Nosce te ipsum

Leave it to a Mac user to bring the new to the old. Pictured above, an original Apple Macintosh SE bred with a new Mac Mini. The SE was a very popular (and powerful for it's day) Macintosh that many people still hold on to. I picked one up last year for around $20 which is fully functional but I've been holding onto it for the sole purpose of someday trying to do some interesting mod myself and this might just fit the bill.

From PC World

Here at PC World, we've become pretty good at fixing Windows' many annoyances, but even we can't do it all. As a longtime Windows user, I've bent my Windows PCs to my will with tips from stories like this month's "Wipe Out Windows Annoyances." But sometimes that isn't enough. Windows' security problems alone are enough to make even the most die-hard Microsoft booster question whether the grass is greener on the other side of the CPU.

Alternative operating systems look better all the time. If you like open-source software, such as the Firefox browser, you have to wonder whether Linux, too, is worth a shot. Plus, the stunning look of OS X (and the affordability of the Mac Mini) intrigued me.

But getting started with a new OS is a big adjustment. Sure, Windows can be annoying, yet most of us can't give it up entirely. Would it help to do most of my work in Linux or Mac OS, switching back to my Windows box when necessary? Or would a cross-platform setup introduce its own hurdles and annoyances, wiping out any benefits found in the alternative OS?

To find out, I spent a few weeks working with Xandros Linux and Mac OS X 10.4 (aka Tiger) in a mostly-Windows computing environment. Along the way, I dug into some of the conventional wisdom that surrounds Linux, Mac OS, and Windows, reexamining the preconceptions many people still have about these different operating systems.

In the past, web applications were limited because a web page had to be reloaded (or another page loaded in its place) in order for new data to be obtained. Other methods were available (without loading another page), but the techniques weren’t well supported and had a tendency to be buggy.

In recent months, a technique that had not been widely supported in the past has become available to a large number of web surfers, giving developers more freedom to develop cutting-edge web applications. These applications, which asynchronously retrieve XML data via JavaScript, are affectionately known as “Ajax applications” (Asynchronous Javascript and XML applications). In this article, I will explain how to retrieve a remote XML file via Ajax to update a web page, and as this series continues, I will discuss more ways that Ajax technology can be used to take your web applications to the next level.

The Register has a piece this morning dumping on PHP which brings to the surface some interesting issues. Personally, I'm still a huge believer in PHP and it certainly remains my scripting language of choice for all things web related but I admit that I am devoting more time to Ruby on Rails and Cake these days.

I've recently been working on a legacy project written in Cold Fusion which has certainly seen a lot of improvement as of late but it I fundamentally, I can't bring myself to devote the time necessary to master yet another proprietary technology when there are so many other (and IMO better) alternatives out there in the free software world. Perhaps I'm still bitter about wasting so many years creating web apps with ASP but at the time, it was certainly easier to get things done using that route than writing more complex CGI scripts, although I certainly would have learned more had I gone that route.

By way of Slashdot

Joel Spolsky (of joelonsoftware fame) has some good points and fun with numbers on the quality of programmers and whether it is more profitable to go with cheap or good programmers. His point is that a good programmer will simply create code of a quality that average programmers never can create. An interesting read.