My father sent me this one.
Then there's the Berne Convention, the 1971 document from which most international copyright law proceeds. It is not to be confused with the Geneva Convention, which is from a different bit of Switzerland and proscribes "cruel and unusual punishment" such as torture. As a rule of thumb, the Berne Convention says you shouldn't copy Celine Dion CDs, the Geneva Convention bans them outright.
Matthew J C Powell, Australian Reseller News 2002-06-26
Then there's the Berne Convention, the 1971 document from which most international copyright law proceeds. It is not to be confused with the Geneva Convention, which is from a different bit of Switzerland and proscribes "cruel and unusual punishment" such as torture. As a rule of thumb, the Berne Convention says you shouldn't copy Celine Dion CDs, the Geneva Convention bans them outright.
Matthew J C Powell, Australian Reseller News 26/6/2002
From the OpenBSD homepage CVS:
-Five years without a remote hole in the default install! +One remote hole in the default install, in nearly 6 years!
Or, as JWZ puts it: "___0___ DAYS WITHOUT AND ON-SITE INJURY!" (sic)
There is a remote root exploit in OpenSSH. The whats and whyfors haven't been announced yet, although there's a point-release available that at least turns it from remote-root into remote-get-stuck-in-chroot if your OS supports it.
This is very serious shit. Upgrade to 3.3 now, and upgrade again when the real fix is available. Everybody runs ssh, and pretty much everybody trusts it and leaves it wide open (which itself is a sign of complacency). The moment the cause of this bug is leaked, there's going to be a hundred thousand script kiddies trying every door they can find.
Updated: Okay, now I'm annoyed. I ran around finding patches and upgrading my Debian boxes, only to discover I wasn't vulnerable in the first place. The Debian policy is that all security fixes should be back-ported to whatever version of the application is in the stable tree, ensuring no new, unknown bugs are introduced by the upgrade. By withholding details of the bug, and just saying "Upgrade to v3.3 or you will be sorry!", Theo forced the Debian maintainers to put an unstable, untested package with major known issues in the stable tree, and force everyone to upgrade to it.
It turns out Theo was making use of the panic-value of a root exploit in SSH to ram privilege separation down everyone's throats. Well, either that, or he thought that if OpenBSD was going to have a security hole then damnit, everyone should suffer.
Kickups. Requires flash. Will cause serious carpal tunnel syndrome.
Found on The Register, you can buy Captain Kirk's bridge chair on eBay. Asking price is between $100,000 and $150,000. It doesn't look that comfortable, either. There are quite a lot of Trekky things on auction including scripts, costumes, tribbles, and those computer card things.
jenett.radio read "Floodbots" and asks what makes
Joe Loser
tick?
Like the Force, the Internet has a light and dark side. The Dark Side of the Internet lies in its capacity to bestow power without responsibility. It's very easy to assault someone on the net, either through words or through network attacks, and remain anonymous and unaffected.
I hate to fall into stereotypes, but that sort of thing is really attractive to people who have lacked power in real life, who see themselves as victims, and thus (unconsciously) approach the Internet as a way to turn that around.
From a mature perspective, the power to destroy is the poor cousin of the power to create. And you'll find far more people trying to create things on the Internet than trying to destroy them. Barely a day goes by when I don't write something in my blog, livejournal or wiki. Sometimes, people even pay attention to something I say. It doesn't really matter, because it's knowing I'm building something that's important. But it's far easier to get noticed, far easier to have people pay attention to you if you're tearing something down.
From Jamie Zawinski; nightclub owner, webcaster and hacker.
Burn, Hollywood, Burn.
Wow, check this out, from RAIN (Radio and Internet Newsletter): the author of the Yahoo deal on which the new RIAA webcasting royalty rate was based has come forward to say that the deal was specifically designed to make it impossible for small webcasters to compete!
Mark Cuban says:
Now, no one asked me any of these things prior, during, or after the first or second pricing. I'm not sure that this matters. But if it does, here it is: The Yahoo! deal I worked on, if it resembles the deal the CARP ruling was built on, was designed so that there would be less competition, and so that small webcasters who needed to live off of a "percentage-of-revenue" to survive, couldn't.
