Life As It Comes

Thanks to a plugin from tantannoodles, I have my Flickr photos integrated with my website now. Check them out!

In and out of my mind for years has been the memory of a short-story, one that I read when I was much younger. It was in the days of “readers,” big text-books with selected works for students to read. The memory of this story haunted me for some time, and I could never figure out what it was called or how to find it again.

Until today:

“Dark They Were, And Golden-Eyed” by Ray Bradbury

Check out CNN’s “America’s Favorite Cities” article.

Dan Haseltine on Jars of Clay’s new album “Good Monsters”:

“I was not sure how all of the experiences of the last few years would translate into music. There have been so many things to look at and describe. This record is part confessional, part euphoric love poem, part bitter divorce, and part benediction. It was born out of many experiences and conversations between addicts, failures, lovers, loners, believers, and beggars. And so the language of recovery and the honest discourse about our attempts to live apart from God and apart from each other is a theme. Engaging people who are doing the hard work of laying their lives open to others, and avoiding isolation, has allowed me to see that there is both immeasurable evil and unfathomable good mixing under my own skin and it is grace, mercy and freedom that allow me to not simply be a monster, but to be a good monster.”

I have not yet heard it, but I’m anxious to check it out.

Big news in the open Java community. Apache Harmony has requested in an open letter that Sun allow it to use the JCK freely.

I’m not sure what Sun will do here. If it does change the license to allow this, does that mean IBM will stop having to pay for it? It seems unlikely Sun will change the commercial license.

The JCK allows 3rd party Java/JVM distributors to test for compliance and claim compatibility with Sun Java. If you cannot pass the JCK, you cannot claim to be a true Java implementation.