Two of my biggest pet peeves were recently addressed. Microsoft announced that in Longhorn, it is dropping “My” from My Documents, My Computer, My Network Places, etc. Woohoo! I’ve always thought it sounded pretty lame. I used to rename these folders myself, starting in Windows 95, but eventually I gave up. The other one is …
Author Archives: Jimmy Lin
More about Borland
Today I went to a Borland presentation on its Java development tool, JBuilder 2005. I hadn’t played around with it for more than five years, so obviously what I saw tonight was dramatically different. It has some slick support for developing and refactoring J2EE programs. For example, if you rename a class via refactoring, JBuilder …
Opportunity escapes sand trap
After being stuck in the sand for almost 6 weeks, the NASA Mars rover Opportunity finally escaped. Kudos to the JPL engineers who got it out. It’s amazing that 14 months after NASA thought the rovers would be dead, they are both still going strong.
Borland switches JBuilder to Eclipse
In a move a lot less talked about than Mac to Intel, Borland announced that a future version of JBuilder will be based on Eclipse. This is good news both for Borland and Eclipse — Borland can focus its energies on building on JBuilder top of an IDE ecosystem, instead of trying to compete against …
Holymolyitstrue: Apple switches to Intel
Makes me wonder if I should buy a Mac in a few years. I could run Windows and Mac software full speed on the same box. (Writing the next version of Virtual PC for the Mac should become a lot easier…) It also makes me wonder who will buy a Mac for the next couple …
Speaking of Macs…
The two features I find most interesting about Mac OS X 10.4 (“Tiger”) are not the ones getting the biggest hoopla, Spotlight and Dashboard. I’m more intrigued by improvements aimed at programmers. Core Data helps the developer manage the data within an application. Core Data, along with Cocoa Bindings, promises to make it much easier …
Big week in information technology
It’s been a more eventful week in IT land than I expected. First, Microsoft announced yesterday that the next versions of Office for Windows and Mac OS X will use ZIP-compressed XML file formats as the default. Woohoo! No more brittle binary files. And they’re being smart enough to change the extensions so you can …
Why I think there is a housing bubble in Silicon Valley
Consider this: between 2000 and 2005, housing prices have gone up 46%, or 7.9% per year. But at the same time… The population has gone up only 4%. Rental prices have gone down 16%, or 3.5% per year. Nonfarm payroll employment has dropped 14%, from almost 900,000 to less than 780,000. The ratio of buying …
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The Meaning of Lah
I don’t remember how I came across this, but… Singaporean English, or “Singlish,” has various particles derived from Chinese that are sprinkled throughout conversation, like, “You see my husband’s not at home lah,” or “There’s something here for everyone lah.” Even many Singaporeans can’t explain when they use it, but Mr Brown makes a valiant …
Silicon Valley food
The Mercury News reviews corporate cafeterias across Silicon Valley. By the way, I’ll say from personal experience that IBM Almaden Research Center’s cafeteria is also quite good. (By the way, all opinions expressed in this blog do not necessarily reflect those of my employer, IBM.) Shortly after this article appeared, Charlie Ayers, Google’s head chef …