Sunday, August 11, 2002

Programming Radio Userland http://radio.weblogs.com/0100190/stories/2002/02/05/hackingRadioPart1Docspotti.html I few years ago I tried to put something reasonably sophisticated together in Frontier, so I bought the O'Reilly Frontier book and hacked away. I dealt with a fair amount of XML data, and I got to appreciate a lot of things about what an integrated OO and scripting system can do for that problem space. However, the whole platform really suffered in terms of debuggability, robustness and documentation compared to environments I was familiar with, (I had to build VERSION CONTROL support into it - sigh) so I gave up trying to do anything it doesn't already do. I see lots of reviews nowadays of people (like the .NET Guy) who actually pick up Dave's gauntlet and try coding on it or getting it to do what they want. But since they're not the 5 people on the planet comfortable with extending Betty, they just flail and rail at the platform. Radio is great - if you want to maintain your own blog tool (I don't), I suggest you go use something else. FWIW, MovableType is currently highest on my list of other tools to try. 10:50:28 PM      comment []  trackback []

Desktop Linux [Review of latest CrossOver Office http://www.desktoplinux.com/articles/AT2282537026.html ] In a related article, Gartner quotes a figure of $1200 for the training costs associated with going to an alternate office suite for large organizations. Has anyone considered what remotely running Office applications with X and Wine as part of a longer term migration away from Microsoft does to the ROI/retraining equation? 8:54:44 PM      comment []  trackback []

Userland file system I'm seeing serious possibilities for the Userland file system software. http://lufs.sourceforge.net/ I'd like to roll my own web monitoring application, that would notify me of updates to sites that I like, and send me a diff of what had changed. I think using httpfs combined with CVS, add in a cron job that does a nightly check-in and I'd be pretty close to done. Almost zero code to do something pretty darn useful. 8:51:29 PM      comment []  trackback []

<SCRIPT RUNAT=SERVER LANGUAGE=TCLScript>? I have to have a go at this. I guess there actually are two prototype implementations of Tcl as an active scripting language, call-able from IIS. I know performance will be terrible, but I have to give this a try and see if I can use openacs/aolserver TCL code to call my MSSQL Server openacs data model. That would be wacked. :-) 6:52:18 PM      comment []  trackback []

First Steps working with Leo I finally got around to using Leo for my work with pg2tsql, my postgres to transact sql converter. It's pretty straightforward so far... I like how it bolts onto emacs the sometimes-useful hierarchical project view found in IDE's, and also how it gives you a 30,000 ft view of what the code is supposed to be doing. I'm hoping it will bring some sanity to the long perl scripts I find myself writing. 6:51:25 PM      comment []  trackback []

Steve Gillmor: "Spam will go away -- with the death of e-mail." [Scripting News] The type of bulk mailing that currently accounts for most spam abuse is dead, it just doesn't know it yet: http://www.cloudmark.com . However, I guess I could always send Dan an email asking him if he wanted to invest in my Nigerian widget factory, and he'd be correct to call it spam. But I think the point is that this type of unsolicited commercial email has existed since I started using email in 1976 - a long long time ago. That it exists doesn't matter (and didn't, for most of the time I've used email) - that it is manageable is all that matters. I think the next pendulum swing in favor of spammers will be when they satisfy the Turing test. We should have some breathing room (to make sensible laws?) until then. 10:00:21 AM      comment []  trackback []