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Thursday, 27 June 2002 |
Amazon's suggestions feature is fun to play with. I wish they exported it as a SOAP accessible webservice, along with (of course) my wish list. Or, do they? Someone out there know? Hello? :)
8:49:10 PM 
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Mozilla's full screen mode would be almost perfect for a Kiosk. Just take out the windowing controls on the top right, and prevent the user from using other means of bringing up apps. Not that I build internet kiosks anymore. :)
7:55:42 PM
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Goodbye Windows 98 and Windows 2000 professional. If you want to buy a new computer with anything but Windows XP on it, you better do it by June 30. After July 1 Microsoft is forcing all of its OEMs to stop selling computers loaded with Windows 2000 Pro and Windows 98.
I'm very suprised that I haven't seen more news about this.
I work for NEC and after June 30 we will not be selling any computers that don't have Windows XP loaded on them. Microsoft weilds a lot of power over the OEMs by offering discounts that if taken away would destroy even a pretty large business like NEC.
Please note: I haven't seen the contract. I don't know what it says. All I'm reporting on is the effect. No more "non-Windows XP sales" after July 1.
Some retailers will sell their stocks after July 1, but they won't be able to buy new machines after that date.
This is particularly dire for large corporations that haven't yet started to get into Windows XP. This will force them to adopt XP. [Robert Scoble: Scobleizer Weblog]
Hmmm. This is bound to get real interesting. In the last little while I have worked (thanks in large to the crumbling IT sector) at a reasonable number of IT shops. Everyone runs win2k pro. No one is racing to put up the dough that is required to convert to XP.
All I can honestly say is, has Linux's time finally come?
7:10:47 PM
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Glue, Gaia, Voyager: Graham Glass.
Glue, Gaia, and the services grid. Graham Glass, the wizard behind The Mind Electric, is "100% sure" that grid computing is the future. To prepare for it he's building Gaia... [Jon's Radio]
"As every user of Glue knows, Graham is more than a brilliant software engineer. He has an even rarer talent for simplicity."
I'll agree fully, and add that he's got a long track record with systems like Voyager, etc.
Glue is nothing short of excellent and Gaia should be too. [Patrick Logan's Radio Weblog]
I am obviously going to have to look at GLUE. I just hope that whatever license Gaia ships under, Apache has access to enough information to allow an Apache license clone. Sure it may be slower, harder to use, et al, but having both implementations will allow this to scale up so much more quickly...
7:04:33 PM
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Dealing with RTP streams in Java. Some ideas:
Any others out there?
[Later...] Decided to check out Teoma's searching ability. And found out two things.
Pressing <F11> in mozilla gives you fullscreen mode,
Teoma has some more to teach me.
Like Java's Media Framework deals with RTP, including serialising it to disk. I wonder what there is in the way of sane ways of multiplexing RTP streams into databases. Does it even make sense?
5:09:00 PM
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This /. post neatly captures my own feelings on the subject:Microsoft had some good standards but they constantly ignore them these days. I saw a quote that thanks to Web application, which forces people to use really crappy UI, and the preponderance of high-resolution with lots of colors and everyone trying to take advantage of it (skinning is just another word for "angry fruit salad"), UI has been set back to about 1984.
And this tendency to make regular Windows apps look like Web pages is just ludicrous. There were so many violations of common sense in just the installation of Visual Studio .NET, I could write a book about it. The app itself isn't too bad, but in some ways Microsoft has become the worst UI innovator because they are making lots of stylistic changes that have a negative effect on usability.
You can read the other side of the story (about Inductive User-interfaces) on MSDN. Frankly, IUI works well for certain classes of problems. Good examples include Money, Management Console, Office XP's Task Panes. But IUI can be carried too far-- look at Windows XP's horrendous (default) Control Panel interface, for example. There, trying to find any given applet is by and large a trial-and-error affair.
[chaos is a state of mind]
Inductive User Interfaces. I personally thought Money looked pretty, as does XP. But,as someone who knows that pretty and usable are frequently in an inverse proportionality relationship, calling something pretty is a derrisory term. I don't want a pretty application. I want it to get out of the fricken road, and let me get what I want to do, done.
