According to this Slashdot posting, the BBC has announced that it will be releasing new radio adaptations of Douglas Adams last three Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books. The clou is that Douglas Adams himself will provide the voice for Agrajag, a character whose reincarnations keep getting killed by Arthur Dent. Apparently, Douglas Adams always wanted to play this part and he therefore recorded it some time before his death....
My company just instigated a complete ban on instant messaging clients, supposedly for security reasons. While I agree that instant messaging applications may not be the most secure and probably should not be used internally for sensitive information (for which an internal instant messaging deployment of some sort would be preferable), I feel that instant messaging has become such a commodity for personal communications that removing this privilege is a highly significant and intolerable restriction....
O’Reilly has produced an interesting poster about the History of Programming Languages. But beware: the PDF file is 39" wide, probably because it covers every minor version of every programming languages, rather than just important milestones. Apparently you can also get a printed version of the poster for free when you order two books from O’Reilly. There’s also a corresponding Wiki, and of course a lively Slashdot discussion. Would you have thought that there are over 2500 documented programming languages?...
Firefox 0.9 has been released a few days ago, and it certainly looks worthy of upgrading to (or installing, if you’re not using it yet). Joel Spolsky lists three reasons to switch web browsers today. Of particular interest is the following one: You’ll help break the Microsoft Monopoly on web browsers. Microsoft took over the browser market fair and square by making a better product, but they were so afraid that Web-based applications would eliminate the need for Windows that they locked the IE team in a dark dungeon and they haven’t allowed improvements to IE for several years now....
I just discovered SQLCreator, an interesting looking Java-based SQL client. Apparently, the goal of this application is to aid developers, and it includes many features that allow developers to search for tables by column name, etc. It is free for personal and commercial use, but there is a small advertising message area at the bottom - sounds fair enough to me. I’ll definitely check it out, although I’m currently happy enough with the free version of DbVisualizer....