Some random thoughts, that may lead to more in the future.
- Language Firestorm – Not surprisingly, the comments by Phillip Greenspun
- Good language != good coding – As Megnut pointed out in her observations of the preceding point, a message on /. sort of sums up a lot of what people, for whatever reason, were not saying: Bad programmers write bad programs regardless of the language. The right tool for the right job, used properly folks…this ain’t religion.
- VeriSign Directing Typo Traffic to It’s Own Site – This doesn’t bother me as much as it should. I guess I’m not that bothered because I’m used to seeing the same behavior on the browser side with IE. That said, it’s problematic because it creates technical issues (spam filters et al). However, the worst part is that if ICANN lets VeriSign get away with this, it pretty much means ICANN is worthless. And that’s not a good thing.
- The Object-Embedding Patent (Eolas vs. Microsoft) – This one is scary for the precedent. There are too many things wrong with the current suit (mainly, prior art), but it’s the precedent, or the potential for something like this to really happen: What if someone does come out with a valid, pre-existing patent for something like Apache or BIND? Then what happens? It’s scary. How scary? Even on the normally “Bill Gates is Satan” sites, there was actually a gruding bit of sympathy for MS. (Why? Because it affects us, not just MS…but still a rare [one-time-only] olive leaf of sorts to MS). (09/25 update: A News.com article about the preceding pretty much supports what I’ve said.)
- Bloggers Fired – Didn’t take too much to see this one coming, but as
comparing Java to an SUV (not in a good way, for the most part) has ignited fierce debate on blogboards (such as /.) and personal blogs. Basically, he sees Java and JSP use pretty much overkill for most Web projects – much like a Hummer H2 is a little overboard for running to the mall and back. I tend to agree with him, but – of course – some people elected to take it a little too personally and seriously. “Slamming Java! You bastard! Java is the best of everything [blah blah…]”. Whatever. Massive Internet or intranet project? Java is a good language – the whole J2EE thingee, with calls to EJBs, not a bunch of embedded scripting code. But, for the most part (and most projects), overkill. Perl/ASP/PHP/ColdFusion are much faster to deploy and maintain for most programmers.
Dan Gillmor points out, journalists fired for their blog’s content is not going to end with the two cases he points out in his story. And this will be true in other industries, as well (made-up example: Engineer at Lockheed talking – in broad terms – about a new project he is working on. WHAM! You’re leaking proprietary secrets!). One real danger I see here is the whole politically correct mode the country is for some asinine reason embedded in: People are going to be fired for posting on their own blogs when their personal views (on their own servers….etc…) conflict with the image the company they work for is trying to cultivate. Especially dangerous will be any remarks regarding co-workers (or others) that may be construed as sexist/racist, even if benign and fact-based – for example, if I said, in some story about a picnic I went to that the Franklin family ate 90% of the watermelon consumed. Oops! The Franklins are a black an African-American family. I’m fired! (even if everyone else there were African-Americans, because I’m not…) And so on. But that’s the life of a writer, which bloggers are, like it or not. Not always skilled writers, mind you, but we all are.