So, now it finally occurs to me. Google isn’t really interested giving people free email. Google wants to be able to definitively answer the eternal question: how many hops does it take to get to Kevin Bacon? By making Gmail invite-only, and being that Google keeps information about who invited whom, and further given that Google has the worlds most powerful search tools, can there be any other conclusion than that Google wants to play a giant game of Six Degrees? If everybody in the world ends up getting a Gmail acccount, then they’ll know, won’t they? And with information like that at their fingertips, who will be able to stop them?

Mwuu-ha-ha-ha.

Fed up, finally, with the various OS CMS systems around, we moved the Relevance website to a custom Rails base. We’re still using WordPress for the blog portion, but everything else is a homegrown amalgam. In the process, I’ve discovered something about myself. I can add a feature to this version faster than I can look for, download, install and figure out plug-ins for the canned systems. That isn’t to say that the canned versions are bad or that I’m some kind of wunderkind, but that, for me, it is easier to think in code than in admin.

I was speaking at the Raleigh/Durham No Fluff show this weekend, and one of the attendees caught me in the hallway to ask a question. At this show, I wasn’t even presenting on Spring; my talks were on SOA, Security Web Services and Hibernate. However, this attendee presented to me his problem: his company is dealing with a longstanding WebSphere project. One of his colleagues has been introducing Spring slowly into the group. Another told the assembled team that Spring was just an open-source J2EE wannabe, and it was silly to use it since they already had WebSphere. He wanted to know what I thought.

I told him that his colleague who was introducing Spring quietly to the group had it right. I also told him that his other colleague was a blowhard who hadn’t read TFM. Rod n Co. created Spring in the first place to make J2EE easier to configure, more flexible and more fun to use. They will be the first to admit that they were trying to eliminate EJB from their toolkit, but we all know that EJB != J2EE. His colleague apparently went on to say that the overhead of the Spring framework on top of WebSphere was too burdensome to the project. Now, I haven’t looked at the current footprint of WebSphere, but I’m willing to guess that the 90K Spring adds isn’t damaging the overall image or resource usage.

So I’d like to remind everybody that Spring, while a perfectly capable "lightweight container" all on its own, shines in an environment that has been struggling to corral the goodness of J2EE through the sometimes labyrinthine configuration and management strategies of the container vendors. Spring is the outcome of several very smart people’s struggles to do just that; if you can use Spring all on its own, then ballyhoo for you. But Spring seems to be being adopted most often by teams with existing "enterprise" apps with standing investments in Big Container X.

Apple’s announcement that it is moving its processors to Intel "by 2007" is big news, and great news for me. I’m well aware of the backlash potential such a decision can have; I watched the webcast of the keynote address at WWDC and could hear the smattering of boos and hisses. Luckily, sanity prevailed and the greater part of the crowd was warm, even enthusiastic, about the announcement. I understand the psychological barrier to accepting such a switch when Appleistas spend so much time cultivating the War of the Different, but this just makes so much sense you have to look past that.

There’s a lot to like here. The best thing, and I have to hand it to Apple, is they don’t announce things before they are ready. Specifically, Jobs had everything lined up for this. Tiger already runs on Intel; the dev kits and even the developer boxes (looks like a 3.6ghz P4) are ready to ship. The price isn’t bad. XCode 2.1 is already out. Rosetta (the dynamic translation/virtual machine for PowerPC apps to run on Intel) is already out. There is no waiting around for Apple to get with the program (unlike their Java support). And that just means that this will all be less painful for everyone. The best part of the keynote was Theo Gray’s presentation on Mathematica5 and the fact that they just ported it three days before the show, in under 2 hours. Good stuff.

As for me, I love my Mac. I want nothing more than to ensconce myself in the luxuriousness of OSX. Unfortunately for me, I do most of my work on a laptop. My PowerBook G4 is well-built. Its display is luscious. The backlit keyboard is a great touch for dark flights. Everything about it and the OS screams "I am built for you; love me!" Except for one little thing: using the laptop as a laptop always reminds me of one of my favorite bands, Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts. And stuck on the G4 for a while now, development work is getting S-L-O-W-E-R all the time. I need more speed and less heat. It looks like the PowerPC isn’t going to get me there. If I can get an Intel-based PowerBook in 2006 that doubles the speed and halves the heat, I’ll be about the happiest guy on the block.