Here’s a great idea: Sascha Brawer is responsible for finding hosting for his local green party’s website and realized that he should find a solution that uses renewable energy. He’s doing this in Switzerland, but I would hope there’s options here in the States, too.

There’s an interesting story over at In Case You Didn’t Feel Like Showing Up describing the convoluted progress of the Eclipse Web Tools project. It certainly dims my outlook quite a bit. So much for the excitement.

Here’s an interesting article on how java threads map onto the OS level threads under Solaris. Currently trying to diagnose and improve some performance problems on a production application server. This is some very cool stuff. I love getting this low level. Someday soon I’ve got to learn more about the VM.

Ever since I met Nicole one of the many, many things I’ve admired about her is the clear sense of the projects, goals and to-do list type items she has to take care of. Of course, she’s a keep of lists, something I’ve never been very good at. Recently, I’ve decided to try and start making this an element of my organizational strategy (if you can call it that). I asked Nicole for advice and she suggested that I start with a list of my projects.

Time for a very brief rant on web design: I find it strangely ironic that this article by Eric Meyer and his blog entry on the same topic both fail to print in any reasonable way. In both cases they print in a very awful, large font. The code excerpts don’t even fit on the page! I’ve tested this in both IE and Firefox on Windows and tried playing with my local font settings, so I really don’t think it’s just me.

Ted Neward defends the principle of YAGNI (You Aren’t Gonna Need It):

But YAGNI isn’t something to cite to users, it’s a chant you murmur to yourself as you wipe out four layers of indirection against your database, because You Ain’t Gonna Need It.

This sort of thing makes me really wonder why we’re not packing our bags for Australia this very moment. Tim is a very lucky man.

Here’s one to think about – it even seems obivous in retrospect. Researchers have determined that our cities are built on the most fertile lands, which is impacting the climate since that land is critical in the overall cycle of the ecosystem. It appears that our yearly 1.8 percent gain in NPP (Net Primary Productivity – a measure of plant growth based on the rate of carbon absorption) is being offset by a 1.

So, the whole many-shades-of-gray thing was getting to be just a bit much. I also wanted a little bit more of a refined feel here, so I’ve done a bit of tweaking to the stylesheet. Also, I’ve added/modified a few things over in the sidebar. First, the archives are now all rolled up into a selectbox. You can select a month/year combination to view that particular archive. Also, I’ve added a feature that pulls in a list of recent links I’ve added to my link blog.

I’ve been thinking lately about how I really should maybe start posting more about the work and project related stuff that I’ve been doing, but it’s become clear to me that the small handful of people who actually read this site tend more towards the friends and family category, so in order to avoid boring the living bejezus out you, I’ve decided to just go ahead and start a second blog.