The Jenkins fork essentially made this a non-event. Here at work we have been using Hudson on Ubuntu. After an apt-get upgrade, Hudson is now Jenkins on our system. The only pain point was the change from /var/lib/hudson to /var/lib/jenkins.

Oracle needs to learn that in the Java world, communities and personalities matter more than corporate branding. Most don't know Hudson as the CI project from Sun, they know it as the easy to use CI project created by Kohsuke Kawaguchi while working at Sun. Java itself was created by this guy named James Gosling. Guess what? Both left Sun/Oracle after Oracle took the reins. The battle over Hudson was about brand. Oracle was loosing the battle because they were loosing the people. That is where much of the brand equity lies.

As a rule of thumb:

• No more than six points per slide
• No more than six words per point

I respect Knuth for his stand that a man of such technical sophistication does not have to be at odds with faith. In fact, he wrote a pictorial Bible study:

http://www.amazon.com/3-16-Bible-Texts-Illuminated/dp/0895792524

Knuth as quoted from a reviewer:

"it's tragic that scientific advances have caused many people to imagine that they know it all, and that God is irrelevant or nonexistent. The fact is that everything we learn reveals more things that we do not understand... Reverence for God comes naturally if we are honest about how little we know."

Reminds me of the old days of IE4 with "channels"

Caps lock keys don't cause bad comments. Commenters do.

Google's attempt to influence users' commenting behavior by virtue of a hardware change just smells of "we know better" and will surely have unintended consequences. What about the areas of computer input where lack of contiguous capital letters is considered bad form? (e.g. static fields in java, some common SQL conventions).

I can see the exercise of choice by developers and users answering this in two ways:

1. Choosing to implement some kind of module into Chromium that will interpret something like a double shift click to be equivalent to a caps lock toggle
2. Choosing to use a different product with a caps lock key

The fact that you company is exploring to significantly different products makes me think you may have bigger issues than just closed versus open source. Plone is a CMS system build on Zope, Confluence is a Wiki. I would not prefer to use Plone to capture shared team knowledge any more than I would choose Confluence to serve up my corporate web portal.

If you are looking to develop a customizable CMS system that will be used by both internal and external people with workflow support then lean towards Plone. If you are looking for a good place to easily capture shared content for your team then lean towards Confluence.

P.S. I have not used Plone much but have been a very happy Confluence user for about 5 years.

I always thought using Emacs 23 to browse the web was at least 4 years ahead of its time.

You don't have to write in Java to run on Java. Languages like Clojure, Scala, and Groovy have come about an an answer to the complexity and verbosity of Java's syntax and structure - all running on the Java platform.

Java

// HelloWorld.java
class HelloWorld
{
public static void main(String args[])
{
System.out.println("Hello World!");
}
}

Groovy

//hello.groovy
println "hello, world"

Clojure

// hello.clj
(println "Hello World")

Google jumped the shark on this one

IPCC = Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

The climate has been changing for hundreds of thousands of years. But to me the name suggests there is some kind of unprecedented change to the climate that we are now tasked to study. Doesn't that prejudice the findings? What if (just a hypothesis) the data shows that the climate is not going through any kind of change that is out of line with historical patterns of change. The conclusion would be that the current dynamics of that climate to not represent a "macro" change in the climates behavior.

Why not name the panel the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Monitoring? Let the data suggest the conclusion, not the panel name.

You know you hate proxies when you are disappointed this article isn't about the best ways to defeat them.

A few tips about the code. Feel free to replace SVN with your SCM of choice.

1. Deployments should be a no-thinking zone. That means if the process requires any variation or creativity, it is bad. Lots of thinking is required to achieve this state.
2. Everything lives in SVN, including your deploy scripts. Keep as few as possible and setup directories for each projects with config files.
3. Developers work with SVN, period.
4. Tag and build once for dev. Package it and store it somewhere (tar.gz, war, etc). Treat that as your "binary" and store the tag in it. Name the file using the tag. Make the tag visible from the application itself. http://myhost/myapp/version works well. If using a date, use a format that sorts naturally (20091001, not 10-01-2009).
5. Never build that version again. From here on out, move the archive, do not rebuild.
6. As requested by your testing / dev teams, do the same for each environment. By the time you get to production you have done it at least 3 times. No surprises. You always know the version and can track it fully.

Don't take shortcuts. It just bites you in the end. Of course, this puts some burden on the dev teams. No environmental config in the project. There are many ways to accomplish this. In Java, we put properties files into the server's classpath. Figure out a similar mechanism for your platform.

Maybe they can right a mainframe batch job to automatically acknowledge all of those annoying Vista messages in one fell swoop.

Java is a massive object at rest in many IT departments. I just don't see these dynamic languages having enough force to unseat it. Make it budge, fill a niche, find adoption in progressive teams, be introduced on the "down low" on small projects... ok, but not a wholesale replacement.

Adoption of languages and frameworks is more about being "good-enough" at the right time. The longer a "good-enough" solution stays in place, the more compelling a better solution has to be to unseat it.