Friday, 21 June 2002

Eclipse Hello World plug-in runs Eclipse has a wizard that guides you through building a "Hello World" plug-in. Apart from not telling the user that certain free form text is actually going to be used as a java class path, and thus breaking horribly when I entered "Hello World" as said class path, it is easy as. I can see a lot of hours being thrown away playing with eclipse. It could easily be the basis of the app that I am thinking about building. At last, a Java UI toolkit that: looks cute, is fast. I think i am in love! 6:39:44 PM

Question of the day How do i feed marked up text to a neural net and get it to do magic? Hmmm. 6:21:57 PM

The failure of email clients Seth Godin: "By monetizing email, these big services create the friction that's currently missing from spam. Without friction, it spirals out of control. With friction, on the other hand, mass mailers make intelligent decisions about what's worth sending and what's not." [lawrence's notebook] Interesting idea. But it will not work because Email is a distributed system. Admittedly, its a quickly failing distributed system. I just had my email identity stolen today by virus running on a machine at a place I used to work at. It merrily went about sending email pretending to be me. That, and I get 200+ spam emails a day. So, in reality, the requirement here is to add some intelligence to my email client/web browser/news aggregator/usenet news reader that allows me to rate what is, and what isn't spam. Obviously we can go p2p on this one, but I suspect that everyone has different feelings as to what is useful, and what is not. And the feeling isn't even a binary decision. Going on just from or to email addresses is obviously not enough. We need a lot more data than that. I think i can see an AI in there. Another sales point for my Design The Box exercise. 5:41:44 PM

Nanny State Reality What is it with people? They think that absence of ideas will stop people thinking them? Do they believe people should be allowed to blame the media for their own lack of self control? Bleh. PARIS (Reuters) - A French politician called on Wednesday for a ban on "Scream," a trilogy of violent teen-slasher movies that a 17-year-old boy said inspired him to stab a schoolmate to death. Entertainment: French Teen Killing Prompts Call for 'Scream' Ban. 09:53 ET - Reuters [NewsBlip.com] 5:32:20 PM

Pet peeve of the day. I hate people who generate RSS for their site that includes relative links embeded. I click on the link in my aggregator, and it's all fuxx0red. I wonder if there is enough information in the underlying RSS to absolutify the html... 5:11:30 PM

RRDTool RRD Tool. For graphing stuff for reporting purposes. Even has perl interfaces. Hmmm. 4:08:30 PM

The Tipping Point of the blogsphere Why Authentication In Aggregators Is Such A Good Idea. [The Shifted Librarian] I think I am going to have to disagree with the lauded librarian on this issue. The whole reason that weblogs work is that they create an intelligent medium full of people who work collaborativly on sorting the good from the bad. Any introduction of things that reduce connectivity of parts of the medium to other parts inherently takes away this emergent property. That, and the fact that if I can't find out about something from site A, it is more than likely I will see the reflections of said something on site B. Go read The Tipping Point again. Weblogs are a medium made to make the communications between nodes quick. The above does increase my feeling on one thing though. The need for a knowledge management tool that can watch the web for changes, watch the users browsing habbits, and pull together mail and usenet. I could do it in Java with a SWT front end. That could be way cute. I am going to have to Design the Box soon. 3:51:26 PM

Bigger Than Enron PBS Frontline: Bigger Than Enron. [lawrence's notebook] Anyone know if this is going to be shown in Oz? [Later...] How is this for a tasty quote? But the weakness of the Democratic in the face of the greatest threat to capitalism since 1929 is by no means proof that the threat isn't real. Look at the stock market. Even though the real economy is in some kind of recovery, investors don't trust corporate balance sheets. This is potentially far more serious than it seems because U.S. capital markets need to import trillions of dollars from foreigners to cover our domestic capital shortfall that is the flipside of our trade deficit. The dollar has begun to fall, and this could feed on itself. [The Politics of Enron] So, my thoughts of earlier that the debt collector may be calling soon in the US of A may be closer than I thought. The debt collector is the rest of the world's pension plans. If everyone else decides to take their cash out of America and invest it in other places, we could see America tank. Think about that for a bit. 3:31:23 PM

More Flash Amusement Drivers Ed. It must be flash day today or something. 3:01:13 PM

RSS Everywhere Everytime I look at a webpage, I now think "Gee, what i'd do for an rss feed of changes to this page". Maybe there is a project there. Maybe. 2:19:49 PM

Jakarta has released POI 1.5.1 and Tomcat 4.0.4. alphaWorks has released MPEG-4 Video for the Java Media Framework. And one from the what the? basket - JDistro Project seems to be trying to "desktop for the Java virtual machine". Check it out - trippy stuff. Bet it runs slowly without JVM-on-a-chip though. [via Cafe Au Lait] [rebelutionary] JDistro is weird. I wish them luck. Or something. 2:16:43 PM

