I welcome efforts by companies such as Microsoft and Sun to embrace openness.  Sun gets it.  They've released Java under the GPL license.  That's a significant contribution to my software freedom, and I will always appreciate Sun for doing so.  As a result, I know I can involve myself in Java as deeply as I need, and never fear my software freedoms can be taken.

I was in the market for a laptop, and if I am anything, it's a frugal gadget geek.  I'm always buying gadgets, but I'm cheap about it.  Buy.com had a deal on refurbished HP DV9627CL laptops for $700.  While that's not cheap, it's a pretty loaded laptop, with a 17 inch widescreen, dual core 64bit processor, 2 GB memory, 200 GB HDD, and so on.  This thing isn't super portable, but it's well equipped for a developer like me. 

The Asus Eee is good for many needs, but sometimes it's nice to have access to a full desktop machine from the convenience of your Eee.  Luckily, like most Linux desktops, Eee packs thousands of hidden utilities, including some that let you connect remotely to other computers.

Accessing a Windows desktop

When I decided to buy an Asus Eee I had a hard time finding one.  Amazon was sold out.  Buy.com was sold out.  Many of the smaller websites I found were also sold out, and claimed they would be in stock again on some future date.

For her birthday, I bought Leslee an Asus Eee (pronounced E).  I've had my eye out for an ultraportable laptop for her for a while.  So far, I'd only found very expensive ultraportables.  When this came out, and was available in the $350-400 range, I jumped at it.  For some, the fact that it runs Linux might be a deterrent, but definitely not for me.

Leslee's homework on her Asus Eee in Open Office

I've been trying various browsers over the past 6 weeks or so.  I've used Firefox for four years now, since it was named Phoenix, then later Firebird, then later Firefox.  I've enjoyed the run, but I was starting to desire a bit of a change.  Firefox doesn't look as good as the rest of my Gnome desktop, and trying to make

Over the past few weeks, I've been trying browser options beyond Firefox.  I've really enjoyed using the GTK-native browsers Epiphany and Galeon.  They are fast, both in loading and rendering pages.  But, the biggest issue I had is that 64 bit builds of these browsers can't use 32 bit plugins.  And Flash 9 is only available in its 32 bit version.  It's pretty hard to use the web these days without Flash, now that sites like Youtube have pushed Flash beyond advertisements and into the mainstream.

Update: I'm getting reports that this has been fixed in Java 1.6 (aka Java 6).  So, I tested this with the latest Java 1.6 32-bit in Ubuntu Edgy, and apps seem to be working fine under Beryl.  So, you may not need to go to all the trouble below.  The latest Java 1.6 for AMD64 on Ubuntu Edgy, however, still doesn't work for me under Beryl.

Currently, I have a simple copyright at the bottom of my website.  I want to replace that with something like a Creative Commons license. 

I love Java Web Start.  I think it does a very good job of solving many of the Java distribution issues.  It supports automatic updating of apps at the jar level, including dependencies.  It really makes life easy for the end user, and really is pretty easy to implement for the developer.

But, if you are running Ubuntu Linux for AMD64 like I am, it won't work out of the box with the 64 bit JVM.  For whatever reason, Sun hasn't ported it.  Not that I'm complaining.  Now that Sun freed Java, we all have no one to blame but ourselves.