Congressman Rick Boucher (D, Va), also the head of the House subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet, says that he want the committee to draft an internet privacy law by the end of the year. Boucher specifically cites concerns that ISPs can track and record everything a user does online. Laws governing internet privacy all sound good on the surface, but it’s my opinion that we need to tread extremely lightly when it comes to any legislation that intends to regulate the internet.

It’s apparent to me that the explosive growth and innovation in websites, social networks, and online services can be attributed to the essential “lawlessness” of the net. Of course, the obvious downside of this is the spread of equally innovative viruses, worms, and malware. Much like the physical world, the broad freedom provided by the internet can be taken advantage of by those wishing to spread their ill will. That said, we need to think long and hard before we pass legislation that bans or restricts certain technologies simply because they can be leveraged for nefarious purposes.

Via Wired blog Epicenter.
Image courtesy Flikr user FredArmitage.

Anybody who has spent time developing enterprise systems likely has experience with both Oracle and Sun products. Oracle’s database applications are ubiquitous in the commercial sector, and Sun’s enterprise servers and numerous software products are almost synonymous with enterprise systems. What, then, does this merger mean for the industry?

Though I’ve only been immersed in the industry for a relatively short amount of time, almost every day on the job I’ve touched both Sun and Oracle products. Another product I use every day at work comes from a different called BEA Systems. Before you preemptively point your browser to bea.com, I’ll save you some clicks; bea.com no longer exists because Oracle recently acquired BEA Systems. My experience during Oracle’s acquisition of BEA has been rocky at best. As an application developer, I often seek support for issues that come up during development. After Oracle acquired BEA Systems, I would often find that support for BEA products started to become harder find. Even the BEA documentation that was preserved was strewn with broken links. Will the same happen for Sun products? I don’t think it will. I believe that Oracle understands the importance of preserving the massive community base that has grown up around Sun’s golden child: Java. The same can be said for Sun’s high-quality enterprise servers and its Solaris operating system.

That said, I do have one concern. Sun recently acquired what I presume to be the world’s most popular open source database application: MySQL. Will Oracle, with its competing database application, be willing to help MySQL to continue to evolve and prosper in the open source community? Time will tell, I suppose.

We wanted to give developers something that they could be ecstatic about, but we knew we would have to marry the simplicity of Google App Engine with the power and flexibility of the Java platform. We also wanted to leverage the App Engine infrastructure — and by extension Google’s infrastructure — as much as possible, without giving up compatibility with existing Java standards and tools.
~GAE Blog

When GAE initially premiered, it came with the condition that you had to use the one-and-only language supported: Python. While there’s nothing wrong with using Python for web apps, the GAE issue tracker almost immediately began to fill with requests for GAE to support other languages, with the most requests coming in for Java. I myself learned a bit of Python (which I think is an awesome language, by the way) just to I could tinker with GAE, and wound up writing a small Facebook application, but I yearned for the ability to utilize my 5+ years of Java experience. Now it looks like I’ll get my chance! The Google folks seem just as excited as the developer community.

In addition to providing support for standards like the Java Servlet API, Google will also be releasing an Eclipse plugin to complement GAE support for Java. I can’t wait to give it a try.

Via Google App Engine Blog. Image courtesy GAE Blog.

When I decided to create this website, I knew I wanted to use up-to-date design patterns and technologies. Initially, while WordPress was the obvious choice for a blogging platform, I was really at a loss as to what to do for the rest of the content I wanted to publish on the site. At first, I contemplated designing a website from scratch, like I’ve done in the past. Along with a from-scratch design, I was thinking of designing and developing and custom content management system (CMS) in PHP (you know, just for “fun”). After about a month of thinking about this but doing nothing, I decided that custom solutions weren’t realistic.

Next I started poking around the web for popular CMS frameworks. I found literally hundreds to choose from, but none of them seemed very mature (especially after being so impressed with WordPress’ interfaces). I was reading more and more about people using WordPress as a CMS in addition to a blogging platform, but I couldn’t seem to find a theme that was both professional-looking and suitable for my needs. That is, until I happened upon a theme called The Morning After created by Arun Kale. Kudos to Arun, because his theme had almost everything that I was looking for. Having this theme is what pushed me over the edge into decided to use WordPress as a CMS. Given the excellent layouts in this theme, along with the awesome extensibility of the WordPress framework, I think I’ll be extremely productive in publishing content efficiently and in an attractive matter.

With this in mind, I can’t think of a better title for my first post here on my brand new domain. I’m diving into using WordPress in a non-typical way (as a CMS), and hopefully this is only the first step on my way to productivity and professional development.