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IBM published a nice article on their developerWorks website that compares Ruby on Rails with J2EE. To be more precise, the article compares the complete Ruby on Rails stack to that of a typical Java web application that combines J2EE with the open source Struts and Hibernate frameworks. This is a very valid comparison (Spring and other frameworks would be valid alternatives as well), as both stacks provide similar functionality. There are however crucial differences in the way these are achieved....

The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy movie (which I didn’t care for all that much, as I previously wrote), prompted me to pick up a copy of “Don’t Panic”, Neil Gaiman’s guide to the guide. The original version came out in the late 80s, but it has been updated several times since then to keep up with all additions to the increasingly inaccurately named trilogy, as well as the unfinished work that Douglas Adams left behind after his death in 2001....

I’ve been playing a little with CafePress. I have to say it’s a pretty cool concept, and very powerful. My daughter Julianna is drawing the cutest pictures these days, and I thought I’d use that opportunity to put my scanner to good use and upload some of those pictures to CafePress. Check out my CafePress store. So far I have uploaded one image called “Happy Guy” (not sure if this is supposed to be me; he certainly has a bit more hair than me ;) )....

It’s amazing how far computers have come in the past 10 years. I remember when decoding a single JPG image took several seconds on my 386 CPU (that was around the same time I was dreaming about having a 1GB hard drive some day…). Even 7 years ago, encoding MP3s still took a many minutes per song and rendered the PC virtually unusable for anything else. Watching (or even encoding) movies on the PC was not even conceivable....