Daily Bytes

David Heller has some good points in this article but I just can't agree with the fact that HTML time is over.

Ultimately, I don’t see a long term future for HTML as an application development solution. It is a misapplied tool that was never meant to be used for anything other than distributed publishing.

HTML has several problems, let's face it, but most are caused by bad browser implementations and misuse. Developers must learn that HTML isn't the answer to all problems, sometimes other kind of technologies (like the ones listed in the article) have to be used in order to create a thin client.

But lets not forget the advantages HTML has:

• Everyone has a HTML browser.
• HTML is simple and light.

These advantages took many time to be fully developed and I can't imagine in the near future another technology that will be so widespread as the HTML browser.

David also points that developers end up developing for one specific browser. I don't see a big problem with this and I don't really see the difference between programming for a specific browser or using another thin-client architecture.

Bottomline is: If you wan't to create an accessible interface for people all over the world there is no real challenge for HTML at the moment. But if you are developing for a strict group of people and you need a little more power than HTML can provide then, by all means, don't use it.

From www.boxesandarrows.com.

I want one... Why do they have to be so expensive? :-(

We build the Cubits ourselves from 5mm solid aluminium in 5 colours. They are hand-finished and assembled around the latest mini-motherboard, a generous helping of memory and more hard disk storage than we'd ever be likely to need. We also make them in Plexiglas. They're more solidly built than the grey monster under your desk - we think you could drive a truck over the aluminium ones - but probably take up less than a quarter of the space.

[If you do decide to put one in your kitchen, please note they're not waterproof. But neither is your toaster.]

From www.netbox.co.uk.

Amazon has always been, IMHO, the most inovative internet business in the in the past few years. This time Nuno found out that sometimes, while you surf their website, you can find some pearls like this one. I did some research of my own and found out at least another easter egg at Amazon:

Go to Amazon.com. Click on "Directory of All Stores" near the bottom, then scroll down to the copyright notice at the bottom. Under the "1996" is an invisible link which will take you to the farewell page for one of their employees.

For the impatient ones here's the link.

From blog.portugalmail.pt.

Interesting comparison:

The nature of blogging allows us to point to what another individual said, adding our opinion without mutilating theirs’ in the translation.

Each opinion in the string remains intact while the message goes ’round.

This is very different from the Telephone game where the message is always translated by the forwarder. (The news media is more like the telephone game.)

The ideal scene of blogging being "the voice of the people" is that the precise blogging voice echoes repeatedly, thereby gaining velocity and power.

From judithburton.weblogger.com.

Blogs are really catching on now. This one is a shared blog of two friends of mine.

From free.7host03.com.

Finally Sergio entered the wireless world. He managed to install the wireless card both in Windows and in Linux but somewhat complains that he needed some guidance to perform the Linux install (given by me btw). It's true, I needed about 3 days to install the card on my laptop (things are much easier now), but on the other hand the Linux open source drivers are much better than the Windows ones.

From blog.portugalmail.pt.

Some comments I found on Slashdot today. This one:

Optimization should never be done until after you've run real-world use cases on code with a profiler. Until then, one should write code that clearly communicates its intent.

• Premature optimization is the root of all evil.

says Knuth, and Martin Fowler says

• "Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand."

Remember: Computers double in speed every 18 months, but programmers stay just the same. If we want our code to live a long and happy life, then clarity should almost always win over speed.

Take a look at why these guys refactored JUnit.

From www.artima.com.

I'm very well impressed by this release. New features like desktop sharing, exchange integration, desktop lockdown framework, desktop sharing, a beatifull new theme and much more ...

To know everything about it take a look at the New Feature Guide and the Screenies.

I'm a WindowMaker fan and I prefer Gnome over KDE but I guess I'll give this new KDE a try. I guess my Gentoo will be doing a lot of emerging tonight.

From www.kde.org.

After Kasparov's humiliating defeat against Deep Blue in 1997 and Kramnik's draw against Deep Fritz 4-4 last year, humans are in the lead again, as the still number one human player defeated Deep Junior, the reigning machine chess player, in the first game of a 6 games match. You can see how the game went here. A nice overview of the match can be found here, and this is my favourite quote:

He also said that the software will be held to "tournament standards," meaning if it crashes or has any other non-hardware problem, that's tough luck. Since "crash" and "Windows" are almost synonyms these days, the Junior team might consider having Bill G's number in their speed-dialer.

From news.yahoo.com.