So I’ve decided to learn driving. I don’t fancy the thought, it must be said. When it comes to where I stand on the issue of cars, I don’t think I approve of them. I saw a futuristic hydrogen powered car on [Top Gear](http://www.topgear.com) a few days back and I wish I could buy that right now. Unfortunately only the prototype is available and it cost 5 million to make. They say we should all be driving one in 10-20 years and I must say I can’t wait.

Being completely oblivious to the automotive industry and driving in general all my life (I blame public transport) I find the idea of me contributing to the global pollution rise quite shameful. Do I really need a car, I ask. Unfortunately I think I do. I’ve happily gotten by on public transport so far and my dad used to drive us around everywhere when we were younger but lately I’ve started to realize that having a car around would help immensely with the weekly shopping and getting around and going places in general. The prospect of waiting around for a bus (perhaps in very cold or wet weather) just puts me off the idea now. Well, no turning back now … I’ve already bit the bullet and signed up for my driving lessons …

For those of who you still aren’t familiar with podcasting, a good and simple primer is on the [BusinessWeek BlogSpotting](http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/blogspotting/archives/2005/05/a_little_about.html#more) site. My personal take on it is that podcasting is like **selective offline radio**. **Selective** in the sense that you, the listener, decides what to listen to and **offline** because you don’t have to listen to it live. You can download the shows to your favorite MP3 player and listen to them on the go. **Radio** because the experience of listening to a podcast compares favorably to listening to a radio show.

Of course, that just sounds like any other audio downloading you may have done in the past. The essential difference with podcasting is that it uses RSS so you can **subscribe** to a feed and are notified in your feed reader when the feed is updated. If you aggregator supports enclosures, it can automatically download the mp3 files for you. It’s quite cool when you get used to it and if you have a suitable mp3 player. I regularly listen to podcasts nowadays, and I really love the **[IT Conversations](http://itconversations.com)** podcasts. Listen to the [Dean Karnazes](http://itconversations.com/shows/detail506.html) podcast about the BadWater Ultramarathon. It’s definitely an eye-opener and very inspiring. Yes, it’s not about IT, but still interesting. Go to [PodcastAlley](www.podcastalley.com) if you want to find some interesting feeds to listen to.

Discovered Buzztracker through Slashdot today. What I really like about buzztracker is that it allows me to see at a glance what the most talked about news items are for today. What it’s really doing is mining Google News and creating links between the geographic locations of articles. It’s quite useful to check out the popular news for the day.

Here is a glimpse of what the map was like today:

* Baghdad (38%)
* Vatican (13%)
* Rome (05%)
* Boston (04%)
* Islamabad (04%)
* Cairo (04%)
* Khartoum (03%)
* Beijing (03%)
* Washington (02%)
* Delhi (02%)
* Kathmandu (02%)
* Mosul (02%)
* Pyongyang (02%)
* New Delhi (02%)
* Moscow (02%)
* Oslo (01%)
* Tokyo (01%)
* Chicago (01%)
* Beirut (01%)
* Jerusalem (01%)

Notice the list associated with this map which is quite useful as an adjunct to the map, showing you more clearly what the picture doesn’t. I will definitely use this from time to time to see what’s popular newswise *at the moment*. The great thing is they publish an RSS feed, which easily keeps you updated within your aggregator of choice.

I agree wholeheartedly with Inderjeet [here](http://weblogs.java.net/blog/inder/archive/2005/04/quest_for_a_sil.html) about quieter PCs. I have also rebuilt my old Athlon PC which I had lying around by doing the following:

* Replacing the case for a [special case](http://www.quietpc.com/uk/cases.php#acc6607) designed with noise reduction in mind.
* Replacing the processor heatsink with [this Zalman unit](http://www.quietpc.com/uk/p4cooling.php#7700)
* Replacing the case fans for [these Acousticase 120mm fans](http://www.quietpc.com/uk/casefans.php#acoustifan). They are bigger than the normal 80mm fans hence they don’t need to rotate as fast to move the same amount of air.
* Replacing the power supply for [this one from Qtechnology](http://www.quietpc.com/uk/psu.php#qtechnology)

I didn’t need to replace any graphics card fans as the machine had an older NVIDIA Geforce2 MX card which comes with a heatsink. I was only planning on using this machine as a medium power server so the graphics card didn’t matter to me.

