Welcome back to my irreverent and regular(-ish) look at what I have read online lately.

Life after Applications

As I have said before, I personally like 'Applications' that leave me alone. On Windows, proprietary applications have attention deficit disorder, they constantly demand your attention and cover your desktop with icons and flashing notifications; keeping a high-profile is necessary to make you feel you get value for money and to make you buy the next upgrade/renew your subscription.

In the free world, we don't cover our desktops with marketing. I just want my computer to do what I want, preferably without asking, and certainly without going to the applications menu and going through the menus.

Jürgen Geuter has been having similar thoughts, he wants to "get rid of the whole application concept", good show ol' chap. However, what will probably happen is that a load of people will disappear into API discussions for four years and at the end we will have fourteen incompatible partial implementations that can each print "Hello World!" to the screen.

Broadening the mind

Our man in India, Andy Lockran, has been blogging about his work there including helping a children's charity as a kind of digital Jeeves.

Meanwhile, Dieter's been off to the Maemo summit 2009, I have to admit I am bit jealous when I hear reports of cool conferences I couldn't be at. Anyhow so far he is just raving about the freebie he got, hope to see some more posts about his experiences hacking with it.

Martin Matusiak writes a fun bash script for finding dependencies automatically, a nice idea that warrants some more implementations.

Planet Larry has had a trendy template makeover. I am starting to think about how to rejig this site, any ideas or templates gratefully received!

Spam V Ham

Brian Carper talks about the problem of spam and ham, i.e. discerning between genuine email that you want to receive and autogenerated nonsense that you don't want to receive. I use SpamAssassin, but like Brian, I am always freting about the rate of false positives versus false negatives. Likewise, Mez, while on the run from a 10 year old, finds a Python programmer.

K is learning to love Vim, I still use Emacs, but I am not sure that I ever learned to love it. As very long-term readers know, I once tried to write the perfect terminal based editor. I should probably go back and continue with it, perhaps I can do better next time.

Another fresh look is from Kevin Bowling who looks again at Java, even I am willing to think about it ... at some point, there could be some ham in there somewhere.

Wind Power

Dave has some interesting posts about how (not) to power the nation, but what most attracted my attention was a post about some propaganda he received trying to claim that meat is a leading cause of global warming. Almost human activity has some effect on nature, picking out 'eating meat' seems somewhat arbitrary, why not just go the whole hog and say that work is the leading cause of climate change, instead we should all be paid to walk in the park and sing Kumbaya.

Hitler was of course the world's most famous vegetarian, and even today it is surprising how many times I am accosted by evangelistic vege-nazis trying to take away my hamburger. Dave does all the proper maths, but my feeling is that the dinosaurs merrily ate meat without fear of the methane emissions of their quarry, and they dominated the earth for 160 million years - pretty good going in my opinion, we being on the earth for only a couple of hundred millenia, and only dominating the last dozen or less.

In any case, have you seen how Vegetarians themselves, munching through their imported lentils and beans, fart as much as an Aberdeen Angus herd? Maybe we start the methane reductions by eating the Vegetarians, then we would have earned enough methane credits to easily compensate for our hamburger production.

Before you throw a pack of tofu through my window, this is all parody, a joke. Sad I have to say this, but this is the Internet, and you are all mad.

Linux and the end of the world as we know it

A couple of New Year's ago, I argued that "a global recession may affect the corporate uptake of Linux Desktop", in that article I argued that the Financial Industry, and other similar industries not normally associated with putting ethics as the first priority, would be the first steps in a global corporate switchover to Linux. Well the New York Stock Exchange and the London Stock Exchange are now there. Red Hat cashes in with a 36.9% year-on-year rise in profits, fantastic considering what a bad year it has been for the global economy.

Meanwhile, Australia's Computer Crime Investigation Unit warned not to use Windows to access your online banking but to use Linux instead. I probably didn't need to tell you that, but it is fun to hear some officials with some sensible advice that actually helps people.

What have you been reading or writing?

Well that is enough for now, if you have read something cool online, or have written something cool yourself, then please let everyone know using the comments feature.