The reality tv/gameshow programme idea generator. Classic.

I have just this lunchtime discovered that one of my colleagues is a Jainist. Well I never!

My mother is a Buddhist, and an ex-colleague of mine is a Pagan. All very interesting religions.

Me, I'm an atheist, a real one, and all these theists look equally odd to me...

Update September 5th: I think that the reason that these religions seem so benign to me is that their adherents don't need to keep being reminded about the most important rule. While the big three (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) are all religions of peace in theory, in practice they seem to promote bigotry, zealotry and violence in at least some of their adherents. This is also true, though to a lesser extent, of Hinduism.

The rise and decline of Java/C++ programmers

This are US figures, yeah, but more or less the same is happening this side of the pond. Computer Weekly was down to two pages of non-public sector jobs last week. The number of my ex-colleagues out of work is truly frightening.

At least my project is making money. There is some reassurance in that.

But will the market pick up again? I think so, but not just yet, and not to the level that it reached during the golden years of the late nineties. CEOs are looking for dead-cert projects these days.

Java hits obstacle with cell phones

So much for Evo on mobile phones...

A Comparison Of Microsoft's C# Programming Language to Sun Microsystems' Java Programming Language

Some interesting stuff here.

Java desperately needs a foreach statement, properties and variable length argument lists. Especially foreach.

C# isn't cross platform, and exception handling looks weak.

Naturally, Python has all this. God, Python programmers are spoiled!

Update September 13th: A Comparative Overview of C#, another C# vs. Java comparison.

Java Server Pages (JSPs) can easily tempt you into what Bitter Java refers to as the Monolithic JSP antipattern.

The solution to this is the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern. The Struts framework exists to help you implement this.

Struts, an open-source MVC implementation is an excellent introduction to Struts and the MVC pattern. It also covers tag libraries - J2EE's way of avoiding the ugly mixture of HTML and Java which can easily result from JSP development.

The example shows a typical Monolithic JSP refactorerd into three simple components, only one of them Java code. Beautiful.

Struts and Tiles aid component-based development covers updates to the Struts framework between versions 0.9 and 1.1.

The protocol Bush tried to kill lives to fight another day.

The US along with Australia are now the only major industrialised nations to have failed to ratify Kyoto.

Bush will just do as he pleases, though, as usual.