I looked at Pandora more than a year ago when it just launched but I stopped using it since you were required to pay a yearly subscription fee to continue listening beyond the initial free hours. I liked the idea a lot though. They have a huge catalog of tagged music and are able to select songs for you based on your taste and preferences. This can be done in several ways, you start off by providing a number of artists or albums that you really like and Pandora starts playing immediately. As you listen to it, you can give each individual song a thumbs up or thumbs down, or just let it slide by. All this influences the decision-making process for the next songs. In the end you create your own personal radio station. You can configure up to 100 of these, which means that you can easily set up different ones and listen to them depending on your current mood. A QuickMix feature also makes it possible to get more variety since it will mix all your radio stations on-the-fly as some kind of über-station-with-stuff-you-like.

I recently decided to take a look at it again and noticed that they switched to a banner-based income model with a subscription for those that don't wont to see any advertising. This is awesome, since for all intents and purposes, Pandora is now free to use. Additionally, it they have increased the audio quality of all their music to 128Kbps which makes it sound great!

Pandora is also spot on with the Web 2.0 community approach since you can share your radio stations. Feel free to listen to G.Bevin's Radio. Note that this will not play what I'm currently listening to, it will select music for you based on my musical taste.

I'm using it with the MacOSX DeskBrowse utility, which neatly slides away into the side of the screen. Most of the time, Pandora is invisible and I only slide it in to give my appreciation of the music that is playing.

I'm curious to see if Pandora will replace my preferred internet radio station, Radio Paradise, or if the computer-mixed radio program will start to bore me. I'm planning on using it for at least a few days to see how it goes ...

TheServerSide has just published the TechTalk about RIFE that I did at this year's Java symposium.

The talk discusses these topics:

• the history and rationale behind RIFE
• which design principles were applied
• how the framework benefits application developers and how you benefit from it as a team
• what continuations are and how they work within the servlet model
• how RIFE's component model compares with others
• what the benefit is of RIFE/Crud
• how the templating engine works and why the syntax is different from others
• when RIFE is a good choice for your application development and which suitations it's less suited for
• what features are covered by the full-stack and which ones are totally unique

You can listen to the talk here.

I created a series of six video tutorials with audio explanations that demonstrate what the development process with RIFE is like.

They cover the following topics:

• RIFE/Crud
  (13 min 15 sec, 9.94MB)
• Basics
  (10 min 50 sec, 7.52MB)
• Continuations
  (5 min 31 sec, 4.48MB)
• Step-back continuations & debugging
  (5 min 21 sec, 4.35MB)
• Database
  (2 min 33 sec, 1.95MB)
• Components
  (2 min 47 sec, 2.28MB)

If you want to get a quick overview of some of RIFE's benefits or if you want to get more information about a particular topic that you don't master yet, these demos should be an excellent resource.

I also added other new videos to the theatre section and revamped it so that you instantly see what each video looks like.

Omnicore recently released the final versions of X-develop 2.0 and CodeGuide 8.0.

Since I have been working with both IDEs for quite a number of years, and have been beta testing the early releases of the new version, I wrote a comprehensive review about these tools for TheServerSide.

If you're interested in state-of-the-art tools for Java development, you might find this an interesting read.

The review is available here.