Thursday, October 10, 2002

Warren Robinett is a designer of interactive computer graphics software. (fyi - 6502 instruction set)

John Robb: "Without 14.4 modems, there wouldn't have been a Internet boom." Subscribing to John Robb was one of the best things I ever did. Some people are so focused and on the money (at least I hope he is). If you interested in RU8, knowledge logs and more fullfilling desktop experiences, I'd subscribe. So quotes from his above post. "This combination of factors is likely to keep even "low-end broadband" out of the hands of most people for the next ten years." (The combination of factors he's talking about relates to current broadband - DSL/Cable, expensive modems, limited access and high costs.) "It means we are back to the days of online services that use desktop software to augment experiences for end-users." "The sweet spot in this is to find ways to leverage the best of the Web with better desktop experiences managed by powerful desktop software"

Jon Udell: "What would it be like to Google your email?" [Scripting News]

Frontier 9 Update.  We have integrated the Frontier 9 screen shots into the printable user's guide for Frontier and Manila.  [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

DaveNet: What is a News Aggregator? [Scripting News]

The Python Cookbook. [Slashdot]  Book review. "Python is something of a programmer's dream and an author's nightmare. What started life as a scripting tool for the Amoeba operating system has matured into a full-blown programming language with such speed that every book seems to be outdated in a year or two. To make matters worse for publishers, the crew around Python's creator Guido van Rossum keeps adding higher-level constructs such as iterators with every new release, reducing reams of code to single-line idioms at half-year intervals. Because not everybody has been able to keep up -- RedHat 7.3 infamously still ships with version 1.5.2 as the default, while SuSE 8.0 is hanging in there with version 2.2 -- authors are forced to cover stone age variants as well as modern forms. Python is cross-platform (Unix/Linux, Mac, Microsoft), has two underlying languages (C for Python, Java for Jython) and works with various GUIs (Tkinter, wxWindows, Qt, GTK, curses, Swing). Given this breadth of material, the idea of writing that most fragmented form of a programming book, a 'Cookbook,' seems as crazy as, say, nailing a dead parrot to its perch."