Please don't drop dead of non-shock.
Do you have a problem with elves? Only you can answer that question for yourself. However, taking the following quiz may help to put your relationship to elves in perspective for you. If you end up answering "yes" to three or more questions, you may want to take a good look how your life is affected by elves.
Remember, there are people who can help you control elves, instead of elves controlling you.
I was talking to an old friend today. She spends a lot of her time helping run the Undernet IRC network, and is really worried about how many trojanned clients are hanging around.
For those of you who don't IRC, here's a quick description of the problem. Joe Loser writes a trojan or virus, and uses it to backdoor a bunch of people with cable modems. Part of the effect of this trojan is to have all the backdoored clients turn up on an IRC network and sit on a particular channel. This way, the perpetrator need not keep track of who is or is not infected, they all come to see him, and he can command them all at once over IRC.
When these bots are ordered to flood a host, they're almost unstoppable. It used to be that packet storms came from a single host, or in the case of smurfing, a single subnet. With distributed denial of service, there are potentially thousands of different hosts the attacks can be coming from, and they all have to be shut off. To quote what I was told:
Remember [person]? One guy caught him cleaning [disinfecting compromised hosts] and launched what his provider called the most vicious attack they have ever seen. They had to get their uplink - Sprint to filter everything, and Sprint almost couldn't handle the attack. [person] was taken out for almost a week. The oper helping [person] had her access cancelled by her ISP the attack was so bad.
The problem is, these compromised hosts are showing up in the thousands, and these days Undernet is probably the smallest of the "big four" networks. My friend is convinced that something big is on the way, that sooner or later, all these people are going to stop using their floodnets to hack ops on IRC servers, and band together to hit some major network infrastructure.
When it happens, it's not going to be pretty.
o/~ The sun is a mass of incandescent gas / a gigantic nuclear furnace / where hydrogen is built into helium / at a temperature of millions of degrees. o/~
Do you live in a house, an apartment or a condo?
A studio apartment
Do you rent or own?
I rent.
Does anyone else live with you?
Nope.
How many times have you moved in your life?
Let's see... Tunbridge Wells to Sevenoaks. Sevenoaks to some place in Melbourne. To another place in Melbourne. To City Beach in Perth. To Wembley Downs in Perth. To East Fremantle. To Fremantle. To an apartment closer to the middle of Fremantle. Back to live with my mother in the previous house. To another apartment even closer to the middle of Fremantle. To my father's place near North Sydney. To my current address in Newtown.
So that's 12 times, an average of once every twenty-six months.
What are your plans for this weekend?
Laze around, really. Maybe do some random coding. Do my laundry, and if I'm really motivated, clean my apartment somewhat.
Mark Pilgrim is in the middle of his 30 days to a more accessible weblog. He starts off with four different biographies of (fictional) people who might want to read your web page, but who may run into problems because of some disability. Then each day he shows how certain web design techniques can make things easier for those people. It's a clever approach - by having these real-sounding people to talk about, Mark makes accessability a personal thing, instead of just an abstract concept.
The Sydney Morning Herald had a somewhat jokey front-page column today explaining the defeat of the English soccer team at the hands of Brazil. The first time I read it, I didn't notice this, my mother had to phone and point it out to me. Emphasis mine.
Mind you, it would be nice to blame England's exit on someone or something. The French blamed their own arrogance. The Saudis blamed the ball.
And, of course, the Italians blamed everyone.
If I blame anybody, it is Charles Miller, an expatriate railway worker who introduced the game to Brazil after returning to Sao Paulo from a holiday in England in 1894 with two soccer balls in his baggage.
Sorry, England, but Brazil deserved to win that.
Hi, honey. You're looking unhappy. Is there anything I can do to help?
From the "how stupid can you possibly be?" department, NPR have a page demanding (complete with legal threats) you ask permission before you link to them. Of course, maybe it's just a plot to get more page impressions through reverse psychology.
