Unsurprisingly, ICANN has decided to eliminate the elected board positions that were created two years ago, and Karl Auerbach along with them. Granted, Auerbach is a hard ass, but removing all public accountability from ICANN is a poor decision. More importantly, Auerbach passionately and more importantly, accurately represented the views of many, many longtime users of the Internet. The fact that the ICANN board couldn’t deal with an old school Internet engineer is telling.

Over the weekend, Russell Beattie Notebook and Dave Johnson had some things to say about the upcoming battle between .NET and Java. There’s no doubt about it, .NET has some aspects that are big improvements over Java. That’s the benefit of competition — .NET has some new innovations, but it’s also a huge ripoff of everything good in J2EE and Java. Fortunately, this goes both ways — I expect Java to steal the good stuff in .NET as soon as possible.

I’m perfectly comfortable sticking with Java, which is already transparently cross platform on the server side, knowing that I’ll be using the best parts of .NET soon enough, rather than tryng to re-adapt all of my skills to the Microsoft world. Doing so would be to abandon not only Java, but also Apache, Ant, Tomcat, Linux, vim, and Emacs … all of which are, in my opinion, superior to the Microsoft alternatives.

Furthermore, I expect Java to evolve even more rapidly thanks to its robust competitive ecosystem than .NET will. In the Java world, we have a huge collection of app servers ranging from free (JBoss) to expensive (BEA WebLogic), all competing to provide the best performance and features. Same thing on the servlet container side of things. For development tools, we have tons of competing IDEs out there, again spanning a huge price range and set of capabilities. There are even multiple Java compilers and runtimes that are pushing the state of the industry forward.

When Sun entered the Web application space, they stole everything they could from ASP, and made a number of improvements on it as well. Now Microsoft has returned the favor with .NET. I expect that we’ll see the momentum shift back soon enough, assuming it has shifted away from Java (I doubt that’s the case, honestly). What we need is healthy competition in this space for the foreseeable future.

If anybody has any interest in testing out a version of the XML::RSS module for Perl that generates valid RSS 2.0, please send email. I’ve got it working (and producing valid RSS 2.0), but I need more testers to put it through its paces. I also haven’t updated the module installer or the perldoc yet, but the code itself is working. That means you should probably be something of a Perl-head if you want to test it.

I discovered a new toy tonight — Jonathan Eisenzopf’s XML-RSS module for Perl. It produces RSS 1.0, 0.9, and 0.91 feeds with relative ease. It’s certainly a lot better than my cobbled together RSS “generator”. It doesn’t support RSS 2.0, and doesn’t look like it’s under active maintenance, but I bet it could be hacked to do so with relative ease. I haven’t updated the production feed to use XML::RSS yet, but I will later this weekend.

Senator Paul Wellstone, his wife, daughter, and five other people died today in a plane crash in Minnesota. What a shame. This Congressional Quarterly article has some details.

It appears as though Blogger was hacked sometime today. Anil Dash was on the scene, announcing it publicly first. Danny O’Brien has set up QuickTopic for posting announcements. Blogger is currently down, so don’t bother going there and trying to change your password. The thing that sucks for me is I had to change my parents’ web hosting password because they have a Blogger weblog on their web site. Now I have to call them and tell them why I changed it and what the new password is. C’est la guerre, I guess.

As you know, one of my minor obsessions is making fonts look as good as possible under Linux. One of the nice benefits of Gentoo’s “build it all from source” model is that everything looked pretty darn good font-wise right out of the box, although I later made some tweaks to improve things. For those of you out there using Red Hat or other distributions that have crappy font support by default, there’s a Register article explaining how to spruce things up. Interestingly, I find that a lot of long-term Linux users don’t really care about how their fonts look, but if you come from the Windows or Mac world and are used to having decent anti-aliasing and a wide variety of appealing fonts available, dealing with crappy fonts under Linux is a major sacrifice.

So Best Buy has a house brand laptop designed for them by Porsche, and all they can do is rip off the TiBook? Color me unimpressed.

Anybody else getting emails inviting them to join the Illuminati Order? I’ve gotten several in the past few days, here’s one of them. I’m puzzled as to who’s forwarding these things to me (and I don’t think they’re spam based on the email address they’re going to), especially considering that the organization’s purported philosophy is far from my own. Judging from their Web site, I’m not sure if it’s a scam or what.

Obviously it’s all over the news today that John Allen Muhammad and his stepson John Lee Malvo were arrested last night as suspects in the sniper case. Several stories mention that Muhammad converted to Islam years ago, and this CBS story discusses his background in detail. I’m somewhat curious as to whether Muhammad was a convert to Islam or to the Nation of Islam, which can be safely described as two different things. In either case, I hope he’s really the sniper so nobody else gets shot.