From Erik's Weblog : Z Failure via Tech Observer to Mozilla Firebird: Extensions. If you're using Mozilla FireBird, you'll want to grab around in this treasure chest!

techno weenie: Text Messaging brings down Hollywood. Oh no! The movie studios will have to deliver quality now, instead of marketing hype! How can they possibly survive? Bad Indians who put those mobile phones together!

Well, I guess the quote is pulled out of context, but still...

A nice regexp plugin for Eclipse. Seems like fun stuff if you're dealing with regular expressions in Java. Enjoy!

Ovidiu Predescu's Weblog: Power grid down because of virus?. Eh? America has put a single point of failure of it's main energy distribution in the hands of one privately owned company? O oh...

Reminds me of a quote in a documentary I zapped by this weekend: "In the 70-80s, the Japanese did pretty well. The 90s-2000s are for the Americans. And it is very well possible that the next couple of decades are for the Asians." Stories like this are very promising indeed. BTW, the quote was followed by a scene of an Indian-based customer center that was urging broke Americans to pay their (admittedly, still American) bills. Time to polish up on my Punjabi, I guess...

It was bound to happen. Sooner or later, some kiddie thinks it's funny destroy other people's environments. I'm actually quite astonished that it doesn't occur more with Wikis. Sorry to hear it has happened to the Roller Wiki.

For those who want to stay up-to-date on the evolution of Mozilla Firebird: The Burning Edge. A daily blog about the new features in Firebird's nightly build.

Via redemption in a blog via the same blogless websiteless person as yesterday (let's call him "nephilim").

Top Ten Toys for Java Coders in 9.0.5. Hmm, most of these are already a long time available in Eclipse. And Eclipse copied most of it from Idea. Thus, not much on that page that convinces me to give JDeveloper a whirl. Has anybody got better arguments?

Rodent Regatta: THE HP WAY Archives. Stories like this make you think twice about which new laptop you're going to buy. And about the feasability of outsourcing your business to a different timezone.

Thanks to a blogless and websiteless person. They still exist, it seems.

Apparently, Marc was right when he said this:

so since they are obviously NOT looking for the ANSWERS you are just being hit by the people from the 3rd paragraph: "the bosses that believe in this"

Just look here:

Great interview question. I'm going to ask something like this from now on.

Well, I can only hope I'm right too with

I can only hope that these bosses will then turn to thinking about their interviewing techniques.

Matt Raible wonders how you can migrate data from Access to MySQL. Matt, I've found this script quite useful and pretty straightforward in the past. IIRC, it needs some tweaking in the code itself, but nothing extraordinary. Let me know how it works out...

Remember this? Now Erik leads me here, which brought me to FreeTTS. I just listened to the "Talking clock" demo. Seems like it is play time :-)

Useful? Maybe not. Fun? Certainly! Just like playing around with charts and Forrest skins is fun: immediate result. I just love to tweak a parameter or a line of code, and see a line change from red to blue.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some text to hear.