Updated: 12/2/2002; 12:18:59 PM.
Patrick Chanezon's Radio Weblog
P@'s links, comments and thoughts
        

Tuesday, November 26, 2002

Russel's got a new job


Announcements Continued.... Okay, so I gave my notice at work so I can talk now - no nasty surprises for anyone here reading online (not that I think anyone reads my blog here at work anyways...).

So woohooo! Last night, the American company I talked about before called Orcom called me up and gave me the offer which I accepted.

...

-Russ [Russell Beattie Notebook]

Russel's got a new job: congratulations Russel !

It was fun to get the teasers in the morning in the Newsreader today: I wondered when your announcement was going to come.

Managing 2 careers + children can be really challenging, but it's worth it. Good luck to both of you with your new jobs. From what I've read in your blog, they're lucky to get you :-)


11:49:04 PM Google It!      comment []

Recommended reading


Recommended reading.

Economist.com design director David Wertheimer shed light on his site's redesign process in a recent book, "Usability: the Site Speaks for Itself." Now, Digital Web Magazine has published excerpts from the book. I've wanted to get the book for a while; reading this whetted my appetite more. (On a related note, Economist.com's innovative "subscriber sponsorship" has been the buzz lately.)

Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch declares keyword meta tags are dead.

Mark Pilgrim has made several technical innovations on his weblog, including a custom 404 script that enables URL-based shortcuts. (Here at Holovaty.com, I've had URL-based search functionality for a few months -- just type holovaty.com/search/[searchstring] in your browser's location bar.) He's also put together a Recommended reading tool that, given your weblog's URL, suggests other sites you might like to read. It behooves publishers of online news sites to keep an eye on the early technological adapters in the weblog community.

[Holovaty.com]
7:21:08 PM Google It!      comment []


Books and blogs. A while back I mentioned Erik Benson's All Consuming site. It continues to intrigue me, and I've now signed up for the weekly RSS feed. Inspired by Weblog BookWatch, Erik's service makes books, as well as people, an organizing principle of  blogspace. So here's a little experiment. I'm going to cite some books I've read recently, and have been thinking about, in order to see what kind of discussion is reflected back through All Consuming. ... [Jon's Radio]
7:16:46 PM      comment []

Groove Webservices WSDL available.


Groove Webservices WSDL available.

Great news : The WSDL and XSD files for the eagerly awaited Groove Webservices are available through Groove's Devzone

Groove Web Services provide programmatic access to Groove tools and objects through SOAP interfaces, available for Groove Workspace's most popular components, including Files, Discussion, Calendar, Contacts, Members, and Awareness. Further, Groove Web Services infrastructure supports 3rd party developers' ability to expose their custom Groove tools as web services. 

Congratulations to John Burkhardt and Matt Pope and the rest of the GWS team for this milestone. You're right John, it just keeps getting better :-)  [Jeroen Bekkers' Groove Weblog]

Soon time for me to play with this stuff.


7:16:09 PM Google It!      comment []

Groove 2.5 and Sharepoint 2.0


Groove 2.5 and Sharepoint 2.0. Commweb : Getting out of isolated-workspace ruts
Groove and Sharepoint
Dana Gardner, an analyst with Aberdeen Group, says there's no other product on the market that can combine a powerful centralized collaboration tool such as Sharepoint with the decentralized, offline capabilities of Groove. "There's nothing this comprehensive for the user and easy for an IT department," Gardner says. "You get the best of an intranet combined with the best of an extranet." [Jeroen Bekkers' Groove Weblog]

MS is getting in the Portal space through collaboration: with Groove they have a killer combination !


7:15:36 PM Google It!      comment []

File access from Servlet apps..


File access from Servlet apps..

Jeff Duska is forgetting a couple of things that many Servlet/JSP developers (myself included) often forget. He is forgetting the distributed nature of Servlet apps and he is forgetting the WAR.

