I just needed to express how impressed I just found myself with how well the linux kernel was working this morning. I was on my AMD X2 3800 processor (dual core, about 2-3? years old) and was simultaneously listening to some tunes on rhythmbox, watching an XVid movie, and browsing the web while emerging ( compiling for those who don’t use Gentoo) on both cores without any noticeable slowdowns in any the realtime activities I was doing!

Piedock is a task bar and application launcher in shape of a pie menu of icons.PieDock feels a little bit like the famous OS X dock but in shape of a pie menu which appears directly around your mouse cursor.

CEO Jonathan Schwartz shows patience and eloquence in explaining how a company can make lots of money by giving away IP.

"I think I have a succinct way of describing the difference between Lisp and all the other languages out there. You can put it in one of two ways -- 1. In Lisp you program semantics, in all of the others you program syntax ..."

"Reporters Without Borders has launched the first Online Free Expression Day today. [...] To denounce government censorship of the Internet and to demand more online freedom, Reporters Without Borders is calling on Internet users to come and protest in online versions of nine countries that are Internet enemies during the 24 hours from 11 a.m. tomorrow, 12 March, to 11 a.m. on 13 March ..."

From the start Patrick has remained publicly silent on the topic of OOXML. No blog posts, no press, nothing. If you asked, he would say that this was his policy. Privately, you would get an earful (all negative), but as befits the unbiased chair of the committee which is responsible for the technical recommendation for the US NB, he kept his personal opinions out of the public arena.

I listened to a webcast from JBoss World today with a group of people. After hearing several speakers announce new middleware products and initiatives (as JBoss is the leading force in open source middleware), one of them turned to me and asked, “Just what is middleware?” When I started to describe transaction servers and database connection pool sharing, she held up a hand and said, “No. I want to know what it is in real world terms, and why it’s a big deal.”

Reports on the death of the Wal-Mart Linux PC are greatly exaggerated, according to the man selling its operating system.