My pal Lak recently resumed blogging and pointed to this piece on the 1999 verdict in U.S.A. v Microsoft. Back then Microsoft was the behemoth that crushed Netscape and nearly crushed Java, in the process diverting Java from the Applet to the Enterprise (where it largely beat out Microsoft for many years, and retains a dominant role).

More recently Paul Graham wrote in his blog that Microsoft Is Dead, not literally but in the sense that the young hotbloods he grooms as entrepreneurs no longer fear Microsoft as a competitor.

I don't want to rewrite or copy these posts, so please go read them, and compare. How much has changed in so little time - Internet time, that is...

I'm neither an American nor a Conservative, but this article in American Conservative is must reading for anyone who wants to think about what's happening in Washington today.

I've written before about Groovy, the scripting language that extends Java into a first-class extensible scripting framework. Given that Ruby on Rails has attracted a lot of attention, it was only natural that somebody build a framework using the ideas from RoR in the context of Java.  Grails is that framework. Groovy and Grails have been gaining momentum - there are now two books on each - and it's built up to the point that the First International Grails eXchange is being held in London on May 31st-June 1st 2007.

More information about the conference is at http://www.grails-exchange.com. A few words from the blurb: "Packed with presentations on Grails, Groovy, Ajax & Web 2.0 and JEE and the core technologies that support the Grails technology stack such as JEE, Spring, Hibernate, SiteMesh, Dojo and Quartz.

"Come see speakers including Grails project lead Graeme Rocher, Groovy project lead Guillaume LaForge, creator of Spring Rod Johnson, Dojo's Alex Russel and Dylan Schieman as well as speakers from technology-leading organizations such as Google, Interface 21, JBoss, Oracle & Sun Microsystems."

P.S. You can read an interview with Grails' creator here.

For some time I've been using Nagios to monitor my own server and that of some clients. One of these machines has a batch of virtual web servers. Nagios' documentation doesn't say much about monitoring virtual hosts, and a web search only turned up people using extreme copy-and-paste to implement this (even a script to automate the redundancy), so I came up with a better way.

Read more...

O'Reilly Media has published my first e-book, Checking Java Programs with Open Source Tools! You can read a bit about it on my little site or you can go direct to the O'Reilly site (the book sells for less than US$10; how can you resist?).