LinLog

Some quick links and commentary on news that's shown up in my RSS agregator this week.

Longhorn reloaded was shut down.
Apparently some people tried to take a copy of Windows Longhorn (the code-name for the beta releases of Vista) and publish an improved version of it. Naturally, Microsoft put the kibosh on that. The only news here is that some of them were actually surprised by that.

Dvorak says what I've been thinking.
Yeah, I'm sure the iPhone is great, but seriously, how many people are going to spend $600 on a freakin' cell phone? Unless you're rich, that's gadget-lust taken to an unhealthy extreme. Plus I'm getting really sick of it being the topic of every other link that gets posted to Digg.

Mono team does Silverlight in 21 days.
Well, sort of. From the sound of it, they have a working prototype rather than anything releasable. Quite an accomplishment, but it doesn't do as much to feed the self-congratulatory über-hacker mythology that programmers in general and the open-source community in particular like to cling to. But still, great job Miguel and company!

Westciv is running their free HTML and CSS courses again.
Right now they're on week 2 of CSS. I did these a few years back when I was first getting into web development and they're pretty good. If you want to learn web design, or if you're one of those backward incompetents who is still writing tag soup and freely mixing content with presentation, you should give it a try.

Mark Rasch on the legal implications of letting Google store your documents.
I've always been a little queasy about storing my personal stuff on somebody else's server. Apparently I'm not just paranoid.