Inspirational Technology

Inspirational Technology
Kimbro Staken's views on Mac OS X, XML databases, and other inspirational technologies.

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Sunday, January 20, 2002

Stopped in at Borders again tonight, hoping to find Mac OS X: the Missing Manual. No go, their computer still says "It's on the way, reserve your copy today" or some such thing. Argh, that's what it said last week too. Oh well, picked up a few other books.
Jef Raskin's The Humane Interface, there's an interview with Jef in Business Week. Not sure if I agree with what he says in the interview, but I'm still interested in seeing what the book holds.
Dealers of Lightening: Xerox PARC and the dawn of the computer age. This was an impulse buy. PARC is always a fascinating topic.
Peopleware, DeMarco & Lister, been meaning to read this one for years, but never managed to pick up a copy. We'll see if it lives up to its reputation as a classic.
Gift cards are great, still saved enough for the Missing manual too. Could be a quite appropriately titled book.
Oh yeah, Mac OS X shelf space expanded even more into Linux territory by taking over half of the Linux shelf where books are displayed with the cover out. That's 1.5 shelves of cover facing Mac OS X books, vs. zero four or five months ago when I first looked.
Is this a silly observation? Yeah sure it is. So what, it's all part of the excitement of watching the emergence of the first truly viable competitor to the Windows monopoly in the home market. Linux had the dream and the eye of the industry. Now that's being swept aside by the wake of Mac OS X building up steam.
9:36:02 PM

Tom Bradford has a new project, a web services framework called Labrador.
I call Labrador a web services hub, though Tom calls it a web services framework. It could just as well be called a broker, but to me a hub implies a simple static component where things come together to communicate. You just plug things in and it enables communications in a passive role. I find that a broker implies a more active role in the communications. Either term is really right, but object brokers have gotten a bit of a reputation for being complex.
Web services are supposed to be simple and we need hubs to allow objects to be plugged in one end and clients in the other. The hub just provides the path for communication. It shouldn't really matter what protocol the client wants to speak. As long as the hub supports it, the client should be able to talk to the objects.
This is the goal behind Labrador. To provide simple communication between web services clients and object implementations.
Currently Labrador supports XML-RPC with HTTP GET and SOAP in progress for protocols. It also supports Java for objects and it is likely Python and maybe Javascript will show up there as well at some point.
Labrador can also be used to provide another mechanism to access Xindice via XML-RPC. It's a bit more complex then the simple Xindice XML-RPC interface, but it also offers the possibility of more power once HTTP GET and SOAP protocol handlers come on line.
12:39:18 PM

Kurt Ward has been working pretty hard with the XML-RPC interface for Xindice and has created several projects.
Xindice Cold Fusion Client http://sourceforge.net/projects/cfxindice/. Xindice PHP client and admin interface http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpxindice/
He's also been updating my original dbXML XML-RPC interface to work with the latest CVS version of Xindice. In the process he's added most of the missing management functionality for creating collections, indexes and XMLObjects. We've setup a new Sourceforge project to host this code and while a download isn't available yet the code is in CVS. http://sourceforge.net/projects/xindice-xmlrpc/
All of this work revolves around the XML-RPC implementation which is a nice lightweight way of accessing the Xindice server.
11:54:25 AM

I'm pushing for a Xindice 1.0rc1 release this week. The feature set has been locked down for a long time and it's time to get it out and start adding some new stuff to the post 1.0 tree.
9:21:02 AM

I think I'm going to start watching the size of the book section in the local Borders a little closer. Sometimes an interesting judge of the popularity of a technology is how many books about it are stocked. When I first got OS X, the Mac section was two shelves at best. It's already up to four and has been moved from being tucked in the corner to a more visible eye level center shelf. Ironically displacing the Linux books that used to occupy the spot. Hmm ...
2:46:56 AM

Tim O'Reilly "iBooks are now the most common laptops at our conferences. And David Pogue's OS X: The Missing Manual is our hottest book in a long time."
I want a copy of David Pogue's OS X: The Missing Manual, can't find the thing in any of the local stores. I have Christmas gift cards burning a hole in my pocket and I can't find the thing. I didn't think I'd learn much from it, but I read the sample chapter and learned so many things I didn't know, getting the book is a must.
2:45:47 AM

Launching some new sites
Through the power of Radio categories and FTP upstreaming I'm now maintaining five sites. Four of them are linked from the sidebar. The fifth is the main Radio page at http://radio.weblogs.com/0100213/.
Here's the breakdown on my goals for the new sites.
Inspirational Technology http://www.kstaken.org is my personal blog and will get pretty much everything that all the other sites get plus all my more opinionated pieces. This is basically the replacement for what used to be on http://www.xmldatabases.org plus a lot more.
XML Database JuJu http://www.xmldatabases.org will be focused on XML and XML database technology. I won't be posting any more opinion pieces there unless they're specifically about XML or XML databases.
Mac OS X Divinity http://www.unitsix.org will get all Mac OS X news, tips and whatever else I want to write on the subject. The domain is just something I had laying around.
Xindice Realm http://www.xindice.org, this is a new site and will be for news and information about Apache Xindice. This will be focused on serving the Xindice community and helping Xindice grow to dominate the XML database industry.
The userland hosted site http://radio.weblogs.com/0100213/ will get anything and everything that I write. This site may get a little cluttered. I'm thinking it will get a new name too, since I'm using Inspirational Technology for what I consider my main blog. Not sure what it will be yet.
1:11:19 AM

Moving to the new XMLDatabases.org
As part of the move to Radio I've decided to maintain XML Database JuJu as a Radio category and keep it more focused on XML and XML database technology. My main blog where I post just about everything including what shows up on XML Database JuJu is now http://www.kstaken.org. The old XML Database JuJu site is still available via a direct link http://www.xmldatabases.org/index.php to the old PHP weblog software.
12:19:12 AM

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