May, 13 2004

Expecting PR fluff, I almost didn't read this interview with James Gosling on BuilderAU. I was pleasantly surprised by his frankness as he spoke of the obstacles on Java's road to broader acceptance:

... So if you want to build say, an infrastructure for a large global bank or a national medical system for a 100 million people, no problem. All the facilities with J2EE deals with that kind of scale.

(But) the problem with dealing in that kind of scale is that it brings about a certain amount of complexity. So our system have tended to be, well… like if you want to do the really hard stuff, it is possible, but doing the easy stuff, it is hard.

The article also touches on the IBM-Eclipse relationship, Sun's agreements with Microsoft, cell phone development, and Queen Elizabeth I.

A few minutes ago, I put up a bunch of fixes and enhancements to the site. Amongst other things:

1. Now better at recognising URLs in comments – underscore and hash are now accepted.

1. Put navigation panel on the left right hand side. When you view a single post, it will let you navigate to the next or previous item. Also works for monthly archives.

1. When you click on the title picture, it now takes you to the cardboard.nu home page.

1. Fixed yet another problem with the CSS and IE.

Thanks to all who pointed out bugs and suggested features – Simon, Jed, Richard, Keith and Charles.

When I took down the Python server, it had been up for ten days and served 44,000 requests. That was better than I had expected for these early days. The database corruption problems seem to have gone away for the time being, too.