In the process of reorganising my weblog, I'm discontinuing this category. All interesting content is now back on the homepage. If you're subscribed to this RSS feed, please instead subscribe to 
http://radio.weblogs.com/0100190/rss.xml instead.
As has been posted everywhere, Joel Spolsky wrote Strategy Letter V. I posted this comment to his discussion site to correct one major misconception:
The strategy letter is entirely wrong about IBM's Open Source strategy. It's a lovely theory, but the premise is inaccurate.
Myth: They're doing this because IBM is becoming an IT consulting company. IT consulting is a complement of enterprise software. Thus IBM needs to commoditize enterprise software, and the best way to do this is by supporting open source. Lo and behold, their consulting division is winning big with this strategy.
I work for an IBM business partner, doing consulting. They are NOT commoditizing enterprise software. Have you looked at the prices of Websphere or DB2? The new version of Websphere Commerce Suite is apparently going to cost US$150,000 for a single license. A lot of our revenue, and a lot of IBM's revenue comes from selling software. We count on this.
Of course, JBoss have other ideas. They _do_ want to commoditize the application server, and live off the consulting fees. But they're also (or at least their spokesman/head coder is) madly passionate about the ideals of Free Software.
IBM's Open Source strategy comes from making use of things that have /already/ been commoditized to some extent, like Unix-on-Intel, and web-servers. They're also capitalizing on the buzz, which has done a lot to defeat the view in many hacker circles that IBM is evil.
The Register: Microsoft Restores Java to XP. Here's the anatomy of Microsoft's decision-making.
From John Pilger's excellent "The New Rulers of the World":
During the Gulf War, President George Bush Senior called on 'the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their hands and force Saddam Hussein to step aside'. In March 1991, the majority Shi'a people in the south rallied to Bush's call and rose up. So successful were they, at first, that within two days Saddam Hussein's rule had collapsed across southern Iraq and the popular uprising had spread to the country's second city, Basra. A new start for the people of Iraq seemed close at hand. Then the tyrant's old paramour in Washington intervened just in time.
Found on Boing Boing Blog, something nearly too horrific for words...
Power-nerd slashfic. Slash (homoerotic fan fiction) has started to surface starring Steve Jobs and Bill Gates:
"(Jobs) nuzzles my neck, bites my earlobe," Slade writes. "I watch him go to his desk and rummage in one of the top drawers. When he comes back, he's holding a bottle of hand lotion.... He hooks his hand on the waistband of my chinos and briefs, sliding them both down at once.... He runs his hand up my back and leans down to whisper, 'Bill, are you a virgin?'"
"Yes." Sort of.
"I'll be gentle."
Rupert Murdoch on Bill Gates: [link stolen from rebelutionary]
"I don't dislike Bill," he says, when the subject of Microsoft comes up, "but Warren Buffett says that Bill Gates is the kind of man who, if he saw a competitor drowning, would push a hose down his throat to be sure."
Rupert Murdoch on Bill Gates: [link stolen from rebelutionary]
"I don't dislike Bill," he says, when the subject of Microsoft comes up, "but Warren Buffett says that Bill Gates is the kind of man who, if he saw a competitor drowning, would push a hose down his throat to be sure."
Step one: a replacement Radio aggregator that remembers when you've un-checked a story, and doesn't check it again. This hack will only be useful for people who have this preference turned on..
License: This code is provided for free. It is derived from the aggregator code within , I thus retain no rights to it. It is UNTESTED CODE, and is provided WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND. If it corrupts your data, crashes your computer, erases your hard drive, sleeps with your wife and performs satanic rites on your dog, don't come crying to me.
Instructions: Put the root file somewhere Radio can see it. Edit www/system/pages/news.txt and replace the macro call with one to aggregatorCategoriesSuite.viewNewsItems (). The aggregator should behave pretty much like it used to, it'll just remember when you uncheck boxes.
