With the server move done, I had some to time to check out what could be the next big thing on the Web, or the Pointcast of 2005: Podcasting. The first thing I listened to was an interview with Adam Curry, a good introduction to podcasting itself and the rationale behind it. Not to mention Adam's stories about mtv.com and his former business partners, who either turned out to be on Scotland Yard's wanted list, or who ran off to Columbia.

Even more entertaining was Steve Wozniak's Gnomedex presentation, where he talks about his high school pranks, Captain Crunch and the founding of Apple.

Paul Graham's OSCON presentation was not much more than a reading of his (excellent) essays, but the interview is worth the download. One thing he says is that programming languages which people wrote to use themselves, like C, are superior to Frankenstein languages designed in a lab, like Java. I'm not sure if this is true for languages, but it certainly is for application frameworks. David Hansson mentions it in his two-hour video about Ruby on Rails, when he compares the current J2EE frameworks with Rails. And I learned it the hard way when we ported Siemens ShareNet to OpenACS in 2001. Since then, OpenACS has matured, but people still stick to four-year old lab-designed stuff which we gladly threw overboard while making ShareNet work.