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Thursday, January 08, 2004 |
Databases get a grip on XML.
The next iteration of the SQL standard was supposed to arrive in 2003.
But SQL standardization has always been a glacially slow process, so
nobody should be surprised that SQL:2003 -- now known as SQL:200n --
isn't ready yet. Even so, 2003 was a year in which XML-oriented data
management, one of the areas addressed by the forthcoming standard,
showed up on more and more developers' radar screens. [Full story at InfoWorld.com (part of 2003 Technology of the Year)]
Although I thought XML support in databases was a hot 2003 topic, Edd Dumbill felt otherwise:
... [Jon's Radio] 
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Foldable 35mm cameras. 
Eli
sez, "This Czech designed pinhole camera is made from carefully cut out
and constructed paper (needs to be stiff and lightproof). The name
comes from the Czech word for pinhole (dirka) and a pun on Nikon. Uses
35mm film. Remember that you'll want a long exposure for a pinhole
camera."
Link
[Boing Boing Blog]
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SRL show in Vegas in February!. Former BoingBoing guestblogger and Survival Research Laboratories engineer Karen Marcelo says:
"Interested in joining SRL for some fear and loathing in vegas on feb 7 2004? Tickets are available online now, right here.
We will be bringing pretty much *everything* and making about 20 brand new sneaky soldiers by then!"
More info here on the SRL website. [Boing Boing Blog]
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Sterling: "I'll believe in settling Mars when I see people settling the Gobi Desert". Bruce Sterling's just posted a doozy about Mars exploration in the interview he's doing on the WELL:
I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the
same time I see people setting the Gobi Desert.
The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times
as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times
cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever
writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well,
it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's
no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly,
it's inhospitable and there's no way to
make it pay. Mars is just the same, really.
We just romanticize it because it's so hard to reach.
On the other hand, there might really be some
way to make living in the Gobi Desert pay.
And if that were the case, and you really
had communities making a nice cheerful
go of daily life on arid, freezing, barren rock
and sand, then a cultural transfer to Mars
might make a certain sense.
If there were a society with enough technical
power to terraform Mars, they would
certainly do it. On the other hand.
by the time they got around to messing with Mars,
they would have been using all that power
to transform *themselves.* So by the time
they got there and started rebuilding the
Martian atmosphere wholesale, they wouldn't
look or act a whole lot like Hollywood extras.
Link [Boing Boing Blog]
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Laszlo is kranking!. Laszlo preview release.
Laszlo preview release
A preview release of Laszlo Presentation Server version 2.0 is now available. Woo hoo!
- New Component Framework: All the components you expect in a
web app plus a few more. This framework is fully laszlo-rrific -- with
the details you know and love from an OS GUI with all the cinematic
user experience you've come to expect from a Laszlo app. The components
support simple declaration, data binding, full scripting APIs, and
keyboard navigation -- whew!
- KRANK Optimizer: Every web engineer worries about
performance. Here's something for the Laszlo bag o' tricks. This new
"instant-on" technology allows developers to optimize an application so
that it will start immediately once downloaded.
- Live examples in the Documentation: I use this feature all the time. With a single click you can modify and recompile examples.
- Better and cooler data binding: if you liked data binding and replication from v1, you're gonna love the new $path expression.
The components were my main gig on this release, jamming with Bret
Simister, Peter Andrea, and the gang. I think this may be the first
component set created entirely in declarative XML. The complete source
code for the components is included with the developer edition. You can
check out a component example
which you change the style to see the components in different colors.
The components use a new "Ultra Pixel" font created especially for
Laszlo by Truth in Design.
Download LPS 2.0 Developer Edition and try it yourself. [Sarah Allen's Weblog]
Laszlo Systems continues to rock and roll.
Not only have they shown real world, major, scalable deployed apps
(Behr Paint, Earthlink, Yahoo, etc.) but they're about to show
something for Kodak and are working on...... (ooops can't tell you!)
Anyway this 2.0 rocks and - gee - that copycat stuff from Macromedia
ain't even in beta yet. Smart developers will put their money on Laszlo. [Marc's Voice]
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FOAF challenges.
 Leigh Dodds
- oone of the leaders of the FOAF community - raps it out. leigh is the
guy who created FOAF-a-matic - teh leading FOAF generator.
