Thursday, January 31, 2002

I bought Radio Userland today.  Seemed like a bargain at $40.  Wish I had a manual, tho. 11:02:45 PM

[Slashdot] The Amazing Lego DAT Tape Changer 11:01:48 PM

[diveintomark] Amazing, they make money anyway. PCWorld: "Google states that it eschews pop-up advertising and traditional banner ads. Google doesn't accept paid placement in its search index, and the interface seems free of commercial ties. How do you make money?" Answer: text-based ads based on keywords. The entire system is automated (Google doesn't do anything that can't be automated -- that's one of the keys to their success). I bought $50 of ads for my book a few weeks back. I don't make any money off my book, I was just curious to see how this much-heralded system worked. You can set up multiple ads per campaign, there are strict limits on the number of characters, and they have excellent reporting to show you exactly how effective each ad has been. I bought the phrase "free Python tutorial", a relevant search term that got several hundred hits a week but does not, for some reason, show my book in the search results (probably because I don't use the word "tutorial" in my text, and Google ignores META keywords). My clickthrough rate for the life of the campaign was almost 4%. 9:23:24 PM

[diveintomark] Python XML introduction. Paul Boddie: "This document attempts to introduce some basic XML processing concepts to readers who have not yet started to use Python with XML." Experienced programmers can also read this chapter of my book to see a non-toy example of Python's XML parsing capabilities in action. [via Daily Python-URL] 9:21:43 PM

[Sam Ruby's Radio Weblog] .... ECMAScript (perhaps better known as JavaScript) ... 9:17:59 PM

[Sam Ruby's Radio Weblog It is nice to see Simon Fell (of Pocket SOAP fame) helping someone integrate a Radio client with a .Net server.  Hint to Mark and everyone: if interoperability is what you want, first look here.  Pick a server from the first table, pick a client from the second table, and look at the results before you proceed.  It will save you a lot of headaches. ] 9:16:23 PM

[Hack the Planet] Werner Vogels from Cornell is working on P2P content syndication. RSS is good, but pull is inefficient. Another inefficiency is that the whole channel must be trasferred every time even if there are small changes. (I wonder what fraction of RSS clients use If-Modified-Since.) He mentions the publish-subscribe features in the UserLand cloud; they had to be turned off because they don't scale. (Dave is not so sure.) His solution to this is P2P distribution; analogous to epidemics. Authentication of content is a must. To make me happy, he has an incentives slide; the incentive to publishers is obvious and the incentive to users is to get news faster. He has a toolkit called Astrolabe; it give you security, scalability, firewall support, etc. He emphasizes that Astrolabe is more than a paper. "Simulated, Emulated, Tested, and Deployed." Think probabilistically not deterministically. The strongest guarantee he offers is eventual consistency; anything stronger is too expensive. Coming soon, it's going to be easy to use. 9:14:02 PM

[Hack the Planet] Gene Kan gave an overview of JXTA. He admits that Jini is dead; Java was holding it down like a weight. The edges of the universe are growing faster than the center but inequality of load is growing, not shrinking. Porn is too hard to find on the Internet today. They're using the Apache license; screw Richard Stallman. He touts that JXTA isn't IP-only, which is a dubious advantage IMO. 9:12:53 PM

[Scripting News] Read this article on Web Services interop. It's an eye-opener because they include sample code for a web service in .NET. Look at all the overhead. Did they really design an environment for web services? If so what are all those magic incantations about? I've seen Simon and Sam (and Christian) comment on this, their eyes can't see the overhead. But Sjoerd who's a scripting guy, sees it. Sometimes it pays to unlearn the things you take for granted. Make every bit of complexity justify itself, and if it can't, off to the bit bucket. Try Don's Amazing Puzzle for a demo of how hard it can be to see things you take for granted. My untrained eye sees six lines of overhead in the .NET hello world script.  9:08:37 PM

[John Robb's Radio Weblog] Thanks Mark!  I used Mark's blog search tool to search through my extensive Weblog entries and I got all my K-Log entries back ( ~125) in less than a second.  Wow!  I love this developer community! 9:01:18 PM

Ellison: Oracle's "whole business" will run on Linux [IDG InfoWorld] 8:38:20 PM

Artwork from Ancient Atari History [Slashdot] 8:04:42 AM

McKinsey Quarterly.  A universal primer for understanding Web services. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 7:55:41 AM

Introduction to DAML, part 1 (XML.com) [IBM DeveloperWorks: XML News] 7:40:38 AM