Boggles the mind.. (geekery)
So, I was noticing that there are 2.6 million active LJs.
That’s got to be bordering on a cultural phenomenon that has global inpact. Especially since I know those aren’t all english, and I know there are other blogging sites, and I know as XML/RSS feeds get better, sooner or later there will be a unified blogreader site. Not that I can’t already read all my blogs togeather via Thunderbird in theory. (I haven’t yet tried this to see how it works in practice, but I expect it does)
I’ve been learning Lazlo, a open source shockwave/flash bytecode compiler. It’s been slow going in spots, especially since the eclipse plugin is still a little on the unstable side. But I’ve gotten my application to where it switches views based on a menu, pulls data from a XML data source, and whatnot. Not bad for a couple of days playing around. I hope inside a week to actually have a nice looking web applet for MC’s site. Then I have to convince people they should be paying me to develop these things for them.
I have my doubts as to whether this is a single solution, though.. I think a combination of flash and css, to offer a rich broadband experience and a tolerable narrowband, is probably where the future’s going. But it’s hard to say. Anyway, I’m having fun developing web applications. Hopefully soonish someone will be paying me to do that..
.. or something.
Anyway, I still can’t believe things like the net aren’t resulting in real political change, and real diversification of opinions. I feel like the world should be evolving faster.. but I guess I should just be grateful that it is evolving as fast as it is. I’d just like to not be seeing wars, and not be hearing about how I should be afraid of the big scary terrorists.
Actually, I’d like to be hearing about how television viewership is at a all time low, people are building their own community wireless networks, and open source software has just hit another explosive development curve – this one trying to bring open source back to the masses. [Actually, I’d argue that Thunderbird is about as mass-accessable a program as you can get. *Very* user friendly. Plugin-based. I haven’t tried extending it yet, but I’m guessing it’s not hard to do. And it’s lightweight and fast on its feet.. if you haven’t tried it yet, give it a shot.
I’ve mixed opinions about Eclipse. I guess I see promise, but I also see a lot of problems. Still, this is a IDE to keep a eye on in my opinion.
I’ve *seriously* mixed opinions about gentoo.. although it does make me look forward to genthree. If I had nothing better to do, maybe I would try and build a linux distribution that *actually* didn’t require any advanced knowledge. Or I’d go work for microsoft. [Actually, I’ve been having some corrispondence with M$ – applied for some jobs over there, talked to some people. It might be fun to come full circle, work for the evil empire. To be honest, I’m no longer convinced that they’re even remotely a bad thing. After all, they don’t seem to be shutting linux down, and they do seem to be learning from it. XP loads drivers without rebooting, kernal module style. It seems possible that maybe we *can* all get along.
Wonder how the IPv6 implimentation is coming over at my ISP. I’m envious.. my friends in other lands are on IPv6, and I’m still stuck in v4land.
Time to make the next quantum leap. 😉
S.