Monday, August 19, 2002

SODA. Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink, summarizes his Seven Principles of Service-Oriented Development in this article in XML & Web Services Magazine. Jason is one of the better analyst/writers on web services, although I can't agree with him on every point. For example: A Web services architect does not have the luxury of combining business and presentation logic. [True.] Coding for Broad Applicability Supersedes Coding for Reusability. [...The] aim is to create code that is flexible and broadly applicable. [An excellent observation.] Scalability Handled Bottom-Up, Instead of Top-Down...If a system experiences unexpected traffic, it can automatically find backup services in a registry, obtain their service descriptions, and bind to the supplemental services on the fly. [I disagree. Any system that can fail-over to an alternative service on the fly must be, by defninition, designed at a level above the switching point.] Instead of taking this top-down approach, service-oriented development takes a bottom-up approach. [More of the above. I disagree. One still needs to determine the required components first.] Platform Dependence Gives Way to Platform Irrelevance...[Referring to the old component-based approach...] The components are soccer players who kick a ball to each other, and the platform is the field. Needless to say, two players will find it difficult to interact if they are on different fields. [One of my favorites.] The article is a tease for ZapThink's $50-per-page research report: Insight: How Service-Oriented Development Will Transform the Software Industry. [Doug Kaye: Web Services Strategies] 2:20:15 PM

New company aims for simpler PGP. PGP Corp. sets out to do what Network Associates couldn't--entice enterprise customers to buy encryption products based on the PGP algorithm by making them easier to use. [CNET News.com] Wow, PGP makes a come back, but without PRZ. Their "new" hook: ease of use. Good luck to them -- they'll need it. 10:17:30 AM

Consumer confidence in housing market continues to slide. Guardian Unlimited Aug 19 2002 7:28AM ET [Moreover - Economics news] 6:47:33 AM

Free Software Licensing Quiz. I took the GNU GPL and LGPL Licensing Quiz and only got 4 out of 9 correct. I don't know if this quiz is such a great idea, after doing so poorly on the test and reading my mis-interpretations of the licenses I'm pretty leary of using the GPL or LGPL for any project. [Found via diveintomark] [Bitworking] I'm surprised that so many people are bombing that quiz. I think the idea of the GPL was that it would be viral and convert a chunk of the software industry to free-as-in-speach software -- so, yep, it has teeth. I still think the idea that software is a service not a product makes sense for about 80% of the software people write. 6:44:00 AM

driving gravestone visits. 10. Tombstone ATM Doles Out Inheritance (5.8 points). Tombstone ATM ... Tombstone ATM Doles Out Inheritance ... Click. [( blogdex : recent )] 6:18:38 AM

Entourage wins again. I tried to use MailSmith as an Entourage replacement for about an hour this evening. It's very cool, I love the scriptability, the powerful text editing and the lightweight - but I've thrown it away already. Entourage (despite all it's failings, like the inability to export, to sync with Palm etc) is still the best mail app I've ever used. In case you're wondering, I'm not an M$ sympathiser (I'm using OSX for f'ks sake) but it is good. Here's why I can't live without Entourage anymore: Received since launch view - this is awesome. It shows me every mail that I have received since I started Entourage in one place (sorted by date received of course). When everyone filters their mail into a million separate folders, viewing incoming emails is a complete pain in the ass. The inbox is now useless (as it only contains spam) and you need to click around to view new mail. With this view created I can quickly overview all incoming mail as it arrives. Slick. I never knew how much I missed this feature until I didn't have it for an hour. Flagged mail - I like to click the 'Flag' button and flag mails to return to later. Then I have a view setup to view different types of flagged mails. For example, mail in the Atlassian folder receives greater answering priority that the rebelutionary folder - sorry guys. I thought Labels in MailSmith might do this, but then I still need to click around the folders in the query results window to view mails. Clickable URLs - Why oh why aren't URLs in MailSmith clickable? Surely this is a basic tenet of any mail program today! (No, command-click doesn't count - it requires two hands) No HTML mail - Actually, this isn't such a big deal (the text rendered view usually looks ok) but there should be a single button to click to open mail in the browser (it's 3 clicks at the moment by my count). The "fuck me" interface - As a good designer friend of mine always says, successful applications have "fuck me" graphics. I like the configurability of MailSmith (deeply integrated scripting is very cool) but it's just... boring looking? [rebelutionary] 5:27:30 AM

Housing Starts Lower in July New Residential Construction (C20) [United States] (1.65 million) First Take: Housing starts fell again in July, down in three of the four Census regions. This defied expectations of a small rise. Nonetheless, housing remains at a high pace as stabilizing labor markets, combined with mortgage rates that are near a record low, are keeping demand for housing high. 5:17:37 AM