Posts

It’s times like these for which Hunter S Thompson is prescribed.

I’ve linked to Phil Carter’s weblog, Intel Dump, a couple of times, but I want to go ahead and recommend it in a general sense. Carter is a law student at UCLA and prior to that was an Army officer. His observations on the military are always illuminating, and he does a great job of ferreting out the best reporting on the war in Iraq. I put him in the “go ahead and read everything they write” category. One downside is that there’s no RSS feed so I have to remember to visit every couple of days or so. ...

Tim Bray on the Web: In my life's experience, the Web has constituted one of the really important steps forward, a blow against the forces of entropy and stupidity.

I already knew this (via Whump). By the way, this link is provided specifically to goad my weekend guest. You know who you are.

At home I have a desktop computer that I use mainly for games. Well, one specific game anyway. For everything else, I use my laptop at home (a Pentium III 850 with 256 megs of RAM) or my laptop from work (a Pentium III 900 with 512 megs of RAM). The game PC has 512 megs of DDR RAM and an Athlon XP 1800 (which is like 1500mhz or thereabouts). Anyway, recently I’ve needed to do some Java development at home, and the home laptop just doesn’t have enough RAM to run Eclipse the way I’d like it to be run. What I’ve discovered, though, is that my desktop PC, for standard development tasks, is astoundingly faster than my work laptop for just about everything. It has a better video card, a faster processor, faster RAM, a bigger, faster hard drive and on and on and on. I could replace the whole thing for about five or six hundred bucks, and tack on a good 17" LCD for another $400 or so. I realize that we’re in the midst of the laptop revolution, but the bang for the buck you get from desktops is just absurd. When I see Ant scripts that take 30 seconds to run on my work laptop run in 8 seconds on my dirt cheap self-assembled desktop PC, I wonder if we haven’t taken this portable thing a bit too far. ...

Dave Johnson has post today on unit testing for web apps. That’s the next step for me. I’ve been heavily into JUnit for testing APIs lately, and I want to branch into writing tests for the web front ends as well on my next project.

Joe Gregorio has started his own company, conveniently called BitWorking, Inc. He’d like you to know that they specialize in custom system development.

My vote for the best Tour de France wrap-up is the Daily Peloton’s Jambon Report.

There’s a new mozdev project that will hopefully enable people to write Java applications that use Mozilla (and XUL) for their interface. I assume this will be something like the hooks that let people write native GUI applications for Mac OS X in Java, and it seems like a good idea to me, particularly since Mozilla is cross platform just like Java is.

I only just now got around to reading A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy, a collection of astute observations carefully documented by Clay Shirky. It’s not hard to arrive at the reason why there isn’t a comment facility on this site by reading it. I have no trouble with the technical issues, but I have a big problem with the social issues. The other day I was reading Anil Dash’s site, and in the comments for one of his items, someone had asked a question that really had nothing to do with the entry. It was just a general question addressed to Anil. If that were my site, I would have to go through and delete all such comments hastily, because they would offend me aesthetically. I don’t want to have to do that, so there’s no comment section on this site. It’s not that I don’t want to hear from people, on the contrary, I love hearing from people. I just don’t want to have to be the janitor for some kind of spontaneous community that exists to serve its own ends, and happens to have gathered on my site. ...