Someday, when your app becomes incredibly popular, you might find that you need to distribute the load across multiple worker processes on multiple computers. All the major app servers support this, does your app? In a distributed configuration, if your app writes a file to the file-system on one computer, you won't be able to get to that file on another computer. If you want all instances of your app to share a file, then this is a problem. If you are just writing a simple little temporary file, which sounds like Jeff's case, then this is generally not a problem.

Even if you are only writing a temporary file, you still don't want to write it inside your Servlet context. When your app is packaged in a WAR file, may not be able to open files inside the Servlet context. If you are just writing a temporary file, it might be better to use one of the static java.io.File.createTempFile() methods to get a file. [Blogging Roller]


7:14:26 PM Google It!      comment []

Emergent intelligence in the Net?..


Emergent intelligence in the Net?..

Cognitive and Biological psychologists (well, including me) have developed behavioral diagnostics of intelligence meta-cognition (the ability to monitor one's own thoughts; a step toward consciousness perhaps).  These could be adapted for study of emergent intelligence in the net...and indeed doing so is the only way to get beyond the current interesting but necessarily inconclusive debate ("is too!" "is not!"  "is too" " "might be!").

Proudly presented pointers to my own work in this area:

William James and the emerging philosophy of the World Wide Web
The View from the Adaptive Landscape
Are Species Intelligent?
and early work on metacognition in dolphins, monkeys, and humans, reviewed and extended by David Smith et al here

Emergent intelligence in the Net?.

Phil Wainewright: Spontaneous intelligence and the Semantic Web. "the only way intelligence gets into a computer is as a result of humans putting it there."

My first reaction was to endorse that statement wholeheartedly. Upon thinking a bit more about it, I think I'd be more comfortable with a more restrictive statement such as "the Semantic Web will not by itself generate intelligence beyond what humans put into it".

I think spontaneous intelligence might pop up in other computer-related areas. For instance, as the Internet grows into a more and more biological-like system, we might begin to notice large-scale patterns of behavior emerge that were not planned by the designers. (Actually I'm not sure that this hasn't already happened, e.g. in router networks.) If some of these patterns turn out to have a recognizable function, they might be construed as evidence of intelligence.

[Seb's Open Research]

[Jon Schull's Weblog]

Very good pointers.


7:13:33 PM Google It!      comment []

Microsoft: Peer-to-Peer beats Digital Rights Management any day


Microsoft: Peer-to-Peer beats Digital Rights Management any day.

MS Researchers say P2P will always beat DRM. According to The Register (File swap nets will win, DRM and lawyers lose, say MS researchers), a paper from a group of Microsoft researchers says that "darknet" file swapping will always be able to share pirated files, no matter what DRM technology copyright holders use. The paper goes through the various options like watermarking and explains why they all will fail. This true even for DRM built into the hardware. The paper concludes that the only way for corporations to compete is to make their services more convenient and full-featured. We have known this all along, but it is pretty amazing to hear some Microsoft people say it. This paper is just the thing to refer to when the next congressional bill comes up to make DRM manditory, just explain to them that even MS says it won't work. [infoAnarchy]

[Seb's Open Research] [Jon Schull's Weblog]

Maybe this will lead to a more balanced approach to DRM than the current: we media and software companies control everything you do with your computer.


7:12:57 PM Google It!      comment []

Daily Wireless summary of Comdex.


Daily Wireless summary of Comdex.
Comdex Opens

Comdex, opening today in Las Vegas, showcases the $1.3 trillion tech sector. The show may be declaring chapter 11, but things never looked rosier for Wi-Fi.

...

Will an Alienware Media Center (right, $1699) with 42" Gateway Plasma Monitors ($3000) deliver wireless streaming HDTV using Vixs chips to provide eight streams to Viewsonic's Smart Displays ($1000) in shopping malls across the planet by Comdex 2003?

Bet on it.

Posted by samc on Sunday, November 17 @ 13:41:43 PST (14 reads)

[Jon Schull's Weblog]

Lots of cool WiFi devices at Comdex this year.

Excelllent review. No need to fly to Vegas.

 


7:10:53 PM Google It!      comment []

J2EE vs. NET, Java vs. C#


J2EE vs. NET, Java vs. C#. [James Strachan's Radio Weblog]

A very interesting discussion between James and Graham Glass about the 2 current contenders in language and architecture.


