I always enjoy a nice romantic story.
Monthly Archives: July 2001
Kylix Open Edition
Now this is the Borland I know and love! In a fiendishly clever move, they have released the Open Edition of Kylix for free. The catch is, everything you develop with it must be released to the general public under the terms of the Gnu Public License (GPL). And you have to release the source, and if you use someone else’s GPL’ed sources, the GPL license applies to the derivative work as well.
This ought to be a shot in the arm for Kylix, Borland, and Linux as well. And maybe a shot elsewhere for Microsoft? We can only hope.
Why is this a big deal? Because our high schools and community colleges turn out thousands upon thousands of proto-geeks every year. Due to Borland’s excellent educational purchase program, many of them have more experience with Pascal and its derivatives than any other language. And now here’s a way for them to move into the world of Linux and Open Source without spending a cent.
I am just tickled pink about this.
Internet Groceries
Adam Engst has a lengthy article in Tidbits on just where Webvan went wrong. He feels, as I do, that it was a viable service that was simply sunk by managerial arrogance and some spectacularly bad business decisions.
Avocados
My friend Mark wanted to know the growth processes of avocados. He asked too late for me to get a picture of the flowers (which are pretty unimpressive anyway) but here are a couple of baby avocados, with my fingers in the picture to show scale.
This tree is one of the many Fuerte variants. These should be ripe along about October or November. My other tree (a Hass variant) has just finished producing fruit, and if it survives, it should start flowering in September.
No Parking
What do you do when the place you park your bicycle says you can’t park it there anymore? Simple: you park other things there. Like teapots. A old door for your refrigerator. The HMS Invincible. You’re invited to make suggestions. What should I put on the Fence?
Goodbye, Webvan
Webvan, the only online grocery delivery service operating here in San Diego, has announced it will shut down and file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. This is bad news. I used one of their predecessor companies, homegrocer.com, quite a bit. Maybe a year or so back, homegrocer.com got gobbled up by Webvan. I didn’t use Webvan as much, because they were more expensive and more difficult to deal with, and they screwed up a delivery on me. That’s the kiss of death in any delivery-based business.
It turns out they couldn’t compete with the regular supermarkets. We have three huge supermarket chains in southern California, who are more that capable of putting anybody out of business. Looks like they’ve done it again. Goodbye, Webvan, you were an idea ahead of your time.