When
· Naughties
· · 2005
· · · December
· · · · 02 (3 entries)
FSS: Swirl · Friday Slide Scan #15 is a picture of, uh, well, I’m not sure what it is. The other night I scanned through the relatively small number of surviving slides that Dad had classified as “Art”, which we’ll be mining for the next two or three fridays. Reasonable people might disagree about whether this is “Art”, but it is kind of pretty ...
On the Naming of Roses · I have on several occasions linked to the UBC Botanical Garden Botany Photo of the Day (“In science, beauty. In beauty, science. Daily”), and while Lauren and I did help by encouraging them to launch, I would have done this anyway, just because it’s great. Yesterday’s entry, entitled Rosa ‘Harwanna’, is outstanding, both for the ethereal rose photo, not taken with a camera, and for its discussion of the intersection of intellectual property and flower names. Did you know that flowers can be patented? And further, trademarked? And further, that these practices damage our ability to talk about flowers? This entry touches me at an uncanny number of points: Alex Waterhouse-Hayward, the featured artist, took the best picture of me that anyone ever has, and the flower is named after Jacqueline du Pré!
On Beyond Java — the Web · Bruce Tate’s Beyond Java is really Web-centric; he argues forcefully that lightweight Web apps are one of the forces driving people towards things like Ruby on Rails and Seaside, as opposed, say, to Java EE. My observations are mostly consistent with Bruce’s, which as a Sun employee makes me think a lot about how we can haul the Java platform into the lightweight-web-app sweet spot. (So far I’ve failed to convince the Software organization to redirect most of the Java EE engineering resources into a radical pursuit of Convention over Configuration. [He’s kidding -Ed.]) But Bruce’s book had me all cranked up to write about the Right Way To Program The Web, and then synchronicity whacked me upside the head with a demo I saw today, and I’m bathing in Web-architectural angst ...
