I kicked in my $25 for Trillian Pro today. It’s worth the cash, and besides that, those guys have been doing good work for awhile now. One thing I noticed is that there’s an RSS plugin for Trillian Pro available that I haven’t yet messed with. It looks promising, though.
eWeek is reporting that IBM with Apple on a new 64 bit processor called the GPUL. Given that the performance disparity between the G4 and x86 processors growing, Apple needs a way out. A new processor from IBM makes more sense than moving Mac OS X to the x86 architecture, not only because such a port would be risky, but also because Apple moving to a commodity platform could threaten its relationship with Microsoft. The bottom line is that Apple needs Microsoft Office badly, and Internet Explorer as well, so Apple can’t afford to put Mac OS X up against Windows head to head. ...
Dave Johnson recaps the Triange JUG J2EE Container Shootout from last night. After reading his summary, I wish I had gone. As I’ve said before, I’m utterly mystified by J2EE, and furthermore, I’m a big fan of relational databases. I feel like I need to buy a good book on J2EE and actually take it for a spin, but I haven’t made the time to do so yet.
Reviews of the British report on the threat Iraq poses seem to be mixed. Certainly it doesn’t seem that there’s anything in there that we don’t already know. Iraq’s “culture minister” dismissed the report as part of a “Zionist campaign against Iraq.” One would hope that the Iraqi government could come up with a better rebuttal than that, the lamest of all excuses in the Middle East.
Later today, the UK government is going to publish a report laying out its case against Iraq. I anxiously await it – and wonder why the US government hasn’t produced something similar.
Google News could mark the end of my love affair with Yahoo Daily News. (Although, I still like the searchable wire photo archive on Yahoo.)
Last week, I posted about needing to write a particular macro for Emacs to do some text formatting for me. I got two contributions from readers that solved the problem for me so I could write more crap about Iraq instead of reading this. I still plan on learning Lisp, but it was nice to get some help so I didn’t have to worry about it right then. The fact of the matter is I can’t think of any questions I’ve asked here that have gone unanswered. Thanks for the help, and thanks for reading my site. ...
In a for the record type piece, Clay Shirky runs the numbers and shoots down the much used trope that half the world’s population hasn’t made a phone call. (That link is to a Wired story, there’s more detail on Shirky’s web site.)
Iran’s government is going to start letting women attend soccer matches. Women have been banned since the revolution in 1979.
One interesting book that I haven’t yet read is Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, but I pretty well understand the thinking behind it. I’ve also been thinking about a lot of things I’ve read about the Arab world, and our war on terrorism, and the threat posed by the incompatability of Western liberal values with a certain set of values held by some Muslims. Steven Den Beste presents a powerful and reasoned argument here about the nature of our enemy. There’s plenty there to disagree with, but unlike many other things I read, it’s internally consistent and carefully considered. One of Den Beste’s favorite articles is Ralph Peters’ Spotting the Losers: Seven Signs of Non-Competitive States, and I confess to being a Peters fan myself. Certainly the seven signs article has the ring of truth, and thinking about it, Den Beste’s article, and tipping points led me in a somewhat new direction. ...