Checking my Bloglines list just now, I was pretty stunned to see that Sun are giving away most of their software.

This is a big deal. Sun are one of the major software firms in the world, and this will undoubtedly shake up Microsoft a lot. I don’t know much about the ins and outs of this, but someone as big a Sun giving away their software … well, it’s bound to raise the profile of free and open source software a lot. Which can only be a good thing, of course.

I wonder, is there a way to use an online thesaurus' web services to generate better mixes of keywords for search engines? Cheeky, but doable!

After a brief chat with a fellow developer earlier on today, I’ve been thinking about what this blog is doing to me. What I hope is that it’s giving me a place to air my thoughts about development, think through some of the deeper issues, and maybe giving you, my dear readers, so useful insight into what’s what on the web today.

Yet it could also be doing me damage. What if someone takes a dislike to something I’ve said? I have, after all, been quite disparaging about certain areas of web technology. I’ve also not held back from saying what I think is going to be the areas to watch – if I’m wrong, I’ll look a fool. Or, to be more exact, more of a fool than I do already. Well, I’m not in control of that, and any controversial things I may have said here are just my opinion. Take them or leave them.

So I’m not going to stop. For one thing it’s extremely useful to me to have to write up my thoughts. All too-often new ideas have occurred to me half-way through the composition of one of these entries. I also regularly look back over my archives to drag back to the forefront of my mind something I previously mentioned, and need to look into in more depth.

Plus I hope I’m doing you some good, as well. Writing this is certainly therapuetic for me. And thanks for your comments, both of you (you know who you are ;0), they are much appreciated.

So, as this Geek Times blog is a little over a year old, I thought I’d take stock. It’s been an … interesting year. Lot’s has happened, both technologically and in all the other areas of my life. But I’m happy with things as they are now, and the future indeed looks bright. Here’s to the next year!

The clever chaps at A List Apart have posted an article about Boom!, a microformat for printing books from HTML. It’s a great idea, and the power built into the CSS3 specification is quite simply stunning.

I wonder how many websites will be using this technique to turn their content into books? How about offering a downloadable, nicely-formatted, printable PDF of this entire blog, complete with index, page numbers and appendices? That wouldn’t take much to do, and could be a great addition to any blog system.

Further to my thoughts on reducing the number of options in a program, 37 Signals have brought my attention to this article on fastcompany.com. The article talks about Google and Philips, two large companies who have found that less is more.

The “More, more, more!” is a trap I fall into all too often. Perhaps it’s time to simplify.