Amazon is a software company

Amazon is now making it official that they’re a software company.

June 24, 2003

Farewell Syndirella

Yole is hanging up his spurs in terms of Syndirella development because he’s got a cool new job at IntelliJ Labs. This certainly seems to bode well for IntelliJ’s new line of .NET products that’s supposed to be in development, and not so well for Syndirella. I’m still hanging my hopes on FeedDemon as my future RSS reader anyway.

June 24, 2003

Tomcat is frustrating

You know what annoys me about Tomcat? This: NOTE - If you use this approach, and wish to update your application later, you must both replace the web application archive file AND delete the expanded directory that Tomcat created, and then restart Tomcat, in order to reflect your changes. Resin gets this right, why can’t you guys?

June 24, 2003

John Edwards' insightful argument

William Saletan has a breakdown of John Edwards’ speech announcing his tax plan and it seems as though Edwards is putting forth a very interesting argument about the effect that Republican fiscal shenanigans are having on our economy. I’m glad to see that Democrats are starting to poke holes in the Bush record rather than just carping at each other. Yes, one of them has to prevail in the primaries, but they should all be working toward beating Bush in the general election as well. The Democrats have a disadvantage in that they have to do some infighting at first, but they have the advantage of all being able to land blows on Bush along the way. Hopefully some of the criticisms will stick when it comes down to it. By the way, John Edwards really needs to work on the fact that his campaign home page is the #10 result from Google when you type in “john edwards” as your query. He comes in behind the host of Crossing Over and a run of the mill attack site put up under a convenient URL. Not good. ...

June 23, 2003

Self knowledge

Aaron Swartz has published a cool toy on the Google Weblog that lets you preview the ads you’d have published on your site if you signed up for AdSense. Unfortunately, mine totally suck, they’re all for weblogging tools. I find that odd considering how little time I spend going meta. Talking Points Memo gets all ads for charity, and Rebecca Blood gets political and current events ads. I’m disappointed … what does Google know that I don’t? ...

June 23, 2003

Professionalism

Apropos of the Rob Enderle article that I pointed to the other day, Phil Greenspun’s proposed definition of professonalism for software engineers. Clearly Enderle prefers the old school definition.

June 23, 2003

MetaPkg

This is a good thing.

June 22, 2003

Rick Boucher vs Orrin Hatch

Ed Cone interviewed Rick Boucher about Orrin Hatch’s bizarre comments on dealing with pirates, and he’s safely dismissive of them. Once again I’m glad that some people decided that Boucher belonged in Washington DC.

June 22, 2003

Thunderbird

I’ve been using Mozilla Firebird as my main browser for the past couple of weeks, and at this point there’s probably no going back to plain old Mozilla. I had still been using Mozilla as my IMAP client, though, until a couple of people clued me into the fact that Mozilla Thunderbird has alpha builds available that are at roughly the same level of maturity as Firebird. I downloaded it earlier and I’m trying it out for email. I have to say that I like it pretty well, and once you install it, mailto links start working in Firebird as well. If I run into any catastrophic problems, I’ll report them. ...

June 22, 2003

Volvo v Volo

The story of mean old Volvo pushing around poor little Volo Auto Museum has been making the rounds. Apparently, there are two sides to this story, as you might expect.

June 21, 2003