Posts

MIT professor Henry Jenkins predicts the death of the 30 second TV spot.

HP fired Bruce Perens, no doubt for agitating Microsoft.

The New York Times has an article today explaining how Iraq differs from Iran and North Korea as a threat.

The Greek government somehow managed to ban all electronic games. I guess it didn’t occur to them that basically every operating system and many cell phones come with games right out of the box.

The Server Side ran a useful article this week that discussed new features in Struts 1.1 and some of the issues that you’ll run into migrating Struts 1.0 applications to Struts 1.1. Seems like a number of useful features have been added, particularly the ability to create sub-applications.

Karl needs help with Cofax. If you’re a Java programmer with an interest in CMS, you know what to do.

Looks like there’s a security hole in basically every version of Windows that’s getting exploited, but nobody seems to know where it is.

There was a really depressing story on All Things Considered today about Louisiana’s vanishing wetlands. The levees built all along the Mississippi to prevent flooding also prevent the delta from being replinished with the silt carried by the river periodically, and the result is that the wetlands built up over thousands of years are sinking into the Gulf of Mexico. The fact that straight canals have been dredged for use by people drilling and maintaining oil and gas wells hasn’t helped. As a kid, I remember going fishing in marshes along the gulf coast, and the thought of losing so much of this beautiful and strange landscape is deeply disturbing to me. ...

Slate has brief reviews of a number of chain restaurants today. Most surprising was the generally positive review of Olive Garden, which I loathe completely. (The one near where I live is an atrocity, and I’ve never had a good meal at an Olive Garden.) My general bias is that chains suck. Some chains have dishes that I like pretty well, but for the most part, I avoid chains like the plague. Not only is the food often utterly least common denominator, but I don’t like dumping money into the coffers of chains when I can support a local business that might even be buying food produced locally. I’ve eaten at several of the restaurants reviewed in the article, and I can’t say that I liked any of them. ...

Well, the US national basketball team just lost its second game in a row in the World Championships, and can now finish no better than fifth in the tournament. It’s pretty shocking, given the fact that we have the best basketball players in the world by far, but it goes to show you what happens when you send second tier players who haven’t really played together at all against the seasoned national teams from other countries. Our national team is no team, it’s just the players they can find who are willing to get off the couch during the offseason to play in an event other than the Olympics, and the amount of practice time they have together is limited. There’s also the fact that the NBA rules and international rules differ. None of that is an excuse for losing to other teams simply because you don’t work as hard as they do. Personally, I think it’s a needed lesson. ...