Note: What I did could be accomplished with about five lines of changes to radio.root, rather than an entirely new tool. The reason it's a tool is that this is the first small step in a pretty big overhaul of the aggregator, I'm just releasing it now because it's doing something useful already.
The aggregator might run a little slower than before. I did a lot of refactoring of the Userland code and moved a bunch of logic around in order to separate the "select which stories to display" code, the "handle the user request" code and the "draw the page" code.
developerWorks: Seven tricks that Web users don't know. About what developers assume non-technical web-users will know, but they really don't.
a = true;
if (some_condition) a = false;
if (a) continue;
That people get paid to write code that bad scares me.
For the non-programmer, the three lines above could (and really should) have been written "if (!some_condition) continue;"
Found in radio.html.viewNewsItems:
flskip isn't used anywhere else. I am now officially afraid of reading Userland code. :)
Dave Winer responds, but his response makes my head hurt. We seem to use one definition of "journalist" when talking about professionals, and another definition when talking about webloggers, but this proves webloggers are journalists. Back when I did Philosophy 100, this was called equivocation.
If declaring your interests up-front is a valid way out for webloggers-as-journalists, then it must be for journalists-as-journalists. Otherwise, we have to declare the two to be fundamentally different ideals.
Journalism for self-interest is called publicity. Perhaps we're not journalists, we're self-publicists.
Radio News Aggregator features I want, in order of importance:
The first is the most wanted. Categories in the aggregator would make my life so much more pleasant, and make my news-reading much, much more efficient.
I am subscribed to about 20 news sources of varying volumes, and the news still gets on top of me. With the three features above, I could probably subscribe to an order of magnitude more.
Matthew Thomas indirectly poses a question.
Assume most "tech bloggers" are employed. This puts them in a position to have detailed knowledge of the field in which they work, including the goings-on within their employer, and the exact position of the competition in their market. This also puts them in a position to be in really big trouble if they disclose that information. If part of the definition of a journalist lies in the editorial freedom to criticise one's employer, can bloggers be journalists?
For example, you work for vendor X. Your employer has published benchmarks, but you know the truth, your product does X and Y better than anyone else (and you're proud of that), but people probably shouldn't use it for W and Z. This is information that really should be given to the Real World. And devotees of the Cluetrain Manifesto (or at least that subset of it that I agree with wholeheartedly) would tell you that making the knowledge public would only increase peoples' confidence in your product, because they finally had some obviously honest advice.
But if you say so in your weblog, marketing is going to nail your ass to the wall.
Bloggers' employers are generally not media companies, and so are not at all pre-disposed to grant employees any leeway for public criticism. A journalist may get away with writing that their boss lost a few million dollars in a stupid deal, a programmer wouldn't.
On top of that, I've lost count of the number of NDA's I'm subject to at the moment. Every project I go on, I'm under some kind of non-disclosure agreement, so if I were to start blogging about things that were happening at work, I might be open to serious liability.
There's a reason I don't name my employer in my blog. I'll disclose that we're a small IBM business partner doing Java development in Sydney, and that we're home to a large number of Davids. You may work out who we are from that, but if you do, you probably know me already.
The majority of people I know consider "Empire Strikes Back" to be the best of the Star Wars movies.
The Empire Strikes Back:
Directed By: Irvin Kershner
Written by: Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan
Story by: George Lucas
Suddenly all makes sense, doesn't it?
When you compare today's sequencing and sampling technology with what George Martin and The Beatles accomplished using analog equipment and tape loops, it's pretty amazing.
IBM unifies Eclipse tools. Open-source environment to ease integration despite patchy industry support [InfoWorld: Top News]
Eclipse seems to be having problems attracting support because it doesn't support Swing. Or at least that's the excuse, there seems to be a strong thread of "if we develop for Eclipse, we're helping IBM and Websphere." The backlash against SWT makes sense, though. It's one thing learning a plugin API, it's another thing to learn an entirely new GUI toolkit along with it.
Quote of the Day: "Failure is not an option. It comes bundled with the software."
