I'm finally on the road back to Alaska. I don't plan to write any more about this trip on this website, but if you're interested, you can follow my travel adventures on my website about life in Alaska, OneMansAlaska.com.

All the Toyota recalls in the news lately remind me of the problem I've had with a noise in the steering column of my 2006 Toyota RAV4, which leads me to wonder, Hey Toyota, where's my recall?

I was talking with a friend the other day about what bad software code ("smelly code") looks like, but I found it very frustrating. I ran into that a lot in my consulting career; it's hard to describe to a non-technical Project Sponsor or Project Manager why their existing code er ... isn't in great shape.

After that discussion, my friend -- who is an engineer and former electrician -- forwarded the following pictures to me, and asked if this is what smelly code looks like. I could only laugh and say yes, that is exactly what it looks like.

As I've been packing these last few days, I've been thinking about something, and I'm just going to put it out here, and see where it goes ...

If anyone is interested in writing for the devdaily.com website, please let me know by using the "contact" link at the top of this web page. I've thought about this (again) because I won't have much time for writing as I begin the cross-country drive, but I think I will have enough time to review articles from other authors every night.

I just wanted to put a quick note out here today to let you know that I'll be moving to Alaska over the course of the next few weeks. Because of this I won't be posting nearly as many new tutorials here during that time, but hopefully the current collection of nearly 2,000 Java, Perl, Ruby, PHP, Mac OS X and Linux tutorials will keep everyone busy for a while, lol.

I just read nearly a dozen reports on the Kneber BotNet, and none of the reports mention it, but this BotNet only affects Microsoft Windows computer systems. According to the actual NetWitness report, the top five Windows systems affected are variants of Windows XP (Home and Professional, SP 2 and 3), and Vista Home (SP 0, 1, and 2).

I've been thinking about rewriting my old article on how to execute system processes from a Java application for a while now (Running system commands from Java applications), but it's a topic that quickly becomes complicated if you want to do it right, so I kept postponing it until I could give it some quality time in a real-world project.

I've finally had an opportunity to test this in a real-world Java application on a current project, so while I'm still not finished with this, I thought I'd share what I've learned so far.

Google released a new beta version of the Google Chrome browser for Mac OS X late last week. To see if you have this new release as an automatic update, look on the Chrome About dialog, and this new release is labeled "5.0.307.7 beta".

The new Google Chrome for Mac OS X browser contains the following new features:

Here's a link to a great story that shows where Microsoft's profit comes from. Remember when looking at that chart that it shows profit, not revenue.

That's one thing that makes the chart so good; it shows that after everything Microsoft has tried over the years, all of their profit comes from Office, Windows, and Server and Tools sales. (It doesn't matter where revenue comes from, especially if your costs exceed your revenue, as in the case of Microsoft's online services.)

To help supplement my income, I've been thinking about creating some Java-based shareware applications. As I started thinking about software to time-out my application after 10 or 15 days, and requiring a license to use the software after that initial trial period, I've started down the rabbit hole of Java software license managers.