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Friday, 12 July 2002 |
Don Box on Blogging and RSS.
Don made an awesome observation about the ties between blogging and RSS. This little snippet pretty much sums it up:
while (true) {
ScanRSSFeeds();
RantAboutStuffYouSawFromRSSFeeds();
ExposeYourRantsViaRSS();
}
What an amazingly virtuous cycle! [Drew's Blog]
I feel the urge to blather about recurrent neural networks, but I'd rather go get pissed instead. It is friday after all. :)
7:02:07 PM 
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Open Source Developers vs. Users [...] Open source on the desktop just won't succeed until people who actually know how to design UIs start designing the apps. I believe the chances of that happening are somewhere between 0 and negative infinity. [Bright Eyed Mister Zen]
It's sad. It's true. I suppose the hope here is that Open Source and Commercialware can co-operate. Here's hoping.
6:44:55 PM
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XML Schema - to arms, to arms
Rising Rebellion Against W3C XML Schema. While I've criticized (some would say whined about) the quality of the W3C XML Schema specifications for a long while, it seems like a lot more dissent is rising to the surface lately, especially this week. [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service]
I was planning to write something about this too so I guess Simon provides a good starting point. Last night, I'm ashamed to admit, was the first time I've ever really looked at Relax NG in any detail. Wow, what a difference. It is so much simpler and is actually a spec that you can understand with only a few hours or so of study. W3C XML Schema, on the other hand, is an absolute beast. Even people who've studied it for months can't claim to understand all aspects of it. Once upon a time with the early working drafts I used to claim that I understood it. Now I will never be so foolish as to say such a thing.
[...]
[Kimbro Staken: XML Database JuJu]
I was begining to wonder why XML Schema was so hard to understand. I think I am going to have to apply the old standard - if it is too hard to understand, the chances of it getting implemented correctly and usefully across the board is close to zero. Thus probably not worth the time to learn.
Pity all microsoft products are going to be 100% XMl Schema based. They probably think that by forcing incredible difficult technology into the core of the XML standards they can make it such that only the Microsoft XML implementation will be standard compliant. Embrace and Extend taken to a new level really.
6:13:49 PM
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I almost blew apple juice all over the keyboard. Go read "Design Patterns" Aren't by M. J. Dominus. Choice take home quote:
Yeah baby, language religious wars at five paces.
It does explain, however, why you see design patterns for java and c++, but not perl, python, or scheme. There isn't a whole lot of call for iterator in higher level languages...
[Later...] Got an email from Mark regarding this entry. I wonder how he found it? Scary. :)
3:41:05 PM
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Anyone out there working on a blog/aggregator/email combo tool? I am coming to a distinct appreciation that knowledge management is going to be the next wave tool. Especially one that can ferret related web pages based on concepts. And there in lies some interesting problems.
I'm kinda hella bored of doing web apps. Shopping carts are a dime a dozen (even if everytime someone releases a new one it is full of information leakage bugs). Portals are boring, even if upper management still likes to think that saying that some batch produced report "is an information portal" earns them buzzword compliance points.
I want to try my hand at that often tried for, but never reached, goal of "understanding" text.
Ahhh. Buggerit. Time to start. But where?
2:58:29 PM
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Anarchy and Infrastructure. Doc Searls has written the most fascinating presentation I've ever read about Anarchy and Infrastructure. Written for JabberConf 2002, I recommend that everyone reads it... twice... and thinks. Lots of great insights here, like:
"Hollywood sees the Net as a plumbing system for intellectual property and other content,
Geeks see the Net as a place - a commons - where people can make culture and do business"
[rebelutionary]
I read the above linked slides straight after the wired article on Broadband Korea. Thus I am having difficulties seperating them in my head - they are different, but the results are the same as far as I can tell.
I seriously doubt if the media will wake up from it's self centered view of the 'net in time to save their lilly white butts from financial ruin.
12:39:04 PM
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My blog cause sleep deprivation in some readers. Readers beware! ;)
12:16:34 PM
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Looks like Dan Sanderson is playing with ideas on how to use subhonker to follow weblogs - blogtracker. All I can say is, Dan, your software needs some UI help. I'm lost! Oh yeah, and where is your RSS feed, god damn it...
12:02:55 PM
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After the Dot Bomb: Getting Information Retrieval Right. Lou is pointing to and discussing Marcia Bates' excellent article in First Monday. This is an excellent article for anyone involved in web development. I have often harped on this blog on the issue of looking at the library and information science literature, particularly when it comes to information retrieval and classification issues (being that I'm a librarian, that should come as no surprise). There is already so much experience and knowledge in the IR field that exists that can be leveraged for information systems design on the web, but it is largely ignored by people who aren't aware of it. [ia/ - news for information architects]
Hoooboy. Good article. Choice quote from near the start:
"Content" has been treated like a kind of soup that "content providers" scoop out of pots and dump wholesale into information systems. But it does not work that way. Good information retrieval design requires just as much expertise about information and systems of information organization as it does about the technical aspects of systems.
11:15:37 AM
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Triangulation. Triangulation at work: Drew, Kimbro and Justin all liked this article about XML::XSH, so it made it over my "do I care?" bar. Thanks guys, it was well worth it - a great read, and potentially a great teaching tool. It most certainly makes the notion of the context node very explicit... ;-) [Peter Drayton's Radio Weblog]
Neat'o tool. If I get really bored I might try and replicate that with JDOM. But only if I am really bored. ;)
11:12:16 AM
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Bad VC market a good time to start a company:. "...while capital is scarce and returns on venture investments have never been poorer, the track record from previous downturns suggests that conditions for building a solid start-up may be the best they have been in years." [evhead]
Hey Mike, maybe doing the company thing isn't so stupid after all. You learn how to run a company on a tight budget! :)
11:09:10 AM
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Gratuitous change in Mozilla. I'm currently writing this from Mozilla 1.1alpha. I got very used to tabbed browsing. Almost every time I want to follow a link, I click with the right mouse button and select Open link in new tab. Or this is what I think I am doing. Actually, since having installed 1.1alpha in place of 1.0, I am clicking on Open link in new window. This is making me insane. For some unfathomable reason, they decided to swap the first two items in the context menu. It's the second time they did it. It took me days to adapt and now they are changing it again? Why? What makes me upset is the fact that there is no apparent reason for these changes. They appear to be made just to annoy the users. [Be Blogging]
I suspect the change has more to do with changes being made on the 1.0 consolidation branch without being fed back to the HEAD. Thankfully making the change to the browser involves hacking a few XUL files, after breaking them out of the chrome bundles.
This involves none-too-insignificant investment in reading doco admittedly, but doesn't actually require compiling anything.
11:07:45 AM
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More USENIX02 summaries from Oleg. Oleg sent in a report on three more USENIX02 talks. Threading was the topic of all three. You can find them at the end of file containing the previous talk summaries. [Lambda the Ultimate]
Threading is bad, and call/cc is rediscovered by NetBSD kernel hackers. Unix is evolving towards scheme. That makes my head spin.
11:04:49 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Brett Morgan.
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