Monday, April 22, 2002

"The Cubik is the. "The Cubik is the world's smallest megapixel digital camera." [evhead] 9:45:07 PM

MasterCard's Mysterious Move. The credit card giant's new policy would deny PayPal transactions. [The Motley Fool] 9:07:30 PM

DaveNet: How to be a revolution. "You can't undermine by trying to dictate the terms, you have to do it by invading at night, slipping in the back door unnoticed. Then when the old folks wake up, it's too damned late."  [Scripting News]  Killer apps never come in through the front door. 9:06:40 PM

The Johnson Tapes. Eavesdropping on the brokering of presidential power. [New York Times: Politics] 9:05:09 PM

Random registration required. NYT Random Login Generator. Paste the address of a New York Times article, then click "Register and Go!" This is why I love the Internet. We all know everybody lies on registration forms anyway; this just automates the process. (And by "everyone", I mean 26.2% of Internet users in 1996, 51.4% in 1998, and you can extrapolate from there. And even if you didn't lie the first time, you sure as heck did after you got that new laptop, or changed jobs, or had a major hard drive crash, or whatever.)[diveintomark] 9:04:06 PM

The Next Computer Interface. The desktop metaphor was a brilliant innovation—30 years ago. Now it's an unmanageable mess, and the search is on for a better way to handle information. [Technology Review - Software] 9:02:10 PM

Digital Cash Payoff. PayPal's fraud-busting technology makes it easy for people to pay one another over the Internet—and may give credit card companies a run for their money. [Technology Review - Software] 8:59:50 PM

C# in a Nutshell: Introducing C# and the .NET Framework, Part 2. In the second part of our excerpt from O'Reilly's C# in a Nutshell, the authors introduce the Common Language Runtime and the Framework Class Library. [O'Reilly Network Articles] 8:55:49 PM

Searching for the light. Sam Ruby: "I asked for some light ... in return what I got was heat." Although this was a technical (and completely secular) discussion, for some reason it reminds me of something I learned when I was considering becoming a Quaker a few years ago. (My father is still a Quaker, so he can correct me if I get this wrong.) Quakers believe that each of us has a God-given piece of the truth inside us, something George Fox called the "Inner Light". The fact that no one person has the entire truth is why Quakers get together for meetings, to piece together everyone's perspective and arrive at a greater understanding. Of course, this only works if everyone allows their light to shine freely; a common problem in meeting is that one person has their own agenda which is not motivated by the quest for understanding or truth, and they side-track the meeting. (Rule-of-thumb #1 of Quaker meeting: "After 5 minutes, it's not God talking.") Keep this in mind the next time you ask for a piece of the light and get burned instead. [diveintomark] 8:04:59 AM

Adam Bosworth: "RPC suggests that it is okay to automatically map the parameters or return type into or from XML messages. It isn't. That is a private implementation detail. Everyone's implementations will vary and all implementations will vary over time. RPC also implies that the caller knows the signature and classes of the receiver. In fact, it is a miracle if the one application's classes and parameter order happen to match another's. In the real world, every implementation will have its own classes." Finally it's clear what we've been debating and why we disagree. In my model of loosely-coupled apps, there is no variability allowed in the places Bosworth says he must allow it. If you want to implement the Google API, you must implement the same method names, and they must take the same parameters and return equivalent results (the search databases are different in different search engines). We went through this with the Blogger API, and it worked fine. I don't see the value in allowing variability, because you trade that off against complexity, too high a cost, too little gain. I think the world of Adam, but I think he's advocating the wrong approach. And it's good to get the issues aired and clear.  [Scripting News] 8:01:41 AM

Mike Deem: What do you think about a binary XML serialization format?  This question has spawned some interesting discussion.  Before I reveal my thoughts on the subject, I'd like to know more about what is being proposed - for example, how are decimals and dates to be handled? [Sam Ruby] 7:55:48 AM

Siebel revenue plunges. Purses firmly shut [The Register] Hmm.... this makes me wonder if the worst is still to come for the tech industry... Last year, CRM/SFA were the only projects that seemed to be moving forward... 7:40:42 AM

Jon Udell: .NET: Microsoft's Enterprise Ticket? Even Microsoft? Absolutely, says Ruby. [Sam Ruby] 7:33:07 AM

Using XML appropriately. Reactions to "Eating the XML Dogfood" (in email) suggest I should restate my point.  I do think the core XML standards are coming along nicely. No-one anticipates more than me the imminent merger of SQL and XML data management disciplines. OpenLink's Virtuoso, which I explored recently, is an inspiring example of what that kind of hybrid will be. What I believe Sean McGrath is saying about XML is simply: use technology appropriately. [Jon's Radio] 7:27:59 AM