Month: January 2003

I sense a great disturbance in the blogosphere. An informative – but also quite amusing – blog-mediated Java vs .NET flame-war seems to be starting between some guy called Carlos Perez and Developmentor’s Jason Whittington. It seems to have started over at javalobby.org and Carlos’s blog. Jason posts some pro-dotnet responses, and the comments hit the fan. Worth a read.

For what its worth, I definitely side with the .NET camp on this one. The technology’s advantages over Java are just too compelling: in particular, language neutrality, the superb toolset, the ability to write rich, responsive client apps, and support for legacy COM components. Even if Microsoft is forced to ship Sun’s Java runtime with its future OS’s, I think Java’s days are numbered.

Hiplogs – the new new thing. A bit like FoneBlogs, but hopefully with less pictures of pissed people in bars. #

Apple’s new Safari browser looks very cool. No windows version, so I won’t get to try the impressive-looking bookmark management – the only thing I dislike about Mozilla. #

Anyone who’s worked in the tech industry has met at least one of these people.

Hey… William Gibson’s just got himself a weblog. Yes, that William Gibson – the one who coined the tern ‘cyberspace’. Well-designed though it undoubtedly is, its still not quite what we were promised:

“Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts…A graphical representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the non-space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding…” –William Gibson, Neuromancer

Maybe next next version?

The Burden: a thoughtful piece by Michael Ignatieff on the US’s apparent moves (drift?) towards being a de facto imperial power. Among other points, he argues that, in trying to be the “worlds policeman”, the US may acquire an empire in the same way that Britain did. That is, accidentally and without really considering the consequences. Lets hope not. It took us a long time, and a lot of deaths, to get rid of the British empire  #

Keith Brown of Developmentor fame is writing a free, online book called Essential .net Security. He currently has only a couple of chapters posted, but if the rest are going to be as good as this chapter then it’ll be well worth keeping an eye on. #

Business2.0 has a good business-oriented article on Miguel de Icaza’s Mono project. #

Tool of the day is Steve Miller’s PureText. Nice and simple, this one. Clicking on the icon that it adds to the system tray causes all formatting information to be stripped from the text in the clipboard. Very useful for copying and pasting text between applications without carrying-over the formatting as well. I use this a lot. #

Alan Adla’s advice to President Shrub on the pressing scrientific issues for the world and the USA.  Wonderful, clear, concise writing – I wish I could express myself like this:

“The problem is that, although we’re all entitled to our beliefs, our culture increasingly holds that science is just another belief. Maybe this is because it’s easier to believe something?anything?than not to know.” #

Infiltration.org has some intriguing stories (and pictures) of people going where they shouldn’t. And, on the subject of unashamed trespass on corporate space, those wacky funsters the Yes Men (creators of the spoof gatt.org site) are demonstrating their “employee visualisation appendage” over at The Ecologist. I read this in the print version of the mag and it nearly reduced me to hysterics.