Development for small, mobile devices has been the next big thing for years now, but it looks to me like things are finally coming together. One of the most encouraging signs is that the APIs for these sorts of devices seem to be maturing nicely. In my aggregator I found Russell Beattie singing the praises of J2ME:

First note that I’ve discovered that the J2ME development platform is pretty damn cool. There’s something quite satisfying about the smallness of the API, the ease of which you can throw screens together and the result of seeing your app run on your phone. It’s limited in lots of ways, but for many, many things it’ll actually be perfect. I’m much more excited about J2ME that I have been in the past because of this past week. Add to this the fact that there’s going to be hundreds of millions of J2ME phones out there and suddenly I’m kicking myself for not spending more time developing with it last year.

I also found Larry O’Brien extolling the virtues of .NET Compact Framework:

Well, as much fun as I had revisiting the days of Windows programming without MFC, ATL, or support for, say, C++ exception handling (!), my experience with the Smartphone deepened my belief that the .NET CF is huge. With the .NET CF, programming mobile solutions is only occasionally harder than writing for a desktop (two silly, but real examples — rotating bitmaps and opening a COM port). Honestly, in my Big List of Programming Projects, I no longer automatically move mobile applications to the bottom of the list — .NET CF makes them absolutely approachable. I’m convinced the next five years in software will be all about mobility: handhelds, phones, and Tablets.

Naturally, I’m completely behind the curve on mobile development and have a few things to learn before I can even get started on it. Right now, I’ve gotten as far as pining for a Nokia 3650.

Tim Bray wrote this weekend about the rewards of rolling your own weblogging software. I like having my own, but I wrote it before Blogger existed. There was really only whatever Radio UserLand was called back then, and I wasn’t interested in that. My weblogging software is really starting to show its age though, but I’m saving up all the features I want (mainly things like trackback and a Wiki-like markup language for use in entering items) for when I learn Python. I’ve also been considering writing an EJB-based blogging package just for practice, but I don’t think I’d ever deploy that anywhere.

If you wanted to take power in a country that you hadn’t been back to in 45 years, what sort of deal would you offer to the occupying power to stand out as a candidate for leader of a puppet regime? In Ahmed Chalabi’s case, it looks like the price may be an oil pipeline straight from Iraq to Israel. The fact that Israel has to rely on oil exports from Russia is stupid, but come on.

Sina Motallebi, an Iranian journalist and blogger has been arrested for the typical crimes against the state crap that you’d expect in a repressive society. For a catalog of human rights abuses in Iran, see Amnesty International’s <a href=”library. I expect that this will be picked up by Reporters Without Borders as well.

A World of Doughnuts and Spheres, by George Johnson. I have no comment on this, it’s just too interesting to pass up.

I know that we fought this war for freedom, justice, and the American way, but that doesn’t change the fact that it, like most wars, still comes with spoils. Michael Kinsley has a great column complaining about how the spoils are being doled out.

I think I’m going to directly apply this article on POI to my work tomorrow. I have an application that generates a report and being able to provide it in Excel format would be quite cool.

Rarely do I post the lede to a story that I’m posting a link to, but I think that you’ll find the lede gets one’s blood to the proper temperature. Salon today reports on the destruction of Iraq’s cultural history. Despite Donald Rumsfeld’s “can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs” attitude, the potential loss of Iraq’s cultural history was a well known risk before US Marines moved into Iraq:

On Jan. 24 at the Pentagon, a small group of accomplished archeologists and art curators met with Joseph Collins, who reports directly to Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and four other Pentagon officials to talk about how the U.S. military could protect Iraq’s cultural and archeological sites from damage and destruction during the impending war in that country. McGuire Gibson, a professor at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, gave the officials a list of 5,000 cultural and archeological sites. First on the list: the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad.

Salon also has an interview about the lost antiquities as well with Linda Komaroff, an expert on Islamic art. (It should be pointed out that much of the collection that was destroyed or stolen predates the Islamic era, in many cases by thousands of years.)

Update: Loyal readers know that I’m always thrilled when someone resigns in protest. Well, two Bush advisors stepped down because we failed to prevent the looting and destruction of Iraq’s cultural artifacts.

Slate is really on the Syria case. This week they’ve already run a profile of Bashar Assad and a review of Syria’s military capabilities.

Daniel Forbes, the writer who wrote the story on The Agonist for Wired News, has written another piece investigating iraqwar.ru. Pretty interesting stuff.