At long last, HttpClient 2.0 has been released. It’s been a lot of hard work from a few almost completely distinct teams of developers (with only small contributions from myself if you’re wondering). I was originally hoping that HttpClient 2.0 would make it out in time to be used in EditLive! for Java 2.0 we actually released EditLive! for Java 3.0 a couple of weeks ago and it’s too late even to make it into the upcoming EditLive!

I haven’t had much time to write lately, but thought I’d point out a few things that caught my eye recently. First up, a little something from Eric S Raymond. Apart from being a particularly poorly worded letter (hint: try being nice to people when you want them to give you millions of dollars worth of source code), it’s full of some really odd comments. Open source is hardly a zero-revenue model; ask Red Hat, which had a share price over triple Sun’s when I just checked.

So I need a new laptop. My current, battle-worn, tried and true PowerBook G4 400Mhz has developed a large crack down own side and while it’s still running fine, it can only be a matter of time before that crack gets bigger and eventually the LCD falls off, possibly taking half the ports on the back of the computer with it. So I’m starting to look at laptop options – almost certainly a new Mac unless there’s some insanely great deal on a PC laptop, but the prices for PCs look to be as much as or more expensive than the macs anyway.

There’s been a lot of discussion about Microsoft’s shiny new patent on putting multiple scripts into one XML file – all of it saying how ridiculous the patent is. This however, gets my vote as best retort. My view: it’s crap, but most patents are. Time to make people go back to having competition I say.

Gregor J. Rothfuss asks: what will be deployed 100% first, IPv6, the metric system or Unicode? My answer: the metric system, it’s got a massive head start. They all require America to pull it’s head out of the sand and play nice with the rest of the world though so probably none of them will ever happen. Sigh. On the subject of Unicode – what is with defining a universal character encoding that has so many different forms?

Well, I thought I’d download Firefox and try it out for a while (this entry is being written using it). The first thing I notice is it doesn’t look right. Read on if you don’t mind hearing criticisms of Firefox.

Dave Hyatt finally got around to posting to his weblog about the release of Safari 1.2. Some really good stuff has gone into it and congratulations are in order for all involved. Sadly, my most anticipated feature, LiveConnect, appears to be broken. I’ve seen it work when going from JavaScript to Java, but never managed to get JSObject working to communicate from Java to JavaScript. Dave’s blog is actually the first place that I’ve ever seen that actually mentions going both ways, or at least that what I assume he means by:

At last, a simple to use playwright tool! Not at all documented admittedly and looking very incomplete but it seems to work okay. Plywood is a python script that works with latex to format a simple text file and turn it into a PDF laid out according to the Samuel French style. It’s horribly incomplete but it’s a great idea and it seems to work. It also includes emacs bindings to make it even easier, but I’m using SubEthaEdit for now and I already know vi so learning emacs seems like to much work now.

Michael Santos explores a few features of Java 1.5. As part of it he uses the new static import feature and asks what people think of it. I think it’s the most evil invention in coding I’ve seen since while (++i < 5) type statements. If you saw the line of code: long time = nanoTime(); where is the nanoTime() function? In 1.4 and below it is obviously in the current class – in 1.

Fear stuck deep into my heart, a chill ran down my spine… I reread more carefully what I feared I had seen: “I’m going to be a pop star!” My heart pounding – not another wanna be pop star! Please don’t let it be true! My morbid curiosity aroused, I had to investigate – surely there was a painless explanation…. After a few minutes playing with GarageBand Arggg! Could this be any worse?

Well I’ve got latex installed – not at all easily I might add, but it’s up and running now. So I learn a tiny bit about the basics of Latex and start trying to focus my learning on the area I’m most interested in – writing play scripts. So I head off to CTAN (thanks to David Starkoff for pointing that one out) and find the “dramatist” package which appears to do everything I want.

Interesting article over at O’Reilly about the available Latex editors for OS X. It’s tempted me enough to have a play around. Well actually, the O’Reilly article gave me the knowledge to get started, this article gave me the reasons to do it. Since I’m getting into playwrighting I need to set up an efficient way of getting ideas down and being able to typeset them properly. I’ve currently got a Word template set up but Word X doesn’t seem to handle templates like it should and the layout is something of my own concoction rather than a standard layout.