OpenJDK, the open-source JDK 7 release (and no, I don't know if there's any practical
difference between the two) has officially opened for business with the promotion
of the "real,
live" Mercurial repositories. These are the real deal, the same repositories that
Sun employees will be working on as they modify the code...

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From the cover of Dr. Dobb's Journal (Jan/2008):

PHP: The Power Behind
Web 2.0

The article goes on to take a much less aggressive tone, simply
saying that PHP is a good language for building web sites/applications that make use
of Ajax and Web services, but let's be honest: you walk into a bar anywhere in the
San Jose, Burlington or Redmond areas and say that kind of thing out loud, yer gonna
get tossed out on yer keester.>

Only because you're saying "Web 2.0", mind you.

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This is, without a doubt, the most accurate quote ever about the "fun" of
writing a book:

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then
it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase
is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster,
and fling him out to the public. (Source:
Winston Churchill)

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• Original article

... for Ruby, or PowerShell/.NET? I'm looking for something to make it easier
to use WebDAV from a shell scripting language on Windows; Ruby and PowerShell are
the two that come to mind as the easiest to use on Windows. For some reason, Google
doesn't yield much by way of results, and I've got to believe there's better
WebDAV support out there than what I'm finding.

(Yes, I could write one, but why bother, if one is out there that already exists?
DRY!)

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Now, I've had my issues with corporate management before (some of you may recall my
run-in with Sun lawyers over the domain "javageeks.com"), and I've seen corporations
behave badly with cease-and-desist letters (Hey, Microsoft... you and RedHat can come
out of the corner now...), but this
action on Sun's part to effectively muscle out the four project leads on the open-source
OpenDS project definitely deserves some kind of award.

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When you can't do something simple with it.

Check out this absurdly simple Groovy script:

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"Hi. My name's Ted, and I write shitty code."

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This is not a title I convey lightly, but Michael Nygard's Release It! deserves
the honor. It's the first book I've ever seen that addresses the issues of building
software that's Production-friendly and sysadmin-approachable. He describes a series
of antipatterns describing a variety of software failures, and offers up a series
of solutions (patterns, if you will) to building software systems designed to combat
said failures.

From the back cover:

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I get e-mail from blog readers, and this one--literally--stopped me in my tracks as
I was reading. Rather than interpret, I'll just quote (with permission) the e-mail
and respond afterwards

Hi Ted,

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• Original article

For those who aren't familiar with the term, "yellow journalism" was a moniker
applied to journalism (newspapers, at the time) articles that were written with little
attention to the facts, and maximum attention to gathering attention and selling newspapers.
Articles were sensationalist, highly incorrect or unvalidated, seeking to draw at
the emotional strings the readers would fear or want pulled. Popular at the turn of
the last century, perhaps the most notable example of yellow journalism was the sinking

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Anyone who is deeply enmeshed in a technology feels compelled to defend that technology
when any sort of "threat" (or perception of threat) appears on the horizon, and apparently
Gavin is no different. Sure enough, as people (apparently in this case, myself) start
to talk about approaches to persistence that don't involve Hibernate, Gavin feels
compelled to point to these other technologies using inflammatory terms and a certain
amount of FUD. I felt a certain responsibility to respond, since it seems that he's
taking a direct shot at the db4o articles I've written and discussed before.

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From Bruce Schneier's latest Crypto-Gram:

JavaScript Hijacking

JavaScript hijacking is a new type of eavesdropping attack against Ajax-style Web
applications.  I'm pretty sure it's the first type of attack that specifically
targets Ajax code.  The attack is possible because Web browsers don't protect
JavaScript the same way they protect HTML; if a Web application transfers confidential
data using messages written in JavaScript, in some cases the messages can be read
by an attacker.

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• Original article

Think that RedHat is still the open source capital of the Internet, all happy-happy-joy-joy
with its supporters and liberal-minded in its goals? Take a look at this and
tell me if your mind isn't changed a little:

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(This piece is currently live on InfoQ.com;
when sufficient time has passed, I'll repost it here.)

Frank Kelly posted some good ideas on his
entry, "Java:
Are we worrying about the wrong things?", but more interestingly, he suggested
(implicitly) a new format for weighing in on trends and such, his "Important/Not-so-important"
style. For example,

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