Something I’ve learned while struggling to change our Wild, Wild West development process at Objectware:

Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.

Happy seventeenth Birthday to Tiasha, my coolest and most favorite sister. Having just recently graduated high school from the Alabama School of Math and Science, she will be attending Emory University next fall. Her AIM is tiashabarik, so wish her the best.

I often keep track of particularly good commencement addresses because of their insight and motivational value. Steve Jobs, of Apple Computer, recently gave such a commencement address to Stanford University graduates. An important excerpt:

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

After running Red Hat Fedora Core 3 at work, I’ve grown quite fond of the Bluecurve theme by Garrett LeSage, and wanted it on my Debian system at home. While the engine is available for Debian under GTK2 Engines Wonderland, the full icon set and titlebar graphics are absent from the package. The solution is simple enough: grab the original redhat-artwork RPM package and convert to the Debian package management format with alien:

fakeroot alien redhat-artwork--0.122-10.i386.rpm
dpkg -i redhat-artwork_0.122-11_i386.deb

Easy as pie. Unfortunately, it looks like Red Hat FC4 will be using the Clearlooks theme by default, which is also quite pleasant. The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if this is due to LeSage’s decision to leave Red Hat.

Lori has the details.

I had a hunch that something like this was going to happen when early last month I stumbled upon this article, but now it’s official. At the Worldwide Developer Conference today, Steve Jobs announced that Apple will use Intel microprocessors beginning in 2006. MacNN has live coverage.

In JSTL 1.0, the following taglib URIs were utilitized in JSP pages:

http://java.sun.com/jstl/core

http://java.sun.com/jstl/xml

In JSTL 1.1 and above, instead use:

http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core

http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/xml

Traditionally, one could access the request object in JSP using the following:

<c_rt:if test='<%= request.getParameter("p") != null %>'>
   <%= request.getParameter("p") %>
</c_rt:if>

Now, one can simply use the Expression Language syntax instead, avoiding the use of ugly scriptlets:

<c:if test="${param.p != null}">
   <c:out value="${param.p}" />
</c:if>