Saturday, 13 July 2002

No Dig Vegetable Gardens As part of keeping links for my hippy gf (she is cute :), I am practicing this whole knowledge management thing right here on my blog. So you Java nerds can look the other way for a moment. ;) Organic Down Under's no dig garden page ACT Gov's no dig garden page Mitra's Permaculture page No Dig Spuds Diggers Seeds Gardening Australia 9:15:37 PM

RSS Aggregators Process logging?. Brett Morgan is talking about KM and blogging integration (k-logging) being the next wave of tools.   You bet.  Or rather I bet.  I'm betting the farm on it. Here's a thing...  How about process-logging. Every workflow process produces an RSS output stream commenting on the state of the process and events that occur.  If you're interested in how the process is going you subscribe. Are any of the open source workflow packages looking at RSS integration? [Curiouser and curiouser!] As an ex-sysadmin I can honestly say, that I would have loved to have the machines under my control feed me a stream of RSS such that I could have a feel for what was going on. As well as the ability to go back and have a good historical look later, if something blew up. Much more fun than the stream of cron initiated email I got. Here's Jon Udell's list of RSS Aggregators. It's got more aggregators than I know about. The one open source platform that could really benefit from an inbuilt aggregator is, of course, Mozilla. 11:38:26 AM

Infomation addiction is painful, yet necessery Atlas says "Goodbye world, hello Tequila!". Today I'm accepting something important. I cannot cope. I am now subscribed to 37 news sources.  I add about one new source a week.  Each of these is easily capable of delivering at least one or two items each day that are really interesting to me.  That I want to talk about.  But I cannot absorb this quanitity of new information even on a good day.  There is no time to reflect, to mull, to doze on it. So I have resolved that I don't care. I won't cope. I'll let good stuff go by the wayside. Other people will find it. Google will keep track of it. It's all their when the time comes. I'm not Atlas to the internet. Even to my own small chunk of it. There. I feel better now. [Curiouser and curiouser!] Funny thing is, I went through this phase with USENET in about '92. Then I stopped reading 'news because the s/n ratio dropped through the floor. Then came Slashdot, but it wasn't enough. Yes, you hurt while your brain learns to live in a hyper-stimulated state that is information addiction. But, try an experiment. Stop reading for a while. You will have withdrawal. For me it was pretty severe. Like caffeine withdrawal, but it hurt more. You will find that as well as not coping with the flow, you need it anyway. That feeling of off balance is actually a good thing. It induces a state of mental agility. It is, in effect, the state of being slightly unsure, and thus able to take in new information. 11:17:41 AM

Interview with Mr FightClub It turns out my favorite modern author, Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club, Choke, Invisible Monsters) is a Forum devotee and attributes much of his success to it. While doing some research last night I stumbled across a great interview with him. [Ken Rawlings] Damn good read. The interview I mean. I have yet to read the books. But they are now on my to-read list. :) 11:00:55 AM

Why UDDI will fail UDDI v3 Announced; did anybody notice?. People have taken a lot of shots at UDDI. So many in fact, that it's almost enough to make me feel bad about taking another one. Almost. [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service] OSI vs TCP/IP part 2. Will they ever learn? No probably not. Oh well. Their loss. :) 10:56:34 AM

link collectables, part 657 Lateral Moves. Mark Baker moved his weblog over to the O'Reilly Network. One of the nice aspects of this move is that Mark's blog is now included in Meerkat. If you want to subscribe to an RSS feed containing only Mark's blogs, use this link (Radio users can click here to subscribe). Thanks to Rael for introducing me to using the Dublin Core-ness of Meerkat. [Peter Drayton's Radio Weblog] Keeping for links, and hints on how to subscribe to the O'Reilly blogs. 10:52:41 AM

