Slate has a nice Scott Shuger remembrance today, one year after his death. It’s a tribute to the publication that both the Today’s Papers and War Stories features have maintained their high quality despite the loss of Shuger, a journalist for whom I had boundless respect.
One thing I need to remember to do is research the alternatives before picking a particular library to use when I need to complete a task. For example, I was dead set on using POI for an upcoming project that involves reading and writing Excel files on the fly, but now I read about JExcelApi. I honestly don’t know which is better, but I’m going to compare the two APIs and choose. Google before committing to something is a rule I need to adhere to. ...
You know, I always think of Tom Friedman as being focused on foreign affairs, but he churned out a darn good column on the Bush tax cuts today (although he’d prefer that I refer to them as “service cuts”).
One thing I’m always curious about is why big companies tend to either stomp on or ignore existing communities and conventions when they try something new. One of the new features of the java.net site is some Sun employee weblogs. Even though there’s already a fine weblogging software package out there written in Java (Roller) and a community site (java.blogs), Sun chose to ignore both and go their own direction, as Dave Johnson points out (he’s the author of Roller). On the other hand, I’m glad to see Sun supporting official weblogs for their employees. I’ve really appreciated the weblog maintained by people at Microsoft, and it’s good to see Sun jump into the blog race. This is a tradition that, in my opinion, started with the .plan files of game programmers, and I’m glad to see it extend to programmers at other software companies as well. ...
Is Sun’s latest strategy to reinforce the company’s geek roots is by displaying amazing marketing ineptitude? Maybe I’m just naive, but I’m convinced that there is little overlap between people who care about Java and people who want a virtual Christina Aguilera on their mobile phone.
The Bush administration has announced a new $100 million jobs program to fight high unemployment … in Iraq. I wonder why he’s not over there trying to sell them on a new round of tax cuts? Update: I promise that I didn’t intentionally steal this item from Doonesbury.
After reading some recent plaudits for Mozilla Firebird, I’m giving it another shot as my default browser. My biggest gripe with 0.6 is that it breaks the bookmarklet that I use to start a new post for this site. That’s a bit agitating. Other than that, I’m very impressed with the overall performance and usability of the browser. I’m especially eager to see the new mail client. I use Mozilla to read my mail at home, and until I have the complementary email client for Firebird, I’ll be a bit stuck out. ...
I signed up for java.net today, to reserve my username if nothing else. (Not that I would expect anyone to take it, it’s fairly unusual, but getting there right away is the only way to be sure.) I haven’t actually explored the site well enough to know whether it’s of any use to me yet.
It’s the weekend so I reserve the right to punish you with more links to articles about the could-be mobile weapons labs. Judith Miller reports for the New York Times on intelligence analysts that dispute the fact that the trailers were clearly built for the purpose of manufacturing biological weapons. Quite a change for her usual role as conduit for weapons hyperbole emanating from unnamed sources.
There have been a spate of good articles on the software business this week. This morning my RSS reader greeted me with Eric Sink’s interesting thoughts on marketing.