Philip Brittan is one of Java.net’s bloggers and is doing his best to prove that the site really does feature voices independence from Sun. He’s currently run off a string of posts comparing and contrasting .NET and Java and does a good job of explaining where Java doesn’t stack up right now.

Eric Sink has some useful career advice for software developers (for anyone, really).

CNET has an interview with Ernie Ball (via Workbench), who switched his small private company away from Microsoft products to open source products in 2000 after he was raided by marshalls on behalf of the Business Software Alliance and then subjected to public humiliation by being featured in BSA “scared straight” ad campaigns.

Kevin Werbach wrote a piece yesterday pondering the death of email. It’s not dead, but it’s gone from being a useful tool to something you have to cope with. These days everybody has email, everybody expects you to check and respond to your email, and at the same time, your mailbox is constantly filled with utter dreck by spammers, legitimate companies that you made the mistake of disclosing your email address to, “jokes,” urban legends, and email viruses.

So I’d say email is anything but dead. Everyone who works sitting at a desk is utterly dependent on it. These days, I use a two tiered approach to email filtering, and I read my email in two ways. On my hosting account, I have SpamAssassin installed. It’s not a perfect installation — for some reason it won’t process mailboxes for the Bayesian filter, it just hangs instead. But its rule based processing gets rid of nearly all my spam. I read my personal email using Mutt when I’m at work, and I see all the spam that gets by SA, which is pretty insignificant. At home, I’m running Thunderbird and using its built in Bayesian filter to weed out the spam that gets past SA. I have its filters trained well enough now that at home I don’t see any spam at all, and I have very few false positive problems as well, even for promotional emails that I actually want to get.

My work email account uses Exchange and Outlook, but I never have problems with it because I simply don’t use it for anything but sending mail to coworkers. I rarely use it to sign up for things on the Web, I don’t use it to send email to friends, and I’d certainly never use it to post to a public mailing list or Usenet. This insures that the email address never gets published on the Internet and thus puts me on the road to getting spam that doesn’t pass through a spam filter.

This is how I cope with email. The only serious improvement I’d like to make is fixing the Bayesian filtering in SpamAssassin, but to really get it working well, I’d need a key in Mutt that says “this is spam,” and I haven’t bothered to figure out how to set that up.

Linus Torvalds on SCO: They are smoking crack.

Update: A PR flack for the crack smokers responds.

Today I curse my fate in never working for a company that believed that spending a king’s ransom on WebLogic or WebSphere was a good idea.

Documents of Freedom: “Letter From a Birmingham Jail”

Looks like I have a lot in common with these Iraqis. I want the same things for the United States that they want for their country.

There should be some sort of award for Mark Frauenfelder’s Boing Boing post entitled “Please diagnose my tropical island skin sore.” As you might imagine, this one is not for the squeamish.

For awhile now I’ve been thinking that pair.com, my long time hosting provider, has been falling down on the job. The performance of this site has seemed rotten to me, and I assumed that it was a problem with the database server because static pages fly onto the screen as they should. I then realized that a phpBB installation that I’m running works perfectly fine. It was then that I realized that the problem was somewhere in my code.

It’s a good thing I didn’t migrate to a different hosting provider over this (I had had considered it). The problem is that the code that displays the items on the home page pulled up all of the items I’ve ever posted and then grabbed the ones from past five days with posts. Pulling them all up insured that under no circumstances would I ever not have five days of posts on the front page, even if they were one year apart or something. Anyway, now that I have literally thousands of items in the database, that query was taking a long time, even though it never wants more than a few items. I set up the where clause so that it now only grabs items from the past 14 days, and that seems to have made things much better. Given the posting history for this site, users shouldn’t see any difference other than improved performance.