Windows Live ID Team has published on the web the SDK that lets you liveID (or "passport")-enable your applications!

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb676633.aspx

There are even code samples in six different languages: C#, Java, PHP, Python, Ruby e Perl! You can download them from http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=91761

Wow! Having time, it would be cool to write a Wordpress plugin using Passport authentication to authenticate/identify users that want to comment… mumble mumble…..

Interoperability. Wow.

More info at the Live ID starting Page: http://dev.live.com/blogs/liveid/archive/2006/05/18/8.aspx

I am only figuring out *now* that Joel Spolsky has written (nearly a month ago!) this post.
It's funny because he mentions that Java might be the new Cobol ("[...]is java the new Cobol ?[...]").
Hey! I've already said this! It gets more and more common. Keep having this topic at hand, for example - do you remember those older posts ?

This assertion (Java being the new Cobol) comes out again and again. It must be true, then

Well, Joel in that same post also says he's been travelling quite a while.
Actually, I did as well. This might be the reason I am catching up with blogs now and I only ready his post a month after he's written it!
I have been around too, but not to conferences and pseudo-funny things: I went to customers in other cities either delivering workshops, or projects, and other stuff. It has been quite a lot of going around, anyway, since when this year has started.

I am starting to find some time to enjoy my family a bit more again now, finally, and relaxing a bit!

Oh, and I even turned THIRTY old, this past March.

It's a turning of a decade… sure, I am not *old* (ain't I ?) … but it sounds soooo weird.

All in all, in this case, I tend to partially agree on some points but slightly disagree on others with Joel.

In fact, while I do acknowledge the need of "hardcore" developers to fix and build lower level things and mantain current code (and know WHAT they are doing), there are also many cases where coding in a high level language which abstracts complexity IS actually more efficient and cost effective, not having to reinvent the wheel every time.
So there are a lot of useful and nice programs written by people who DO KNOW what happens under the hood (as good in C as in Assembler), that for simplicity and flexibility run in sandboxes, high level languages, even interpreted ones! An example is Dave Aitel's CANVAS, written in Python. But that's just an example.

But I do agree with En3pY that I don't like Java myself, and I consider it being too "heavy", in general.
Solution on my side, tough, is that you don't need C or assembler to get cleaner, smaller, more efficient code, you just need better languages. An example of this is a situation I have been involved in some time ago: in that case a colleague (that works with a very large customer who has a very large exchange deployment) needed to do some performance testing of this Exchange system. He had done the testing from some Windows IMAP clients, but the customer also wanted to see the same performance values measured from a Linux box accessing the same exchange via the very same IMAP protocol.
So I wrote a nice and sweet Ruby script - and at the same time another colleague developer a similar application (in Java).
Result: 45 kilobytes of .JAR to do the same things I did in 20 lines of Ruby (20 lines - including comments!).