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Sunday, February 15, 2004 |
Forty years ago today. Actually, it was in 1960, four years before the Beatles showed up on Ed Sullivan, that Doug McIlroy published Macro instruction extensions of compiler languages,
which appears to be a seminal paper in the literature of
metaprogramming. I mention this because a number of folks have
responded to last week's item, Programs that write programs, pointing out that Lisp programmers have been there, done that:
"your note about code generation, and the referenced discussions - bits
of which i'd already read elsewhere, left me with a really eerie
feeling, that i might not be living in the same dimension with you
folks. you see, there's a practice of code generation which extends
back decades: lisp. code generations is a lisp programmer's bread and
butter."
"In the lisp world, they call these macros. The idea is
pretty widely known, though not too many languages implement them. Perl
6, and by extension the Parrot interpreter, will include macros, and
they will thus be available to any language that gets implemented on
top of Parrot (which currently includes Ruby, Python, (maybe) PHP, and,
of course, Perl)."
... [Jon's Radio] 
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IBM to bring MS Office to... Linux?.
IBM has plans to bring Microsoft Office to the Linux desktop. current
indicators are that this may possibly be done via work from
Codeweavers, Wine, and efforts from IBM to utilize "code provided by
Microsoft to make it happen." [Ars Technica]
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Worldview Management System. Lisa Williams's Worldview Management System is a great design for an aggregator. Read the whole thing to see the lenses she'd like to view the world through.
QUOTE I believe that a truly great aggregator can be developed around the idea of The Worldview.
Each
of us has a specific and unique way of viewing the world. Our worldview
is informed by our life experience, our way of thinking, our culture,
our family, and for many of us, the things we read, watch, and listen
to -- the media products of others' worldviews informing and
(sometimes) enriching and expanding our own worldview.
The
best aggregator, to my mind, would be much more than a list of sites
with handy update notifications. It would be a Worldview Management
System for the user.
A Worldview Management System would
not just allow the user to read sites more efficiently but be able to
actively manage and expand their worldview in a number of ways by
making robust use of metadata. Ideally, my Worldview Management System
would allow me to see the sites that I read *and* the blogposts that I
write through the following lenses: UNQUOTE [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
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Back to Software Garden.
I have resigned from Interland as an employee and CTO. I will be
available to them to provide advice on product and service offerings,
and possibly participate on their behalf in various external
relationships. I am going back full-time to Software Garden, the tiny
company that I founded in 1985. I plan to do consulting (for Interland
and other companies) to bring in revenue, as well as product
development and sales (for Software Garden). [Dan Bricklin's Log]
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Debka has some
interesting analysis that indicates that the US is in a bind. The
recent moves to empower Iraqi defense forces to take control of city
centers is premature (as proved in the brazen attack in Fallujah
yesterday). At the same time the US is committed to a shift of power
this summer and the UN is talking about elections this fall. There are
three potential outcomes for this:
- A full civil war that draws in adjacent powers.
- Democracy and stability under Sunni leadership.
- More US occupation but with increasing resistance.
How would you assign the odds (in percentages) for each outcome? [John Robb's Weblog]
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ReSharper first impressions.
After downloading and installing the ReSharper VS.NET plugin earlier
tonight, I have to say I'm pretty impressed with this first release.
While it's still got quite a while to go to before it gets close to
IDEA, JetBrains did manage to add a lot of very useful functionality to
VS.NET. Here's an overview of the current functionality of this
plugin:... (658 words) [Luke Hutteman's public virtual MemoryStream]
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Vault: Looking for true love on Valentine's Day. On the website of many small ISVs there is a testimonials page which contains
quotes from happy users of their products. The concept here is
great: Prospective users like knowing how current users
feel.
However, the usual implementation of this concept has a bug: Since the
company's website is maintained by the company, it is almost impossible not to
wonder how those testimonials might have been embellished as they found their
way onto the site. When I see one of those pages, I always wonder how
credible it is. Is this true love? Are these real quotes from real
users who really love this product?
