You may wonder what exactly happens to a site when Slashdot sends its legions of page requests to it. Well, The Metric System blog has an analysis of what happened on November 6th when they received 31,218 page views. You see the breakdown by site and you also see an increase in traffic by 89,094%. While this may by anecdotal, it's the first time I've seen hard numbers on the Slashdot/Digg effect.

One of my favorite series has released its third movie, "Bender's Game." Wired has an interview with some staff from Rough Draft Studios (The Simpson's Movie, Ren & Stimpy) that was entertaining. Get out and buy Futurama to support the show!

Obama was brutally attacked by MPAA lobbyists mere hours after his acceptance speech today. Who else is already pandering to the president elect?

From the mouth of John Cleese, it's official: Sarah Palin is funnier than Michael Palin!

I hate to sound like an Amazon fanboy ... what with their 1-click patent crap and all ... but if you've read my comments related to anti-DRM you know I love their MP3 service. It's completely DRM-less (unlike Apple's) and has quite the selection. Well, today I discovered that the yet to be released David Byrne & Brian Eno album has a free MP3 listed for download on Amazon.

This excites me as I hope to see all music distributors (labels, retailers, sites, etc) move towards a model similar to that of Afternoon Records site where the artists pick one or two songs from each album to be distributed for free. Although this doesn't satisfy the N'Syncs and Britney Spears of the music world (where one pop single should sell an entire album of 95% filler), it completely draws me into purchasing more and more music from artists that write their own music.

These selections still seem few and far between on Amazon (Brian Setzer, Ted Nugent & The Apples in Stereo are the only others I can find at the moment) but let's hope this spreads.

I can't tell if this is legit or not but Torvalds may be blogging. It's just inane enough that it might be him though it doesn't have the same feel as his posts that I've read at the KernelTrap.

For example, he seems to use _exclamation_ on kernel threads instead of exclamation like the blog has.

If you're a coder who uses .NET, I recently came across some new neat tools by ItJustWorks. The four tools are:

• IJW Profiler for .NET & Java
• Corfu Text Editor
• IJW Framework
• IL to Native Compiler

As someone who's just moved to Java myself... I suggest starting here: http://grails.org the Grails framework will get you started in Java based web development and you can learn more diving deeper into Java as you get more and more proficient. Grails is built on Spring which is a Java Enterprise platform but Grails saves you from having to learn all those "enterprisey" bits. Instead Grails picks defaults that are the most sensible for web development.

As you get better you can graduate to adding your own features to the framework or even beginning to use the more advanced Java frameworks outside Grails tying everything back together using Spring's IoC and Java JNDI. Or you can keep things light weight and web2.0 by using various remoting technologies inside Grails. It's a quick way to learn that doesn't put training wheels on you.

Get going in an afternoon... scale out using Java as your project grows.

There's a worthwhile This American Life episode about 419 scammers (Act I just past the intro).

Quite interesting (and I must admit it's a more than a little amusing). It begs the question: Do 419 scammer scammers take their anti-scamming too far?

A developer posted a brief blog outlining the libraries that Google Chrome uses. Since it's open source, you can see how many (and which) libraries they chose to use. Interesting stuff if you want to get an idea of what is needed to start an open source browser like Chrome. Another blog talks about the security implications of this.

Artists like the eloquent poet Kid Rock are taking a stand against iTunes as they continue to see album sales fall while their hit singles skyrocket in sales on the popular music distribution application. He will be joining Jay-Z in not putting his latest album up for sale on iTunes. I guess Kid's fans were either sending him a message he didn't want to hear or it's just not fair to give consumers a choice. Either way, the world will mourn the loss of Kid's music on iTunes. </sarcasm>

... looks like I'll be packing up my bags and leaving the Perl kingdom for the lands of Java. Forever this time. Not entirely from choice but from pragmatic concern over my career. All the cool vibe has rubbed off the Perl kingdom. Most of it dribbled onto the Rails zealots. I'm beginning to think the Django fans may have gotten some of it too. But, I'll be making money by day doing huge scale Java applications for medical, clinical, and biotech applications from now on.

My only hope is that the lands of Java will be invaded by the "cool vibe" again ... somehow ... I don't think there will be a Perl rebirth anymore. It seems more likely that there will be a turbulent season of integration efforts between a new incarnation of Java born from open source, some language redesign, and a smattering of Linux distributions. There is a very good shot at Groovy, JRuby, or Jython becoming the "new Java" on the Java platform. I also sense the inkling of a Red Hat, JBoss, Java, Jython integration story happening at Red Hat over the next few years.

For reasons that are just becoming apparent Groovy/Grails is not as popular in my region. There is no technical reason in fact if you are running in a Java environment you'd be myopic to not pickup Groovy... and you would be well served to at least build a demo app in Grails. This region however is a Python/Jython stronghold. I didn't know why, but, I just learned that a major Jython contributor is a member of my Jug. That explains a lot. I know RedHat is primarily a Python shop so Java to Jython in the region surrounding the Red Hat campus makes perfect sense. I suspect that Java running Jython code would be the main way Red Hatters will use Java going forward. They are big on Python. And so too are some parts of Google apparently...

I'm beginning to learn that political forces more than technical merit can shape the technological landscape. It's a sad thing to learn because we techies want to believe we're more like mathematicians and only proof and merit rule our decisions. It's not true. For example, Slashdot is among the last strongholds of the Perl kingdom. Outside these hallowed walls the PerlBe are under constant threat.

Each of the major technologies have their own little world they live in and very few technologists actually have a realistic view of the whole technical landscape. I've found that http://www.indeed.com/ is an invaluable tool for looking into the reality of what the tech landscape was. The fact is companies hire for the technologies that they were using three to five years ago. Most do not hire for what they will use or what they are going to use. The hiring managers simply don't know where tech is going tomorrow. If the job is on a job board it's probably a legacy application that's being supported and that means it's a few years old.

You start to bundle these technologies into sets. Perl and C go together better than Perl and Java for example. Python, Perl, C and C++ all roll together for example. So to me it looks like if you were after sheer job security you should learn C really well. In fact from this data C is the unassailable emperor of computing languages. And even though I'm packing my bags for Java land that's the truth of the tech landscape ... Java land is firmly in second place. It's shocking that the whole of the kingdoms of Pythonistas, Rubyists, and the PerlBe are all half of what the C++ers get.

Truth hurts. I'm going to have to go and play with some open source C again at some point. I figure if I can cross between Java and C I'll be a sight better off than someone trapped on either island. Both of these are pretty big islands now though.

I really do.

How robust is your religion? Have all the boundary cases been tested and thought out or does it have more holes and contradictions than the USSR's Penal System? Well, the Vatican is shoring up some questionable parts of Catholicism in regards to those pesky extraterrestrials that may or may not exist. In fact, some major theologians are speculating that each sentient creature would need its own Jesus Christ to save them from certain doom while others claim that it was a one shot deal for everybody. Still others speculate that there could be an alien race that never committed sin. Guess the movies have it wrong. A recent Vatican Newsletter proclaims: "The extraterrestrial is my brother."

Each kind of karma point would be aligned along it's own axis in N-Dimensional space. The resulting total karma score would be expressible as an N-dimensional manifold. You could then filter the resultant N-ary manifolds using your own total karma manifold. The results would be utterly transparent to you... instead as you accumulate karma points it informs the shape of your own manifold that is being projected onto the comment moderation system results.

In short you would experience the Slashdot that best fits your perceptions of reality.