the long arm of...

Weird: Right after 9/11 last year, Bin Laden's family members in the US where helped by a concerted effort from the Saudi Arabian and the US Government to leave the country.

development environments

I keep forgetting to check out Eclipse (First time I heard about it was around July). Well, no longer. Now I have some time, so I am downloading it and will see if it's good. I am skeptical that it can be better than IntelliJ IDEA (which I've been using for about a year now).

simonyi leaves microsoft

Microsoft has announced that Charles Simonyi (an ex-PARC scientist --from PARC's golden days-- that went on to create Word at MS among other things) will be leaving MS soon to start his own software company. The new company will apparently focus on programming tools and such.

mozilla

I started using Mozilla about a month ago and I quickly got convinced that it was better than IE.
Here are some reasons. With Mozilla you can:

• Pause and resume a download
• Configure the browser so it doesn't allow most of the Javascript tricks that fill your screen with ads, popups, popovers, popunders, etc.
• Use tabs, so that all the pages you're reading are in a single window and there's less clutter in the taskbar.
• Change font sizes in most sites. For example, IE can't change the font size of CNN.com, Mozilla can.
• Use the integrated editor to write weblog posts with fully-featured, standards-compliant HTML that won't later be filled with stupid Microsoft tags (which would happen if you used Word or Frontpage).

It's fast, it's stable, and free. Maybe now that it is at this stage it will be increasingly used as a basis for some true innovation. Salon covered this topic recently on their article Mozilla Rising.