The blog has moved to a new location: www.freshblurbs.com

I was shown the cuttiest photo of a kitten today. I mean, I have seen lots of cats and kitten in my life (just as everybody esle, I gues) but  Tessie is one of a kind. See yourself:

Empire State building construction took 14  months. From ground zero to opening - just 14 months, and with the technology (or lack of it) that they had back then!

One word - INCREDIBLE.

One of the best moments of my life - I got admitted to the Smith School of Business at UMD.

What's the most annoying creation in the entire universe? Right, customers.

Three Dead Trolls have posted a video which is very representative and funny as hell. Check out and begin your day with a healthy lough, maybe you will survive a day of dealing with your customers.

Enjoy

Longhorn Screenshots were leaked, once again. It looks like those are close to the final version, this time.

What can you say about them? It's sad when people have no taste and no feel for good user-interface design.

Could not they hire, at least, somebody normal? How can one be so tasteless? For so long?

Gross.

If you are a Blogger subscriber you can get a free podcast via an affiliated service: AudioBlogger.

It's pretty cool and generous, if you ask me, but one thing that really sucks is - you can only post your podcasts via some phone number (1 - 6 6 1- 7 1 6 - B L O G). As far as I know, calling that number does not involve a fee (disregarding long-distance charges) so I don't know - why such an awkward approach? Voice quality is gonna be sucky and I thought we were past the telephony era, anyway.

Why not just allow users to upload audio files?

Weird. There must be something about it. I just have no idea what, yet.

It makes me sick to stomach to see what is happening with the Java Web Frameworks. Sun and other vendors shamelessly push JSF down the customers throats and they swallaw it without as much as a word of a protest. JavaServer Faces is a piece of crap! It has its rotten roots so deep in Struts - saying Struts is the history and JSF is the future - ain't even funny! There is no community spirit, really. It's all about vendors and their buddy CTOs in corporate world, who buy from their buddies.

This just sucks. I so much hope Howard will be able to pull it off, like Gavin did with Hibernate, but I just don't see it happening yet. Such a shame! Tapestry is soooo much better than the joke of all frameworks  - JSF! I am very dissapointed with JBoss, too - standing behind JSF. It is becoming just another corporate vendor - that's what is going on. Too bad!

I may have officially become Persona Non Grata at Sun and... FSF at the same time. *chuckle* At least in the UK press

First, by catching Jonathan Schwartz on his very unthoughtful (actually I do not buy that, so probably - stupidly fraudant) claim that "F" in FOSS/FSF stands for zero price, which was covered at the following publications:
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/linuxunix/0,39020390,39206659,00.htm http://uk.builder.com/0,39026540,39254220,00.htm http://software.silicon.com/applications/0,39024653,39145031,00.htm

And then, to be fare with my conscience, I did say that while Jonathan's comment was false, this does not mean Sun is doing anything wrong:
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/developer/0,39020387,39206644,00.htm http://uk.builder.com/0,39026540,39254200,00.htm

Which, knowing Richard Stallman et al, probably made me unpopular over there, too *larger chuckle*.

But here is the reality: I don't think Sun JVM has to be open-source. It is free. I totally agree to Schwartz that it being free and non-restrictive (so, open-source solutions can be built on top of it) was the the factor most important for the developer community. Stallman argues that if JVM is not open-source it restricts products on top of it too. I do not see - how? There are practical proofs that it does not - just check out how many Java-based, FOSS products of all kinds of licenses are out there. Most importantly - Java is an open standard so an open-source implementation can be made and is, actually being made so - I think that's more than enough.

Sun is nice, ok? If you think it is not - compare it to certain Redmond-based company. I am an Open-Source guy, not a Free Software one (search Google for distinction) so I do not believe all software should or can be GPL-flavored. Sun is more than nice and let's not bash nice guys, ok? There are more than enough of bad guys.

I just wish that Sun's president would not make himself wrong when he was actually right, by making a very stupid mistake. I said it and I am going to repeat 100 more times: "Schwartz should have known better". Whoever prepared that speech for him, gotta be fired by now.

P.S. Publications mention my current employer - The Development Gateway Foundation - a wonderful, charitable organization that is dedicated to help build a better world. I am proud to work for the DGF but thoughts I shared with ZDNet-UK are my own observations expressed by the right of Freedom of Speech and may not be assumed as the official position of my organization. My organization has never declared whether they agree or disagree with my personal position on the matters, so neither of those should be assumed. If you are interested in their position, please contact the Communications Office of DGF.