I read Cringely's column this week with quite a bit of interest. I don't know what Microsoft is up to, but they seem to be having a lot of legal problems recently, and not many of them are nearly as publicised as they should be.
Frankly, I thought they lost the Eolas suit on purpose, so as not to create a legal precedent that might endanger their position as the holders of many software patents, but now I'm not so sure. Could it be that Microsoft is actually having some trouble they don't quite know how to handle? I hope so, it's the kind of tribulation that forges character.. :)
It's been an unacceptably long time since I last wrote, but I have an excuse! Yes, I've been on holidays for the last week and a bit and just got back to work today.
Anyway, this is just a quick pointer to an article over at java.sun.com which describes the newly-released Java RSS Utilities. This is basically just a taglib that processes RSS feeds and allows you to format the output as you desire, but it also provides a small API (used by the taglib) to process RSS in code. It looks good, although I haven't had time to play with it yet. However, it seems like a good start for building a really quick-and-dirty aggregator. Maybe I'll invest a couple of hours and see what comes up.
I have got more stuff to talk about, I want to get a gallery up of some random photos on my cellphone from my week off and also polish off and release a small software project I invested a few hours in recently, but I'll do this when my employer isn't paying for my time, so tune in later!
On Wednesday I had to modify some C code at work, to customize a piece of open source software. I hadn't realized how much I had forgotten about C. I even had to look up some really basic stuff.
I used to think my C was quite good when I was at university, I even did some Linux Kernel hacking (on a small scale), so it just goes to show how much you can forget in a few short years. I'm going to have to take up a project in straight C, I've been wanting to do some GUI programming in Linux, so I might roll these things up into one project.
Also, and to rub salt in the wound, Kuro5hin is featuring an article titled Certainly Not Logic, which includes a lot of sample bad C code. I admit a couple of these threw me off, because I had forgotten quite a few language specifics. For example, sizeof means different things in C and PHP, and since I frequently code in PHP I had forgotten this. Sucks.
This is extremely cool. Dave Winer mentioned today that Google has a calculator, and indeed it does. And a pretty decent one as well. The provided documentation gives you a good starting point, but I recommend some exploration.
The coolest thing for me is that it does unit conversion. I played around with some things and noticed it recognizes full names (kilograms), abbreviations (kg) and informal shortenings (kilos). Things with various possible values (e.g. gallons) default to the US values, but putting "uk" in front of gallons gives you the result in "Imperial gallons". Smart.
It doesn't do spell checking, so "33 kils in pounds" will not work, but that's a minor inconvenience. Actually, the fact that it doesn't work should be enough of a hint to check your spelling.
And all this from my (Mozilla) Googlebar. What will make it perfect is when I can type in "299.95 usd in euros". Let's hope it comes soon...
Update: It doesn't seem to be translated yet. "20 kilometros en millas" doesn't work yet, but doubtless they'll have it soon.
It's been quite a few days straight without writing anything. I've been very busy, but things seem to be getting quieter now, so I'm going to try and get up the stuff I've been thinking about the last few days.
Actually, it seems like everyone's posting a lot less, although I think people are either on holidays or just spending their free time away from their computers, which is probably a Good Thing. :)