According to this blog , some Chinese engineers claim, that they managed to reverse-engineer the protocol, used in Skype VoIP products. They are also said to be developing an example application implementing the protocol, which will be able to communicate with other Skype clients.

After almost a year of development, the long-awaited Linux version of Skype with proper sound support has been released . It definitely seems faster on my machine.

Firefox 1.5 is quite cool, but the forthcoming Firefox 2.0 should be even better. Built-in spellchecker and a few other user-visible features, and a lot of bug fixes and performance improvements.

If you want to try it without tampering with your current installation, try using Portable Firefox 2.0beta .

According to an article in FT, EU is actively discussing the issue of taxes on diapers. I especially liked the phase, that it has “exposed a rare split in the otherwise harmonious 25-strong executive body of the EU” - I think it’s rather ironic.

2020 update: this article was written well over a decade ago. Feel free to take a look at my recent thoughts on the subject of web development. Some might it also useful to read about my migration from Drupal to Django+Wagtail.

Abstract

C++ has always been considered a language for mission-critical server-side functionality. Web development, although in part server-side based, is done using different software development languages. I try to analyse what caused this situation. Possibility to provide a portable pure C++ web development framework is explored.

According to an article on BBC, the EU Commission plans to increase competition by introducing international telecom regulator and removing limitations, imposed on foreign companies by national legislation.

In general, it seems like a great idea, and goes in line with previous steps taken by the Commission in order to reduce roaming charges in EU. Hopefully, one day we will be able to travel around Europe [and the world?] and not even think about how much we must pay for calls.

I am quite surprised by the fact, that I have not received yet a single spam letter, despite the fact, that my e-mail account appears on every page and is not protected by any kind of fancy JavaScript. The only explanation I can think of is that my site is still too young and the spam crawlers simply haven’t discovered it yet. A lot of spam to come in the future, probably.

It looks like there is no Flash player ver. 8 for Linux. The only information, available on the Internet on this issue is a blog entry by some developer from Macromedia, who claimed in December last year that version 8.0 would be skipped and 8.5 released for all platforms. Nothing happened since then.

The problem with Flash 7 is that Google Analytics are not displayed properly with it - all the captions are missing.

Working in financial sector in the UK definitely requires a strong liver, since visiting a pub is one of the most popular forms of socializing. It is made only worse by the fact, that quite often the drinks are sponsored by the company. When beer is free it is much harder to say no. And on the other hand you need to watch your tongue, since your boss might be sitting next to you and you don’t want to be sacked next morning just because you were too drunk and said something that was never meant to be said.