6:58:40 PM Google It!      comment []

The Java API Map: I hope students are not put off by java's breadth


On Java Map. This Java map over at O'Reilly's OnJava is pretty cool.

Java API Flow

-Russ [Russell Beattie Notebook]

This rings a bell with the discussion between James Strachan and Graham Glass in today's post J2EE vs. NET, Java vs. C#, about the overly complexity of J2EE, which is only a small area on this map.

Finally on J2EE vs .Net. I totally agree that we need a simpler way to create server side applications. Glue, Axis and recent AOP discussions are all examples of this happening.

I'm glad to have learnt java going along as the language grew: every new API was a little gift to play with.

I wonder how people who come out of school today manage to learn all this and what they think about it. I haven't met any young programmers in a while: the people with whom I've worked in the past 3 years are all pretty experienced.

This complexity is something that may put java in danger.

 


6:56:34 PM Google It!      comment []

Hoarding is for the weak


Hoarding is for the weak. Xerox has apparently proven what all knowledge workers intrinsically knew anyway; that knowledge hoarding is detrimental. Via Column Two

A recent Xerox research report has found that high-performing employees don't tend to hoard information. According to the news summary: The idea that knowledge is power has been knocked on the head by researchers who claim that high-performing employees are more likely to be ones who proactively share information with their colleagues.

My own experience agrees 100%. I am personally more powerful in what I do when I collaborate and openly share with others. They provide essential critique, support and grounding for my thoughts. [thought?horizon]

I think there are exceptions to this Hoarding is for the weak rule. When an organization is in decline you might see good people who for some reason can't or won't leave for greener pastures trying to save their butt by hoarding knowledge, in an attempt to make themselves irreplaceable.

[Seb's Open Research] [Jon Schull's Weblog]

Best guys share has been my experience as well.

I've been in organizations in decline but usually good people usually leave or continue to share knowledge. But my experience not that vast. 


6:47:14 PM Google It!      comment []

Websphere 5.0 announced: Web Services, a clever mix of open source and proprietary features


IBM pushes Web services, e-business in WebSphere upgrade. Version 5.0 to ship Tuesday [InfoWorld: Web Services]

Web services features include the Axis 3.0 open-source SOAP parser for improving Web services requests by a factor of four to five, and support of Web Services Invocation Framework, an IBM technology that enables Web services to be deployed over networking protocols such as CORBA IIOP, MQSeries, and JMS. Web services over AOL Instant Messaging also is supported.

...

In addition, using Parallel Sysplex technology, multiple mainframes can be linked together as one system. Mainframes also offer a workload management mechanism for managing service-level agreements.

IBM is really good at leveraging the Open Source: they involve some of their top engineers, like Sam Ruby in the Apache community, then they really leverage that by integrating the latest and greatest of the Open Source, like Axis; then they add some value added proprietary software that  is necessary to industrial strength sites, like WSIF. And some proprietary soft that runs only on their proprietary hardware, so that if you really want some advanced features you have to buy their hardware.

Clever.

The good scalable WS stack will be useful for the Grid computing area: Websphere will be their vehicle of choice to implement the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA)  

Other functions of WebSphere 5.0 include HTTP clustering for sharing workloads between multiple application servers, and servlet-level clustering for managing the link between the Web and application servers.

I need to look at what their docs to see what this means exactly. I thought they already had that in Websphere 4.01. BEA had these features since Weblogic 6.1 !


6:42:08 PM Google It!      comment []

I want to switch


Reminder of How Good OS X Users Have It. [James Duncan Davidson]

James' weekend at his parents remind me my own weekends at my parents and parents in laws. I also used to be pretty good at debugging all these problems under windows and setting up their systems. But I no longer have time to do it.

I consider switching myself soon.

His recent post about the fact that Nice matters make me even more willing to switch: I guess i must be getting old.


6:04:03 PM Google It!      comment []

© Copyright 2002 Patrick Chanezon.
 
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