I have always wanted a testimonial page for Vault, but I want one which does
not have this particular bug. So, I have decided to try something
different.
Over on SourceGear's forum site, I have created a page which is
intended to serve as a place to collect positive comments from
Vault users. The concept here is a testimonial page which is controlled by
users. Anyone who wants to contribute a few words of praise for Vault can
simply post their comments as a reply. (There are a few simple ground
rules which are explained at the top of that page.)
So today I am asking my readers for a favor. If you are a Vault user,
and if you truly love Vault, please consider expressing your affection by
posting a few words. :-)
Happy Valentine's Day! [Eric.Weblog()]
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The Vault Single User Edition is dead.... ... Long live the Vault Single User Edition
With our new pricing for Vault, some readers will note that we have
eliminated the "Single User
Edition". Previously priced at $49, this offering was quite
popular with self-employed consultants and their ilk. In place of the
Single User Edition product, we have implemented what could be called an
"Implicit Single User Edition". In a nutshell, Vault is
now free for one user. Just download the Vault
binaries and install them. You don't need a serial number at all.
With no serial numbers, Vault 2.0 is hard-coded to behave as if there is one
license. [Eric.Weblog()]
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My ETCON talk, in the Public Domain. I have just given a talk at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Confernece called Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books, which is something of an anomaly for me in three ways:
- I wrote out this talk, word for word, in advance of the presentation
- I am releasing that written text as a free, public domain file, right now, moments before I get off the stage
So here's the text of that talk, dedicated to the Public Domain, for you to do with what you will.
This isn't to say that copyright is bad, but that there's such a thing
as good copyright and bad copyright, and that sometimes, too much good
copyright is a bad thing. It's like chilis in soup: a little goes a
long way, and too much spoils the broth.
From the Luther Bible to the first phonorecords, from radio to the
pulps, from cable to MP3, the world has shown that its first preference
for new media is its "democratic-ness" -- the ease with which it can
reproduced.
(And please, before we get any farther, forget all that business about
how the Internet's copying model is more disruptive than the
technologies that proceeded it. For Christ's sake, the Vaudeville
performers who sued Marconi for inventing the radio had to go from a
regime where they had *one hundred percent* control over who could get
into the theater and hear them perform to a regime where they had
*zero* percent control over who could build or acquire a radio and tune
into a recording of them performing. For that matter, look at the
difference between a monkish Bible and a Luther Bible -- next to that
phase-change, Napster is peanuts)
Link [Boing Boing Blog]
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Down and Out relicensed today. Just over a year ago, I released my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, as an experiment in what would happen if I allowed my precious copyright to be slightly eroded by one of the Creative Commons licenses. I chose the most restrictive CC license available to me, staying cautious, and I waited to see if the sky would fall.
It didn't.
So here we are, just a little over a year later, and I am currently, at
this moment, standing on a stage at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology
Conference, delivering a talk called Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books,
in which I lay out the case for what I've done and explain the myraid
ways in which the sky has not fallen on me, and just about now, I'm
announcing what' sin this blog post:
That I am re-licensing Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, effective today, under the terms of one of the least
restrictive Creative Commons licenses, the
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, which explicitly allows
anyone in the world to make any non-commercial adaptation of my book
s/he can think of: translations, radio plays, movies, sequels, fanfic,
slashfic...you get the picture.
I can't wait to see what you-all make of this. Surprise me, please!
Link [Boing Boing Blog]
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Python runs on Nokia phones.
During yesterday's morning keynote at ETCON, the CTO of Nokia confirmed
that new Nokia phones could run python scripts. Rael's got the
screenshots.
Yesterday's keynote by Nokia CTO Pertti Korhonen at the O'Reilly
Emerging Technology Conference confirmed that we would be seeing Python
rolling on Series 60 handsets (specifically the 6600 and family) via
Forum Nokia.
