I’d heard murmurs of such a platform before, but I didn’t know there was an active project to create a version of BSD optimized for desktop use. FreeBSD stability and ports system plus a decent desktop environment would be a very sweet thing. I might have to throw it on my SuSe workstation which I’m not currently using and check it out…
Found via Slashdot, apparently there is work underway to start BSD certification testing as early as April of 2006. The interesting part is that they will have seperate certifications for the various BSD’s, hence there being a FreeBSD specific certification.
This is very cool– I started the certification program for Linux in 2001 or so through Sair as it seemed to have the broadest, distribution agnostic Linux certifications at the time and completed the “Installation and Configuration of Linux” certification. Shortly after that the company seemed to implode, and I’m really surprised it’s still around at any capacity at this point. I don’t really use FreeBSD to much professional capacity, but it’s something I love playing around on at home, and has hosted my website for almost 6 years now.
I started off in Linux 1997 and got frustrated by it’s frequent changes which kept breaking stuff, and switched to FreeBSD in late 99 and haven’t looked back. 
I still use Linux for sure, but much prefer FreeBSD. I was also to surprisingly able to get JRun 3 to work on it way back when, but didn’t have a way to connect to it via Apache unfortunately.
Unfamilliar with FreeBSD? You can read an intoduction about it here, including a list of various large companies who use it.
Here’s a good post on particletree.com discussing various ways to go about tackling a JavaScript project. Personally I’m fairly out of the loop with JavaScript since I’ve been very focused on back-end programming for about 4 years now, but I do like to try and keep up with the space.
After seeing the flurry of blog postings for jobs lately, I thought I’d post a link to an old Joel On Software entry where he debunks the myth that there are NO good programmers available.
Simple economics also dictates that this is a fallacy, but companies aren’t as desperate as they say or they’d do what it takes to land top talent (as I’ve pointed out a few times in comments in various blogs). Granted the reason companies do not invest in employees enough to overcome their head count problems usually do so because of opportunity cost, but it’s still false to say that there are no good programmers available. Instead, you should say that there do not seem to be any good programmers available at the price you are willing to pay.
For instance, I’m happy where I’m at and enjoy what I do, but given the right offer, I’d certainly have to think twice about switching jobs. So if you have a 200K salary position + a new Porsche 911 Turbo S laying around, lets talk! Just kidding, I’d settle for 199K and the regular Porsche 911 Turbo.
An interesting perspective on why this guy thinks good programmers are lazy and dumb.
I will easily admit I’m a lazy programmer– I will take the time to write a tool to automate a task or create for myself rather than have to repeat a given task. This especially is true when I have to muck around with any sort of text reformatting or processing. I dig out the Regular Expressions book and/or write a macro in UltraEdit so I’m not stuck extracting or de-crapifying something by hand.
Given all of the buzz in the past year about Ruby on Rails, I think this post at CodeSnipers.com talking about when to and not to switch programming languages is a good introduction to situations which actually sticking with an existing platform is still the best option.
Yeah, the post title doesn’t make any sense, until you’ve checked out VisitorVille.
What makes VisitorVille unique is immediately clear: VisitorVille does not represent website visitors simply as numbers or graphs, but as real people in a real environment. You can watch your site traffic as if you were people-watching in a big city.
I’d say the person who came up with the idea of this product used to spend a lot of time playing SimCity 2000.
Being that I work quite a bit with analytics, I’ll have to download it and check it out sometime to see how it works. Interesting stuff.
You can now download Google Talk, though I don’t know that it’s officially been released. Ryan called-me from Hawaii using it and the call worked pretty well.. it used around 3.5Kb/s of bandwidth… so it would definately be usable on dial-up too. Very cool!
I came across an interesting read about J2EE Clustering at TheServerSide.com. I’ll have to read this in more detail later, but it looks like it covers all of the various clustering/replication methods in detail by both vendors and open source implementations of J2EE servers. Good stuff.
I came across a Firefox extension as well as a Greasemonkey script which adds a delete button to GMail. Sweet!