I really have to mention for the benefit of my non-apache friends, Planet Apache. It’s an aggregation of blogs by Apache committers and contains a lot of really interesting stuff both from the world of Apache and from outside it. It’s open to all apache committers but is still ramping up with new people adding their blogs so we’ll see how well the noise to signal ratio survives, but at the moment, the signal is really very good.

This is a fantastic suggestion from Warren Ellis. Friend of a friend systems should be integrated with instant messaging to become the central hub of your internet community experience. It needs to go a step further than that though – it should integrate with iSync, Outlook, your PDA etc, so that it really becomes the central hub of all your communications devices. It should include the functionality that Address Book now has (on OS X) with it’s bluetooth phone integration.

As Iain points out, MS have a new toolbar, and it’s not particularly original. I’m not so concerned about it being similar though, it has the same function so it makes sense that it would have the same kind of look. What really concerns me is the fact that a browser vendor has to release a toolbar plugin for their own browser to add new features instead of just adding it to the browser directly.

“jbob” comments about how Java and Linux are a good fit for each other, and that better access to the internals of linux would make it even better. I definitely agree that Java and Linux are a good fit, but they are a good fit only because Java provides a platform independant abstraction. Providing access to the internals of linux from Java would remove the biggest advantage Java has over C/C++ because the code would no longer be portable.

Over at O’Reilly Chuck Toporek complains that iSync didn’t support the bluetooth phone he purchased. I think he’s pointing the blame in the wrong place. iSync supports the standard syncing protocol SyncML so it will work with any phone or device that also supports that standard which apparently Chuck’s phone doesn’t. So while I sympathize with Chuck for having bought what is for him a dud phone, I think it’s a bit much to expect Apple to do all the leg work to support every device under the Sun.

I really don’t like perl at this point in time. If anyone can explain why attempting to use the Google search webservice from within MT would return an error saying the file protocol is not understood, I’d love to hear about it. All the required modules for MT are properly installed as per their instructions and it’s still a no-go, despite the fact that it’s up and running fine on my internal server.

In the beginning there was chaos…. Nothing changes really. I’ve finally gotten around to putting a blog online, I’m not sure how long it will last but hopefully I’ll be doing enough interesting stuff this year that there’ll be something to blog about. I guess in the worst case I can just pester Iain from here instead of in his comments.