IBM poop heads say LAMP users need to “grow up”
Nope. We call bullshit. After wasting years of our lives trying to implement physical three tier architectures that “scale” and failing miserably time after time, we’re going with something that actually works.

I can’t stop thinking, a funny/useful web comic by Scott McCloud. I’m motivated to get back to my online comic, except that I have too many open project HANDLES.

“There are a lot of people using Ajax,” says Mike Gilpin, an analyst at Forrester Research. While Ajax apps don’t have the interactivity of software written with Microsoft’s Windows technologies, Macromedia’s Flash player, or the open-source Eclipse tools for Java, Ajax doesn’t require developers to download a set of tools or media players from any one software vendor. That’s attractive to some savvy programmers, but makes Ajax programming labor intensive. “Not everyone can justify the amount of effort it takes to create that kind of user interface,” says Gilpin. “Not everyone is Google.” — Microsoft Plans Support For Ajax

Labor intensive? The most labor intensive aspect of Ajax is that IE is not compatible with standards ([foldoc: Xhtml], CSS2, DOM2, etc.). The fundamental mechanics of rich web applications are trivial, and are designed to make development easy. JSP, ASP, etc., are heavier approaches that don’t address the problems of rich applications, they instead focus on simplifying large-scale projects.

It’s obvious when Microsoft intends to crush something, they poke fun of it while rushing to add related features.

AjaxRequest.js … yet another handy Ajax bit.

George Orwell books and etexts. One of our century’s best writers.

Script.aculo.us
More amazing client-side JavaScript goodness.

Behaviour
A comprehensive, unobtrusive AJAX abstraction.

Why JSP Sucks So Hard
This is completely stupid. It’s as if your compiler tore up your source code every time you compiled, and you had to go back and reverse engineer your source again in order to change the binary. Stupid! JSP is only an effective solution when the JSP author is also the HTML author.

“As much as that hurts my eyes, I know that is an important capability for the Virtual Server technology for our customers … “
– Steve Ballmer

Moodss and Moomps
Moodss is a graphical monitoring application. It is modular so that the code accessing the monitored objects is completely separate from the application core. The core takes care of managing modules (loading and unloading), displaying modules data through sortable tables and diverse graphical viewers, handling user set threshold conditions with email alerts, recording and browsing data history from a database. It looks a bit like a next-generation spreadsheet tool, some interesting thinking here.