On Thursday July 13th, Japan's Ricoh Co. announced it will ship an optical component that reads both Blu-ray and HD DVD. This should prevent a repeat of the 1980's VHS versus Beta battle. Both HD DVD and Blu-ray delivers dazzling high-definition video and can store several times more than conventional DVDs.

Initially the component will only be capable of reading discs, although Ricoh intends to improve its laser to write in all formats.

MusicBrainz is a non-profit foundation developed to hold information for music heard around the world. This community driven effort is one that I applaud, it is my solid belief that it is foundations and businesses models after the empowerment of the individual will drive the true evolution of the internets' impact on society. It is also my opinion that this site will endure for generations to come!

Blinklist.com (beta)

"BlinkList is a social bookmarking service built on ajax. It is very buttoned up and has some excellent features. It also has an all-star team with deep experience." - TechCrunch 07/2005

Being an application developer, I pride myself on a deeper understanding that I have with web applications that I interact with daily. To a certain degree, I catch myself making assumptions about web apps and their implementation, overall due to the fact that I have witnessed major growth and advancement over the past decade. One point on which I expect from any decent sized membership based app, is that my password be encrypted. Simple MD5 will do, so long as it is not clear text.  When developing any membership system, encryption should be one of the first considerations.

Unfortunately, today I was saddened to find that a site I frequent BlinkList(beta), did not feel the need to encrypt my password:

Not only do they not encrypt a users password, they are displaying in a debug statement. Not my idea of a solid application.

They also still tag on "Beta" to their name, I know some development shops have some drawn out development lifecycles, but a year, and still in beta?

Another major flaw which is quite glaring, is the fact that they are calling in-line SQL query from inside of code, stored procedures are there for a reason, use them!

I'll have to admit, although LAMP based web apps have become quite popular in the last few years, there is nothing like building applications using OOP in a managed environment like Microsoft.NET or J2EE.