Is that too much to ask?
4:44:35 PM
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Simon Fell: The Web Services Invocation Framework (WSIF) and WS-Inspection for Java Implementation (WSIL4J) are now Apache projects. [snellspace] Now all they need to do is fix the license on the dependencies, so its actually usable. Just to be clear, WSIL is clean today. WSIF does have a dependency on JROM. The license for JROM will either be corrected, or the dependency on JROM will be made optional. [Sam Ruby]
The obvious question being, whats JROM and what is it used for? Google thinks "JROM - An XML Schema-based tool that provides an in-memory tree representation...", which would tend to indicate some form of high level java binding for an underlying XML representation.
For some reason, alphaWorks pages don't seem to want to render in my win32 mozilla nightly. Ergh.
3:57:15 PM
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Case in Point. Received from a random user this evening:
"I was running the Linux Mandrake 8.2 Install and I don’t know what I did
but it brought up a command prompt about "global destruction". Help me out
I’m clueless."
Attempt to free unreferenced scalar during global destruction
Can’t upgrade that kind of scalar during global destruction
Install exited abnormally : -(
Sennding termination signals…done
Sending kill signals…done
unmounting filesystems…
/tmp/img
/tmp/stage2
/proc/bus/usb
/proc
you may safely reboot your system
Yeah. I can't wait to get my mom on Linux. [C:PIRILLO.EXE]
Which is honestly worse, some coder speak debugging output, or a BSOD?
I am currently using some win2k boxes, and a couple of them are flakey flakey. I can't explain it. I can't debug it. I can't fix it.
On Linux, I have a better than even chance of getting some decent debugging assistance. Go figure.
3:51:55 PM
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posted by megnut » June 26 1:39 PM | 8 comments. In the thread about his recent article on the econmics of blogging, Arnold Kling wrote:
But my point is that blogging ad[d]s value collectively more than individually. To me, that suggests that a network of bloggers is the more likely economic unit than is the individual blogger.
I've been thinking about this a lot - what would these networks look like? What would one's ideal size be? What would it focus on? What would the business model be? I'd love to brainstorm some ideas here about ways in which we can organize ourselves into these "economic units" so that we can add value *and* make some money. Any thoughts? [Blogroots]
Why does a grouping have to have an economic imperitive to exist? As long as the contributors to the blogsphere gain something they value in exchange for the time they commit to contributing to the blogsphere, they will continue to do so.
I personally am seeing a lot of Java projects and news a lot sooner than I would have previously. I also get some odd funnies that keep me smiling. I also get a great resource that I can look back on when I want to search for some project ideas and whatnot.
Whether anyone out there is actually bothering to read what I write is, of course, an open question ...
[Later...] I now think i understand megnut's actual question. She wats to know how she can get paid to blog. Honestly I think the answer is to use blogs to stay current in your areas of interest, and use that advantage to keep yourself employed.
Case in point, just the other day I one through in an interview because I knew that Eclipse can be used to host ActiveX components in a win32 java app. I wouldn't have known that, was it not for my blogging addiction.
Of course, this means that the large group of people that grew up thinking they could survive by learning a bunch of stuff at school, and then never re-training, are even more fucked than they used to be.
Now instead of expecting to retrain four times in a 40 year working career, it is now increasingly the truth that you always have to be re-training. A massive case of the Red Queen syndrome, sprinting at full speed just to stand still...
3:43:32 PM
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World's richest give $1bn to poorest. The G8 decides to boost debt relief for the world's poorest by $1bn,
as it turns its attention to Africa, but aid groups say that is not
enough. [BBC News: world]
The sad thing is, no matter how much, or how little, money is given from the richest to the poorest nations, it will not make a lick of difference until the rich nations drop the tariffs on farm produce imports.
Unless the poor nations are allowed to trade with the rich nations with something which they can produce with their huge pools of labour, they are never going to boot strap.
Bloody american farmer protection laws.
