Brett Morgan's Insanity Weblog Zilla : Days of our lives. Honestly.
Updated: 15/09/2002; 10:14:59 PM.

 

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Monday, 29 July 2002

Possibly something Useful from Microsoft R&D

Intentional Programming Overview.

Full title is too long: "Transformation and Visualization of Abstractions using the Intentional Programming System." This is the most sober and simple description of Intentional Programming that I could find. Written by a German scholar visiting Microsoft, it provides a brief overview of Abstract Syntax trees in IP, alternative ways of visualizing a program, and a classification of program transformations. [Lambda the Ultimate]

I will be very interested to play around with Intentional Programming when (err, if?) it escapes Microsoft R&D. Any technology that allows for people in different locales the ability to "localize" source code by supplying alternate localizations for variable names, and the like, is going to be so interesting. Apparently early versions of the IP toolset were used in developing Outlook.

Interesting.

[Later...] It looks like IP got killed. I wonder what happened to it? .NET kill it? Ugh.
6:52:51 PM    


Compare and contrast Java Jabber libs

An article on Jabber on JavaWorld brings into focus the fact that there are several Java Jabber API's in existance. Given the fact that sooner or later (sooner if past experience is any guide), I am going to have to use one. Any one got experiences to guide as to which one to use?

Options:

  • JSO appears to be low level API,
  • JabberBeans,
  • Echomine's Muse API appears to be a multi-im network API (and the one featured in the article).

5:53:23 PM    

JavaSpaces

Anyone know what happened to JavaSpaces? Over the weekend I read up on a couple of papers dealing with Linda and Tuple Spaces, and I was kinda intrigued as to why I hadn't heard more about the java implementation of tuple spaces ... thoughts?
2:01:36 PM    

Pocket Hacking

Qualcomm will add Wi-Fi to CDMA chipset: another piece of the overall picture. [80211b News]

Truly portable war driving kit ...
1:41:46 PM    


Evolvability is the key

For an excellent, informative, readable, and highly entertaining view on this subject, read Clay Shirky's In Praise of Evolvable Systems. [Sam Ruby]

Good read. Reminds me of Worse is Better.
10:05:53 AM    


Bumper Stickers

Tim Bray: Good heavens, is someone arguing that markup or meta-markup have semantics? Seems to me that semantics lives in the human mind and executable computer programs; one of the virtues of descriptive markup a la XML is that you get to choose what semantics you want to apply. [Sam Ruby]

Almost good enough to be a bumper sticker. (Now, if only I owned a car. ;)
10:03:49 AM    


US Martial Law

Foundations are in place for martial law in the US - smh.com.au [Daypop Top 40]

Scary
10:02:50 AM    


Memory tracking, the hard way

Valgrind 1.0.0 Released [Slashdot]

An interesting memory allocation tracer for C and C++. Have a look at how it was built. This is why I enjoy programming in languages that do book keeping for me. Now, if only they introduced type inference into Java. Heh.
10:02:21 AM    


An example

THE SALON BLOGS don't seem to be working at the moment. Are they hosting on Blogspot? [InstaPundit]

Mike, harking back to my remark that Blogger was getting smacked on InstaPundit, here is an example. It is not a good example, but it demonstrates that Glenn is continually picking peices out of Blogger and Blogspot. This was from this morning's RSS crawl, so it should still be on the homepage by the time you see this...
9:08:49 AM    


Taking time to do it right

System Metaphors.

Of course, coming up with the metaphor in the first place can be really, really tough.

[The Desktop Fishbowl]

Heh. Quite true. This is where good use cases and user scenarios are supposed to help you out. Play with your proposed users, put them in scenarios, make them carry out the use cases, and somewhere along the line (in theory) it all falls into place. Unfortunately this usually takes time that most people do not want to spend.

It is, however, an investment that is obvious in the delivered product. Very obvious.
8:58:12 AM    


Verbose != good

Biglook: A Widget Library for Scheme. Of a special note is a comparison of Biglook, Tcl/Tk, Swing and GTK on an example of a widget with several buttons. In Biglook, the creation of a button, its packing and the setting of the event handler are all part of the same expression. In Tcl/Tk, the code that deals with a button is spread out in three places. In Swing, the same code is split in 4 places. In GTK, in 5 places. The paper notes that in the experience of the authors, the Biglook source code is about twice smaller than the same interface implemented in Tcl/Tk, and about four times smaller that the interface implemented in C with GTK+.

Another Usenix summary from Oleg.

As usual, the new summary is at the end of the file.

[Lambda the Ultimate]

One (of the many) reasons that Swing has problems. The code for it is quite verbose. Something that Jelly's Swing tags seem to deal with quite nicely. :)
8:55:18 AM    


Cube

Cube: A Modern 3D Game Engine [Slashdot]

3D game engine in SDL. Cute.
8:52:03 AM    


BTrees for Java

Jisp. Paul points to the Java Indexed Serialization Package (Jisp) in reference to my question about lightweight databases. It is "...a set of classes that use B-Tree indexes for access to variable-length serialized data stored in files...This is terrific for standalone applications, where an enterprise-class database is not a reasonable option. " [weblog.masukomi.org]

Gotta love a good B-Tree implementation.
8:51:10 AM    


RIAA rant

RIAA stupidity. I was jsut thinking about that new law the RIAA is trying to get passed, that would allow them to hack into your computer via any means if they catch you downloading copyrighted material. The one that doesnt' hold them liable if they completely screw over your computer.

Imagine how funny it would be to catch one person at the RIAA downloading something copyrighted... then hack in and completely hose thier systems. It would be legal as long as you had authorization from the copyright holder. If anyone asks just say you were accidentally too zealous about deleting the copyrighted files. It was an accident you deleted every file on every computer they own. [weblog.masukomi.org]

It entertains me that the entertainment industry believes that they can hire the best hackers. A large number of the p2p'ers they would be going after are script kiddies who 0wn large floodbot nets. Attack these bored schmucks, and all hell is going to break loose.

Actually, thinking about the attacks outlined so far - denial of service by repeatedly asking for the same file, uploading broken files, resource floods by half open attacks, and so forth, are all old hat. Broken files are being dealt with by distributed trust networks, repeated requests are easily delt with by simple statistics, and optionally with distributed blacklists, and half open attacks can be delt with fairly easily in the OS (assuming the OS provider has half a clue).

So, honestly, who does the RIAA honestly think they can hack here? About the only people who really are going to get hit are the moms and pops whose five year old son just found gnutella for the first time. I can really see attacking these people is the way RIAA is going to be popular.
8:49:31 AM    


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blogchalk: Brett/Male/26-30. Lives in Australia/Sydney/Carlingford and speaks English. Spends 60% of daytime online. Uses a Faster (1M+) connection.
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