Lung cancer? I wanted heart disease. →

Is Google finally devouring itself? →

Random swirling ideas that weren't big enough for a post by themselves. →

This time around, it didn't feel like home. It felt like this place I happened to know my way around. Maybe this is natural: four years is enough time to lay down roots in a new home, be planted somewhere else. Or maybe it's just that I live so much of my life within myself already that I'm not so easily attached. "I am the cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to me." →

If we can write 137 lines of code without a bug, then we can structure our programming style so that we're always writing units of fewer than 137 lines. We can build those units into components, and voila! No more bugs. →

Two months ago, I thought reaching 1.0 was one of the toughest things a software project could do. On your left is a pile of bug reports, on your right a pile of feature requests, and in the middle there's a calendar screaming "Release, already!" →

Like all plans, it was simple and effective. I even wrote it up on the whiteboard in clear steps. It was all downhill from there. →

Are we all at sea with webservices? Geek Cruises seem to think so. →

Now call me a cynic, but I can't help wondering if the next year will see a less aggressive, more financially responsible Sun cutting back on projects that are unprofitable and that only exist as a weapon against a company they are no longer in pitched battle with. Like, say, OpenOffice.org. →

For that, I'll happily tell the world how excited I am to be in partnership with you, and how much I respect you as a company. I'll come to your barbecues and laugh at the funny slogan on your apron, even if nobody else does. →

We're only talking about a few lines of helper method here, of course. Apache Commons already has one ready-made and waiting for me. All this would be doing, though, is moving the ugly code into a ghetto so I wouldn't have to see it. It would still be there. →

Alright, we're here. Let us never speak of the shortcut again. →

This pretty much sums up the Internet. →

Confluence 1.0.1, out tomorrow, will mostly consist of workarounds for weird Sybase behaviour. →