Thursday, 25 July 2002

Warped thought of the day Thought of the day. Make a blog ui based on Mozilla's mail/news client. Would be much easier to use than this silly-form-in-a-web-page thingey. And it could even talk the Blogger API or something. Hmmm. 3:45:27 PM

Another book Cocoon: Building XML Applications. Matthew blogs about his book from OSCON [Be Blogging] On to the wish list. I wonder how big my wish list is. On second thoughts, no i don't. :) 3:06:11 PM

Race conditions anonymous Java Software Automation with Jakarta Ant [Jul. 24, 2002]. Java Software Automation with Jakarta Ant - this is cool (if not totally wacky). As of Ant 1.5 it seems that you can run Ant scripts from within your application (turning Ant into a general purpose task scripting and automation tool). The example given here is an AntServlet that sets up the request, response, session etc as Ant properties, and then runs an Ant script - Ant as JSP! This integration is great for IDE vendors though - no more spawning an expensive new Java process to run Ant. Do it in process, do it faster. Neat. [rebelutionary] I like Ant. It's fun. It's just a pity that this article contains a race condition that is as old as the hills (see if you can spot it, second page, top block of code). Writing secure software is hard work. It would be so much better if compilers had heuristics for these kind of things to teach baby programmers what is good code, and what is bad. Oh well. 3:04:30 PM

MeshNets Wired Magazine on the power of meshed networks: although you kinna change the laws of physics, meshed networks allow multiple data paths simultaneously, providing higher bandwidth and throughput over greater distances. [80211b News] The telco's will not want to build mesh networks, because new distributed ad-hoc networks undercut their business model. Which is why, the telco's will not be involved in the emergence of mesh networks. Whether they survive once they emerge, however, is another question. 2:58:01 PM

Future arc Isenberg on the Telco Meltdown and Revolution. David Isenberg's new SMARTLetter has his must-read analysis of the "utter crisis" in telecommunications, as FCC Chair Michael "Son of" Powell calls it. [...] This is the most coherent, understandable explanation I've read of what's goin' on technologically and economically. [JOHO the Blog] Mix this with the revelations that for the last five years most of the systems large businesses have installed "to improve productivity" were utter failures, but for the last five years productivity figures have climbed anyway, and what do you see? The end of the command and control structure. The first harbinger was email, the killer app that you can still use over a 2400 baud modem with a dec vt220. Next, irc, instant messaging, blogs, wikiwebs, ... Ahhh. I wonder how to facilitate the next step in this revolution? 12:16:35 PM

Battle of the HttpClients The other Trove. "is a library of useful classes that is used by Tea and the TeaServlet. Trove includes the Class File API, the Logging API and a set of utility classes." The HttpClient looks pretty useful. [Blogging Roller] Any words on how it compares to Apache Jakarta Common's HttpClient? 12:05:06 PM

RIP Rumpole "Rumpole and the Angel of Death." [Daypop Top 40] Ahh Leo, how we will miss thee. 11:58:28 AM

ZillaStuff New Orbit Theme. Jeremy writes in to tell us that our favourite theme, Orbit has been updated. The update now includes a button [Blogzilla - a blog about Mozilla] Purty 11:46:52 AM

Security matters News.com   Congress is working on a bill to authorize the media industry to hack your computer.  This is insane. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] As microsoft appears to be intent on getting into bed with the media dinosaurs, I think now is a good time to go back to running something secure for my desktop. Who said Linux on the Desktop was Dead? 11:38:31 AM

Bad UI Design can kill you The Economist.  Airbus is slowly killing Boeing.  My old buddy and former roomate during pilot training is now a senior pilot at United.  He tells me that the cockpit design for Airbus is modern and efficient while Boeing aircraft haven't changed since the 60s.  That means a task that takes 3-4 steps in an Airbus takes a dozen or more steps in a Boeing.  I suspect that Boeing is going to have to rely more heavily on military aircraft, and particularly RPV sales, to stay alive over the next decade.  Or, it could get with the program and really compete with Airbus. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] I have heard similar things from pilots I know. They hate the Boeing's cockpit UI. The thing that keeps being said is that boeing is controlled by a bunch of ex WWII pilots, and thus they believe they need a guage for everything, where as Airbus is quite happy with the concept of the glass cockpit. Now apply this concept to User Interface design. Try and only tell the user about things when they are in the red, and come up with suggestions as to how to fix it. Consider it user education, as no user I know actually has time to read the twaddle that goes by the name of "User Documentation". 11:36:28 AM

© Copyright 2002 Brett Morgan.

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