For the past couple of years, nearly all of the work I’ve done has been concerned with what’s going on on the server. My new group is a small one, so we have to be generalists. This has given me a chance to pick up on what is happening in browser-based user interfaces. Thankfully, things are a lot more pleasant than they were a few years back, particularly if you don’t care about compatibility with older browsers. At work, my group has an internal customer, so browser compatibility is not an issue there. For my blog, I do this more for myself than for anyone else… so as long as it’s compatible with my browser, I’m happy. Thankfully, creating a nice layout for both Moz and IE using CSS is not very difficult.
Technology
As my work has been shifting toward Java from scripting languages (Perl, Python), I’ve been thinking that a scripted layer on top of Java is a good way to write code. Java can run very fast but can be tedious to write. By scripting on top of Java, it’s pretty easy to write code at a high-level and then shift to Java wherever performance is paramount.
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Technology
This is a question that many people ask webloggers (and that many webloggers probably ask themselves). It often seems that we write for some nameless, faceless audience. That, of course, is not entirely true… many of the people that read our blogs have blogs of their own. We can communicate with them through our blogs and many have independent conversations in email. So, in many cases, the audience is not nameless… we know who they are.
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Random
Kent Beck’s Test Driven Development: By Example follows the mold of the XP books: fairly thin and $30. I’ve never read Beck’s XP book, but I’ve read a couple of the others. Those books all seem to rehash the same material. Thankfully, this book is not like that.
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Reviews, Technology
If this bill were to pass and be ratified by the states, Clinton could return for a third term. Intriguing, but it seems unlikely. This bill was introduced in January and it seems like you’re not going to get an Amendment through without at least some publicity.
Politics
Stupid Censorship, Stupid Security [Slashdot] Links to two pages summing up infringements on freedom of speech and personal freedom. The freedoms granted to us by the Bill of Rights are there for a reason, and there will always be people who want to restrict those freedoms “for the good of society” or for “security”.
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Politics
The Christian Science Monitor shows how independent music labels are doing just fine. It makes a lot of sense to me… there are many reasons that the major labels are having trouble. Cost structure is certainly one of them… the indies do well by not spending enormous sums on random things.
Music
Shaking our faith in Google - DaveNet: Shaking our faith in Google. [Scripting News] Dave writes about Google’s SafeSearch filters and how they can catch some pages that are not prurient in nature.
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Technology
End Run Around The Labels: Pat DiNizio Offers New Way To Distribute Music - n/a [MTV News] Here’s someone who’s actually working on bringing the future of music forward. DiNizio is the lead singer of the Smithereens. He’s looking for 100 patrons to sponsor his music at $1,200 each. For their $1,200 the patrons get 50 copies of a few albums (so that they can pass them out to friends), plus backstage passes to a Smithereens show, plus a “living room concert” for the patron and a few friends at the venue of their choice.
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Music
Cell Phones Companies Fight Number Portability - n/a [Slashdot] The most interesting part of this to me is that the regulation stipulates that people can transfer wired phone numbers to their cell phone carriers. That would definitely make it more appealing to some people to get rid of their land lines.
Random
