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Friday, 26 July 2002 |
durability problem. Takeaway from eavesdropping on Billg at lunch: "Software has a huge durability problem." By this he means that persuading companies to upgrade is getting harder and harder. What works today works fine, so why upgrade?
Paul Andrews, paulandrews.com, 25 July 2002 [design notes]
I thought Micosoft had worked hard over the years to teach users to expect broken software? One of my old bosses used to thank Microsoft for lowering expectations of IT departments from 100% uptime to somewhere around 85% uptime.
I really think, if Microsoft really wants new sales, it will have to go out of it's way to help bring new things to it's operating system. And you know what that means? Being nice to developers.
Given the fact that there are a large number of out of work developers out there, itching to develop the next killer app, the pricing structure on the microsoft development tools is going to kill microsoft. They really need, with every copy of WinXP, to include a bundle of their latest development tools.
Thats the real reason that Linux and Java have kicked Microsoft's butt. Easy no cost development platforms for kids with bugger all in the way of pocket money. Think about that for a while, and let me know when you stop charging like a wounded bull for your development kits.
5:12:34 PM 
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I just noticed something really uncool - the Hoyts website breaks when you run mozilla such that windows can't popup new windows. Oh, and they don't have title's on their windows either. The Greater Union just breaks all over the place. I wonder what would happen if we could mail these guy's Mark's accessibility guide?
I must say, it is all very unprofessional.
4:48:35 PM
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Sorry for the lack of Titles. I had been putting titles on a lot off stuff, honest-). Of course, it was foolish of me to rely on the Radio Prefs settings "Item-level Title and Link?" thinking that they did what they said. You actually have to do this which is kind of foolish as the prefs settings should insert a line like this into the HTML. Oh well. [Sam Gentile's Radio Weblog]
I wondered about that.
12:41:19 PM
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Computer Games. "At some point you have to make decisions and just get it done..." [The Motley Fool]
Ahhh. The trap of arguing instead of doing. Very common. Seen it a few times myself.
12:34:41 PM
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Guiding Visitors: Separating Navigation from Computation. Operations on abstract syntax trees are an important
application of the Guide pattern which goes beyond the Visitor pattern and separates "navigation from computation and object structure":
"A guide is an object that captures a traversal scheme through an object structure....
the notion of top-down or bottom-up traversal can be captured
by a guide and used in visitors for pretty-printing, collecting components by
predicates, transforming a structure etc."
A simple example, counting the number
of leafs in a tree, is rewritten several times
gradually uncoupling navigation from the Visitor
computation and object structure and discussing the
implementation of similar libraries such as
JJForester,
JJTree
[1,
2],
Java Tree Builder, and
Walkabout.
A Generic extension to Java is used because
"parameterised types allow us to parameterise a class with another class.
This will prevent many type casts, especially when working with collections."
(an early-access implementation of the Java 2 SDK 1.5 compiler is used).
The paper also mentions an extension of the
JRefactory refactoring tool
to "collect the exceptions that are caught around a set of statements."
[Lambda the Ultimate]
Keeping this for the links. Oh, and it looks like we are geting generics in java 1.5. One more area where C# is going to have to catch up.
12:33:29 PM
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Thought of the day. Make a blog ui based on Mozilla's mail/news client. [Brett Morgan's Insanity Weblog]
Like MozBlog? [The Desktop Fishbowl]
I remember scooting past this a while back. Will have to go back there, and spend some serious time playing. I suspect this is going to involve learning c++ again at some point.
12:12:45 PM
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JIRA:. "The brilliantly simple, incredibly powerful way to track and manage issues." Mike Cannon-Brookes writes that JIRA "was inspired (in large part) from Pyra." Very interesting. Will check it out right away... [evhead]
Mike: Given the bollocks'ing that Ev is copping on InstaPundit, amongst other places, it would be an interesting thing to try and do a deal with Ev akin to the deal that you were thinking of cutting with Dave. Be good all round I suspect.
12:05:00 PM
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Paul Andrews: "I'd feel more optimistic about R&D at Microsoft if the company could point to a single successful original product to emerge from R&D expenditure." [Scripting News]
Given the fact that a lot of what Microsoft R&D does is stuff like programming language theory, you will not see products anytime soon. It is basic theoretical stuff that will take 20 years to have an effect. But if it does change things, it will be in the form of new programming environments that are more effective, less buggy, et al.
(I never thought I would defend microsoft. bleah)
11:38:30 AM
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 Chihuly glass, shot at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas. I used a slow sync flash and zoomed the lens during the exposure to create the rays of light, then selectively desaturated the glass around the edges using photoshop.
By the way, Dale Chihuly is one of my favorite artists. If you're not familiar with his work, do yourself a favor and check it out. [Phil Ackley's Radio Thingumabob]
If you are into photography, subscribe to this guys weblog.
11:22:17 AM
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Morning Coffee Notes: Solar Broadband RPVs! I have been watching this develop since 1996 (I mentioned when I spoke at Comdex in that same year). It's very cool. Simply put an RPV at 65,000 feet (above weather and commercial air traffic), provide a bent pipe connection between the user and a broadband source, and voila: inexpensive broadband. Estimates are that the each plane could provide from 5 to 15 Gbs of bandwidth. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
Interesting to see which happens first, broadband via RPVs, or Mesh Networks based on WiFi and Rendezvous. Of course, the two technologies are complimentary. Hmmm.
11:20:09 AM
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The drug caused the men to lose their will-power? [The Peanut Gallery]
Moral of the story? Don't lick 'em, unless you trust the owner. :)
10:34:55 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Brett Morgan.
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