IFoo or just Foo? Please stop naming interfaces IFoo. Maybe he’s right! Probably all two of the interfaces in Databinder start with an I (just following Wicket). It’s a nasty thing to change tho. We’ll just wait until they become traits in Scala.

Why do people waste their time making embedded HTML editors that generate <font> tags look pretty on the outside?

Hey… what is this ActiveObjects ORM that Eelco is contributing code to? That is getting ideas from AcitveRecord? Guess it will have to go on the list of ORMs we might look into some day, along with Cayenne, and whatever it is that persists objects in Lift. By the way, we aren’t going to kill ourselves trying to make Databinder work with generic JPA containers, because that would make Databinder incompatible with itself. (Yes, glorious standards body, we actually do need Hibernate’s “current session” facility.)

These are your father’s parentheses.

Anil Dash on Fake Steve once hating weblogs in Forbes: “The benefits of blogging for one’s career or business are so profound that they were even able to persuade a dedicated detractor.” We wish we could believe he’s a reformed weblog advocate, but it seems Daniel Lyons (F.S.) belongs to a lingering cadre of journalists who write weblogs while maintaining that amateur publishing is an evil. Note that when F.S. congratulates NYT for outing him after Valleywag had failed: “Guy from the Times did it in a week. So much for the trope about smarty-pants bloggers disrupting old media.” Do as I say, not as I do, et cetera!

Right before his unmasking, FSJ posted a very annoying anti-open-source rant. We had started a counter-post here, but decided that would be taking the bait. Still, the anti-Linux venom seemed weird and over the top, even for Fake Steve, and Roughly Drafted has unearthed an unfortunate explanation: “Lyons not only maintained a prominent pro-SCO, anti-reality blog that rivaled Rob Enderle in its contempt of all things open, but also regularly delivered scathing attacks upon the hero of Groklaw, Pamela Jones, and her crusade to expose the garbage SCO’s lawyers were throwing around.” So Daniel Lyons has been blogging, like, a long time—even before his big anti-blog article. He’s kind of a jerk!

Best Buy sells a ten-foot USB cable for $40: “24K gold-plated and corrosion-proof connectors for maximum conductivity and error-free transmission of up to 480 Mbps.” Man oh man does buying cables ever suck! Gullible “audiophiles” have ruined it for everyone.

The new iMacs are available at the Soho Apple Store, by the way. And were available last night around 7. And you can get a scanner/printer for free with one. And… oops, we early-adopted again.

Hilarious ad for Linux servers manages to insult everyone with various exhausted cliches. The same ad ran in 2000, until the company president “promised” not to run it again. Its model’s bizarre shade of lipstick is thought to be not from that year but from an alternate dimension known as Technopathetica.

Carbonado: a ”persistence abstraction layer for Java… types are object representations of relations. It is not an object database nor an object-relational bridge.” Surprise!—none of the innovation happening in persistence constrains itself with the EJB / JPA spec. Our little Databinder’s course seems like a sound one: if you’re using Hibernate, just use Hibernate. Save your migration energies for the next different thing. It’s not like the record of EJB standards is anything other than abysmal.

John Siracusa analyzes Apple and the e-word: “The further removed these two groups become—the users and the purchasers—the more ’enterprise-y’ the market, and the less Apple is interested in serving it.” It’s become a bad word in purchasing, programming, even in personality; is there anywhere left that “enterprise” can bask in its stuffy hubris?

So long, Typo. Typeturner has an import feature for WordPress WXR archives now, sort of. It works with the format that this script generates, except with a few changes because that script wasn’t making valid XML. Anyway! All the old dusty stuff that was under /n8 is now under /code, with redirects of course.

Roughly Drafted connects the dots between Fake Steve and Rob Enderle, ruining the internet for readers of Daring Fireball. What’s next? Awarding a “jackass” to someone for engaging in innocent, old-fashioned reporting, apparently.

Some bad dumb people are blocking “FireFox” because it is possible to install the Adblock extension. Not that those people have a clue, but Adblock sucks anyway because it is so ham-fisted. The problem is not advertising in general, it is animated advertising. The solution is to disable animated gifs and install the Flashblock extension to put Flash under your control. And since Mozilla’s text rendering sucks anyway, we’re lucky that Safari Stand has the same feature.

All we do is link to Roughly Drafted these days, but still: “Somewhat ironically, a complete suite of well regarded apps had been developed for NeXTSTEP by Lighthouse Design, and could have been ported to Mac OS X without much work. However, Sun had bought the company during its fling with OpenStep in 1996, but after losing interest in its NeXT partnership, it left the apps to rot. After a failed attempt to convert some into Java apps, Sun gave up on them entirely.” Oh, the tragedy of desktop Java. Macbeth’s got nothing on Duke.

More people are starting to wonder if every application needs its own special data layer. Maybe not anymore because of some new software called LINQ? It magiks C# the way that ActiveRecord does Ruby, so you’re allowed to not waste your life writing DAOs that don’t do anything. Just don’t try using the Hibernate Criteria API that way, and certainly not HQL, or else you’ll sink the USS Enterprise when you can’t reconfigure it to store data in particles of dust arranged by nano-machines at the flip of an XML tag.

A carefully typed-up press release beginning, “Apple’s new IMAC Campagin…” warns that the aluminum iMac’s intro-slogan You can never be too thin. Or too powerful. could be “extremely triggering” to people whose genes tell them to be anorexic. What’s that? Oh, sorry, gotta go purge now, lest we disappoint the judgmental iMac waiting at home. [via Infinite Loop]

On Java compatibility being bad: Scala “should embark on a journey of its own, developing supporting libraries that make excellent use of the unique features it offers.” Isn’t that happening with Lift and other projects? If you don’t want to use Wicket and Hibernate from Scala, then don’t. The assertion that they are slowing the development of pure Scala tech is a creative way to look down on the affair, but we’d like to see some evidence first. [via bytesized]

Drive into Mark: “Fresh off my latest car wreck, I just finished researching and buying new auto insurance online.” Maybe work for Google in New York instead so you won’t need a PT Cruiser (a face only a father could love) to get around? Just a thought!

Not that we’re willing to accept Gecko’s refusal to break on hyphens and dashes, but Opera is just annoyingly slow on Ubuntu. So. Epiphany. Have you used this thing? The version packaged with Feisty actually very slick. And, Ephiphany’s crew is experimenting with WebKit! And, you can make FlashBlock work on it. Maybe we can tolerate this Linux thing a while longer until iMacs are airlifted into the office. { related }

Of course Sun changing its ticker symbol to JAVA is embarrassing and stupid. Daring Fireball’s predictable comment (“deck chairs on the Titanic,” and so on) suits us just fine. Half of Sun probably will sink (oops our ship metaphor just broke) and the rest will become a Global Services type firm that trades on the company name to rent out pricey Java programmers for a few decades. Meanwhile the JVM is open source and we don’t need Sun or anyone’s permission to use a far better language on top of it, so what’s the problem? Unless you work for Sun or don’t like learning new things, there isn’t one.

Waffle: “the curious position is that hardened programmers don’t need no usability. Instead of ‘let’s respect the people who will be using this and make it easy and efficient to use so that we can get out of their hair and let them get real work done,’ there’s buried a sentiment that the customer (or user) is stupid.” Don’t we want to get them out of our hair? Either way, it’s more fun to make software that people enjoy using; everyone should try it.