I don’t tend to post political comments on my blog, but Andy Hunt dug up this wonderful, 84 year old quote that seems oddly relevant now: When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental—men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand....

This morning my PC’s video display suddenly shut down. When I tried to reboot it, it got through the initial boot sequence and died again right after it switched into graphics mode during the Windows startup. As I had similar problems with my previous ATI card, I wasn’t particularly surprised… I turned the PC off and decided to troubleshoot the problem after work. After I got back, I tried to start the PC again....

A while ago I mentioned GmailFS. I still have not had a chance to try it, but now that I use Linux at work there’s even more reason to give it a shot. A similar tool now exists for Windows users: GMail Drive. Definitely worth a look. I wonder how much effort Google will put into disabling these tools. I guess it depends on how much they catch on. Apparently they have already modified their login procedures, breaking a previous version of GMail Drive....

At my new job, development is done on Linux workstations. In many ways this is great, as I enjoy the power of Unix. Unfortunately, the experience has not nearly been as smooth as I would have hoped… ...

In the last 4 months or so, I have made several posts on Eclipse, which I had started to use at my previous job. Overall, my experience with Eclipse up to now had been fairly positive, with the exception of some minor quirks. Unfortunately, this has changed significantly in the last two weeks, at my new job. At my previous job, our applications were built on top of J2EE, but we did not use JSP. Instead, our Struts actions generated XML output which was then rendered into HTML using XSLT templates. Therefore, I never even realized that Eclipse does not support JSP out of the box. It does not even provide syntax highlighting! ...