Way back when, Microsoft added some special code to Windows 3.1 to detect DR-DOS (a competitor to MS-DOS) and throw up spurious error messages during install in an effort to make customers think there was something wrong with the not-from-MS product. They appear to be doing it again, the bastards.

And now Haloscan seems to have restored another backup tape. We now have back our comments between Feb 2nd and Feb 5th, but lost those left yesterday. Crap crap crappity crap. This is almost as bad as YACCS.

Haloscan seems to have lost all our comments left since February 2nd. Sorry about that.

Moe, I had left a comment following your comment about open source which was one of the lost bits. One person who's spent a good bit of time thinking and writing about the economic and sociological bases for open source v. closed source is Eric S. Raymond. He has a dead-tree book named "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" available now from Amazon.com as well as probably everybody else. He also has the original essays online at http://www.catb.org. I suggest, given the economic nature of your question, starting with The Magic Cauldron.

Why is JBuilder evil?

Among all the other things I do that suck up my time, I read the two main Struts mailing lists. On struts-user, there is periodically a message or two observing that JBuilder is the Worst.Tool.Ever!!!1! or similar unsupported statement.

Do either of you readers know what they're talking about? I use JBuilder all the time, and find it an excellent tool worthy of my attention (not least because I can get "vi" key bindings in it, and we all know that CUA and EMACS are the sperm of the devil).

What gives? What's so evil about JBuilder that I just don't see?

Apparently AT&T isn't the only group trying to make a completely human sounding conversation without any human involved. I'd heard "Most Requested" a time or two before, but never really thought about the time commitment that would be invovled in honestly doing such a thing.

Note to self: start working out. I would have added "more often" but that implies "workouts(current) > 0" which isn't quite true.

Ooooh! Shiny toys!

Hooray! Homestarrunner is back! 404 Doodoo Error

Step 1 of my all-time-consuming project is (apparently) done: today I submitted a tag library to allow Struts projects to target small-footprint wireless devices via WML. Because 1.1 is about to go release candidate 1, the submission is being set in abeyance, but it should be part of the "contrib" distribution post 1.1 release.

Maybe 1.2 ... we'll see.

Analysis of the Sapphire Worm, which managed to infect almost 80,000 hosts in just 30 minutes. I'll graciously allow you three guesses to figure out which manufacturer's products were affected.