Worse is better If It's Broke, Don't Sell It. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Words to live by, aren't they? But for software makers, I would like to add an equally important motto for selling software: "If it is broke, fix it -- before you release it." Instead, it seems that many live by the following sentiment: "If it's broke, but it's really hot, then release it and fix it later." [osOpinion] Nice theory, but the truth of the matter is that most software in this day and age dwarfs the complexity of something like, say, a Boeing 747. Sure, using unit testing, layered design, and various other techniques you can reduce the chance of bugs. But all the testing in the world only demonstrates that the software has matured to the point where the testing team couldn't find bugs. And most people need cash flow a long time before software can be certified bug free. And they usually lose market to the first movers. A distinct case of worse is better unfortunately. 10:50:20 AM

Electronica JOHN SCALZI has his own ambient electronic music available on his site. Check it out. [InstaPundit] Do check it out, but not over a 56k modem :/ 10:44:46 AM

Brain slosh Slice of π. It's not every day that the pi-calculus gets mentioned in a article from a mainstream news vendor: Jon Udell wrote a nice little piece on the various orchestration grammers (for a more application-oriented view, see this article by Stuart Johnston). [Peter Drayton's Radio Weblog] pop 10:33:26 AM

Mac users are modest Mac Users are Smarter Are Mac users smarter?. A new study compares Mac-using Web surfers with their PC-wielding counterparts. If you're reading this on Windows, feel free to take your time on the big words. [CNET News.com] Yep, sure are. :-) [Bright Eyed Mister Zen] And so modest, too. ;) 10:26:07 AM

PayPal the coming International Currency Application Trends Are Backwards. One of the things I noticed about all of the recent PayPal/EBay media coverage is that the media has PayPal's application usage trend backwards. Many reports talk about PayPal *already* deriving 60% of its business from auctions, implying an increasing overlap between PayPal and EBay (and an obvious rationale for the purchase.) A year ago, however, PayPal derived 70% of its business from auctions, implying increased usage in non-auction applications over the last 12 months. Hmmm. [PayPal Watch] That would tend to indicate the buyout of Paypal by EBay could signal the start of the decline for PayPal - if PayPal fails to recognise their impending role as the new international currency. Interesting to see what EBay does now... 10:23:40 AM

JavaDoc enforces a higher level of thinking Writing JavaDocs leads to Refactoring. It's like Peanut butter and jelly. You decide to cleanup you JavaDocs, as you do so you realize the API... [paradox1x] Too bloody right. About the only time I find that I don't need to refactor an API is when I have thoroughly planned the API and written a large JUnit test suite before starting the code. Unfortunatly, I am usually exploring new things, and thus planning API's is hard to do. So, next time I promise to start writing my JavaDoc before freezing the damn API. :) 10:18:19 AM

Some more link collectables Telepathic knowledge management [Be Blogging] Keeping for the links: Jokes aside, would you care to take a look at CocoBlog (seems like you have a good background on Java and XML) and see if we can make it into a killer KM tool? There are some other people who seem to be interested in exploring the limits of the blogosphere with a tool like CocoBlog. It's very crude at the moment but, being based on the Cocoon pipeline mechanism, it's modular, easily extensible in a declarative way and, of course, XML-base from start to finish. While you're at it, you could also explore Kevin Burton's Reptile: And in short, yes Ugo I will be looking at CocoBlog, Roller, Reptile, and a few other odds and ends. :) 9:48:18 AM

Dylan, a dynamic/static language An argument for Strongly Typed languages"I believe strongly typed languages yield better encapsulated code because requirements are explicitly presented up front. " [Richard Caetano] Agreed. However, a dynamically typed language is much more pleasant in the early stages of development. It is my feeling that languages should allow you to start with dynamic typing and then allow you to specify static types later, providing the speed and type-checking you need as the project matures. The only language environment I know of that currently has this ability is one of the commerical Lisps. [Ken Rawlings] Another dynamic/static language that isn't commercial is Gwydion Dylan. There is also a commercial Dylan implementation - Functional Objects, nee Harlequin Dylan, for win32, and soon linux. It is kinda weird because it is effectivly an infix scheme. :) 9:28:46 AM

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