Blue Sky On Mars

Joel raised maybe slightly less hubbub than usual with his latest article Please Sir May I Have A Linker?. In there, he rants about the giant size of the .NET runtime and his desire to just include the classes he needs. Though this doesn’t eliminate the need for the Java runtime, SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Pack ant task: smallest set of classes needed to run", url: "http://www.blueskyonmars.com/2004/01/29/pack-ant-task-smallest-set-of-classes-needed-to-run/" });

Joe Cheng writes about using virtual private servers for your hosting. For only $20/month you get root access to a virtual server, giving you full access to run whatever code you need to run. That’s really, really cool. I’m quite happy with my $8.45/month service that I have now through Sitelutions, but there are times when being able to run any arbitrary software seems nice.

If you missed this from the Keith Pitty’s mention yesterday, Gavin King has written up some Hibernate performance tips.

The Server Side is presenting The Naked Object Architecture Series, which is an interesting comparison of the Naked Objects approach vs. a standard Swing approach. The discussion attached to the link is also interesting.

I have had a tendency to think that using a generated UI would not be as productive for our users as a custom-tuned, task-oriented UI. The Naked Objects folks have some more info coming up about this topic, so I’ll have to keep an eye out for that.

On January 22nd, at 11:25AM MST, there were these Remarks by the President to the Press Pool:

THE PRESIDENT: I need some ribs.
Q Mr. President, how are you?

THE PRESIDENT: I’m hungry and I’m going to order some ribs.

This is a fairly amusing exchange. I tell ya, reporters have no respect. As Bush said, this was not a press conference, but the reporters just have to get their questions in.

James Strachan announced the release of Groovy 1.0b3, and it’s clear that a lot of work has gone into this release. Groovy looks to be shaping up very nicely. Now if only they’d add “import foo.bar.*”

I’ll need to read more about Morbus Iff’s LibDB, because I am very much in a library/cataloging world.

CBS is going to have a greatest Superbowl commercials special, and this page has their top 10.

It’s great to see an article like The Tyranny of Copyright? in the mainstream press (NYTimes in this case). Most people are probably not aware of the culture theft that is going on. It’s unfortunate that they use the term Copy Left to represent this “movement”, because the FSF which coined the term “copyleft” is far anti-copyright. The folks like Lessig and myself are pro-reasonable copyright.

Some folks have started a new service called Furl which allows you to archive and search interesting pages you find on the web. Unlike a bookmark or a blog post, they actually store the content. So, if the original site goes away, you still have a copy of the content. Very nice, if it doesn’t run afoul of copyright laws.