Wednesday, November 20, 2002

Raising the Bar on RSS Feed Quality. Timothy Appnel says we must improve the effectiveness of RSS feeds. He offers recommendations for authoring more useful and effective feeds with an approach that is neutral, practical, and conservative. [O'Reilly Network Articles] 6:30:15 PM      comment []

Solaris: A New Dawn for Sci-Fi?. Science-fiction buffs madly debate online the merits of Steven Soderbergh's upcoming remake of an obscure Russian film. Could the new Solaris, starring George Clooney, signal a revival of smart sci-fi? By Jason Silverman. [Wired News] No, that's not another Scott McNealy visionary talk, just a film. I have seen the version from Tarkovski but I didn't like it very much. I haven't read the book. 6:10:26 PM      comment []

Dropping the hacker mentality. A post from the OSAF mailing-list gives a summary of good practices for developers.  Most of them are good, but like all long lists, some are harder to agree with.  An in particular: Rather than put a bug in the bug database, first try to fix it. This is a bad idea and typical of a hacker's mentality as opposed to that of a software engineer.  This kind of action is based on the fallacy that the scope of a bug is limited to its fix.  This is the sure way to disaster (or at least to a very messy project). If you find a bug, the first thing you should do is enter it in the bug database.  The reason is simply that you are not going to be the only one working on it.  Once you (or someone else) are done fixing it, it needs to be QA'ed, which may involve writing new tests.  Then you might have to change the documentation, either as a release note or as a new section in your manual.  Then you might have to issue a patch, or one day somebody might read your code, stumble upon your fix and short of having a reference, will wonder why the hell is going on there (here is another good practice:  when you fix a bug, try to include the reference to the bug database in a comment). Stop thinking like a hacker or all you will produce will be code used by hackers. [Otaku, Cedric's weblog] One more great post from Cedric: soon I'll need to create a software engineering category for my Radio weblog.   6:03:21 PM      comment []

AOP and RDF. Just a little note: coincidentally AOP and RDF work very well together. Both are about attaching stuff to object identifiers. In the case of AOP it's about attaching code, and in the case of RDF it's about attaching data. I.e. the perfect way to store AOP objects is as RDF tuples, where each namespace represents an AOP "extension"(/Java interface). [Random thoughts] I've been reading articles about AOP, especially AspectForJ and it looks very seducing. I agree with the intuition that it is in principle similar to RDF. Having to ability to influence (wether adding code or describing) something from the outside is very powerful and fascinating. 6:02:02 PM      comment []

What is Microsoft OneNote? Microsoft OneNote is a new program in the Microsoft Office family that enables you to capture, organize, and reuse your notes on any laptop computer, desktop computer, or Tablet PC. It gives you one place to store all your notes and the freedom to work with them how you want. Je suis curieux et j'ai hâte d'esseyer ce produit. D'ailleurs, je convoite en ce moment un Tablet PC convertible (comme celui-ci) si je peux m'arranger pour le faire dualbooter en linux et m'en servir aussi comme d'un laptop régulier... [via Web Voice] [A Frog in the Valley. Communication + Technologies] I also dream of a Tablet PC. I'd like to develop some games for my kids (1 1/2 and 4 years old). I've been waiting for that kind of devices for 3 years now. Need to look at OneNote.   5:56:59 PM      comment []

Dream PDA-Phone by Nokia reviewed by Russel This is it.. ... -Russ [Russell Beattie Notebook] Russel salivates for the Nokia 3650: I have to admit his enthusiasm is contagious ! When can i have one of these babies ? My first PDA was a Psion IIIe, something like in 1995: I used to pour all my life in there, through the little keyboard. My wife would order me to stop using it when she talked to me. One day I let if fall on the floor, the batteries jumped out of it and I lost 6 months of data. This woke me up from my PDA-addiction. Now I do regular hotsynchs, and I very seldom do any input on my palm anymore. The underlying OS is what led to Symbian: it seems like Nokia made something great out of it. I wonder what you use as an input device though. Maybe there'll be an optional external keyboard. 5:52:08 PM Google It!      comment []