[Later...] I should mention here that I am an Australian, who has watched our farmers, who, under various GATT negotiated trade deals, are now basically trading with the rest of the world with 0 tariff protection (apart from some bans for various insect risks) have had the crap kicked out of them repeatedly by American dumping of subsidised farm produce.
Its criminally insane for a country like America to over produce using tonnes of chemicals to raise meagre crops on almost devastated land by transfering money from high tech (ie, high value add) industries to back water farms. The same must go for Japan's rice farmers. And europe's wine and cheese industries. And Italy's pasta producers.
The G8 need to realise that they need to force the farms to compete on a global landscape. Yes, a lot of them will go to the wall. Maybe we can move to reforest abandoned land, thus encouraging the repair of the soils, along with controlling water table problems.
3:38:37 PM
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JTidy is a Java port of HTML Tidy, a HTML syntax checker and pretty printer. Like its non-Java cousin, JTidy can be used as a tool for cleaning up malformed and faulty HTML. In addition, JTidy provides a DOM parser for real-world HTML.
Why write a HTML parser, when some guys from w3c go and write one for you? Very useful, considering just how much of the worlds knowledge is now out there in badly marked up html...
3:31:11 PM
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Radio has some interesting bugs. My entry templates are standard (ie no title), but I have enabled titling for the RSS feed. Now, if would appear if an entry contains a link with the same text as the title for the entry, the a tag's href entry gets replaced with the url of the item itself.
Dave dave dave, this software is in need of some serious refactoring...
2:27:03 PM
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WebServices.Org: "IBM donate key Web Services technologies to Apache" The Web Services Invocation Framework (WSIF) and WS-Inspection for Java Implementation (WSIL4J) are now Apache projects. [snellspace] Now all they need to do is fix the license on the dependencies, so its actually usable. [Simon Fell]
Ergh. Someone flag this as fixed when (err if) it happens.
Or, should we expect the Apache crew to re-do all of this from the ground up like they have re-done soap4j?
2:03:33 PM
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hahahah Jackass The Movie. [rebelutionary]
I am going to have to see this moofie. Preferrably tanked on Mike's hard lemonade or some other vodka based thought suppressant.
12:10:53 PM
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paradox1x reminded me that java.sun.com has been redesigned. I love the new redesign. Much cleaner, clearer and generally seems to have less crap on it. Ahh well, entropy is certain to kick in soon enough. As he alludes, there are no applets on the front page anymore. [rebelutionary]
I prefer the new look. I understand where the look comes from, I just saw the new Solaris 9 media box. Looks like Sun is trying to kick the Purple habbit.
12:09:22 PM
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X++
x++: The World's First Full XML-Based Programming Language Released!. Top XML Jun 24 2002 5:37PM ET [Moreover - XML and metadata news]
It is...well...something I would never have suspected seeing. [Justin Rudd's Radio Weblog]
I'll second that! This is interesting...although I'm not completely sure I understand the point. I do disagree with the scenario he lays out, though:
"Everything is going fine and dandy when one day, the source company is forced through circumstances to change their [XML] data format. [...] In the x++ case, the entire x++ object with the data is shipped off and the destination company's XML client code can access the methods of the object and get the data-- without caring what the actual data format is lexically!"
In my experience, the lexical format isn't always what causes problems in the interop case. If the source vendor adds a new data field, the client vendor has to modify his code to take advantage of the new data in a meaningful way. So even if operations are packaged with the code (as in x++), the client must still change to deal with data additions/deletions. The obvious exception is if the data is purely reorganized, in which case the above scenario is valid; but I think this is not the most common case.
And one other thought...in transaction- and service-oriented architectures, we have taught ourselves to separate data from actions; separate nouns from verbs. X++ thrives on the merging of code and data. Interesting. [Greg Reinacker's Weblog]
Something I should read up on. May be useful.
12:05:19 PM
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Deleting code. I love deleting code.
Select, delete. Bam. You are the weakest method, goodbye. Build. Errors. Fix errors. Re-factor. Select, delete. Au ’voir.
If you work like I do, then your projects always get to a point where the main features are all there and all that’s left are bugs—and clean-up.
