Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

I had the good fortune of spending a bit of time, over the course of a few days, with Stephan Janssen at the Java Posse Roundup this year. He is a great guy, very cool to hang out with. His slides of the failed theme names for Javapolis are hilarious, as is the Gosling idol video.

One of the most interesting things he spoke about, aside from the fact that American's don't like sperm, is the approach Parleys is taking to putting three leading RIA technologies to the real world test - by implementing the site in JavaFX, Flex, and GWT. (You can find the Flex BETA if you poke around, the JavaFX version works, I have seen it, but I don't think it's a public URL, yet - and the GWT version is still in the works, last I heard.)

InfoQ has a nice interview with Stephan today that explores his experiences with the different RIA offerings, it's a good read. Stephan Janssen On Parleys.com And The RIA Landscape

This news is all over the interwebs, but I didn't realize until I grabbed it that FF3 has really gone "native" for each platform. My Mac version looks very safari-ish:

See what's new.

It definitely feels a bit faster, and I have been using FF3 for a while (betas 1 and 2) without all of the problems that FF2 seems to have with GMail and other Ajaxy sites. Go back to 1.5, or get 3.

Call me irrational or whatever you want, but if Microsoft ends up owning Yahoo!, then I will look for other places to move my deli.icio.us and Flickr stuff (both things Yahoo! bought, but really the main Yahoo! things I use on a day to day basis). I just can't stand Microsoft, on a historical/experience level, and on a company/philosophy level - have seen too many things burned too many times to go there.

End of Support for Netscape web browsers

So this comes up in my Reader today:

Google Talk Translation Bot

WHOA! I think. Did Google just release a UT for GTalk?

No, it is much more mundane. Basically they just have XMPP bots that will translate messages sent to them. How completely uninteresting. Why couldn't they have made an XMPP filter that you could message and have it auto convert languages for you while you chat with someone else? Come to think of it, why can't we put this in Gmail too?

Just as I am going through my Reader folders that are all 1000+ except "code" and "science", I see this in Jeremy Zawodny's linkblog:

Why Are You Reading All That News?: "It is a self-created problem, and I need to understand what makes me feel the need to consume the equivalent of a Carnegie library every day, instead of just finding a more efficient way to choke it down." True, dat...