Saturday, April 27, 2002

David Chappell (aka the best dressed man in software) started an email newsletter. His first article is How Progress Happens: .NET and Java. David's writing & speaking is always marvelously clear, and this newsletter looks well worth subscribing to. Recently I've been reading David's new book, Understanding .NET: A Tutorial and Analysis, and it's just as good as his previous books. David's got his own series with Addison-Wesley - the next book in the series, Understanding Web Services by Eric Newcomer, looks promising based on the ToC. [Peter Drayton's Radio Weblog] 9:48:15 PM

John Lam: "...attending the first ever Aspect Oriented Software Development conference......successfully demonstrated CLAW, my runtime aspect weaver...well received. The future is looking quite bright...posting a copy of my...presentation and the demos...until I get a security story...I won't be releasing any bits". Congrats, John! I hope you nail the security story ASAP so you can release bits, too. [Peter Drayton's Radio Weblog] I have been watching John's AOP work with great interest. This is great stuff. 4:43:49 PM

Hugh Pyle provides an excellent description Edge Services: In the edge services model there is no Big Central Server, just a whole lot of PCs (at the edge of the network: behind firewalls, on roaming WiFi connections, DHCP-assigned IP addresses, all the usual garbage - you generally can't find a simple IP address to call into these machines). By building SOAP interfaces to the services these PCs can implement - and there's a whole lot of interesting services they can provide - you get a new world of interop between Groove and Web. The magic sauce is somewhere in the middle, using well-known relay points (multiple, many) to be able to call these devices's services (and receive callback events from them) regardless where the endpoints are. This is one of the ways that has made this project so challenging, and interesting.  Most Web Services models are an extension of Client/Server architectures.  The service lives in the center, and you call it from the edge.  At Groove we are all about decentralization which leaves the power with the user.  So I can have my information accessible from anywhere, but it is always under my control and on my devices.  Of course, I do have to have a device connected somewhere to access it.  But hopefully you get the concept. [John Burkhardt] 4:42:40 PM

Hmm, some really nice people out there, sending me emails. "...I hope you reconsider, but if you do quit I can respect that decision." and "I was sorry to hear about your decision to quit blogging. Your page was one that I regularly read because it seems like your views of .NET were very close to my own (There's too few public Managed C++ advocates in the world..)." "I won't try to talk you out of the way you're currently feeling or try to minimize whatever it was that is causing you to feel this way but I wonder if you'd reconsider you decision to totally abandon something that (IMO) was resonating with people and helped educate them as well. If all the good guys leave town then only the bad guys will stay. And then this blogging thing _will_ be totally worthless....Anyway, I've said my piece. Even if you do stick with your decision to end your blog, know that it did have a positive impact and was valuable." Very nice! 4:41:56 PM

SuSE touts user-friendly v8.0. Up and running in minutes [The Register] Gee, sounds just like *any* version of Windows, since, ahh...1995 perhaps 4:36:48 PM

I wasn't going to write about this but I have a bunch of emails. About a week ago, after yet another online confrontation, I quit Radio. I stopped completly. Why? Because its not worth it. Despite Winer's hype, Radio and Blogs are nothing more than a glorified electronic diary. There is nothing earth-shattering here. What's worse, is a whole bunch of geeks (who have little social skills) unleashed in a public forum where they can show even worse behavior, attacking others and trampeling things. Where are the checks? Who checks the facts? There were and continue to be totally false things posted by people on a variety of things. Who watches the community? What if someone gets hurt? Well, the attitude is probably one of "obtaining a thicker skin." Is that what we really want? I don't think so. That's just an excuse for bad behavior. Also, as Chris Sells pointed out many people get trapped up in the process of commenting on Radio and blogging in general. "Look, isn't this cool" and such just point out to the usual geek thing of crying for attention. I know. I was doing it too. Spending 4 hours a day with this. I'll tell you what I learned. I love my 4 year old son Jonathan and my wife a whole lot more than any of this. And that's what counts. Arguing with people endlessely here does little and creates a whole lot of distress, Loving my son a whole lot more and spending that time with him creates a whole lot more in life.   1:00:22 PM

© Copyright 2002 Sam Gentile.