Blackmoor Vituperative

A girl in my game group just sent me this link. If this doesn’t make you laugh out loud, then you aren’t me. 🙂

Firefox Flicks: Wheee!

Very, very funny.

Are you looking to simplify AJAX code? Bruce Perry has some help in “Prototype: Easing AJAX’s Pain,” which introduces the “Prototype” library. Prototype introduces a number of development-easing shortcuts for JavaScript authors. Further, “Prototype also wraps the functionality of XMLHttpRequest with its own Ajax.Request and related objects, so that you don’t have to bother with writing code for instantiating this object for various browsers.”

Chris Hardin has written a really good (if brief) introduction to Maven 2.0. Check it out.

Interesting news:

Red Hat, the leading Linux distributor, announced on April 10 that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire open-source Java middleware company JBoss.

JBoss has been rumored to be on the acquisition block for months. Earlier this year there was much speculation that Oracle was going to acquire the Atlanta-based JBoss, but JBoss CEO Marc Fleury said he had no immediate plans to sell the company.

Red Hat will pay at least $350 million for JBoss. That will be made up of 40 percent cash and 60 percent Red Hat stock. An additional $70 million may be paid depending upon JBoss’ financial performance. Oracle had been alleged to have been looking to pay from $300 million to $480 million for JBoss.

The deal is expected to close in May. If completed as planned it will add to Red Hat’s earnings next year.

In early Monday morning trading, the market enthusiastically greeted the proposed deal with a jump of almost 10 percent on extremely high volume.

(from eWeek, Red Hat to aquire JBoss)

Also worth reading:

Oracle refuses to confirm or deny that it spent the past few months working through the details of acquiring JBoss. But the rumor mill has suggested that Oracle uncovered code ownership issues when doing due diligence in preparation for an acquisition.

With Oracle refusing to comment, there’s no way to confirm that premise. But if it were in fact true that the deal proved too risky for Oracle, why would it be OK for Red Hat to buy JBoss?

(from eWeek, If Legal Questions Killed an Oracle-JBoss Deal, Why Not Red Hat-JBoss?)

There’s a really interesting article at SearchOpenSource.com about FSW Inc. switching to Linux. (FSW is a Connecticut nonprofit that offers people healthcare and social services.)

What makes this article different from most that I read is that it doesn’t just mention Linux, Firefox, and OpenOffice. These are great, and they’ll meet the need of 90% of the small businesses out there, but for large enterprises, they need more. They need virtualization. They also need something to replace Microsoft Exchange. This article doesn’t go into exhaustive depth on the decision making process FSW went through, but it does touch on these issues, and mentions what products they considered. This is good ammunition for IT directors out there who want to reduce their agency’s costs and increase their reliability by moving their core infrastructure from Windows to Linux.

The article also doesn’t gloss over the work involved. It’s a lot of work, make no mistake. But at the end of this phase of the transition, FSW saved $100,000 on their HIPAA compliance effort. That’s not trivial, and the great thing is that those savings carry forward — every time it would have been time to upgrade, or renew a license, FSW will save again.

This is really a great article. I think it does a lot to dispel the FUD that Microsft spreads about TCO.

eWeek has a head-to-head review of Apache Jetspeed-2 and JBoss Portal. The last time I was reviewing open source, standards-based Java portals (which was a little less than two years ago), neither of these was ready for prime time. At that time, the two main contenders (in my opinion) were Liferay and Exo. At the time, I selected Liferay for the project I was working on, because its security model and architecture was more compatible with my project.

It looks like Liferay and Exo are still going strong, but if I were evaluating Java portals again today, I’d probably take a good hard look at Jetspeed-2. It supports portlets written in other languages, which helps transition legacy systems into the portal framework, and it plays well with other Apache products most of us are already using.

One portal system I have not examined at all is Plone, although I keep hearing nice things about it. The next time I need to evaluate open source, standards based Java portals, I guess I will have to add that to the list, as well.

Why is it good to open source OpenSolaris and OpenOffice and bad to open source Java? Peter Yared, formerly of Sun and now CEO of ActiveGrid, poses that question in an open letter to Sun.

Dana Gardner follows up with what he thinks is the answer: IBM.

I get irritated when I read someone who ought to know better defend universal surveillance. Larry Seltzer on eWeek makes the claim that there is no privacy interest in public places. He draws a comparison between having a camera on every corner and having a police officer on every corner, as if there is no difference. A camera on every streetcorner is vastly different from a police officer on every streetcorner.

1. Police officers can respond to a citizen in need — cameras can’t. Even if every camera is actively monitored by a human being (which is impossible), dispatching assistance to a camera’s location takes as long as responding to any other 911 call.
2. Police officers are not all networked to the same system which stores what each of them sees. Cameras are. There is a HUGE difference between having a single human being aware of what’s on this corner, today, and having that same human being watching this corner, and every corner, every day. No one can be trusted with that level of omniscience. No one.

Universal surveillance is a huge invasion of privacy: that is its sole purpose. “Privacy” does not simply apply to what is done behind closed doors (although there are cameras to record that, as well.). “Privacy” applies equally as much to not having one’s activities tracked and monitored on a continual basis.

Universal surveillance is not a “slippery slope” to Big Brother: it is a pit trap, and Big Brother is waiting at the bottom.

OMB chief architect Richard Burk told agency chief architects last week that the agency IT investment repository known as the Federal EA Management System will be replaced by the Component Organization and Registration Environment Web repository, at Core.gov.

“Based on the last year’s usage rates, and discussions about the costs and value of the online application, FEAMs.gov will be deactivated as of April 30, 2006,” Burk said in an e-mail to chief architects. “For information on government service components available for agencies to use, register at CORE.gov, the cross-agency forum for component development, registration and reuse.”

FEAMS will remain in operation until April 30, Burk said.

OMB had high hopes for FEAMS, based on a Housing and Urban Development Department system to track IT investments. It had gone through a last round of testing in September 2004, but agencies never found it useful or user friendly.

But Core.gov, which the CIO Council launched in March 2004, hasn’t caught on with agencies either. Just recently, the site offered free user training classes at the end of March, and the council published operational procedures for how to use the repository.

The CIO Council also has plans to retool Core.gov to make it more useful, Burk has said.

(from GCN, OMB closes FEAMS for Core.gov)

I really like the core.gov logo, but for some reason it seems really familiar, as though I’ve seen it before. It’s probably just my imagination.

Here’s an example of why I keep reading the Hero Games forums, even though I am no longer posting to it. I learn about nifty things like this, a live map of Hero System players:

Herophiles United

Google, will you never cease to amaze?