not java?

Brett references an weblog entry by Anthony on spaces and comments: Going by the screen shot, I'd venture that isn't a java application....
If he still has doubts, the Java Web Start Install and the screenshots of spaces running on Mac should put his mind at rest. <wink>

blog browsers

I'm itching to add a blog archive import to spaces. Hopefully I'll have time for that soon. I wonder though, once the import is done, what will be the best thing to do? Keep up to date using the RSS feed of the blog? Or do another import, somehow scheduling them to happen automatically and catch the updates? mmmm....

The decline and fall of the american empire

An article from Salon:

An expert on geopolitics says forget Islamic terrorism -- the real future threat to America's supremacy will come from Europe.

patent holders on the ropes

Woha. The W3C has repealed the use of royalty-based technologies in their standards, and others are lining up. An article from News.com.

postcards from planet google

A New York Times article on how Google's search logs provide a glimpse of what's on people's minds:

[...] the most trivial events may also register on Google's sensitive cultural seismic meter.
The logs team came to work one morning to find that "carol brady maiden name" had surged to the top of the charts.
Curious, they mapped the searches by time of day and found that they were neatly grouped in five spikes: biggest, small, small, big and finally, after a long wait, another small blip. Each spike started at 48 minutes after the hour.
As the logs were passed through the office, employees were perplexed. Why would there be a surge in interest in a character from the 1970's sitcom "The Brady Bunch"? But the data could only reflect patterns, not explain them.
That is a paradox of a Google log: it does not capture social phenomena per se, but merely the shadows they cast across the Internet.
"The most interesting part is why," said Amit Patel, who has been a member of the logs team. "You can't interpret it unless you know what else is going on in the world."
So what had gone on on April 22, 2001?
That night the million-dollar question on the game show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" had been, "What was Carol Brady's maiden name?" Seconds after the show's host, Regis Philbin, posed the question, thousands flocked to Google to search for the answer (Tyler), producing four spikes as the show was broadcast successively in each time zone.
And that last little blip?
"Hawaii," Mr. Patel said.

wind + rain = flu

I'm feeling pretty sick today (and yesterday was no picnic either). After the trip to Spain a couple of weeks ago I came down with a cold, which peaked last tuesday. Last wednesday morning I was feeling better. But I had to go to the university early, around 7:30 am. It was raining like hell, with 30 mph winds and maybe 2-3 C (38 F) of temperature. Buses were full, so none were stopping. I had an umbrella, and said, what the hell, let's walk.

Big mistake. It's an almost 3-km walk from my apartment to the university. After only one block the lower half of my body was wet and freezing: rain was coming in horizontally. I discovered that umbrellas can be quite useless. The wind was so strong that a few times the umbrella was about to collapse on itself (that is, I was walking against the wind with the umbrella in front of me).

So now I'm sick again, except this time it's worse. Bad throat ache. Body hurts, and so on. And so much to do! And why spend time writing this? Well, I guess that griping is soothing to the mind :) (incidentally, the word "gripe" means "flu" in spanish--such a coincidence).

the arms race, continued

[From the New York Times]: Students learning to evade moves to protect media files.

new JDK 1.4.1 on Mac

Marek: Apple released Java Development Kit 1.4.1 Developer Release 6 this weekend, and I tried it on Spaces alpha-1.5, which now provides Mac OS X compatibility in the main release stream. He has a nice screenshot too. Java apps definitely look nicer on Mac than on Windows.