Thursday, January 24, 2002

XML enabled applications: Need for speed (XML Journal) - A nice article on performance tuning for XML.   They give a couple use cases, talk about typical usage patterns, and suggest some techniques for streamlining processing.  I find it a bit ironic though - the claim with XML (at least for Web Services) was that the network latency made XML-induced latencies insignficant.   10:06:00 PM

Relax NG, compared (XML.com) This article has links to couple of other interesting articles including a primer on Schema. 9:17:57 PM

Joel on Software has a nice article on what its usually better to refactor than to rewrite.  Sounds good to me. 9:08:47 PM

Refactoring - Very fashionable these days -- if you listened to common usage of the term, you might thing that any change to code other than the initial pass at writing it was refactoring.  Just the same, it's popular for a good reason.  The book that launched the craze (Fowler's Refactoring), is full of practical advice for how to take that ugly, legacy code and effectively turn it into something more maintainable.  9:02:02 PM

Java VM performance comparison. Kazuyuki Shudo has updated his Java VM performance comparison to include recent versions of Intel's ORP and IBM's Jikes RVM. [Hack the Planet] 8:47:13 PM

Powells Books The WSJ this morning has an interesting story about Portland's Powells Books. Apparently the ghost of the original owner is heard frequently in the stacks! (The Journal is hard to link to so I won't!) [SJL's Radio Weblog] 8:41:04 PM

Pointcast was good, but not that good.  I expected the News Aggregator in Radio to be like when I configured.  Interesting, but I'll probably get bored or frustrated with it.    But, it's really not at all like Pointcast.   Two things make it different:  First, it's completely open - I have the freedom to add any available news feed to it.  Since the formats for news are all open, lots of people have feeds.  And that's the second thing -- there is a great diversity of the feeds, some from big media outlets, some from a guy on his home PC.   Unhomogenized, free-flowing news and commentary from all over the map.   Tune it to your liking. 1:19:08 PM

Are you ready?   I think this last year has, in a way, been great for technology - a clearing of the dead wood on the tree of technology innovation.   And there was so much of it after the IPO driven frenzy of the late '90s.  I learned something that was hard for me to learn - innovation is easy; execution is hard.   Still, I can't help but notice that most of what lasted happened while people were connected via occasional, slow connections to their mostly-for-work PCs.   Adoption continues and the PC is taking new forms everywhere.   I think the biggest changes of the information age are still to come.   It's still too early to name them -- I don't necessarily think they are the obvious things the pundits describe.  Still, I see their forms beginning to coalesce.   It won't be long... the biggest question probably is, after the 90s, are you ready? 12:05:57 PM

RIM: BlackBerry users enjoy 25-hour days. According to a Reasearch in Motion study, users of its BlackBerry wireless e-mail device save themselves about an hour of wasted time a day and spend less time on the phone. [ZDNet Tech News] 8:06:33 AM