grack.com

From the first posts I made to this blog in 2003, I’ve had a couple of blogging goals in mind. I want to reiterate them to keep myself on track:

1. Post original ideas. I’d like to keep the content here fresh. There’s no use in repeating what people have said already. Writing technical articles (like my CVS-over-ssh and various other tutorials) are a good way of keeping this thing interesting.
2. Be more than a link blog. I hate link blogs – I would rather subscribe to digg or Slashdot if I want a steady stream of links. Links are okay if you’re going to make an honest attempt at discussing the content, but mindless links should be kept to a minimum.
3. Keep the conversation going. There’s a lot of other bloggers out there with fresh ideas and interesting perspectives. Blogging is a good way of getting into the conversation. It’s rewarding to post responses to some of the stuff that the rest of the world is thinking about.
4. Post often, even if it’s not much. No use keeping a blog if you’re not going to update it, no?

Sounds like there’s a bit of a negative vibe going around the blogosphere concerning the impending release of a buggy VS.NET 2005. All things considered, this doesn’t surprise me much. VS.NET 2003 shipped with so many bugs that were never fixed. Heck, there wasn’t even a service pack!

I don’t understand why they keep shipping below-par releases of their IDE. I feel as if enterprise developers are left out to dry to better serve Microsoft MVPs doing inane web services demos. None of those MVPs ever demoed a solution with more than 90 projects. I’d wager that noone within Microsoft ever even tried it, considering how badly it works.

My suggestion: don’t ship until you’ve got all the bugs out. It’s such a no-brainer that I can’t believe bloggers need to bring it up.

Now this is a virtualization product to get excited about! VMWare has decided to release a free version of their powerful VMWare workstation product that can run, but not create, virtual machine images.

Since they’ve included the Linux version in this deal, you might be seeing Live CDs with a full virtual machine player installed. In fact, you could distribute your application as a Linux LiveCD that boots your application image in VMWare!

I also imagine that we’ll be seeing VMWare-enabled Linux distribution demos. What better way to try out a different flavour of Linux without installing it?

I’ve decided to take the plunge and switch RSS readers. I was using SharpReader at work under Windows and Liferea at home under Linux. Neither reader met my needs very well. I found that SharpReader was a big memory hog and suffered from the general heaviness of most client-side .NET applications. Liferea at home was fast and supported the page-per-blog model, but it was somewhat crashy.

Starting today, I’m using the Sage RSS Reader at home and work for my RSS reading. It’s a firefox plugin, so I can use Adblock to block those annoying feedburner ads in some of the feeds that I read.

Sage is very fast and the integration with Firefox is a big plus for me. I enjoy having tabbed browsing available with the feed items (something not available in SharpReader). Another plus is that it stores the RSS feed list in my bookmarks list, allowing me to use an extension like Syncmarks to keep my feed list synchronized between work and home.

There’s an active wiki for the Sage community where you can find stylesheets for your feed list and GreaseMonkey scripts. Who would have thought that you could use Greasemonkey scripts in your RSS reader?

From Groklaw:

The Australian National Archive has selected OpenDocument XML for long-term storage of government documents. GovTech News also reports that Open Source Victoria has called for all remaining Australian government institutions to follow Massachusetts’ lead in adopting OpenDocument XML…

Wow.