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Let's talk about Java and internationalization. Java makes a pretty clear point about being platform independent and so it's only logical to also try to keep user interfaces language neutral. When you read the Java I18N trail however, it more or less only tells you to use ResourceBundleS, but keeps rather quiet about best practice. What you are essentially left alone with are the four most important questions:

• What's a good naming scheme for keys?
• How do you organize the property files?

This is utmost annoying: Swing MDI has been around for ages and nowhere there's a decent, ready to use window placement algorithm to be found. I mean, I understand that there's no one size fits all solution to this problem, but you should at least expect some example code somewhere. The JDesktopPane class is pretty much useless if you are just going to pop up your JInternalFrameS at 0,0 and then expect the user to arrange them. Yet, nothing, zip, zilch that would even give you an idea of writing a window positionier.

Do you know this kind of situation? You get an email - A bug report for one of your applications and it kinda reads like: "Help, your app is broken - please fix it". Now it's your job to help the user figure out which application is meant (assuming your portfolio contains several) and more importantly, which version of that application s/he is actually using. A task, that usually includes sending back and forth a number of extra emails, just to explain how to gather the required information.

I have been playing with the Boost module a bit today. Boost is a nifty caching module that can vastly increase your website's performance when most of your visitors are anonymous users. So, how does Boost work? Basically, whenever an anonymous user requests a page, that page is not only delivered to the user, but also stored in a file. When a second anonymous user requests the same page again (within a given time), the webserver does not even bother to boot Drupal, but will just deliver the cached file instead.

Do you know what's funny about the movie "Plan 9 from outer space"? It's so bad that you wouldn't want to pay money for it and therefore nobody would try to sell it to you anymore. Yet, you just have to see it. Good news is, the movie is, like many others of that era, in the public domain now. Bad news are that you need to download it and are likely to end up with something that will play fine on your PC, but not necessarily on a DVD player.