Evans Data is reporting that Visual Basic is losing ground to other languages, and that Java and XML are on the grow. I take all of these market surveys with a grain of salt, but if this is true, I imagine people are freaking out in Redmond. The drops in Visual Basic usage in the study results are extreme.

A couple of interesting Perl 6 items. First, Apocalypse Two, the second installment in Larry Wall’s ongoing review of RFCs for Perl 6 is out. Second, there’s Damian Conway’s design document for Perl 5+i, a hypothetical design for Perl 6.

No surprise here: Andrew Leonard has posted a column examining Microsoft’s motivation in launching their current assault on free software.

Abner is on my list of things to buy when I have a few million dollars stashed away.

I guess open source is really starting to make it big. Microsoft is now coming out full force against open source software, using the same old FUD that has gotten them this far. They’re focusing on the GPL right now because it’s the easiest thing to attack, and because it’s the easiest thing to misrepresent. I see this as a victory for the open source world. Who’d have thought a few years ago that IBM would be hyping open source software and Microsoft would be bashing it so vehemently? I’d have wagered that they still wouldn’t even be paying attention to it.

God bless Patrick Leahy. He’s putting Solicitor General nominee Ted Olson to hard questioning about his past role as franchise player for the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. And it seems Olson has decided to be less than forthcoming about his role in managing the privately funded multimillion dollar investigation of the Clintons sponsored by Richard Mellon Scaife. Of course Olson is going to be confirmed as Solicitor General anyway, but it least it will be on record that he’s a lying lowlife guilty of the same sort of dishonesty that he and his ilk savaged Clinton for over the course of his Presidency.

The Smoking Gun has a collection of dressing room requirements of big name singers. All things considered, Tina Turner is my kind of gal (chocolate milk and ribs, yum). Reading it reminds me of the time a certain wunderkind from a big name Internet company came to visit a startup where I work, and his assistant phoned ahead with his personal list of requirements: sticky buns for breakfast, pizza for lunch, and Coca Cola. Oh, how we guffawed.

The Economist: Bush’s call to arms

Unsurprising news: yesterday Dubya and unredeemed Cold Warrior Donald Rumsfeld announced plans to go full steam ahead with their plan to implement Reagan’s Star Wars NMD scheme. They’re not referring to it as such, but that’s what it is. It’s the perfect government program: incredibly expensive (pouring all of the money into the coffers of the defense industry), unlikely to work, and likely to piss off pretty much every other country in the world. The best case scenario is that we kick off a new arms race. The worst case scenario is that we place our faith in a system that doesn’t really work, start throwing our weight around, and wind up getting a U.S. city or two deleted when the system fails.

Brock Meeks takes on HR1542, the bill I was griping about yesterday. His coverage of the issues at hand is much better than my cursory reading of someone else’s summary of the legislation. I guess that’s what we pay these journalist guys for in the first place.