The proof being in the pudding, here are a few snapshots of the
Python interpreter and scripts running on a 6600 to get your
programming juices flowing...
Link [Boing Boing Blog]
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Why Sharepoint really isn't used for weblogging. Dave Winer was at Microsoft on Monday. Don Hopkins put up a transcript. At one point they compared Sharepoint with weblogging.
Dave made a point about open formats and why that'd be important for Sharepoint to do.
I think Dave missed why Sharepoint isn't being used for weblogging.
I wrote about this earlier. I have a checklist of "what made weblogging
hot?" that I call "the five pillars of conversational software."
Sharepoint only has one of the five.
The five are:
1) Is your system easy to publish to (can I go to a URL, see a box, type in it, and hit publish?) Sharepoint has this.
2) Can I discover which sites have been published? With weblogs I
can go to weblogs.com and see which sites have just been published.
With Sharepoint? No. I have a Sharepoint site on Microsoft's intranet.
3) Does your system show social ties? With weblogs I have a public
referers page. I can see who has linked to me within minutes of them
doing so (as long as they send some traffic my way -- hint for
webloggers, if you link to me, click on the link on your own weblog).
With Sharepoint? Nope. I don't know if the http://longhorn site links to my http://evangelism site. And, none of the info I get from Trackbacks or referers (traffic importance, etc). I can't start a conversation.
4) Does your system build permalinks for individual ideas? No. On my http://evnagelism
site I've posted long pages that have several ideas each. If I wanted
to point you to the third idea I've put on a page, there's no way to do
it automatically (yeah, I know, I can manually build a name tag, but
that's not the same thing as a permalink). Translation, it's hard to
virally send your idea around.
5) Does your system syndicate? Does it build an RSS or an Atom feed
that I can read in a news aggregator (I'm watching 1300 news feeds
right now -- that would be impossible to do if I needed to visit all
those sites in the web browser). Sharepoint doesn't do this natively
today (there is an addon, but my Sharepoint site does not yet publish
in RSS or Atom yet).
Sharepoint DOES support open formats. It publishes in HTML. Now, you
might say it isn't "cool looking" HTML. You might say "it doesn't
support the latest CSS standards." But if you said either of those
things you'd be totally missing the point. Those two things have
NOTHING to do with why Sharepoint isn't being used for weblogging or
syndication or why most people outside of Microsoft perceive Sharepoint
as being behind the times (Mick Stanic, of OgilvyInteractive just told
me basically the same things as I'm reporting to you here). [The Scobleizer -- Celebrating the Geek lifestyle]
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First look at Flickr. Stewart Butterfield is giving me a demo of flickr.
Real-time media sharing. Collaborative drawing. Real-time Photoshop
contests. Uploading samples. Playing with the media we all generate.
Free, ad-based. Expected to see "pro" accounts. Stewart wrote the user interaction/UI for it. This is impressive.
It was turned on on Tuesday. Already a couple thousand users. Real launch is next week. [The Scobleizer -- Celebrating the Geek lifestyle]
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Alphaville Herald Interview with Don Hopkins. Interview with Don Hopkins
In this interview, Don Hopkins describes his early days on the Sims
development team with Will Wright (back when the project was called
Dollhouse) and the difficulties the team had fighting EA's attempts to
terminate the project, and then preventing EA from gutting it of
interesting content (like architecture tools). Even now, he claims that
EA fails to respect Will Wright and his vision by not developing custom
content for TSO, and that it has shown no interest in a tool that he
(Hopkins) created that would allow users to safely create custom
objects that won't crash the game.
Overview of the Interview -- some headline quotes:
"I recall that one of our most difficult accomplishments was
convincing EA not to cancel the project, because some of the EA old
guard didn’t trust nor respect Will’s vision, didn’t “get” the idea of
Dollhouse, didn’t think it would sell, wanted to inject it full of
their old tried and trusted formula, and wanted to gut out the most
interesting parts of the game (like the architecture tools). I think
it’s a lucky fluke that The Sims ever shipped, and I hope EA has
learned enough from their experience to trust the projects that Will is
directly involved in, listen to what he’s been saying eloquently and
consistently for years, and let something like The Sims happen again."