Brunching Shuttlecocks: The Weblog FAQK
Gosh Jesus no! Weblogs cover a wide range of topics, such as other weblogs, what the mainstream media are saying about weblogging, new weblogs, advances in weblog publishing, books about weblogging, the future of weblogging, and that one naked guy painted up like Spider-Man.
Slumbering Lungfish: Hate Mail
Anyhow, based on an unreliable and unscientific sample, I'd say that religious folks, taken as a whole, are maybe the fourth most thin-skinned group on the Web. The most thin-skinned? Furries. Absolutely, no question.
Brunching Shuttlecocks: The Weblog FAQK
Gosh Jesus no! Weblogs cover a wide range of topics, such as other weblogs, what the mainstream media are saying about weblogging, new weblogs, advances in weblog publishing, books about weblogging, the future of weblogging, and that one naked guy painted up like Spider-Man.
When I downloaded WAS 4.0 and tried installing, I was almost immediately shocked to death by the sheer complexity of the thign. I am of the opinion that app servers should be simple, small devices that act purely as enablers. Even WebLogic is pretty straight forward. I found WebSphere and HPAS (which may not live much longer) to be bloated.
In WebSphere's defence, it's not that easy to "simply enable" some things. WAS has very good support for clustering/load-balancing/failover, distributed security, distributed administration and the like
Some of WebSphere's bloat (and some of its stranger mannerisms) from its relationship with Component Broker. IBM built their J2EE infrastructure around their CORBA ORB. This makes sense, because a lot of EJB services (by design) map onto their CORBA counterparts. On the other hand, it makes the product somewhat heavy going, and perhaps a trifle schizophrenic at times.
Reading this made me feel particularly guilty: A call for the complete elimination of joke haiku production on the Internet.
Triangulation in action. Over the last few hours I've seen three or four comments from Mac OS X users saying that Silk is a good thing. Now I thought I should pass that along.
[Scripting News]
Silk enables anti-aliased text in Carbon apps under MacOS X 10.1.5, without the application having to support it deliberately. I just installed it, and although I have a love/hate relationship with anti-aliased text, it still looks pretty sweet in Mozilla.
(I ask because the TV just reported that "It's acknowledged that a culture of alcohol abuse exists amongst some sailors", as if that was news.)
Update: I'm informed that an aide of Winston Churchill said "the only traditions of the Navy are rum, sodomy and the lash", and that Churchill always wished he said it.
A quick note for anyone writing documentation, or filling in default values in the configuration file for an application.
The domains example.com, example.net and example.org are reserved for use in documentation. Thus, if you use bob@example.com in your default configuration file, you can be guaranteed that the address will never exist, and thus there will never be a "Bob" who is annoyed at your stupid choice of example domain names.
Addendum: The authority for this comes from RFC 2606, which also reserves the following top-level domains for the various, obvious uses: .test, .example, .invalid and .localhost.
Everyone fears WebSphere. I've tried to run it twice (albeit not in the last 6 months) and both times I gave up before I even got to the 'deploy application' stage.
To get WebSphere running I believe you need a small squadron of highly paid IBM consultants, and a battery of seriously large IBM hardware.
If you have that (and can handle the very old standards compliance!), I believe it's quite a nice server ;) [PSquad's Corner] via... [rebelutionary]
Hi there! I'm a <edit>moderately well-</edit>paid IBM consultant!
To get Websphere 4.0 running, you'll need a good mid-range Linux (or some other OS if you're heathen) box, and a copy of the appropriate Redbook. Redbooks are way cool - this one is about two inches thick when you print it out, and has step-by-step installation/deployment instructions.
Oh, and you'll also need a rather significant five- or six- figure sum to pay for the software licenses.
Damnit. I can't afford to get sick.
A quick huzzah to my TiBook. Her name is epiphany (or 'epi' for short). I just upgraded to OS X 10.1.5, and must reboot. According to 'uptime', my last reboot was 29 days ago, also occasioned by an OS upgrade. Not bad for a laptop, eh?
