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(Apologies for the headline to anyone who hasn’t watched Mel Brooks’ History of the World, Part I. It’s good to be the king.)

Microsoft MVPs are revolting. They’re petitioning for redress of sins against VB6. There aren’t tires burning in the streets of Redmond yet, but it’s clear that some very loyal MS developers are truly torqued.

I did a lot of development in VB 4, 5, and 6, once upon a time. A set of applications I wrote in VB once for a couple of customers earned me loads of software maintenance work that got me through some tough financial times. I can understand the source of frustration that VB programmers who have a big installed base feel now that the tool they’ve built their empires with is no longer being supported.

But.

The conversation going on over at my old friend Rich Levin’s blog shows that there’s definitely more than one side to the story. And, in all honesty, I can watch this argument with total neutrality because I’ve moved on to PHP, Python and other dev tools for my programming work. (By the way, VB’rs, PyCON is coming up soon…maybe you should go.) VB.NET is pretty powerful, and VB6 makes me feel all warm and fuzzy with nostalgia, but I like to deploy things on the Web on any platform, and Python and PHP just work. They work on the Mac, which is now my primary Unix desktop. And they work on Windows.

Speaking of Windows, VB’rs, I wonder what Jim Hugunin is up to these days. I know that he went to work for Microsoft on the CLR… looks like he’s giving the keynote at PyCON. I may have to figure out a way to get down to it despite the dicey logistics of my daily life these days.

I’ve been building a wiki of press contacts for the Linux industry, and I need your help to flesh it out, folks. If you have information about who to contact regarding Linux distros, Linux-related software and other projects, please register on the site and give me a hand.

I’m going to be collecting the same information for other technology areas as well; security and app dev are next on my list.

It looks like TheServerSide, the enterprise Java community, has been gobbled up by TechTarget in that company’s pre-bubble burn-rate buying spree. I don’t know if that’s necessarily a good thing for TheServerSide fans in the long term, but I am sure that somebody walked away with a pretty big check.

It looks like today’s a big Sun Microsystems news day, what with the announcement of the rollout of Solaris 10. But hold it–Solaris isn’t shipping until January? They’re not announcing open-source Solaris today? What the heck are they announcing that’s news?

They’re going to make Solaris for X86 free. I guess that’s the news.

And apparently, the best news is yet to come. Next month. Sometime. I think.

OK, somebody slipped me a rumor about Sun open-sourcing a port of Solaris to IBM’s Power architecture. Another person wagged, “Well, they can’t even get Intel right; how could they have a port to Power already?” And, unfortunately, the source of the original rumor has been known to pull things out of his nether regions every now and then, so it’s difficult to even entertain it seriously. Except, that is, to consider whether this is another piece of Schwartz leakage wrapped up for a gullible reporter to run with just to create FUD.

Slashdot is dark tonight — apparently, there’s some server upgrading going on that they, like, forgot to mention.

I’m tinkering with a project to pull down select RSS feeds and, when changes occur, send a summary of them as an instant message over AIM.

I started mulling over how to do this as I was strolling around San Francisco receiving AIM messages on my AT&T Wireless cellphone. There’s a service called JabRSS that provides this, but I’m looking to do something that I can wire to a desktop aggregator, or something I can do a quick config of from my desktop to push stuff to my AIM account .

I could do this in AppleScript, I suppose…but where’s the fun in that? It wouldn’t be cross-platform.

Jabber’s probably at least a good place to start…anybody have other suggestions?

Headed for JavaOne? There’ll be a Java blogger get-together on Monday at the Thirsty Bear–if they can fit all of us in.

A little bird tells me that BEA officially said today what Darryl Taft reported a week ago–that BEA will open-source the framework for its Weblogic Workshop, under the project name “Beehive.”

Workshop is BEA’s effort to Visual-Basic-ize J2EE development. I saw a demo of it during Adam Bosworth’s introduction of Workshop at BEA’s eWorld conference a year ago (the event where I picked up my nifty Scott Dietzen bobble-head). It uses meta-data, like the “properties” box for VB controls, to configure objects within the framework. I thought it was a good idea, but the implementation left a little to be desired.

That, plus the demo was based on “Minority Report” — a Department of Precrime interceptor-routing application. A little too irony-free for my taste, thanks.

Anyway, open-sourcing Workshop’s framework should at least help them pick up some steam in terms of others building Workshop-ready J2EE objects. Or, at least, it might. Maybe. Possibly. Can I shove any more qualifiers on the end of this paragraph?

Or, it could be a sign that BEA is having trouble getting adoption, is tired of spending money on Workshop, and is foisting it off on a volunteer workforce to maintain. But they’d never do something that cynical. Maybe.

Via MobileWhack, I learned of Amaretto, the Python-on-Symbian project. This is, well, way cool.

But what will it mean, really? A scripting language on a somewhat well-established bunch of phones…that have, like, zero penetration in the US, it seems, because of the stupid telcos. And it’s a beta program.

Now, a Python for BREW port could be interesting…