June 18, 2002
Weblogs give a voice to Iranian women

Web gives a voice to Iranian women - even the BBC is talking about weblogs now.

A rather more important use of weblogs than mine...

Posted by Simon Brunning at 03:45 PM
Eclipse: An IDE for Tomorrow?

Eclipse: An IDE for Tomorrow? at Midrange Computing talks about the way IBM is building the new WebSphere Studio Tools around Eclipse.

It explains what Eclipse is, and lists the new Websphere tools which will plug into it.

What has happened to eclipse.org? It seems to be dead at the moment.

Update: eclipse.org is back.

Posted by Simon Brunning at 01:47 PM
AlltheWeb

According to News.com, AlltheWeb has now indexed more pages than Google.

"However, the number of pages in an index is only one indicator of a search engine's power. Others include how often it is updated, how easy it is to use and how quickly its results are generated", they say. Even more important, I think, is how good the links are. From Google you get quality rather than quantity - the link that I want is usually on the first page.

Besides, AlltheWeb doesn't support Elmer Fudd.

Posted by Simon Brunning at 01:40 PM
TrayIt!

TrayIt! is a useful little gadget allowing you to minimise apps to the taskbar.

Free as in beer, but not as in speech.

Posted by Simon Brunning at 01:28 PM
A computer with common sense?

Nah, it'll never happen. I've yet to meet a computer programmer with common sense.

Posted by Simon Brunning at 01:06 PM
This can't be true

Guinness is NOT Good For You? Rubbish! Steak, egg and chips in a glass, is Guinness!

Posted by Simon Brunning at 12:59 PM
15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense

15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense at Scientific American.

Worth a read.

Posted by Simon Brunning at 12:37 PM
Code Migration and Modernization

PEP 290, the Code Migration and Modernization guide, is up.

The key in dict thing is really nice.

See also PEP 8, the official Python style guide.

Posted by Simon Brunning at 12:30 PM
Teleportation for real

See the BBC and Slashdot.

They can only teleport light at the moment. Not as useless as it sounds - if they can teleport some light from Kylie's bedroom, say...

Posted by Simon Brunning at 12:24 PM
Python PS2 and GameCube ports?

Groovey!

Posted by Simon Brunning at 12:21 PM
Why software is so bad...

Why software is so bad...

Ironic that this is on MSNBC. ;-)

So, litigation is the answer, eh? Bloody Americans. Still, it's true that software is currently a long way from being an engineering discipline, but that it could be. It would be a huge culture shift, though.

'Correct by construction' - there aren't any languages which make it hard to write bad code, I'm afraid. "Real programmers can write assembly code in any language." There are languages which make it easy to write good code, though.

(Via Techdirt)

Update: Slashdot is covering this. Interesting comments this time.

Posted by Simon Brunning at 12:13 PM
Start NT programs from the iSeries

Start NT programs from the iSeries at Search 400 is a useful technique.

Not that I'd use VB, naturally. The NT side if things can all be done with Python - sockets are built in, COM support comes as part of win32all, and py2exe allows you to run your scripts as NT services.

Posted by Simon Brunning at 09:04 AM