BTW Our PeopleAggregator.com social networking service (coming soon) does ALL THREE things: generate, gather and consume. HHmmm - yum yum.
FOAF challenges.
FOAF challenges
Some interesting discussion has been triggered by Jon Udell's comments on FOAF. I agree with Edd
and Dan that FOAF is about more than social networking and have said as
much here on several occasions. Personally I see two problems with FOAF
neither of them big.
Firstly the name causes people to adopt certain expectations about
it's intended usage particularly with general surge of interest (fad?)
in social software. I certainly wouldn't advocate a name change but, as
the exchange with Udell has demonstrated, we need to take care to
present FOAF correctly.
The second problem is just about data. Because there is no central
repository of FOAF data, it's harder to create FOAF applications: you
either need to run a scutter yourself to collect up what's available,
or generate FOAF out of the back-end of another site. Of course you can
also hang out on #foaf and badger someone (e.g. Jim Ley or Matt
Biddulph) to give you a data export; that's what I did.
I firmly believe that playing with the FOAF data that's out in the
wild will generate the most interesting applications, and provide
essential implementation feedback on the vocabulary itself.
So I'm going to try encouraging folk to regularly and visibly
publish the results of their scutter runs. An "offical" data set hung
of the FOAF homepage would also be useful. This should hopefully
encourage the development of more FOAF applications.
Incidentally I mentally classify those applications as follows:
- FOAF-generating -- e.g. FOAF-a-Matic, ecademy, TypePad, etc.
Applications that generate FOAF but don't typically process it to
perform any useful function. These are an important step in producing a
critical mass of data
- FOAF-gathering -- e.g. a Scutter, FOAFbot, FOAFnaut.
Applications that harvest the web of FOAF data to build a data
repository. Functionality is then built around this repository
- FOAF-consuming -- e.g. FOAF explorer/viewer, Dashboard,
Planet RDF. Applications that read specific FOAF data, to fulfill some
function. FOAF-gathering applications also typically consume data in
this way -- to manually refresh their repository -- but I'm thinking of
slightly different application scenarios, e.g. automating web site
registration and preference maintenance, generating a project or
community blog, etc.
For me this classification separates out some of the implementation
issues: a FOAF-consuming application doesn't typically have to worry
about attribution, trust, etc. The data is coming from a limited number
of sources. FOAF-gathering applications have to deal with a much more
difficult set of problems. [Lost Boy] [Marc's Voice]
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I want Beethoven's Ninth or some Verdi Aria - like "Di Provenza ma'il Suo". New Toys: Nokia 6600.  I'm
starting this year with a brand new phone. For the last 8 months I used
a Sony Ericsson T68i, but I've been disappointed by this phone. It's
true that considering the feature-set it was cheap, but the fact that I
had to reset it every few calls because for some reason it randomly
stopped working made it a pretty poor phone.
So I went back to Nokia, buying a 6600. This has been a totally weblog-driven purchase: I picked the 6600 after reading Joi Ito's and especially Russel Beattie's weblogs.
It
took a while to get it working properly with my Mac (it's not supported
by iSync), but after some googling I got it to synchronize with my
Address Book (pictures associated with people in the address book are
sent to the phone, cool) and I can get on-line via bluetooth/GPRS with
my PowerBook on the road.
The built-in camera seems to be
almost usable: I can take a picture and send it via email right away,
which is kind of cool. The included Opera browser works pretty well and
the screen is big enough to let you do some web surfing directly on the
phone.
Another cool feature is the ability to use any midi file
as a ring-tone and ring-tones can be associated with specific users or
groups. I guess I'll let people in my address book choose which song
they want to be associated with when they call ;-)
[Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog] [Marc's Voice]
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Out of Doc's mouth to our hearts and souls.
Doc Searls sees it as it is - in so far as Apple's role in our
industry is concerned. Anything that can facilitate the development of
personal publishing is fine by me.
This is the continuation of the journey started by macroMind when we first started selling 'Creativity Tools' back in 1984.
Macwhirled.
Had an interesting day at Macworld yesterday. As expected, Apple
didn't provide wi-fi net connections during the keynote, but I had a
fun time hanging out in virtual space with other journalists there,
notably a crowd led by Adam Engst, who put up a wi-fi LAN and facilitated group note taking, which he put up somewhere (I'll find out later).
