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• You Should See the Other Guy
• HRC Thinks I'm Second-Class
• Natural Doesn't Mean Good
• I-64 Update
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David is an occasional blogger, software engineer, Nintendo fanboy, liberal, news magazine addict, voracious TiVo user, and bibliophile. He was born in St. Louis, grew up in southern Indiana, and returned to St. Louis to attend Washington University. He hasn't managed to escape yet. He's a fan of free wine tastings, too many tv shows to name, and eating out.

David makes his living developing web applications used internally by his employer. He doesn't blog about work because he's heard too many stories about that causing workplace troubles.

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• HTML applications are such a pain, but also heavily needed. The UCSC genome browser is a web application, and every time that I use it I want to build a standalone version. This is where Java GUIs could really fill a huge need, but Joel doesn't even mention them. I see three large obstacles for Java GUIs: 1) not like native interfaces, and that makes them more complicated and therefore worse than HTML interfaces (though Eclipse is getting there. 2) JVMs take prohibitively long to start up. 3) Commonly installed JVMs have a fixed size heap, resulting in ancient Mac OS like memory management issues (like Chris is fond of saying, users shouldn't have to guess how much memory their application is going to need). It's likely that none of these is insurmountable, but judging from past attempts, it's going to take a lot of work.
• That article was really interesting. I also prefer standalone applications to web apps (providing that the standalone apps are built well), and it's upsetting to hear that my Crazy Eights game won't work on Longhorn.