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First, Coca-Cola’s new brand of “pure” bottled water, Dasani, was revealed earlier this month to be tap water taken from the mains. Then it emerged that what the firm described as its “highly sophisticated purification process”, based on Nasa spacecraft technology, was in fact reverse osmosis used in many modest domestic water purification units.

If you need more prodding to turn you into a cynic when it comes to multi-national corporations… Ludicrous, really, isn’t it?

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As far as I have been able to tell, if you are tech-savvy in any way, Linux is better than Windows for a number of reasons:

  1. Linux just doesn’t die

Windows seems to slow up and either crash or just become un-usable after a few days, if you are doing much with it. Linux doesn’t. I’ve had my Gentoo system up for fifty days doing full time dev work and gaming without a noticable slowdown.

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Recently, there has been some discussion in the Gnome community about whether to stay with C/C++ as the main language used for Gnome, or to move to another language, specifically C# or Java.

Both of these languages are, in my opinion, far better than C for desktop application development. Their focus on higher level structures makes them more suited to the task of creating usable software, relieving the developer from low level string manipulation, to take an example that always causes me problems when I use C. I think C is an excellent language, just not when it comes to desktop development. I’d be much more prepared to dev on a desktop level using C# or Java than C. The extreme control you get with C for all aspects of you code just seems like overkill for a desktop application.

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As mentioned in the sidebar, we lost a couple of chat entries on switching to the new server. I guess this was due to the time it took the DNS change to propagate. Anyway, the most interesting post I saw was to Dean Edwards’ IE7 page.

This page presents a pretty good looking way of adding to IE’s CSS support by using DHTML behaviours to semi-rewrite CSS sent to IE into a form that IE can understand. It allows a developer to use some nice stuff that was previously only available for, ahem, decent browsers. It’s still in alpha right now. So it should be worth messing with, if not production use as yet.

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Right now I’m in a state of wondering as to quite where my interests lie. While I still read about and am interested in web standards, the push towards them and the inventive things that they allow you to do, writing about them is no longer the fire that it once was. I still find Linux and open-source in general interesting, but I’ve been so busy recently I haven’t really had the time to mess with my system and in the process learn some interesting snippet that’s lead me on to other interesting prospects.

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