A sub-par Steve Jobs keynote for product announcements, I thought.
Not that it mattered. My main take-away was that Apple is doing a great
job of hacking the music industry, and is playing a significant role
(how intentionally it's not clear) in the mass market shift from a
consumer to a producer culture.
What will happen when all of us can be the first sources of music and movies as well as journals and books? A bigger, freer and far more interesting marketplace, is what. [The Doc Searls Weblog] [Marc's Voice]
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Web services for newsreaders?. If you haven’t seen feeds.scripting.com
yet, it’s a place you can share your OPML subscriptions files. It has a
rankings page so you can see what’s popular, you can see who subscribes
to a given feed, and if you’re a member of the site there are a few
other cool features.
Other web sites have some similar features, of course. (Technorati
is one of my favorites.) I bring up feeds.scripting.com because it’s
new and so it’s a good time to ask what you think about web services
for newsreaders.
We at Ranchero don’t plan to create any web services. But we do plan to
make NetNewsWire work with various newsreader-oriented web services—so
here are a couple questions:
1. What existing web services interest you?
Examples: you might wish NetNewsWire uploaded OPML files automatically
to feeds.scripting.com or somewhere. Or you might wish NetNewsWire made
it easy to create Feedster search feeds. And so on.
And here’s the bigger question...
2. What new web services would you like to see?
I have to admit, I don’t spend much time thinking about web services,
so no really good examples come to mind. And there are actually a
number of good services out there already, some of them
under-publicized, so it may be that a bunch of good ideas have already
been done.
But I bet you can come up with some new ones. [inessential.com]
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Don Hopkins is a longtime friend and one of the developers of The Sims. He's developing a set of add-ons and an RSS module for Sims add-ons. [Scripting News]
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Dynamic languages and enterprise VMs.
We hoped 2003 would bring a rapprochement between the dominant
enterprise VMs, Java and .Net, and the dynamic-language VMs that are
still in many ways well-kept secrets. That mostly didn't happen. At the
JavaOne 2003 technical keynote in June there was a nod in the direction
of JSR (Java Specification Request) 223, which would enable languages
such as PHP to be used in the Java Web tier. But the stewards of the
enterprise VMs still aren't pushing to integrate them with the popular
and productive dynamic-language VMs.
Jython, the Java/Python hybrid, has a growing cult following,
but isn't on Sun's radar screen. Microsoft has yet to deliver on its
early promises to make dynamic languages first-class citizens of the
CLR. Here's hoping that the many VMs that flourished in 2003 will work
better together in 2004. [Full story at InfoWorld.com (part of 2004 Technology of the Year)]
The ever-quotable Sean McGrath has said, of Jython:
Jython, lest you do not know of it, is the most compelling weapon the Java platform has for its survival into the 21st century. [Sean McGrath]
Hyperbole? Maybe not. This weekend, I was working with the Java API to
Sleepycat's Berkeley DB XML, and it felt like one of those bad dreams
in which you're slogging through molasses toward an ever-receding goal.
I switched to Jython and quickly got the job done. And it was the same job (indexing and searching content) using the same engine (Berkeley DB XML).
... [Jon's Radio]
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Some excellent Social Software Ideas from Matt Haughey. Some
great brainstorms from Matt! My favourite is #2, the geographical
opinion system because I have moved a lot and trying to figure out
where the best services and products in a town where you have no social
network is a nightmare. Here's the condensed list; read Matt's full post for more details.
QUOTE
- Colloquial mapping = approximately Yahoo Maps + Slashdot
- Geographical opinion system= approx. Epinions + Friendster
- Collaborative consumed media = approx. Friendster + ??? (some sort of media management service)
- Reputation management ideas = approx. Multi-variate reputation management
UNQUOTE [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
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Blogging for Power. An excellent list of must-read blogs for people interested in enterprise related stuff.
QUOTE Each
morning, I fire up my RSS aggregator and go through the latest
headlines from enterprise-related Weblogs. Here I've pulled together a
list of the 10 I've come to consider essential reading. Their bloggers
do a good job explaining the fields they specialize in, offering unique
insights or information you might not get elsewhere. UNQUOTE [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
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© Copyright 2004 William J. Maya.
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