To fix or not to fix?. It's not worth spending an engineering day to fix a problem that wastes 30 seconds of someone's time once a month. This quote comes from Joel's latest column and it's music to my ears... [Otaku, Cedric's weblog] I just suggested not to fix a bug 5 minutes ago: I'll send this to my team as a follow up :-)   5:41:48 PM      comment []

Visual Thesaurus: Applet of the Week. <P> What can I say. It's just stunningly cool. Run it. My favorite applet of all time, I think. <P> Right now, I'm trying to figure out: if every person is separated by at most 6 degrees from everyone else, and if every film start is separated by at most 6 "film degrees" from Kevin Bacon, is there a similar thing for words in a thesaurus? <P> For example: Can I reach any word in the dictionary in 12 or fewer steps from "egg&am... [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service] cool indeed ! 5:39:17 PM      comment []

Bonsai Outliner.   I really like using JOE - the open source Java outliner. It's fast, flexible, Java and open source. However, I found myself wanting to be able to add and edit my outline while I was away from my desk on the bus. This is a relatively new thing for me. The bus to work at night is a chartered bus that goes directly from here to a stop right near my apartment, but can take anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour and 15 minutes last night. (There's also a bus in the morning, but at 8:30... I never am able to catch that one.) I want to be able to use that lost time in transit to review my day, plan for my evening and work on my thoughts with my outline! So even though I love JOE, I needed to find a solution for my Palm. First I downloaded and tried out Aportis' Braintree because there's a Windows and Mac client for it... but it was aweful. The PC client is horrible and it doesn't actually sync with the Palm, just exports. That's useless. Then I tried out Bonsai from Natara Software and it's AWESOME. Exactly what I was looking for. It's a full featured, easy to use outliner that perfectly syncs with the Palm. It took 2 seconds to export the outline as text from JOE and import it into Bonsai. The PC client is really nice, and one of the things that it has that JOE doesn't is the ability to mark nodes as "To Do" or "Tasks". A task is like a to-do, but with a percentage complete. This is great - it'll allow me to choose outline items as Getting Things Done style "actions" while I'm brainstorming, then I can "View Tasks Only" later to get a list of items to do. The only major downside is that the client is Windows only, but that's not a huge deal for now... I'm trying to limit my dependency on M$ code for an eventual migration, so I try not to do this. I do a lot of thinking... I don't have many people here to brainstorm with about technology. Much of what I write here is an attempt to clarify my thoughts, etc. Being able to brainstorm into an outliner, then carry it with me is very nice. Maybe the Palm isn't so useless after all. Once again, despite feeling like an early adopter, I'm many years behind the curve on some things. Anyways, I got this installed last night and a program called FatFinger, which is a blown up screen keyboard for the Palm you can use by tappping at the screen with your finger... I used the trial and was sold - especially because of my flaky digitizer which isn't very accurate. Then I installed the Afterburner hack, which made a noticeable difference while perusing the PDF for Steven Hawkings's novel using Adobe's Palm PDF reader. It was ridiculously slow switching pages before, but now it's reasonable. Very nice... my Palm is now quite useful again. Of course, after all this, I left it at home. Ugh. I remembered my mobile phone though... think about it. -Russ [Russell Beattie Notebook] I use a Handspring Treo (180 I think, the B&W version) since 6 months now and it solves 2 of the problems you described here: No need of a onscreen keyboard: the little keyboard that is included on the phone is good enough for short Notes taking No need to have a cell phone AND a palm: so now either you forget both, or none of them :-) I bought the B&W model when it shipped in Europe and find it very useful. It was expensive at that time but it seems the price went down dramatically.   But I don't use any extra applications on it: I don't travel too much and use it for calendar, addressbook and phone only. I did not subscribe to the web surfing or email services either: I spend my day at home in front of my computer and don't want to be disturbed while walking in the street. But I know it's there in case I change my mind. 12:50:48 PM      comment []