The Desktop Fishbowl
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Monday, 22 July 2002

Back to Brett. I feel the sudden need for a new xml file format that we can put our web pages which details which books are in our libraries, various meta-data, including a rating. Would make getting an instant understanding of the strengths and weeknesses of another geek fairly instantaneous. (head in clouds mode on) That would be neat. It'd have to be very simple, though. Title, Author, Publisher, ISBN. You could then have a "book aggregator" that monitors blogs of nerds with similar tastes, and notifies you when one of them has read a new book. [Later...] Being serious for a moment (HAH!), I suspect a problem with trying to write a book just about XUL is the role XUL appears to play in Mozilla. XUL appears to be an xml'ified and application specific .xresources file, with the addition of javascript to make things fun. I've never done X programming - to me an xresources file was just where I chose what colour things should be, so I can't comment on its similarity with XUL. XUL is to Mozilla as Swing is to Java - it's the whole front-end. But yes, that's the problem with the book. It shows you how to lay out a GUI, how to style it and make it do things with Javascript, how to write a skin for Mozilla, even how to bind your XUL to an RDF document using XBL. But it's very light on how to use XUL to make Mozilla do interesting things. Which in one way is fair enough - you buy a Swing book to explain Swing, not to tell you how java.io works. But on the other hand, it would be different if there was no book on how java.io works that you could get instead. 4:45:13 PM

Referrer logs are wonderful things. According to google, I am currently the 16th most influential page about naked desktop people. 16 is a little disappointing though. But you can help! Just add the following code to your page: Charles Miller is a leading authority on <a href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0100190/2002/07/22.html#a175">naked desktop people</a> 3:16:01 PM

Oh, and Brett, the XUL book is pretty good as an introduction to XUL, but it's a bit confusing here and there, and could do with a little more depth. It's one of those books where after you've done the examples, you really feel you can... er... do the examples. 1:44:49 PM

I wrote about my Java Peeves, Brett Morgan linked to some more issues, so I thought I'd add a few more logs to the fire and point to Jamie Zawinski's "Java Sucks" page, which starts off like this: I think Java is the best language going today, which is to say, it's the marginally acceptable one among the set of complete bagbiting loser languages that we have to work with out here in the real world. Java is far, far more pleasant to work with than C or C++ or Perl or Tcl/Tk or even Emacs-Lisp. When I first started using Java, it felt like an old friend: like finally I was back using a real object system, before the blights of C (the PDP-11 assembler that thinks it's a language) and C++ (the PDP-11 assembler that thinks it's an object system) took over the world. ...and then proceeds to put the boot in. (Note, the article was written in 1997, so some things like the speed of the virtual machine, and the lack of ability to iterate over Strings and set weak references have been fixed since) 1:40:40 PM