About 5 years ago while I was doing some part time work for my university one of my lecturers walked by, looked at the program I was developing and asked: “You’re using antlr or something like it to generate your parser aren’t you?”.  I wasn’t, I’d written the parser by hand in an hour or two and it worked exactly as I wanted so I saw no need to go back and rewrite it.

Brian McCallister gives a brief synopsis of Microsoft’s 2005 financial statement. I think it pretty clearly shows why people dislike Microsoft:

Regarding Windows sales and profits:

Well, we see a pretty nice top line revenue of $12.2 billion. The fun part of that is that the operating income (profit before taxes and interest) is a tidy $9.4 billion. It is awfully nice to pull a 77% operating margin (profit before taxes, hereafter referred to as “profit”). Regarding Office sales and profits:

In the comments for my post Ant Is Cool, Erik Hatcher points out that Groovy has ant support (see http://groovy.codehaus.org/Ant+Scripting).  While that’s cool and all, I really don’t want to add a new language into the mix just to call out to Ant so not a great option for my case, but useful to know.  What is more useful however is knowing that you can embed Groovy in ant scripts using the Groovy ant task (also via the ant script task since 1.5 or 1.6 I think).

Scoble pointed to this article by Ben Askins comparing Google’s customized homepage and Microsoft’s Start.com.  Unfortunately the comparison was overly complex and missed some critical criteria, so I thought I’d do my own.  I’ll be using a very simple set of criteria, one criterion in fact.

Does it work?

First up, Google.  As the screen shot below shows, it works.

Now here’s how Start.com looks:

A nice clean search engine interface, but unfortunately no customization options.  It seems Microsoft forgot to do any testing using Safari. Oh well. How useful can a start page be if it doesn’t work in all the browsers you want to use?

I’ve been thinking for a while that I should get a cheap car audio system that includes an aux-in jack so that I could use my iPod to play music in my car (FM transmitters are just too unreliable for city driving and I don’t have a tape deck, only a CD player). Reading this article though makes me wonder if I can just get a car audio system that’s specifically designed for the iPod.

I think I’ve reached the point in my programming career where I’m about as lazy as you can get. Fortunately I’ve also started heavily leveraging the power of ant recently as a cross-platform, heavily Java oriented, shell scripting tool.  Shell scripting isn’t really the right word for it though because it’s really the declarative nature of ant files that makes it work so much better than shell scripts, python, ruby etc.  I don’t think about how to do things I just say what I want done and it happens.

Dear lazyweb,

I’m writing a J2EE (well technically JSP/Servlets but no EJBs) webapp which has two goals:

1. Secure authentication is required.  Unauthorized users shouldn’t be able to access anything except a login page.
2. Easy access for authenticated users.  ie: Don’t prompt users for their password every time they open a new browser instance and don’t time out logins.  Prompting the first time they access the system using a particular browser/computer is okay though.  Even prompting once per day would be okay though not ideal.

I realize that these goals tend to conflict to a degree – ie: it’s far more secure to log users out every so often so that if someone gets access to a machine they logged in from they don’t get access automatically. We’ll have to live with that risk and so lets just assume that the systems users are accessing the system from are secure or users are smart enough to always click logout when they’re finished.

On Friday night while strolling along the riverside at Southbank just like on our first date, I proposed to the beautiful Janet and she accepted.  The wedding bells aren’t expected to actually start ringing until Janet finishes uni in a couple of years but we’re very excited to be about telling everyone how happy we are together.

I pulled the big red lever on CVS this morning and converted over to Subversion at work.  It’s gone pretty smoothly though one of the engineers is complaining that Eclipse is now freezing up a lot.  Not sure if that’s related to the Subversion change of if something else is going on but it’s something I’ll have to investigate some more.

It’s sad but I get a buzz out of being able to move things around in the repository right from within Eclipse and knowing that the history is being preserved.

It’s interesting to watch our press release about the release of EditLive! for Java 5.0 flowing around the various news agencies via a Feedster search.  I really should circle back with the guy pushing out the notifications to see which ones he actively submitted and which ones it flowed around to by itself. It’s pretty amazing what you can track these days.

Okay, lets get this clear, driver signing has nothing to do with security.  It might help stability, but security – nope, totally unrelated.  So when you see Windows developers posting under the title When people ask for security holes as features: Silent install of uncertified drivers, and then talk exclusively about system stability without mentioning security once you really have to wonder.

The security of the system has been breached long before the unsigned driver warning pops up – security is breached the minute the installer starts to run or possibly even by the time the installer downloads.

You’d think it would be obvious given the number of people looking for ways to clean up Word’s so called HTML output to make it look something like HTML, but apparently Google failed to google it.  Good work guys.

So the new Blogger Word plugin is going to result in a whole ton of really, really, really bad HTML being published to the internet (in addition to the current volumes of it).  Sigh, and we had been making progress….