News.com launched a minor redesign today. They still put their stories in lame packages in order to rob you of an extra click, though. Unfortunately for them, I never look at advertisements or click on sponsored links.
Microsoft is paying ActiveState to beef up their version of Perl for Windows. I wonder where this will lead? My gut feeling is that Microsoft feels like they can steal away Unix customers if they can get Unix stuff working better on Windows. According to the article, Microsoft is paying for the addition of the fork function to the Windows version of Perl, among other things.
One thing I always disliked about using Unix on the desktop was the X windows environment. I’ve always found it to be kludgy, and I thought that all of the window managers were hard to configure, and difficult to use. Then I discovered WindowMaker. WindowMaker has really nice, clean lines, is incredibly easy to set up and configure, and is nice to use. The only downside is that it’s incredibly poorly documented (a failing common to a lot of free software). Maybe I’ll be able to write some documentation for it once I finish working on the book.
Michael Leventhal has declared war on XSL. He makes a strong case against XSL in the article, and I have to admit that I’ve always been anti-XSL, since Microsoft is the main party behind it. It really pisses me off that Microsoft eschewed adding standards-based XML styling with CSS to IE 5 in favor of their own proprietary implementation of XSL.
Sun has released the reference implementation of Java Server Pages. They’re the perfect solution for people who are dissatisfied with Cold Fusion, PHP, Active Server Pages, iHTML, Meta-HTML, embPerl, and server-side JavaScript.
I downloaded Mozilla M6 tonight. It’s looking really, really good. In fact, it’s almost to the point where one could use it full time as their browser. It still has a few small glitches that prevent me from doing so (like difficulty with cut and paste).