" I don’t think the lack of user created content is the only reason
The Sims Online is a failure, but I think it’s an extremely important
one that EA went out on a limb and promised, but never executed on. EA
still hasn’t officially announced that they’re not going to let Maxis
support user created content, but as far as I have been able to tell,
they’ve whitewashed the original discussion groups where they made and
discussed the promise. I realize that there are some difficult
technical issues that have to be solved, in order to support user
created content in an online game like The Sims Online. That’s why I
wrote this proposal for SafeTMog, a tool that would enable users to
safely create objects for The Sims Online that could not possibly crash
the game: http://www.donhopkins.com/2004/02/05.html#a72"
"Unfortunately
EA was not apparently interested in SafeTMog, which leads me to believe
that they’re not interested in ever supporting user created content in
The Sims Online. I don’t know why Maxis never executed on the plan they
promised, but I do believe they disregarded and didn’t respect Will
Wright’s opinion in this matter, which he clearly articulated. I don’t
think the problem was a lack of resources – just the opposite. So much
conservative money was bet on the project that it wasn’t allowed to
innovate. I don’t believe it was ineptitude at the engineering or
design level, but more likely at the executive management, resource
allocation and marketing level. My impression is that some of the
people in charge didn’t believe in Will’s vision, didn’t trust him,
didn’t listen to him, didn’t do what he’s been saying for years, all
along. I wish EA would have taken some of the millions of dollars they
made from The Sims 1, and invested it back in fully developing The Sims
Online, instead of sucking it out of Maxis to support the rest of EA."
You can read the entire Interview with Don Hopkins in the Alphaville Herald. [Don Hopkins' RadiOMatic BlogUTron]
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Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks ETCON talk notes. Here're my running notes from Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego.
It's the 10-second rule: if you can't file something in 10
seconds, you won't do it. Todo.txt involves cut-and-paste, the
simplest interface we can imagine.
It's also the simplest way to find intercomation. EMACS, Moz and
Panther have incremental search: when you type a "t" it goes to
the first mention of "t", add "to" and you jump to the first
instance of "to", etc.
This is being added to Longhorn (Unix geeks, we've had this since
Jan 1 1900, and it will go away in 2038).
Power-users don't trust complicated apps. Every time power-geeks
has had a crash, s/he moves away from it. You can't trust
software unless you've written it -- and then you're just more
forgiiving.
Text files are portable (except for CRLF issues) between mac and
win and *nix.
Link [Boing Boing Blog]
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Programs that write programs. Following pointers from Ned Batchelder's recent excursion into code generation
led me to another nice example of the power of dynamic languages. In
order to streamline his use of C++, Ned wrote a little tool called cog which enables him to embed, in C++ programs, Python fragments that generate verbose and/or repetitive C++ constructs. He adds:
For more about code generation in general, try:
-
Dave Thomas interviewed about code generation. Dave Thomas is one of the Pragmatic Programmers,
and I find I agree with him almost universally. He forbids putting the
output of code generators under source control, I encourage it. We
agree that the output should never be edited.
- The Code Generation
page on the c2 wiki. As will happen with a wiki, this fractures off in
many directions, with many different viewpoints, both for and against
code generation.
