If you’ve ever used Firefox, chances are that you have also tried to spread the word about the browser. You may have had innumerable short conversations about web browsers, you may have seen the surprised expressions of people who were not aware that there were even other options available.
Whether you were the evangelist or the evangelee, chances are that this phrase, or some variation of it, was used in the conversation:
Firefox is free.
This seems like a simple enough statement to make. After all, “free” is not a confusing word, open to drastically different interpretations, is it?
It is, if you’re talking about software.
Continue reading ‘Free vs Free: Firefox and Iceweasel’
I’m starting to dig into Java Server Faces (JSF), and giving some serious consideration to becoming involved in the MyFaces project, which is an open source implementation of the JSF standard. Digging into JSF has started a few thought processes; among them, the gap between so-called “Enterprise” software, and regular “run-of-the-mill” software.
Continue reading ‘The Enterprise Software Gap’
I’m a fan of all sorts of music, and that includes most styles of metal, old and new. It is fairly universal to acknowledge bands like Led Zeppelin and (especially) Black Sabbath as some of the progenitors of what we now call “heavy metal.” What’s occasionally overlooked is some of the roots of metal in Psychedelic rock.
Continue reading ‘Metal’s Psychedelic Roots’
Via the Yahoo! User Interface Blog.
Interesting discussion of browsers and the web from representatives of the IE team, Mozilla, and Opera… It is worth watching at least the first six minutes for Douglas Crockford’s abridged history of the first browser wars alone… Among my favorite quotes, Crockford says (describing the days following Microsoft’s disbanding of the IE team after winning the browser wars):
“… an amazing thing happened. After Microsoft stopped introducing bugs to the web…. I should say that nicer… After Microsoft stopped ‘innovating’….”
(paraphrased)
Top notch stuff. The information from the representatives of each of today’s major browsers (sans Safari, for some reason) is also very interesting.
Couchville.com is a sort of TV guide on the web; simply a great idea. I almost always have a laptop sitting in the living room, and the little 3-line channel line-up that comcast scrolls through (with the HUGE advertisements going on above it) is too painful to use; this is perfect.
Mind you, I watch comparatively little television to begin with, but every once in awhile you just want to know what’s on, to see if there’s anything worth wasting a half-hour on.
Okay; it needs to be asked. Do we really need a history of programming languages/the internet/computers as the first chapter of almost every stinking technology book ever published?
I’m sorry, I came to read about servlets — do we have to talk about arpanet, cgi, etc, for 10-20 pages, again?
</rant>
Well, maybe in some cases the answer is “yes, maybe, just in case the reader skipped this material in all the other books he or she has ever read about computers“. And maybe some of that is valuable, but… sheesh. I’m pretty sure I’d have about a thousand fewer pages, altogether, on my shelves if this repeated history was excised from my programming/computing books.
Let’s just publish a short book called The History of Computers, Programming Languages, and the Internet, and at the beginning of all our other books we can just refer to it and say, If you are unfamiliar with the history of computing, you should have read this first.
Kind of like putting #include <history> at the beginning of every technical book… If only it were that simple.
The long-awaited (?) new improved Gravatar is at last live; read about it on the Gravatar Blog.
There is now a tiered membership; a free account allows you one email address and two gravatar images (though you can only use one at a time, of course). A paid ($10/year) account allows an unlimited number of emails and icons to associate with them (one particular email is associated with one avatar).
I’ve always thought gravatar was sort of a neat service, and the free version will certainly suffice for most users. Server space and bandwidth is not free, though, nor is development time, so I hope that their subscription model works well for them.
