It's Christmas now. Beagle 2 has just landed on Mars but as far as I know, no one's sure if it arrived intact. Apparently another mars probe will land shortly. Odd, I think. Perhaps a bit of a space race there?

I've been fiddling around with DotNet. I think that it's a really powerful, flexible environment. It's also very complicated. I wonder if M$ isn't fighting the last war. To me, one of the really cool things about Java was that you could create your applications as Applets that users could run directly from a web page without having to install any software.

As far as I can tell, DotNet has two modes--ASP.NET which translates backend applications into a Javascript-based UI which is then forwarded to the client browser, and EveryThingElse.NET which is traditional fat-client with some web additions like web services. There doesn't seem to be support for anything akin to an applet.

I still have a lot of delving to do so I could very well be wrong (and pleasantly surprised to be so!) about lack of support for applets. I think that Microsoft pushes developers toward activeX for applet development. Personally, I shun ActiveX as a massive security risk. How many innocent users have unwittingly installed the Gator spyware software via an ActiveX control?

I do really like the new VB.NET--it's a real language now, not the ugly kludge that was VB6--and I especially like the way that you can step into a C DLL. This is wonderful! It makes debugging DLLs so much easier.

I went to see Lord of the Rings - Return of the King last night. A good movie, though long. At the end of the movie, the group of teenagers in the seats behind me were complaining about how long the ending took. "This has got to be the longest ending ever!" they said.

My understanding is that the movie was filmed in New Zealand. If so, what a beautiful place! There's something about mountains that calls out to one's soul, I think. Or perhaps it was the celtic music...

LOR is heavy on heroism and this seems appropriate for these turbulent times. There are lots of scenes where a king of some sort or another is exhorting his men to "die for honor".

I found myself wondering if Tolkein had some sort of symbolism in mind when he wrote LOR. I know this has been examined and reexamined and the answer has always been "no". It occurred to me that Sauron has all the technology. In middle-earth, technology is represented by magic. Sauron has the all-seeing eye, he has the magic that can make orcs walk forth in the light of day. The race of men has the elves and gaandalf but they're outmatched on the technology front.

I also wondered--what would LOR be like if written from the point of view of an orc? How did Sauron exhort those men from the east with their huge war elephants to fight? What incentive did he offer?

Then, while driving to work today I found myself scanning the distant horizon for the fires of mount doom...

OK--I've figured out the problem with the page width...nothing at all to do with DreamWeaver. The problem was that the little java clocklets at the bottom were all being displayed on the same line. A line break after each one and suddenly my pages are back to their normal girth!

I've just updated the web site using DreamWeaver. I'm realizing how powerful DreamWeaver is, but I'm still a novice so there are problems, like the fact that some of the pages are different widths and heights...