Monday, 2024-05-24

random linkage

Thomas C. Greene on Abu Graib

High school teacher fired for not censoring poetry

The ultimate timewaster for the taco

democracy in action

Ho hum. MEP elections are coming up. Booooring.

I feel strongly about one thing in the EU: that the CAP must be abolished. No-one I can elect to the parliament will make this happen. Probably only a combination of global warming and a massive die-back of French farmers will bring this about, in a century or two.

I feel less strongly about software patents. They affect lots of people and the future of free software, but compared to growing food they are unimportant. However, they maybe can be banned in the EU by the EP.

So I'm looking for a candidate who's opposed to software patents.

I'd like to vote for Christofer Fjellner (m), but his party supports software patents, and who knows what kind of hold they have over him.

So I'll probably vote for Olle Schmidt (fp) instead.

the dark side of java

Anyone who reads Erik's linkblog will be astounded about two things:

  1. damn, there's a lot of Java projects, and

  2. how the hell does Erik do it?

The list of projects is impressive, and for me as a novice Java maintainer, a bit daunting. How can one person keep up with all this? And everyone seems to be on first-name basis, not just with the developers, but with the projects themselves. What the heck is Maven, anyway?

But it's not just one happy family. There's a dark side to the Java development scene, and it rises to the surface here.

This person probably has a name, but I prefer to consider him or her as a cry from the collective subconscious of those Java programmer who're having trouble just staying on top of Java, never mind all the whimsically named frameworks and tools.

Both Erik and Russ are on the Bileblog's shitlist. But so is everyone else.