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Ring fever: A first-hand look at Java-powered jewelry

<em>JavaWorld</em> columnist and former JavaSoft engineer Chuck McManis gets a serious case of technology fever

By Chuck Mcmanis, JavaWorld.com, 04/01/98

Page 2 of 4

Now my curiosity is really piqued and I can't find out any more about this thing, so after the first technical session I'm off to the Java Pavilion (read: hype bazaar). And there, in an innocuous-looking booth, is Dallas Semiconductor, and -- lo and behold! -- its reps are selling something that looks like it goes with the Java Ring. They are! It's the reader and adapter for your computer. Only 5. So I plunk down the plastic and walk out with a Blue Dot reader. Nearly beside myself with excitement, I find that you can download the demo code from http://www.ibutton.com. Which, when I get home that night (after the Java Pavilion cocktail party), I promptly attempt.

Of course, if life were fair I'd be done, but it isn't, and I wasn't. The Web site had been misconfigured; my browser assumed the tarred and gzipped file was text, and downloading it resulted in el-junko. Sigh. I remembered, however, that the machines in the Hackers' Lab had ring readers, and the next morning I resolved to set about finding out how they worked.

Day 2: To ask permission is to seek denial

It's Wednesday morning. I listen half-heartedly to the keynote address (the Ed-and-Scott show); Zander and McNealy are remarkably composed given the injunction handed down the day before. (See the JavaWorld news article, "Sun's Scott McNealy and Alan Baratz discuss preliminary ruling in MS/Sun suit," referenced in the Resources section below.) As soon as the talk is over I go out to the Hackers' Lab and start exploring one of the machines. Sure enough, there's a file called jibkit07.tar on the machine, and therein I find a bunch of Java source code related to the Java Ring (conveniently located in a directory called javaring).

Exploring further, I found the source to the BusinessCard applet and the Fractal applet. Unfortunately, whenever I plugged my ring into the button, a bogus applet came up with only the show choices. Hmmm, not good. So (like any good hacker) I used the copy of Netscape that was running on the box and mailed the .tar file to my home machine. So much for the download problem.

I then trekked across the pavilion to catch the tail-end of the talk Dallas Semiconductor was giving about the ring. I was too late to catch the whole thing, but good info nonetheless.

Wednesday evening was the JavaWorld party. Quite fun, and I was glad to meet many readers and some of the other authors I knew of only by name, and my editor, Jill Steinberg, whom I'd never met face to face. But on my mind was the ring, always the ring.

At home, around midnight, I fired up my development environment and started hacking. I immediately ran into problems, however. Suspecting my JDK 1.1.2 release, I started downloading the 1.1.5 release over a 33-kilobit per second modem -- ugh! About 15 minutes into the download I remembered that all JavaOne attendees were given the Java Developer CD at the show, so I dug it out. There was the 1.1.5 JDK. Whoo-hoo! Back in business.

I struggled unsuccessfully for another hour and a half trying various things to get my Java Ring to respond to the apduGUI program in the Toolkit. No joy. Couldn't even get it to start. My classpath was full of so many jar files it couldn't be typed in the DOS command line. Then a typo got the apduGUI program to come up. It turns out the Developer Kit has an extra copy of java.lang.Object in it, whoops. After fixing that I got the programs to come up, but they still wouldn't talk to my ring. I resigned in disgust at about 3:30 a.m. Up at 6:00 a.m. for day three.

 

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