Articles that were never written

I was doing some spring cleaning of my filesystem this morning and I came across an old list of "potential article topics" from seven years ago when I was writing for JavaWorld. Many of them I eventually blogged about over the years, but here's a few gems I never got around to polishing:

"why linux guis are doomed; gui standards from apple, microsoft, sun, etc."

Having worked closely with Linux this past year, I can sadly say this still holds true.

"20 things about Java you never knew (or cared) about: the short datatype, goto keyword, int.class, java.lang.Void, etc. (re: craig)"

Apparently this stemmed from a discussion with my old friend and former colleague Craig.

"the big picture"

That's all I wrote. Apparently at the time I had "the big picture" but not enough time to write about it. Over the years I lost it.

"asp servlet follow-up (registry classpath, com object)"

Perhaps my proudest achievement as a bright-eyed ambitious young programmer was a bridge that let you run Java Servlets in IIS; no third-party engine required. I wrote about it in JavaWorld and the article was republished on IBM's developerWorks site (but was eventually deprecated, hence no link). Apparently I had a few follow-up topics worth discussing.

"array reordering trick"

I have no idea what the trick was; should have been a tad more detailed in my note.

"ejb abstraction layer (entity beans)"

This was referring to an abstraction layer I'd developed at my first dot-com for the original EJB spec in the late 90's. It's all long moot now.

I'm going to leave the list alone. Perhaps it will be twice as amusing when I read it again in another seven years... and by then I'll have forgotten about this blog post and I'll probably wax nostalgic all over again.