular. There are also some operators outside U.S. having a little different security domains for MIDlets. Hutchinson 3G  is one of them. (Disclaimer. I have not hold a phone with Hutchinson 3G branded software in my hands - all the following information is extracted from implementation-level documentation.) 

Interestingly H3G has by default a little more open access to network and local connections for untrusted MIDlets, as the default access right is "ask once" instead of "ask always" as detailed in MIDP security policy recommendation. However the user data access (file system and PIM) as well as location information (JSR-179) is not available for either untrusted MIDlets or MIDlets in the trusted 3rd party domain.

An additional small difference is that for trusted 3rd party MIDlets the only available option for messaging is "ask always". There are no other settings like "ask once" or "always allowed" available.

Even though I have not lately used Sun's Wireless Toolkit much for MIDlet development, I think it is worth mentioning that the final version of WTK 2.5 is finally out (I think the WTK 2.5 beta version was launched in June last year).

WTK 2.5 contains support for MSA (JSR-248) specification, so it includes implementations for all the required 16 APIs. Plus it also supports JSR-239 - Java Binding for OpenGL ES API. Pretty nice set of APIs, I have to admit. Also the emulator has new skins and there are more sample applications shipped along the package.

So no earth-shaking additions, but still worth an upgrade.

I have been keen follower of Demo conferences for a long time. Never been there, but just browsing through the intro pages of the companies presenting there is always an interesting read.

First of all, what is Demo conference? Basically it is an event, where a selected group of companies (usually start-ups) make a 6-minute pitch for their product in front of an audience full of VCs, angel investors, technology journalists, and representatives from big technology companies. Some notable product announcements have been made there over the years, like PalmPilot.

There is a number of first-hand accounts (mostly describing companies which seemed interesting to the authors) on the event, for example here and here. (One of the technologies Dean Takahashi was writing about, Zink - inkless printing, is a nice idea, but sounds like a step to the 80s bringing back "polaroid" photos...of course with having a digital counterpart and the instant gratification of seeing the picture on paper...)

This time a colleague of mine attended the conference too and suggested a couple of interesting companies/products to check out. Of course, based on his background, his picks are likely different from mine, but so far I have not had time to browse through all of the products presented in the event last week to give you my take.

• Vringo is launching a video sharing community which allows you to share video ringtones (or Vringos) with your buddies each time you call them. 
• Jaman is the way people discover, enjoy and share world cinema.
• Crickett (from Seagate) is an ultra-portable wireless storage solution (up to 40 GB) that works seamlessly with Bluetooth-, WiFi- and USB-equipped handsets.

I know this is old news to many of the Flash Lite enthusiasts, but I thought a general heads-up would be in order. Adobe is namely working on some quite cool tools for mobile content developers. You can get a sneak peak of the coming Device Central, if/when you install the Photoshop CS3 Beta. Note, that the beta is good for only two days, unless you have Photoshop CS2, Creative Suite, Production Studio or Bundle serial number, which allows you to get a Photoshop CS3 beta serial number (and use the beta for a longer period of time).

Here is a short summary what Device Central is. Be warned that I checked the tool for just for few minutes, as it kept crashing my computer (I have not seen the blue screen of death appearing so reliably for a little while...), so my impressions can be a wrong...

Device Central seems to have two main uses: a) previewing&testing of the mobile content and b) providing detailed device information (device profiles) for the content developers.

The testing part is very slick with nice touches, like outdoor/indoor glare simulation and device performance simulation. Think Flash Lite device simulator squared.

The device information library is very neat too. You can check details of one phone only, or compare multiple devices side by side. The information included for each of the devices seems to be very comprehensive (from mobile content developer point-of-view). The hard part is to get the mistake-free hard data in the tool...

I failed to take screen shots from the tool while checking it out few days ago and now I am too lazy to remove the beta and reinstall it again (in order to be able to use it past the 2-day grace period...). Hence you can check some screen shots here.