If anyone else is interested, Apple released an update to their Power Mac G5 line today - introducing a dual 2.5 GHz G5 machine that boast serious performance. Performance increases of 78% over a dual 3.2 GHz Xeon machine for example in one of the Adobe Photoshop tests. They have 1.25 GHz front side buses on these new models and the part that some of you will enjoy - they are liquid cooled for an even quieter experience.

Also of more interest to you hold outs - the Airport Express was released that lets you easily set up a wireless base station with a usb print server and wireless music. It includes AirTunes which will allow iTunes users to stream their music to a stereo or powered speakers which can plug right into the base station. The station itself can also act as a repeater or access point for an existing network and supports the full wireless functionality of the Airport Extreme Base station - including WEP, WPA and other settings. And you PC users will be happy to know that it will work with any 802.11g wireless cards/adapters/networks.

All of this comes a couple weeks before the WWDC - which is very unusual for Apple, they usually wait to unveil new products... my hope is that this is just the small peak of the mountain that is to come on June 28.

I have been seeing more and more sloppy programming everyday and it is starting to get to me. I guess this is one of those software engineering traits coming out in me. I would like to think that quality control is on the top of people's minds, but at the same time I can see how it might slip through the cracks. Obviously left to their own devices, programmers are most interested in getting the job done and not in learning and doing it properly. Obviously web programming is what I refer to with most of my comments as that is what I am most familiar with. You can be an excellent programmer but that won't necessarily make you a good web developer. And knowing php or asp really well doesn't make you one either. Experience and a little bit of common sense go a long way. You can't just start with experience I realize, but it shouldn't take you very long. This rant could go off in a lot of different directions and I don't think that I really want to do that. I'm liable to offend a few people. I think that at some point in the next couple weeks I will write up an article on how to properly plan and develop small applications for the web. I think that many people will learn a fair bit from it, I'm sure that I will. Until then remember - when you pull something out of a database and you know/desire that there will only be one record, use an if () statement, not a while () loop!