Look, there’s some lovely filth right here. Select, delete, auf wiedersehen.
Uh oh, looks like my data and UI are intermingled right here. Think MVC. MVC MVC. Re-factor. Select, delete. Build. Yahoo.
This is my favorite part of software development, when the code goes from weird but working to clean and maintainable and working much better.
And the most fun part is that delightful Delete key. [inessential.com]
I wish I could come to grips with Eclipse. It has refactoring support out of the box....
12:03:31 PM
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BEA releases WebLogic 7, partners with HP
Quote of the day from some chump manager: BEA's products "may not all be best of breed, but they're up there with the best of them,". Way to give your partner a compliment in their press release mate.
All I can say about BEA 7 is... that's a lot of moolah!
- WebLogic 7.0 Platform - $90,000 per processor (yes, you read right)
- WebLogic Portal - $57,000 per processor
- WebLogic Workshop - $2,495 per developer (wow)
- WebLogic Server - $12,000 per processor
[rebelutionary]
Does anyone wonder why JBoss is so much the J2EE App Server of choice?
12:01:25 PM
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In case you missed my earlier post about localBlog, I will mention it again. Jeremy has now added support for Velocity-based page templates. Try it out and encourage him to continue development, we need a nice Java-based client-side blogger. [Blogging Roller]
Toys part 3
12:00:18 PM
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Shiro Kawai - Shooting A Moving Target. How can you track complex information flow for an organization rapidly changing its structure and workflow?...
To cope with this situation, we've been using a Lisp-based object oriented database (OODB) from the beginning of the production. Lisp's flexibility allows us to change internal data structures quickly while maintaining the compatibility with the other parts of the production, which turned out to be the key requirement for such a fluid structure.
Trying to clear the backlog of items from before the conference...
Shiro Kawai tells an interesting story about a database intensive project (we are talking terabytes here) implemented in Lisp. Another aspect of the design was using an open and well-defined scripting API, implemented (obviously) in Lisp.
If you find this interesting, do read the second article Shiro wrote about these issues.
Oleg, who pointed me in the direction of these articles, also suggested a comp.lang.scheme thread discussing these projects. [Lambda the Ultimate]
My Lisp/Scheme addiction is getting out of hand...
11:54:20 AM
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Timothy Appnel: WSIL is a relatively simple XML file format that is published with a standard URI on a provider's web site and read by consumers to discover and use the provider's listed web services... This is an exciting possibility to me that I think deserves more attention. WSIL is decentralized unlike UDDI... this means that adoption will be based on the network affects model. Hopefully the existence of a royalty free, open source implementation will help "prime the pump". [Sam Ruby]
Hella cool. If this follows an arc like RSS we should be seeing a cool new internet sooner rather than later.
10:52:09 AM
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Is Financial Corruption Pervasive? [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]
It is starting to look like it. I suspect the disconnect that comes from being in charge of 40,000 employee companies leads to this sort of recklessness. I suspect, coming from various studies, that any company over 150 people in size is inherently at risk of this sort of fraud.
The human brain (and other mammals it is starting to appear) can handle thinking about all the inter relationships of groups of people up to 150 people. After that, it turns into us vs them warfare.
10:37:44 AM
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The rare male bachelor (degree). The Washington Post is running a story on the decline in numbers of males receiving Bachelor's Degrees. As their graphic shows, of those receiving bachelor's degrees in 2000, only 43% were male. Although not a huge disproportion, it should be noted that this trend is projected to continue, and become worse. [kuro5hin.org]
Speaking as someone who has started serveral degrees, but has yet to finish one, I have to say that the need to earn dosh is probably a major reason why males are not finishing degrees.
Don't get me wrong, I want to finish my degree. Hell, I even bank rolled my gf through her comp sci degree. It's just that working on some stupid 10 person group assignment at Uni has no appeal when I can do the same thing at work, get paid, and get the slackers fired. I mean, uni is just a major PITA in comparison to the "idealised" world of uni life.
10:34:03 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Brett Morgan.
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