Now this is good! I saw a television program about "Hunting for Bambi" a couple of weeks ago and thought is was absolutely hysterical. The concept: guys would pay $10,000 to hunt naked women with paintball guns. I saw the news report, complete with footage of a hunt taking place, interviews with the proprietor and with the girls being hunted. If that isn't enough, the footage showed one of the girls get shot and then interviewed her afterward where she showed the welt from the paintball. It turns out that the whole thing was a hoax and CBS affiliate KLAS, out of Las Vegas, got suckered.

Despite the fact that the station's LuAnne Sorrell did a four-part report on the scheme -- supposedly giving men the chance to hunt naked women with paintball guns for up to $10,000 -- it failed to do the heavy lifting needed to unmask the hoax. Instead, urban legends site Snopes.com led the way within days with a detailed explanation of why it was a hoax [USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review].

I have used Snopes.com a number of times to look up urban legends. The site has a ton of them listed and explained. Kudos to them for doing the work that the mainstream media is obviously not willing to do. 12:29:32 PM    comment []  

It seems that gcj is making headway with the recent announcement that it has now been used to compile the Eclipse IDE to native code [Slashdot]. Though the "write once, run anywhere" mantra is important and a major selling point of Java now and in the future, the ability to compile down to native code has some obvious advantages, speed being the most obvious.

I have been watching some of the discussions on the Debian Java mailing list and there is a lot of buzz about using gcj to compile most, if not all of the Debian Java packages to native code. The advantage of this being that the J2SE SDK is not completely free and, therefore, cannot be part of the main Debian distribution. However, if an OSS Java application where to be compiled down to native bits, this would circumvent the reliance on Sun's code and allow these projects to be included in Debian. 12:15:00 PM    comment []  

My wife, Andrea, is about to go to India for three months. She will be setting up some English classes there for Microsoft service center employees. It's a good opportunity for her, but it does suck that we will be separated for so long. However, while she is there she will be maintaining a weblog [Andrea's Weblog]. She decided to start a weblog so that she could keep friends and relatives appraised of her experiences in India. It is a much more efficient and less obtrusive means of doing so than email. I just hope she enjoys it and keeps it up after she returns. 10:59:35 AM    comment []