Of course, my desktop W2K box has a similar uptime. And my Linux box has been up 70 days now. This is why I tend to stick anyone I see who says "I tried [Operating System], but it crashed all the time!" in the this-person-is-full-of-shit basket. (for modern values of [Operating System]).
A post by David Hyatt about web standards reminded me of this rant that's been circling in my head for a while.
Last year, I ranted on mozilla.general about web standards and the W3C.
I mean, what's with the W3C? CSS2 was released in 1998 as a standard, and I can count on the toes of one hand how many compliant browsers have been released, three years later. So what are the W3C doing about it? Yes, they're off working on CSS3. Their own HTML showcase, Amaya, doesn't even support CSS1 properly.
Wahey!
The closest we have to an implementation of this three year old standard is Mozilla. So it's not really "W3C CSS2", it's Mozilla CSS2, because nobody else has bothered with more than a third of it. It may be W3C DOM, but it's an incompatible subset of what people are really _using_ out there.
A follow-up replied to mention that Mozilla is closely involved with the W3C, and you could consider it to be the reference implementation if you want.
However, my sentiment stands. A standard should not be given the name "standard" until there exists a real-world implementation. Until something concrete exists that demonstrates the standard, it's just a good idea that might some day work.
Without an implementation, a standard is unproven. There may be significant, vague edge-cases. There may be outright self-contradictions. There may be things missing that people really want to be able to do (text flowing between columns, anyone?). There may be things that nobody really wants to do, but that catering for adds 10% to the running time. Until there's an implementation, nobody knows.
Publish a standard without an implementation, and you leave those vague edge-cases and self-contradictions to be worked out by the implementors. You'll have competing implementations of the same standard that don't behave the same way. Have a reference implementation, and you can say "It has to look like this"
Anyway, enough ranting for now.
Davezilla: These are the Daves of our Lives. "Everyone knows a Dave or three. Daves are always dependable, competent, rather silly and the jack-of-all trades in most offices. Dave is always the guy who can fix the copier, jumpstart your engine or make that noisy dog calm down."
When I started working for my current employer, the company had five Davids (including two of the three company directors). Which wouldn't be too surprising, except that there were only around ten people in the company.
A pretty well-written Salon article on eXtreme Programming. As an aside, I've been on a couple of projects that used (or tried to use) XP. When you can get the buy-in of customer and programmers, and you're not scared to fix the bits of it that don't work for you personally, XP works really well. Just, whatever you do, don't try to do XP without the full involvement of the customer. If you do that, you're doomed.
As another aside, Salon is the one website I've actually paid to subscribe to, purely because I believe it deserves to exist.
A link that might be useful to web-designers, from Mark Pilgrim:
Adrian Roselli: A Simple Character Entity Chart. Both entity names and entity numbers are listed, along with the representation of the character (so you can test for compatibility by loading this page in your browser).
Found on the net...
Bush admits global warming exists, report recommends AC to offset effects. Well, the Shrub has finally admitted that global warming exists. He had to, after a study commissioned by his own government said, basically, "Duh, yes, stop being an idiot." However, the same report contains such howlers as:
"Health impacts ... can be ameliorated through such measures as the increased availability of air conditioning."
CO2 junkies in denial are so sad. Link Discuss (Thanks, Stefan!) [Boing Boing Blog]
Adrian Roselli: A Simple Character Entity Chart. Both entity names and entity numbers are listed, along with the representation of the character (so you can test for compatibility by loading this page in your browser).
Announcer: (back-announcing a rather dull dance track) And that was [such-and-such]... personally, I thought that was shit.
Co-announcer and Producer: Yeah, me too.
Announcer: Well, that's three out of three. Sorry about that, audience.
I like Triple J.
Now why do I have an entry in my referrer stats for the Shonen Knife Homepage? Something tells me somebody is playing silly-buggers with their browser settings.
I do love their cover of The Carpenters' "On Top of the World", though.
More on the browser feature I want.
