stephenwoods.net

I love new and shiny things. So I am basically in favor of all the new building projects in SF. I am all for tall buildings.

If you make a good product, they will come. But for some reason product managers and other assorted MBAs can’t resist pressing the “cheat” button: which is all some people have left. It makes me think of North Korea. You know you have a crappy country when you have to physically keep people in.

I’m too lazy/busy/whatever.

I am working on this blog right now, trying to make it pretty. Sorry that it isn’t right now.

An interesting post on Java. I think the comparison with COBOL is very apt, because despite the fact that few new projects are being started in Java it is so common in the enterprise I think we will all be supporting Java apps for years to come.

I think it is right that Java is not a bad language, its just that development practices are so unwieldy. The frameworks are huge and hard to work with, the core libraries are sparse and the JVM is slooow. But, as  Russel says, if you are developing long running server processes. PHP is really unacceptable for this, your options are Java, .net or c/c++. And none of those are good options.

The solution to quantum gravity AND the stock market: for sale on ebay.

The iphone is not breaking the web. As Joe Hewitt notes, the “iphone only” sites are raising the bar for mobile web apps. As other devices catch up with apple everyone will benefit.

These guys have come up with a sort of “firebug-lite” css-inspector bookmarklet they call xray. Not as good as firebug of course…except it works in IE 6, which is basically awesome.

I just got an account…and the service is down. Its a strange thing about downtime. Around here downtime is the sort of thing that sends people in to a blind panic an for that reason it almost never happens. Complete downtime with cute messages is unheard of (except for flickr occasionally). I suppose that is a function of having lots of infrastructure and ops people to handle graceful failover.

So I wanted one too. Yay. This is it…maybe more will be forthcoming?