After all this effort, I had a virtually quiet machine! Note that I said virtually quiet because there is still some residual noise but it is so low as to be imperceptible from about a meter away. It doesn’t bother me anymore and that means the exercise was a success
The first comment on that post says to get a Mac because they are quiet and I would like to point out that I recently sold my Power Mac G4 because it was **too** noisy. I know the newer Power Mac G5s are quieter but some people are still quite unhappy with them because they make strange chirping noises. I’m not making this up, I tried hard for a long time to buy another Mac but couldn’t justify the hassle of finding out whether it would be quiet enough for me. After a month, my G4 machine started making rattling noises. At that point I had never opened up the machine and so I had to peek inside and couldn’t figure out why it was doing it. I took it back to the repair shop and as expected they said there’s nothing wrong with it and I had to pay them for doing nothing! I brought it back home and it was rattling again. This is **not** quality. I somehow figured out that placing a stack of books underneath it reduced the noise.

There are definitely issues with Macs as far as noise is concerned. Russell has a [good rant](http://www.russellbeattie.com/notebook/1008309.html) on it. What is he supposed to do about it? Nobody is going to fix the noise issue because as far as Apple is concerned it’s normal noise. Check out [g4noise.com](http://www.g4noise.com) for more G4 related noise issues and a petition to Apple to replace the power supply in the older PowerMac G4s. The problem Russell describes about the fans increasing or decreasing their rotation speed and hence noise based on load drove me insane! Whenever I did something slightly heavy on my machine (like going to a certain page in a browser \***gasp**\*) the fans would ramp up. Then they would go down again. It drove me nuts.

Many times on forums people are literally *shouting* about the bad service they got from Apple. Just go to the ArsTechnica Mac Achaia forums to witness this yourself. Do you know what the final course of action is if nobody helps these people? Email Steve Jobs himself! These people have actually had their problems fixed this way too! I mean, I understand that may be a good thing but come on! You’re supposed to get top-notch support from these people if you call the regular support line!

To be honest, though, I really love the Mac operating system but I hope they sort out their hardware problems or at least ensure that **everybody** gets a quiet machine if it is advertised as one. I won’t be buying one until they do.

I need to start investigating alternative persistence frameworks whenever I get some free time. I’ve tried looking at Hibernate in the past but just couldn’t find the time to implement a small project properly in it and understand the benefits.

A great write-up about another alternative, iBATIS SQL Maps which seem to have found the sweet spot between full O/R and hand-written JDBC can be found here.

As others have found out entity beans can be overkill in situations and that’s basically why I’m looking for some persistence alternatives. I’ve got to buy this book on J2EE Without EJB as well at some point, I’m sure it’s a great book as I have another one by the same author.

On the Swing/AWT front, SWT seems to be emerging as a good alternative for cases where you need a simpler interface which doesn’t need to have all the customization benefits that Swing gives you. Some evidence of people who like this approach is here and here is Bruce Eckel’s take on what Gosling has to say about SWT. Basically Gosling prefers the flexibility of Swing and the complete emulation and hence customizability it gives you while Eckel and some Smalltalkers think Swing takes it too far and suggest that using the interface objects underlying the platform and wrapping them to give a Java interface is a much better idea and yields better, more lightweight and faster code.

I have to agree on the faster and lightweight issues, even though the only SWT app I use is Eclipse. I know Eclipse is huge but it feels a lot snappier than a pure Swing implementation of it would have been. It has *never* crashed on me and much simpler Swing apps have crashed for me in the past. It is also proof that SWT is indeed suitable for huge projects.