After reading my brother's article about bloglines, I was curious what web RSS readers were out there. I had tried Google's Reader, but I wasn't impressed with the interface. I did some searching and found Netvibes. At first, I thought it was just another site like My Yahoo, but it had a couple of features I really like.

If anyone has used "irb" (ruby interactive shell), this is the web version of that. The tutorial looks pretty cool as well.

My disappointment of the weekend was I didn't watch North Carolina vs Kentucky. On the other hand, I am excited that UNC won since this is (or was) a rebuilding year after losing most of their team from last year to the NBA.

Here are a couple of different projects I ran across this weekend:

• Password Generator
• Symfony

Password Generator is an interesting little javascript project that tries to solve the problem of having a single password for multiple websites. They use an MD5 hash of a master password and the domain name. I originally found it on Signal vs. Noise blog in the comments.

Symfony is an "open-source PHP5 web framework". After viewing the online tutorial, it looks pretty interesting - like Ruby on Rails for PHP. PHP is much more readily available than Ruby on Rails/Fastcgi so it might prove useful. They are also posting a set of 24 tutorials for each day between December 1 and Christmas.

Netvibes made the Best Web 2.0 Software of 2005. Too bad I didn't find it earlier in the year. It is a good "Start Page" for reading news and more.

Is Java's usage on the decline? From this article, it might be. Since so many larger companies have converted (or in the process of converting) their applications to Java, this would make sense. They tend to be behind the curve - some more than others.

This past weekend I went to Myrtle Beach for a scrapbooking weekend with my friends Eileen and Heidi. We had a great time and got a lot of scrappin' and a little shopping done.

In the past year, I was talking in a meeting and mentioned "refactoring" code is important. Most articles I have read cover why you should refactor or what you can do to make it feasible (automated unit testing, etc). In the meeting, someone asked what is refactoring. I was surprised since it has been such a hot topic in software development. The question came from a knowledgeable person, but their view was limited to developing and supporting a large ERP system. Unfortunately, this type of system doesn't lend itself to the concept of refactoring.