techno.blog("Dion")

I know this is a little old news, but if anyone hasn’t heard, viewed, or read what George Galloway said at the committee meeting discussing “Oil For Influence: How Saddam Used Oil to Reward Politicians Under the United Nations Oil-for-Food Program”, they should do so right now.

The Brad Blog had it right when it said:

Not since attorney Joseph Welch confronted the soon-to-fall Anti-Communist Crusader/Idealogue, Joseph McCarthy in 1954 with his now famous “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” testimony can we recall such a direct shaming of a Congressional Committee as that which took place earlier today in a Senate Subcommittee Hearing on the trumped-up U.N. Oil-for-Food “Scandal” which Bush Lackeys and Fox & Friends have been flogging ever since it became apparent that there were no WMD in Iraq, and thus, no justification for this trumped-up war.

The transcript was tweaked on the goverment website, but can be found at The Times, here.

You can view a PIECE of the footage here, but read the transcript to get more details.

Update: The entire piece is found here.

Of course, I don’t know about the claims made about George Galloway. But his words are correct, and I am proud of the scottish! :)

TV is changing. We get TiVo and the like, but now the BBC is really pushing the envelope with its interactive Media Player (iMP).

iMP offers UK viewers the chance to catch up on TV and radio programmes they may have missed for up to seven days after they have been broadcast, using the internet to legally download programmes to their home computers.

As part of the next phase of iMP’s development, the BBC will now open up more of its radio and TV schedule – around 190 hours of TV programmes and 310 hours of radio programmes, as well as local programming and rights-cleared feature films.

I always knew that Bill Gates was looking at my blog, and I think he saw my joke regarding the Mac OSX RSS screen saver.

Microsoft is heading for more RSS.

Among all of the RSS push stuff, they will be pushing out an RSS screen saver! :)

So, we now have something that lets us personalize Google:

http://www.google.com/ig

You can even drag and drop ;)

It would be nice to be able to have a checkbox for “Suggest”

More press at the factory tour

Google has a tradition of reinventing a service that Yahoo! already has (Gmail, Maps).

I would be willing to bet that GPortal is around the corner. How will Google be able to reinvent that bad boy? This is where Ajax comes in.

Ajax finally delivers on the vision of the portal/portlets. None of the annoying lifecycle issues, and change pages when in different modes… now the components can really have a nice lifecycle and the portlets can change in the page itself.

There will also be a nicer way to rearrange your portal (like this example).

I can’t wait to see it ;)

It is fun to watch the Sun and Microsoft show. Have they done a lot in their first year of not fighting? Is Sun just doing this to try to gang up against IBM? ;)

I also saw that Microsoft is going to be in a bunch of JavaOne talks.

In my opinion this is only a good thing. There have always been MSFT guys at the show of course, but often they are in stealth mode. If you see Doug Purdy around stop him for a chat. I think you will be impressed. They know a LOT about our world, and are keen to grok it.

The closer Java and MSFT get together the better IMO.

Update: Jonathan Schwartz has his say, including IBM jabs…

Madison is just about to vote on a referendum or three, regarding giving our schools enough money to STOP the cuts that currently have to occur.

The problem is that the Bushistas setup all of this testing for schools. Unfortunately after setting the rules, they kinda forgot to BUDGET for it. This means that the States have the burden, and can’t afford it, so they ask local school districts to do more with less.

In fact, there are LIMITS on the state giving money to schools. It is a joke.

Madison has always been proud of their schools:

Madison has fine public schools, the sort of schools that convince businesses to locate in and around this community, the sort of schools that help convince great academics with young children to join the faculty of the University of Wisconsin, the sort of schools that led Money magazine to rank this city “the best place for education” among the nation’s 300 largest metropolitan areas.

How good are Madison’s schools? At one point in recent years, the Madison Metropolitan School District was the only district in the entire country to have schools at the elementary, middle and high school levels rated as National Schools of Excellence by the U.S. Department of Education.

However, my wife is a teacher in one of these schools, and they need a lot of help.

So, we come to the referendi, which asks for money from the residents to help the bleeding. As usual, some people without kids in the schools come out crying foul. Why do people think that they need a kid in school to care. WHO IS YOUR DOCTOR.

Hopefully Madison will come out in strength and push this through as they have historically done. There is nothing more important than education. THAT is the trickle down. Good education trickles down to everything else (health, crime, …)

“Don’t pray in our schools, and we won’t think in your churches”

Stephan Janssen of JavaPolis and BeJUG fame, sent over a mixed song, based on James Strachan quotes from the presentation on Groovy that we both gave to the euro crowd in Belgium (which was a really lovely time).

I have put the groovy song up here.

Quality :)

Normally we are watching the top of the table at the end of the premiership season. Not this year. All eyes were on the relegation battle, and congratulations to Bryan Robson and West Bromich Albion.

It was amazing to listen to all of the games, as all FOUR of the bottom teams were “safe” at one point or another. Amazing stuff.

This is why major US sports need to have hierachies. If you are midseason and you are doing crap in Baseball… who cares? You don’t have much to play for.

I am also REALLY excited to head to Chicago in 2 weeks, to see the USA play England in a “soccer” friendly. I hope it is better than the game I went too when we lost to Australia :/

The Spring Framework 1.2 Final has been released by the Spring team.

On this lucky Friday the 13th, we are pleased to announce that Spring 1.2 final has just been released.

(Thanks to Juergen for doing the packaging and his usual coding heroics). 

The major new features since 1.2 RC2 are:

• TopLink support (for both TopLink 9.0.4 and 10.1.3)
• JDO 2.0 support (tested against JPOX 1.1 beta 3)
• Hibernate 3.0.3 support (aggressive release of Connections)

The overall major new features of Spring 1.2 are:

• finer-grained distribution jar files
• simplified XML bean definitions
• JMX support
• JDK 1.5 transaction annotation
• support for WebLogic JTA extensions
• JDBC RowSet support
• JCA CCI support
• JDO2 support
• Hibernate3 support
• TopLink support

Thanks to Oracle for donating the original TopLink support
prototype,  and in particular to Jim Clark from Oracle – for all his
help in getting the TopLink support into its final shape!

For details on new features, deprecations and bug fixes, please see the change log.

FYI, we have a 1.2.1 release scheduled for June, featuring minor
enhancements that did not make 1.2 final. See our JIRA road map for
details.

Kudos to the Spring team for a nice new final release :)

Time to test production code and get a migration plan…