Massless

Gotta stay awake. Too many bugs; software, my life.

The Mozilla browser, particularly release 0.9.2, is becoming my favorite web application development environment. With regards to UI, it nearly completely fulfills the promise of write once, run anywhere. For my admittedly limited needs, at least.

If you've been reading this log recently, you know I've been thinking about my current dependency on Microsoft technologies and the roadblocks I would encounter in avoiding the next MS upgrade cycle for development technology. So the number of Hailstorm/.NET/Mono discussion threads and articles that have saturated the dev community as of late have been extremely helpful. Camworld, for example, is awash in really great links about this subject. How does he find the time? I'm amazed.

I'm about to bring up an article about this; I wonder...is it flamebait? I don't know enough about developing on Unix/Linux to make an accurate estimation and I find it harder and harder to imagine people are representing themselves and their benchmarks accurately. (Thanks, "Kaycee" / "Gorgeous Guy.") The article's title is inflammatory, Let's Make Unix Not Suck, but Miguel de Icaza of the GNOME project just wants to improve the Unix system. His worry is that "Unix lacks a modern component system for building modern and consistent applications" and he considers his enemy carefully: "Lets consider "Internet Explorer", he says...

"Internet Explorer is not a single executable as you might think. Internet Explorer is built of a collection of COM components. These components are developed individually, debugged individually, exported individually, and eventually, all of them create the illusion of an integrated application.

Now, the beauty of this is that these components can be reused outside of Internet Explorer: programmers outside of Microsoft can use those components in their applications: the HTML rendering engine, the XML engine, the JavaScript engine, the toolbars, their scripting engine and so on.

Microsoft applications reuse pieces of Internet Explorer.

Sure, [in Unix] we have small components, that are small and beautiful, but their usage scope is still limited. My thesis is that we can build small components that can be reused in many more ways than the traditional way. "

End geekout. Have fun with these: Software that annoys typing cats. PawSense is software that detects when a cat is typing, and prevents further input. PawSense also plays a sound to attempt to scare the cat away. [via Bubble Chamber]

And finally...say your name is Cody. And let's say you're 13 years old and lost in a remote corner of Yellowstone National Park. And just as you start to cry, out of nowhere swoops a helicopter to save you. You rub your eyes dry to see your savior. And it's Harrison fuckin' Ford! [Via Reuters and Dangerousmeta.]