November, 2005:

No, it’s not a let-down because it actually sucks. Instead, it’s a let down because I can’t tell you if it is actually any good. That’s because, as embarrassing as it is to admit, I actually woke up at 5:00AM this morning and drove to two WalMarts, two FredMeyers, one Target, one CompUSA, one CircuitCity, and one Best Buy. All of them had huge lines and had already handed out tickets, effectively selling the system out before it even came out.

While I can appreciate that Microsoft tried to do something different by launching world-wide at the same time, the insanely limited supplies are mind-boggling. Most stores that I called this morning indicated they didn’t expect any large additional shipments until after Christmas.

At this point, I may be resigned to just getting one when the PS3 comes out and the cost gets dropped. Probably for the best anyway… after all, I am starting up a new company.

Why on earth isn’t there a template language that produces valid XML and can deal with all the fun little scripting language features we’ve come to know and love? In short, why isn’t there a language that looks and acts like JSP and JSTL?

I’m close to starting a new project to tackle this. Getting the FreeMarker guys to support Maps with non-String keys is hard enough. Asking them to change the syntax so that it plays nice with IDEA could be even tougher

I looked at all the options listed here and none of them address this. Is this some crazy idea?

PS: To be fair to them, the FreeMarker developers, like the rest of us, only have 24 hours in a day and haven’t had as much time as they wish they could to focus on FreeMarker. So, anyone want to help them out?