It's about that time of the year. As an intern I missed the last one so I'm interested in seeing what actually happens at one of these Borg shindigs. I have a friend who was about to quit last year who was so impressed by the last one that he decided to stay with the company. I guess that's why Business Week called it part religious revival and part business report.

I'm particularly interested in seeing stuff like akin to the antics on the the CEO of the Dance page. I was chatting with some co-workers over lunch about the fallout from the videos on the Internet and they both remarked about how cool it was that our CEO is that into the company.

Poll: Was Ellen Feiss high?

On Monday Slashdot had a story entitled Did MS Lobbying Stop NSA Work On SELinux which implied that MSFT basically told the NSA what to do and how to spend their software development efforts. As usual with Slashdot reading the linked article tells a different story. Basically the article mentions that an anti-Open Source report was written by Alexis de Tocqueville Institution a while ago and that some [aka a Slashdot article] believed it was Microsoft funded.

The kicker was a slashdot post by Reid Wightman who works with the NSA software folks and claimed it was a GPL misunderstanding. Of course, the slashbots followed up to claim that the GPL is so easy to understand that this isn't the case. Funny enough, I used to think this too until I took the GPL license quiz on the GNU website and got 6 out of 9 questions right.

Poll: What was your score on the GPL Licence Quiz?

This past weekend marked my 6 month anniversary working in the Belly of the Beast. People typically bring M & M's (or other candy) to share with their co-workers on their work anniversary. Typically one pound of M & M's per year they've been here. I had planned to buck the trend by bringing half a pound of M & M's to work to mark my six month anniversary but never got around to finding a candy store. :)

My mom just called and reminded me that today marks exactly five years since I came to the US to start my [college] life over.

Poll: Favorite Standards Body

I've just spent a frustrating bunch of hours fighting with Tomcat trying to figure out how to get a simple servlet that talks to Xindice and is available as a servlet to work.

Tomcat has now wrested the title of most painful piece of software to work with away from Oracle's 8i database. I am now taking suggestions for a free [as in beer], Java application server I can use for a personal project.

Poll: Favorite Java Application Server?

Saw another " Tech industry sucks, I hate it all" article on Slashdot which makes me more and more thankful that I actually like practically everything about my job. I still can't help feeling that most people who bitch are those who saw the Tech industry as a way to cheddar and bling bling instead of as a profession where they did it for the love. So I completely agree with these sentiments I see my job as being paid for stuff I either used to do for free or had to pay Georgia Tech umpteen thousand dollars a year to get to do.

Thoughts on XHTML 2.0, the Fear dot com movie, Afghanistan War Syndrome, and working for the devil below.

Poll: Best HTML version

Read it and weep, suckas