Pain and Glory from the Trenches of the IT World

Due to a recent topic about Windows Vista on Slashdot, I decided to learn more about it. My first stop was looking at some screenshots.

Now, I want to make it clear that I have not used Windows Vista yet. In all my years, I have very limited experience with Windows in general. So what you’re reading here is my opinion about how it looks, based on my viewing of screenshots. The one screenshot I’ll focus on is this image, showing a variety of applications, what was called the Start menu under earlier Windows releases, and the Taskbar.

I recently wrote an article entitled ‘JRuby cannot save Swing’. Well, Danno Ferrin has written a rebuttal of sorts that I’d like to address.

He does bring up a good point about performing heavy operations in the event dispatch thread. Such things can become a real problem, in terms of the application’s performance and responsiveness. However, I’m not convinced that such developer mistakes are the only problem.

The Ubuntu FAQ states that ”Ubuntu” is pronounced ”oo-BOON-too”. But I was talking with a colleague today who pronounced it ”you-BUN-too”. I know another guy who pronounces it ”ooBOO-un-too”. There are so many different variations! So how do you pronounce ”Ubuntu”?

Over the years I’ve done more work that I’d care to using Swing, the main GUI framework included with Java these days. But myself and other developers I know have become disenchanted with it, for a number of reasons. So I became quite interested when I read an article suggesting that JRuby could help save Swing. But after reading the article, I have come to the conclusion that Ruby will not be able to save Swing.

Anyone who does web development these days knows of XHTML. One of the benefits of XHTML is that it brings some of the strictness of XML to what, at least under previous versions of HTML, was often a free-for-all. It’s quite easy to check that your web page is valid XHTML. The W3C, for instance, offers a great web-based tool for validating your XHTML pages. But apparently not everyone thinks this is a good idea. Take this article that tries to give five reasons to never validate your XHTML.

I felt the need to clarify some things with this article that discusses so-called “Ubuntu Web Browsers”. The fact of the matter is that those browsers are in no way tied to Ubuntu. Likewise, Ubuntu supports browsers other than those.

Browsers like Firefox and Opera run on many different operating systems, from Windows, to Linux, to Mac OS X, to Solaris, to FreeBSD. Check out the Opera FTP site for proof of this. Look at the wide range of platforms they support. And don’t forget that some of those directories, like the “unix” directory, themselves contain several platforms.

A while back I wrote an article clearing up several popular Java myths. One such myth is that Java can be considered a “compiled” language. It seems that a link to my article was submitted to Reddit, and one of the comments there concerned this very issue. This is a topic I would like to address further.

It’s often the most flashy and rapidly-developed open source applications that get the most attention. Most people focus on projects like Beryl, Metisse, Firefox, OpenOffice.org and Ubuntu. But we can’t forget the importance of the open source software an average user doesn’t see every day. This is a list of nine such programs and libraries.