[Ned Batchelder]
... [Jon's Radio]
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Andrew Grumet's RSS TiVo
system is very interesting. Increasingly people are getting high
definition TVs (Plasma, LCD, or Projection) that display text that is
crisp and readable. Additionally, the vast majority of programming
doesn't broadcast in full screen HDTV format and therefore leaves lots
of screen real-estate unused. It would be great to put RSS into that
empty space. This may be something that the HD versions of the media
center PCs should look at. That way, if you see something interesting
you can zip away to the site to read the rest of the post/article. An
HDTV is a wonderful 42 inch wide-format computer monitor (at least mine
is). [John Robb's Weblog]
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Virtual Keyboard Really Exists!. Somebody hide my wallet! MobilePlanet has ultra-cool, George-Jetson-ish Virtual Keyboard
for sale for $99.95! The specs say it works with most Palms and uses a
USB/Serial Connector. I'm going to guess that means it doesn't work
with the Treo 600, but how do I tell?????? [via Daily Palm]
"The Virtual Laser Keyboard leverages the power of laser and
infrared technology and projects a full-size keyboard onto any flat
surface. As you type on the laser projection; it analyzes what you're
typing by the coordinates of that location....
The Virtual Laser Keyboard requires no special training. The light
weight device weighs two ounces and is similar in size to a disposable
cigarette lighter. The Virtual Laser Keyboard includes a
self-contained, rechargeable lithium ion battery. It provides the
Virtual Laser Keyboard with its own internal power supply, so it
doesn't drain any battery power from the PDA or PC. The battery lasts
three to four hours, more than enough time to do some instant messaging
and SMS messaging from the handheld device or to update calendar and
phone book entries."
I want, I want, I want!
Also on the list for tonight is to try out the supposedly released the new RealPlayer that supports the Treo 600. I think it still doesn't handle streaming, though, which would be the whole, fricking point. [The Shifted Librarian]
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Leveraging RSS at Disney ETCON talk. Here're my running notes from Leveraging RSS at Disney: from Collaboration to Massive Content Delivery at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego.
Modern computers can handle large files, video, media, etc.
Want to provide experiences above the effective bitrate of our users, and bits are expensive to ship.
Example: Added a high-quality video clip to the front page of ESPN.com.
Came to think about the enclosure tag in RSS -- the idea of
asynchronously d/ling content behind the scenes. You can download the
experience prior to hitting the page.
Built a client-side technology -- espn.com, disney.com, etc -- an RSS
aggregator that d/ls and pre-caches video on the machine, and
communicates with the mothership to tell them who's got what in the
cache.
We wanted 500k users in 1 year -- in three weeks we hit a million. Over 2 million now. Sustainign 2GB of bandwidth, TBs/day.
Link [Boing Boing Blog]
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A good demo of VB.whidbey inspires. A good demoer can make you feel like you could go home and be world class at what they are teaching you. Robert Green of the Visual Basic team
was just onstage here at the .NET Developer's Association showing off
new features of Whidbey, the next version of Visual Studio.net.
It was enough to make me give up my dreams of being a C# programmer.
I am still struggling through the early stages of learning to program.
The next version of Visual Basic has so many things that will help me
become proficient enough that I'm convinced it's the way for me to go.
I haven't really paid attention to Visual Basic for the past 24
months. I'll be honest. I wrote off Visual Basic. I thought it was a
"has been" product. You know, one of those Microsoft products like
Outlook Express that lots of people use but that haven't really seen
any real innovations for a while.
Tonight I saw how Green used pre-done snippets to get things done
quick -- and which teach you how to program to boot. That, and new form
design features (aligning text labels to text input boxes is a snap
now) and edit-and-continue editing (you don't need to take your eyes
off of your code to debug it anymore) and pre-compilation code errors
(it underlines errors and gives you suggestions) tell me Visual
Basic.NET is coming back.
Thanks Robert for the inspiration!
Anita Rowland blogged the meeting. So did Jim Blizzard (with photo) and Wesner Moise and also Brian Lutz who echoed my observations of Robert Green's skill: "My
jaw nearly dropped when I saw that this task that had proved the source
of so much frustration had been reduced nearly down to a simple
drag-and-drop." [The Scobleizer -- Celebrating the Geek lifestyle]
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© Copyright 2004 William J. Maya.
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