techno.blog("Dion")

I had to have a little Friday chortle when reading that the WS-* stack are aspect oriented protocols.

Personally, I would agree that they are AO, but not AOP :)

We are seeing that “security” is the topic that Microsoft is going to use to attack Firefox. There has been many claims that IE is actually “more secure” than Firefox.

The problem is that it is hard to make an Apples to Apples comparison, due to the open environment vs. closed, and market share of the browsers.

Firefox 1.0.4 was just released to fix the arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities.

The Firefox team is proud that this update happened in the space of a couple of days.

It will be interesting to see the new battle when IE7 comes out :)

KT had me see CNet talking to Joel (On Software) Spolsky which talks about his new documentary which will follow interns at Fog Creek this summer.

I keep picturing The Office, software company style. Hopefully it will be more British version than US ;)

So, the Project Harmony effort has a lot of supporters.

Interestingly, it seems like it was lead by good ‘ole Geir Magnusson.

Maybe nothing was read into that when the proposal came out. But now, Geir is an IBMer.

The whole Project Harmony could take on a new level of importance. I think a lot of sentiment out there was:

We have seen the troubles of having an opensource JVM/libraries a la GNU Classpath and co. Do they really think they can pull it off?

Maybe they can with the IBM VM team (as well as with help from other folks).

Imagine this world….

• Apache has a leading opensource JVM
• Developers start to go to use that JVM rather than going to java.sun.com
• IBM has another level of control over Java, making Sun more and more of a fringe player
• BEA JRockit folks join in, offering their own JIT and tools that work in this world

It is a very ambitious project, but there is a lot to be gained. Who has their hand up for writing the Swing implementation :/

Stallman is also at it again, talking about OpenOffice.org’s use of Java, and his rampage for a free Java.

IBM developerWorks has an interview with Jeremy Boynes, CTO of Gluecode where he talks about “Building a better J2EE server, the open source way”.

Marc Fleury also came out firing, with IBM Turns the Guns on Professional Open Source.

I like how Firefox changes the URL area background when I am on a https connection. It is good to give more feedback.

With all of the phishing and pharming going on now-a-days, it would be cool to do more things like that.

For example, what if the background went red when you went to a URL that was looked up via /etc/hosts (and equiv) instead of DNS.

Not only would this help you realise that something could be wrong in your hosts file, but I also forget that I have put some items in there. The other day I thought a site was down when in fact I had it in my hosts file and the site had changed locations!

I had a double take when I saw the news that IBM has purchased Gluecode.

IBM is really looking to do something different here. Maybe it is just an experiment with opensource, or maybe something more fully planned.

One of the most interesting parts of the press release is the graph:

Is Gluecode really less that WebSphere Express even??? hopefully not for long!

This makes it look like a migration path too. It will be interesting to see how the brands are marketed (”If you like Gluecode, why not upgrade to the full blown WebSphere”????).

Again, we can read into:

Continuation of IBM’s open source strategy

IBM is making a major commitment to Apache Geronimo as the Open Source application server of the future. The Gluecode team will continue to be major participants in the Apache Software Foundation

The New Yorker has been publishing a series of articles by Elizabeth Kolbert called The Climate of Man.

It is scarier than any horror movie. It is amazing how soon this could all happen. I think everyone should be reading information such as this, and it needs to be the NUMBER ONE priority for the world at large.

I know that some people think that this global warming stuff is bogus, but lets all come together and look at the facts.

If we don’t, we may lose New Orleans, or Manhatan, or Florida?

Part One

Part Two

New Yorker doesn’t let facts get in the way – PittsburghLIVE.com

I am sitting at the begining of an Ajax Summit, hosted by O’Reilly and Adaptive Path (who coined the Ajax term). This is a two day event, and day one is a set of presentations by people who want to share Ajaxian experiences.

I am going to be blogging about the interesting talks throughout the day, and the round-table discussion tomorrow over on Ajaxian.com.

There has been a lot of discussion spirred on the Apache Project Harmony announcement.

It even gave Hani some ammo other than that from the TSS Symposium :)

I think I know why they are doing this though. It isn’t to do with opensource, nor making a better JVM, or anything like that.

It is all about the Apple!

I polled the group that have put their name to the petition at Apache, and they are all Mac users. These poor people are so sick of the Apple support that they want to write something decent themselves so they aren’t behind the times all the time ;) ;) ;)

Google just announced the beta service: Web Accelerator. The magic behind this is that the Google Grid is now a proxy itself.

It is even a smart proxy than can send diffs rather than full pages, and can actually gzip the content.

The most interesting part of this how thing, is how Google can use the data. I am not talking about the privacy folks jumping up and down warning you not to use it, rather it can be used for GOOD.

One problem with Google crawling around the web is that the GoogleBot is a bot. It isn’t human.

Now, if enough people use this service, they will be able to work out the important links. If a popular page such as Slashdot put hidden links, Google wouldn’t be fooled as NO humans would be following those links.

This can be huge, and can add to Trust Rank by grokking the human element. Interesting stuff. I am a little sceptical to see how much the tool speeds things up though, but I will give it a shot :)

I wonder if Google and Firefox could be tweaked to work even better together… and I also wonder how it works out how much time the accelerator has saved you :)