Blogging Roller

Russell said some pretty nice things about Dot-Net in his most recent anti-Microsoft rant, take a look:

• I've got some old coworkers and blog pals who are doing some really cool stuff with Dot-Net
• Many of the dumb ass things in Java have been fixed [by Dot-Net]
• [Dot-Net] means that you can program in any "language" that you want
• [Dot-Net Studio] is still the best IDE there is
• [Dot-Net's] WindowsForms kicks Swing's ass
• In as little as 4 or 5 years, Java could be a niche language like COBOL
• [The Dot-Net] CLR is going to be faster on M$OSes than the JVM

This sounds like a pretty bad situation for us Java advocates. Versions of our favorite open source Java tools are being ported to C#. The GNOME folks are working feverishly to port C# and the CLR to UNIX. To top it all, the chairman of our revered Jakarta Project is a <a href= "http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2002/Oct/08#x892">Dot-Net blogger.

My thoughts on this? Nobody knows who what technologies will win out in the short term or in the long term so my advice to you is: hedge your bets.

After reviewing the video of the Triangle JUG's J2EE Container Shootout, Andy Oliver has posted his summary. <a href= "http://www.superlinksoftware.com/cgi-bin/jugwiki.pl?OutSummary">Andy's summary of the shootout is much more detailed than the one I posted last month. He has written up five of the questions so far and promises to get to the rest soon.

Like <a href= "http://www.dominicdasilva.com/index.do?date=20021026#130147">Dominic, I have no idea what "Greenbaum" means. So Rickard, please dumb-down your sniper conspiracy theory a little so that us under-educated Americans can understand it.

Roller 0.9.6's referer tracker already ignored hits from pages in the same weblog, now <a href= "http://brainopolis.dnsalias.com/roller/page/lance/">Lance has added an ignoreHosts option so that a Roller admin can configure Roller to ignore hits from different hosts. That is cool, but I want a little mre control over what should be ignored. For example, I got hits today from file://<some file path>/penis.htm today. Ouch!

I think the Roller referer tracker needs a both ignoreStartsWith and ignoreContaining parameters (each being a list). You could use ignoreStartsWith to ignore hits from your own host, other hosts, and from protocols such as file: or mailto:. You could use ignoreContaining to ignore hits coming in from URLs containing certain keywords.

Searching on ignoring referers I found an interesting post from Mark Pilgrim about <a href= "http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/03/04.html#full_disclosure">an old Manila bug and the importance of properly escaping HTML displayed from referers. I think I need to address this issue in both the Roller Editor UI and macros.showReferers().