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I remember back in the heady days of the Netscape IPO when Marc Andreessen was seen as the child god of the Internet and business publications lapped up everything he said. He represented all that was new, and exciting, and better and faster and more incredibly amazing than the old stuff that came before. Now we can look back and we can say that he was just another CS student that was hacking on an open source project back then, and everything that happened afterward was just an accident of circumstance. By virtue of being rich and famous, he’s had the opportunity to go off on a number of other wild business adventures, seemingly in hopes of proving that all the good things that happened to him back in the early days really were just in accident. It’s not that I have anything against guys who go from being everyday soldiers in the software development trenches to being rock stars seemingly overnight. Take Linus Torvalds for example. Despite the fact that he’s never cashed in in a nine digit sort of way (at least that I know of), he is perhaps the most famous software developer in the world (at least of those that are still actually programming), and he’s also an insightful and articulate spokesman not just on matters concerning the Linux kernel, but on just about everything else he’s asked about as well. Contrast that with Marc Andreessen. For some reason, journalists still like to ask him about browsers, even though the last browser he contributed real code to really is ages old in terms of that “Internet time” thing that Netscape people used to love to talk about. Here’s what he had to say to Reuters on the topic of browser innovation: ...

Note to Bill Gates: trying to explain why your company isn’t boring is boring. Microsoft is doing plenty of things that aren’t boring. In the words of Hazel Motes, nobody with a good car needs to be justified.

The bottom line for me is that I’m voting for the Democratic nominee in the next Presidential election. Even if it’s Joe Lieberman. You already knew that. One thing I haven’t yet done is pick a favorite. I will say at this point that the two candidates that most intrigue me are Howard Dean (who has been on my radar screen ever since he joined the campaign) and John Edwards. I like Edwards because I think that his candidacy is a good trap for Bush – if Edwards is the nominee and the election becomes about bashing trial lawyers and tort reform, I think Edwards will win. I like Dean because his views are philosophically in line with my own, and because he’s leveraging the Internet to help his candidacy. I find Edwards’ lack of a proactive Internet strategy troubling. For practical reasons, Dean is also a good choice. History teach us that governors are more likely to win the Presidency than Senators, and charges of inexperience and opportunism could hurt Edwards’ candidacy in the general election. In any case, what I continue to hope for is that all of the Democratic candidates will gang up on Bush from their various areas of expertise and work hard to put any Democrat in a position to win in 2004. I had no hope for what a Bush presidency would be like, and things have been even worse than I’d feared going in. Let’s elect somebody else. Update: Max Sawicky argues that right now, progressives should be supporting Dennis Kucinich. ...

I think that the implications of the new Sony EyeToy could reach far beyond immersing people in their video games.

Knowing next to nothing about soccer and little more about England has not prevented me from becoming fascinated with the David Beckham phenomenon. The closest analogue I can come up with in the US is Michael Jordan, and they’re not even really that close. David Beckham is a good soccer player – Michael Jordan is the best basketball player ever. And while Michael Jordan’s clothing line and, more importantly, namesake shoes, have been ridiculously successful, nobody obsessively pays attention to what Michael Jordan wears (or ever did). I guess they are both known for hairstyles, but Beckham’s revolving door of haircuts hardly stands up to Michael Jordan’s inspiring an entire generation of men confronting male pattern baldness to simply shave their heads. ...

Struts 1.1 is out. Here’s a link to the release notes.

Yeah, spam is ruining email, but so will the widespread deployment of challenge-response systems for dealing with spam. Patrick Nielsen Hayden posted a first hand account of this problem. I’ve only ever sent email to one person who had put such a system in place (ironically, I was responding to an email that they had sent to me). I just ignored the challenge email and let it drop.

Eric Sink has a brief piece explaining some version control features that many users just ignore. You know, reading it makes me think of a good interview question for software developers: how does branching in version control work and why would you want to use it? This enables you to determine whether the person you’re interviewing really has worked on as part of a relatively large team before. If you don’t know what branching is or how to use it, chances are you haven’t worked on projects of much scale, or your team was really not taking advantage of their tools. ...

Tom Friedman has a remarkably depressing column on what pervasive Internet access and robust search engines mean for the future. His take is that it means people who hate the United States will be able to connect more easily and band together to do mean things to us. His real point is to just say another way that we should do fewer things to piss off the rest of the world, and he uses the Internet to make his point. In doing so, he completely ignores the fact that the availability of more sources of information is generally a net good in the world. Most of the world doesn’t know much more about the United States than what they’re told by the state run media and the local clergyman. Maybe they’ve seen some badly dubbed US TV shows as well. The Internet creates potential for connections that could never have possibly existed before it came about, and Google (and other search engines) make it much easier to make those connections. (So do weblogs and RSS, by pointing you at information that may be slightly off your radar and letting you consume lots of information easily.) Furthermore, if hate groups and terrorists are advertising online to recruit new adherents, then we have a lot better chance of being aware of them and their agenda than if they’re going through a back channel network that’s incredibly difficult to crack. ...

Nick Bradbury’s FeedDemon beta release has arrived. Update: I need to figure out how to make the dates that items on this weblog were published show up in FeedDemon. I’m not sure what I’m missing but it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out.