Firefox is simply not working well enough, consistently enough, for me to stay with it. I can't stand IE, so Opera wins... as long as it works better than Firefox.

I routinely play with nearly every IDE out there because I have to keep up with the various features of each for comparison points, and here're my first thoughts on NetBeans 5.5.

My son is doomed to a life in software engineering - he already has mangling requirements down pat.

My oldest son is into hardware, in a big way. Me, I hate hardware. The reason? My speech synthesizer project, back in 1984 or so, courtesy of Ahoy! magazine... and here's the story.

Bruce Tate said it took him four months to design a data model. That doesn't make sense - while I don't know what his data model looks like, I just modeled a complete structure for myself in about an hour, including the time it took to learn EJB3.

Sys-Con is telling people through its newsletter that Oracle might be considering buying JBoss. I think that's irresponsible, in a lot of ways - the article is written as if it *might* be true, but it simply isn't true. Period.

Whew! The not-being-home part of my longest vacation ever (except my honeymoon) is over, and lots has happened. Hospital visits, falls, caves, Java in Action, and... no work.

I was talking to Geert Bevin today, about testing UI interaction. I'm used to scripts; I think XQuery is the way to go, pages of XQuery tied to responses. Geert skewered me with my own employment, though.

What features are important to you for TheServerSide.com to have? This is your chance to give direct feedback.

CNet made me laugh: "Extra Storage is for the Young" is talking about 18-to-24 year old kids' insatiable desire for storage. Boy, am I in for it: my ten year old son sneers at mere 200GB hard drives, saying they're not big enough.

I rerecorded "True Believer" yesterday - here's the first mix... and a test of podcasting on blog-city.

Sun's Application Server 8 is great, in a lot of ways, but then again, maybe it's not.

I run a community portal for OrionServer, a J2EE application server, called OrionSupport.com. It's running a portal called Epix, which is really nice. You may notice, though, that it may be nice, but it's not online.

In "Coming to campus: E-books with expiration dates" from ZDNet, Princeton University is offering discounts for students who purchase e-books. The e-books expire after five months. The article focuses on the usage problems - but it got me thinking.

Paul Graham has another essay, this one called "What Business can learn from open source." As usual, good premise, great writing, crap essay.

I recently had a, uh, bad online-shopping experience that highlights why the technology we work with is so complicated.. and why things like transactions, BPEL, AJAX are good tools to have.

I finally decided to check out Ruby on Rails in anger. People say it's SOOOO much faster than your standard Java development (as if that's the lever that moves the world), so I gave in. I ... installed... Ruby and added Ruby on Rails. Guided by th

Joel Spolsky has written another essay, this one called "Hitting the High Notes," focused on emphasizing why one would want to hire the best programmers - because they hit the "high notes," the watershed moments in software development.

Should Java 6 have an even smarter for loop, one that supports "for(Type name:IteratorName)"?

I was reading some news this morning and saw this headline: "Sun Aims Open-Source Efforts at Competitors." It's another example of where news vendors take the chance to rake Sun over the coals. That bothers me.

I have to say, I don't quite get them. An internal email surfaces where they say there's no evidence of a violation on the part of Linux, and yet the official corporate stance is still "there's evidence of a violation, of course there is, pay no atte

Looking at Java One through the wisdom of hindsight shows a few key trends: one is the emphasis on SOA (with attendant emphasis on JBI) and the other is the emphasis on XML-enabled client side technologies, in particular AJAX. Both JBI and AJAX worme

Well, I'm at home at last - and the shirt I chose to wear first? It's my "VOTE FOR JBOSS" t-shirt, because the back says "And all your wildest dreams will come true." I'm a little doubtful - I have some pretty wild dreams. We'll see. If they're wr

One of the main benefits for me for coming to JavaOne is, of course, networking. And networking. And networking. It's neat to meet the people you've talked to and respected (and disrespected!) for so long - it humanizes them. So I thought I'd try

An acquaintance today made the best analogy for J2EE I think I've ever seen: "J2EE is like a Jaguar." I can't agree more: luxury, features, everything - and a horribly broken electrical system that you replace as soon as you drive it off the lot.