Had a great day today. Fixed a major networking-related issue at work which prevented us from accessing some site. I was really pleased I finally fixed that. I’ve also been using Netbeans for some time now and the latest 3.6 is quite good for interface design. I’m using the Mac version and the one thing I really like about it is the ability to instantly preview the interface A lot of other interface designers have been doing this for ages (e.g QT Designer) and it’s about time I saw this in Java

I also spent some time yesterday downgrading my firewall from Debian unstable to stable Despite all the stuff you’ll find after googling about ‘Downgrading is NOT supported!’ I found that its actually not that difficult at all. The best discussion of this I found that helped is here

A lot of discussion these days about A9, Amazon’s new search engine. It allows you to do a web search, book search and look at your search history from what I’ve seen so far. You do need to log in first though. A lot of people are worried about the privacy implications of this, as this allows Amazon to build a pretty accurate picture of what people are searching for and buying. I suppose in the end this is good for the consumer, but still worrying for some people.

Similar privacy concerns have surfaced around Google’s new Gmail webmail system. I simply cannot see why anyone would want to store a Gig of their mail somewhere! I subscribe to many mailing-lists and do have some folders that are megabytes in size, but a gig is just too much, and what if the system is compromised somehow? That’s a lot of my personal life in someone else’s hands. More from jeremy on the issue here