Speaking of CGI, my new CGI book was supposed to be available from Amazon.com yesterday. Even though the cover of the book has been on this site for ages, the link actually pointed to my old book’s page at Amazon.com. The new book is much, much better than the old book. If you own the old book, I apologize, but I’ve learned a lot since I wrote the earlier CGI book.

O’Reilly has an article posted explaining why you should learn Java. I think it really oversells the language. Yes, Java is popular, but it’s hardly the lingua franca of computing today, as the author claims. Of course, the article’s author is also the co-author of the O’Reilly published Learning Java, so what do you expect? By the way, have I told you that you should learn CGI programming and SQL as soon as possible?

Fill out your Major League Baseball All-Star Ballot online. (And vote for Richard Hidalgo and Ken Caminiti.)

Today’s lesson in Java programming on a large team involves coding standards. I’m trying to adapt to putting opening curly braces by themselves on the line after a method declaration (or if statement, or whatever) rather than at the end of the same line. I’m handling it OK, in case you were worried.

Simson Garfinkel has an article in Salon about a monitoring program installed on his computer along with some children’s software. Spyware is becoming an increasingly significant problem, and I think that it’s going to take legislation to solve. Most people aren’t attentive enough to figure out whether such software is running on their system, and software makers are not beholden to disclose that their software is sending reports back to the mother ship when you run it.

The feds arrested 120 people yesterday in a huge securities fraud bust. The mafia was buying shares of thinly traded companies, and then using stock brokers they controlled to push shares of those companies onto their clients to drive up the share prices, which the mafia members would then liquidate for big profits. Didn’t I see this on the Sopranos?

So long, epidemic.com. The startup that freaked everyone out with a Super Bowl ad promising a service that would let people earn cash by including advertisements in their personal email is dead, having run out of cash. Thank goodness.

Either Courtney Love is really, really smart, or she had someone brainy write her speech for the Digital Hollywood conference. The speech is awfully long, but if you’re interested in music piracy, the record industry, or the rights of artists, you really should read the whole thing. In it, she mentions that now artists work under “work for hire” contracts when they sign with record labels. Basically this means that the record company, not the artist, owns the copyright to the music. I can tell you that computer book writers who produce works that have half lives of about two weeks scoff at “work for hire” contracts. It’s amazing that recording artists are forced to accept this kind of shoddy dealing. The level of sleaziness exhibited by the major labels is truly amazing, and the entire music industry is desperately in need of major repairs. As a writer, I believe that artists deserve to be paid for their intellectual property. Courtney Love is right in saying that record companies don’t do a better job of paying musicians than does Napster.

My big project of late has been learning Java for work. (Well, that’s one of my big projects anyway.) Since my programming life has revolved around scripting languages (like Perl) for the past few years, getting up to speed in the world of Java has been a real pain for me. I don’t really think that Java itself sucks, but learning Java sucks for me right now. Just for fun, here’s a link to jwz’s Java sucks page, which lists several specific reasons why Java sucks. When I understand why all the problems with Java that he lists are problems, I’ll probably be a pretty good Java programmer.

I’m against breaking up Microsoft, but when Bill Gates speaks to the press, I want to see the company dissolved and their assets sold at auction. What an arrogant jerk.