Friday, January 18, 2002

Recent surveys find financial institutions bullish on XML (Lighthouse Partners) - I think this is kind of interesting.  The two main points are that IT Departments are driving the spending on XML  and that the projects mostly focus on internal functionality (and not, say, on interacting with external partners).   [via IBM DeveloperWorks: XML News]  7:36:17 PM

XRefactory - This looks like a *very* useful tool for developing Java in Emacs. 6:15:14 PM

xmlrpc.el - An XML-RPC client in Emacs lisp - at first I thought this was silly. But, now I think the folks at Userland are on to something... the real win for web services is being able to invoke them from your desktop in a scripting environment fo your choice. Now, we just need a SOAP impl. 5:44:15 PM

Business Week: The Power of Smart Design [via Tomalak's Realm] An article on Dennis Boyle and Ideo (where he's senior designer).  He makes the excellent point that people want simple products that do a few things really well.   A lesson completely lost in the enterprise software market. 10:34:04 AM

All these years, I thought I was the only Pete Dapkus in the US.  Turns out, there's one in Missouri.   Even more shocking, he turns up on Google before me.   Even stranger -- my name appears with a past co-workers in a syllabus for a class on Materials and Structures.   I'm relatively certain that we had nothing to do with that class.   Someone must have re-used a word document and left the hidden revisions in.  Weird. 8:17:58 AM

Al Qaeda uses Weak Encrytion - somebody on /. used this article to call for strengthening encryption export restrictions.   The cat is out of the bag - if these people had knowm what they were doing, they could have easily used strong encryption.  I guess, on the other hand, keeping it out of products like Win2k at least meant they didn't get strong encryption unless they knew what they were going. 7:58:09 AM

Ah!  I see.    Developing in Radio Userland is like developing in Frontier.  So, if you want documentation, look at the Frontier documentation.  I must have missed that.  Dave Winer pushed the following links -- the full text of the O'Reilly Frontier Book (wonder if that's a play on "Front Tier"?) and a collection of articles that cover things added after the book was out. 7:45:43 AM

On the Goodness of Emacs - The act of programming is mostly  generating and moving strings in very intricate and precise ways.   Emacs is exceptionally good at this.   Not only is good at it, it's good at exposing it's capabilities that are customizable and configurable to solve any problem and suit any persons needs.    Emacs lets you forget that you're moving strings around and focus on programming. In my experience, IDEs have been a little dismissive of string moving -- they cover the basics.  Instead they focus on whiz bang features like interactive debugging, integrated language documentation, managing the overall project, etc.   Many of those features are nice (though they almost always go to far in their attempts to control your development project -- requiring it rather than just supporting it).   But you can never quite forget that you're moving strings around while you're using it.   That's why I always end up back in emacs. 7:39:31 AM

James Gosling on Java vs. .NET - An interesting interview with Gosling where he makes some points about the security/reliability of C# that are probably valid (i.e. its too permisive in allowing you direct access to memory).   He also acknowledges Emacs as the leading development interface for Java.  Then disrepects it.  And claims parentage.   7:28:07 AM

The Problem with Linux Today -- The problem is that everyone is trying to make Linux into a competitor for Windows on the average users desktop.  Although I can see a number of reasons this might be interesting, most of them have nothing to do with good business.  It'd be much better to focus on some niche where the existing offerings are weak and Linux (through it's Unix roots, through it's open source, etc) has some unique ability.   Three markets I can think of off the top of my head where linux has already found a foot hold --  professional corporate developer workstations, embedded systems (e.g. Tivo), and mainframes.   Roll with it. 7:09:57 AM

Sorcerer Gnu Linux - This review of Sorcerer GNU Linux [Slashdot] makes it look interesting.  I like that it's optimized for your hardware.  Wonder how fully baked it is?   You'd think it'd be tough to compete with RedHat at this point.   Or at least, you'd hope. 7:02:36 AM