I'm tempted to learn how to hack a Mozilla sidebar and write this, but I barely have enough time to breathe right now, and I still haven't got that sodding Java RCS up to dogfood yet.
Number of visits shouldn't be the only deciding factor on what goes on the list. A site I've been to several hundred times in the past, but not at all in the last two months is probably less important than one I've only been to three times, but all in the last week. Perhaps a rules-based scoring system of some kind.
If a page doesn't make it on the list in the first pass, the feature should start aggregating pages and combining their scores, either by making use of <link> tags to identify which pages are related (and which one is the "first" page that should end up in the list), or in the absence of link tags, guessing parent URLs.
Dmoz.org should publish an XML-RPC API, so that URLs in the list could be looked up to see if they're in a particular category.
It would be better to have this feature, and have it be wrong one time out of three, than to not have the feature at all.
The second law of thermodynamics states that any attempt to increase the amount of order in the universe must result in an even greater amount of disorder being produced as a by-product.
Thus, organised people are hastening the death of the universe, whereas us disorganised people are really protecting the environment.
I hate keeping bookmarks. Often, I'll find myself having visited a site a lot through links from other sites, but never remember its URL because each individual time I visited, the site wasn't important enough to remember. I want the web browser to keep track of what sites I visit frequently, and put them in a list for me. And I want the feature to be smart enough to work without me having to perform any configuration, or maintain any lists manually.
The bookmark paradigm hasn't really changed substantially since Mosaic was the Cool New Thing. Considering how central the concept of "remembering where we've been" is to the whole web experience, you'd think the bookmark/history tools would have evolved a little more than they have.
In the very persuasive article Is Tomcat Crap?, Mike Cannon-Brookes makes the following statement about IDEA
Using Orion (or Resin) is just like using IDEA - the developer productivity increase from Orion is just like the personal performance boost you get from using IDEA over NetBeans or JBuilder. (If you're not using IDEA, you really aren't a good server-side Java developer - are you?)
I'd like to plug IDEA as being really cool. I use it at home, and am very impressed. However, I'd just also like to mention that at work I use the Eclipse-based Websphere Studio Application Developer, and so far, it's impressive. I cant wait for WSAD to move to Eclipse 2.0, which would mean compatibility with the Eclipse AspectJ plugin. (full disclosure: my employer is an IBM business partner)
I miss the hot-code-swapping in VisualAge for Java, though. Being able to change code while you were at a breakpoint in the debugger, hit save, and then have the new code running as soon as you start stepping forward again was magical. Maybe when the Java spec settles down and IDEs no longer have to rush to keep up with it, we'll see features like that start to reappear.
I got a whole bunch of hits (ten so far, anyway) from Rebelutionary's list of Java bloggers, so I figure I'd better wave and say Hi. :)
I'd say more but I'm snowed under with work at the moment. I seem to have just been turned into a "defacto project manager", which really means all the work and none of the authority. And on top of that, I suck at delegating. Feh...
(Mailed to the radio-dev list)
The HTML spec defines directory-based links for "home", "previous" and "next", among other things. While we are playing with the tag, it might be useful to add these as well.
What does this give you?
For all weblog pages:
<link rel="home" href="{URL of weblog homepage}">
(Home isn't in HTML4.0, but since it's supported by the two browsers that actually look at tags at all, it could be considered a useful defacto standard)
For all "single day view" pages:
<link rel="next" href="{URL of next day page}">
<link rel="prev" href="{URL of previous day page}">
(if there is no next or previous day, omit the link tag entirely)
Ceci n'est pas un journal.
Can someone recommend a better mp3 player for Windows? After using iTunes, the playlist features in Winamp seem brain-dead in comparison.
I hate keeping bookmarks. Often, I'll find myself having visited a site a lot through links from other sites, but never remember its URL because each individual time I visited, the site wasn't important enough to remember. I want the web browser to keep track of what sites I visit frequently, and put them in a list for me. And I want the feature to be smart enough to work without me having to perform any configuration, or maintain any lists manually.
Today, I get to visit my cat!