404 Page OK, I installed Flash for Netscape.  I wonder what Mark Pilgrim's Jackie, Michael, Bill, Lillian, or Marcus would think of this page? [Sam Ruby] That gets my vote for 404 page of the day. 1:57:19 PM

MTTF != Finding bugs. Study: Open, closed source equally secure. A Cambridge computer scientist argues, in the ideal case, that proprietary-source programs should be as secure as those developed openly. [CNET News.com] Equating finding bugs and MTTF. Errr. Problem. Mean time to fail is the time before something fails. A bug isn't a failure. It was a product defect. The fact that knowledge of the defect is not known by everyone is another story. 11:34:05 AM

SpamAssasin I Heart Spam Assassin. [raelity bytes] Something to install. Something like 95% of my email is now spam. 11:06:00 AM

Nav links Navigation links updated. The navigation links macros did not yet create title attributes. Mark Pilgrims explanation clearify that the title is very useful, so I changed the macros. The macros can also create normal hyperlinks, which will also get the rel="prev" or rel="next" attributes. I wonder if there's software that does something with rel attributes on elements. Mozilla shows it in the properties window of the hyperlink, but I think that's all. [Sjoerd Visscher's weblog] Yet something else I need to do. How about I start a todo list? :) 11:04:13 AM

Anachronistic Catholic Church Rome may reject U.S. reforms. According to Mark Shea Rome may put a hault to the reforms the U.S. Catholic bishops want to put in place.[paradox1x] Another anachronism about to bite the dust. Disintermediation is a wonderful thing. Honestly. 11:02:28 AM

Toxic sludge is good for fish The EPA says toxic sludge is good for fish. According to one article found on the Washington Times' website, the Environmental Protection Agency has stated that "The Army Corps of Engineers' dumping of toxic sludge into the Potomac River protects fish by forcing them to flee the polluted area and escape fishermen." [kuro5hin.org] Only in a government department. Seriously fucked up. 10:59:53 AM

Project Ace Project Ace. Nothing Beats Sun Labs' "Ace" Technology for Fast Development of Flexible, High-Performance, Enterprise Applications. Code from specifications (not the first time it's been discussed here, I know, but I wonder how close this is to being released on the market?). [Lambda the Ultimate] Someone wake me up when sun releases this. 10:56:13 AM

Copy protected DVDs. Hah "Harry Potter" DVD protection goes poof. Some DVDs of Warner Bros.' "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" lack technology that keeps people from copying the movie to videotape. What's up Hollywood's anti-piracy sleeve? [CNET News.com] Hmmm. If all dvd's are copy protected, why do they continue to turn up as DivXs? (I'm not even going to mention Fair Use rights) 10:53:59 AM

Netflix cranks up DVD distribution. With 10 new distribution centers opening throughout the country, the online DVD-rental company believes it has the capacity to handle up to 1 million orders a day. [CNET News.com] I want a Oz based netflix. But only if they don't force me to rewind the dvd when i send it back to them... 10:51:53 AM

JDO Suxx0rs David Jordan on JDO vs JDBC - interesting thoughts. I haven't looked at JDO much. I guess we'll all be 'forced' to move that way eventually because it's a Sun standard. Still, it does seem to have some smart people on the expert group (unlike some other JSRs ) so there is hope. [Blogging Roller] [rebelutionary] I have to say, I have used an early edition of Sun's JDO equiped Forte, and the number of things it couldn't do really did make it seem painful. Might see if OJB is any better. 10:50:58 AM

Moz Google bar Google Toolbar for Mozilla. The Googlebar for Mozilla project has released version 0.4.5 of their Mozilla add-on. "While we are in no way affiliated with Google inc, our current release, 0.4.5 Release candidate, emulates all of the basic search functionality of the toolbar, allowing users to easily access a number of specialty searches from their browser [...]". [Google Weblog] Something to play with. Yes, I am addicted to Moz. :) [Later...] Said moz add on works quite nicely. Looks like google has found my home page. Yay. I think. [Even Later...] My google search bar has disappeared. Wonder if that is because I am now off the air, or if something went fuxx0red. Will see sooner or later. 10:49:16 AM

OJB toy of the day OJB. It looks like ObjectBridge (OJB) has finally moved over to Jakarta. Hooray! OJB is a neat piece of software, I'm using it alot at the moment and I'm extremely happy with it. Supports ODMG, Soda and JDO APIs. Once its got some nice Torque-like auto-generation features it'll truly rock. [james strachan's musings] Must play toy. 10:21:40 AM

IBM Dropping Laptop Linux Support [Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters] I get the distinct feeling IBM want me to buy a iBook. 10:07:18 AM

Morning Train amusements. 1 Casiopedia, 1 iPaq. Trains are getting more and more wired everyday. That plus several people playing snake on their phones. Heh. 8:39:54 AM

© Copyright 2002 Brett Morgan.