The Irish Penguin

Just to warn non-geeks, this is actually an article about programmin stuff so don’t get too excited about replacing Toilet Duck just yet! This is just a rant…

In short, my head is wrecked. After watching .NET mature into .NET 2.0 and now .NET 3.0, there’s been loads of nice improvements. It’s a pleasure to write code on the server with the latest C# additions, especially generics and partial classes. So with all thing clean tidy technology available on the server, it is thoroughly depressing that most (90%) of the time is spent writing code in bloody Javascript - possibly the worst language ever! Painstakingly, writing reams of rubbish which you must translate into different types of rubbish for different browsers. The best approach seems to be a James Joyce style ‘Stream of Consciousness’ technique where you deprive yourself of sleep for a week, then grab your keyboard and type blindly away for 4 hours and then see what works at the end - preferably with a large vodka in one hand and a larger vodka in the other hand. Who on earth invented this spawn of satan language - which should just be turned off on every computer. We need a revolution! Somebody please write a client side C# implementation.

Otherwise the vodka wins…

A big congratulations goes to Sun Microsystems, who have finally open sourced Java - under the GPL, if you don’t mind. This is the move that will finally stop me criticising them so I’ll shut up now. In addition, they’ve very kindly given me permission to use their Joint Copyright Agreement for my Frogface project (just thought I’d plug that one again!) which is ticking along nicely on www.sourceforge.net/projects/frogface

Man of the moment is Ganesh, who’s managed to submit the first non-me patch to the Frogface codebase and, along with all the other Frogface developers, has demonstrated great patience as the project gets up on its feet!

Finally, a big shout goes out to Vee who’s working her little socks off studying at the moment. All she’s missing is the hang’n'cheese sandwiches to complete the student lifestyle - mainly cause she doesn’t have the time to make them!!!

You would think that if you or your friends lined Apple Computer’s coffers buy purchasing a load of Apple gift cards off them that the least they could do is let you easily trade in those gift cards for a purchase. Well, maybe not. Here’s another story that shows how customer friendly the big Apple is.

Which is pretty much about as friendly as I’ve ever found Apple’s customer service. Here’s the skinny on TheConsumerist.com.