Thursday, April 25, 2002

Did you read Andrew Orlowski's analysis of Bill Gates' testimony? If not, stop everything, and read it now. Then read the latest soundbites from The Mind of Microsoft. "Christopher Jones, in charge of development of the Windows operating system for desktop computers, said proposals to let computer makers and rival software developers tinker with parts of Windows would create chaos for consumers and hurt the computer industry."   [Scripting News] 4:16:32 PM

A coder's guide to coffee. As most software and creative professionals know, coffee is an important technology for boosting mental acuity and maintaining peak on-the-job performance. But did you also know that coffee can be a damn tasty beverage? It's true. All you need is the appropriate amount of disrespect for the mainstream coffee industry and a desire to enjoy a better beverage. So read on, and learn the secrets to great coffee. [kuro5hin.org] 4:04:43 PM

"Zoe" [Daypop Top 40] interesting that Zoe is getting so much attention... shows how much of a problem email has become... 4:03:25 PM

Windows .Net Server now due in mid-2003 [IDG InfoWorld] 3:57:45 PM

The more I think about the innovative approach Zoe is taking with e-mail, the more I like it.   It points to a fully web-enabled desktop -- where e-mail is just web app along with publishing.  The first thing I would do is index and webify all my current e-mail and attachments.  The second thing I would do is have my e-mail web app pull e-mail in parallel from my mail server along with my current app (Outlook express).  Slowly, but surely I would probably find that I spend all of my time using e-mail in my web app.  My "new mail search" routine would get better and better everyday as I modify them.  I would have saved routines for business partners and corporate internal.  In a matter of months I suspect that I would be saving hours a day that would have normally been spent sorting mail.   [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 11:04:16 AM

I just noticed that a friend gave me (and my ~/bin directory) an acknowledgement in his dissertation several years ago.  How kind.   8:10:29 AM

Interwoven debuts CMS for the masses. The company unveils new content management software designed to make it easier for rank-and-file workers to share, manipulate and store documents and code. [ZDNet Tech News] 7:41:10 AM

Clay Shirky: What Web Services Got Right ... and Wrong. Web Services represent not just a new way to build Internet applications, says Clay Shirky in this interview, but the second stage of peer-to-peer, in which distinctions between clients and servers are all but eliminated. [O'Reilly Network Articles] 7:40:18 AM

Flash + GPS + Pocket PC.  Interesting.  This would work better on a real mobile PC like the OQO.  Here's why.  Dumb, inexpensive devices need to leverage smarts in the cloud to provide rich, interactive user experiences.  To do this well, there needs to be 1) an expensive server infrastructure (which means the service will be expensive) and 2) plentiful bandwidth.  This is a non-starter  ... [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 7:32:52 AM

SOAP vs. REST. Paul Prescod: Google's Gaffe. "Google's choice [of SOAP] was technologically poor... I will show that a Google API based on XML, HTTP and URIs can be simpler to use, more efficient, and more powerful." Dave Winer: Rebuttal to REST. "I think that what goes over the wire is nowhere near as important as the fact an interface to a popular Web application now exists." Joel Spolsky: "There's a lot of SOAP backlash these days. ... The claim that SOAP is bad because the wire format is ugly and hard is like claiming nobody should use Pentiums because their instruction sets are so much more complicated than the instruction set for the 8086. Yeah, it's true, but we have compilers that take care of that." Of course, Joel goes on to say: The real problem with SOAP is that it's a completely inadequate remoting system. It doesn't have events (which makes it useless for large classes of applications). It doesn't support references (ditto). It has about 10 years to go before it gets to where CORBA and DCOM were 10 years ago. And we're supposed to be all excited about this because we can sneak through the firewall. Gee, I wonder what the firewall vendors are working on these days? As soon as they're done, we're even further back than we started. Note that these are not arguments for REST instead, since REST has the same limitations. Joel wants something that doesn't exist (and may never exist): an enterprise-level distributed object system that's platform-neutral, vendor-neutral, language-neutral, patent-free, and that enjoys wide industry support. Lots of luck with that. Meanwhile, pundits will keep having these pointless little flame wars about wire protocols, and programmers will keep scraping HTML pages because 99.99% of the information we want is only exposed through web pages anyway. [diveintomark] 7:30:29 AM

"Ecological Footprint" [Daypop Top 40]  Interesting -- this is multiple choice interview that tells you how much land is required to support your lifestyle -- your ecological footprint. 7:23:46 AM