Brett Morgan's Insanity Weblog Zilla : Days of our lives. Honestly.
Updated: 15/09/2002; 10:15:01 PM.

 

Click to see the XML version of this web page.

Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.

 
 

Wednesday, 31 July 2002

The irony here is that there is that there is no irony here

An Equal and Opposite Disservice. Stuart Cheshire, prime mover behind Rendezvous, wrote an interesting essay on network disservices. For each network service, there is an equal and opposite disservice. For each call that goes through, there's another that doesn't. [The Peanut Gallery]

Funny. Sad. True.
7:09:58 PM    


log4j

Don't Use System.out.println!. So you already use log4j? I bet you could use it better if you read Vipan's guide to log4j - "Don't Use System.out.println!" An excellent read, with a lot of useful log4j tidbits and example configurations in it. [rebelutionary]

Nice quick intro.
7:07:13 PM    


Example Chapters

Some polar bear goodness. So while I'm impatiently awaiting the release of Information Architecture for the WWW, 2nd ed., I was wandering around O'Reilly's book site and found five sample chapters to whet the appetite. [ia/ - news for information architects]

Nummy
6:50:19 PM    


More books for the Wishlist

Developer Jedi Masters Write....

Joe points to two brilliant looking books:

Test Driven Development (Kent Beck) is a book devoted to the black art of unit-testing. Remember in Return of the Jedi when Yoda was rambling on about how to be an effective Jedi and then in Attack of the Clones you actually see him strut his stuff - and he kicks ass... well Kent kicks ass.

and

Enterprise Application Architecture (Martin Fowler) is his long awaited book that's been evolving on his website for over a year. This book looks at design and architectural patterns of enterprise systems and discusses many practical implementations that can be built ranging from the quick and simple to very clever and scalable.

[rebelutionary]

I wonder how much Fowler prose I have. I know I have Refactoring somewhere, but what else? Hmmmm.
6:47:21 PM    


Pension Perishables

"The only reason Tennessee doesn't look like Argentina right now is that it isn't a sovereign nation." Paul Krugman dissects that cooked books of state administrations and reckons the federal government is now heading down the same, disastrous path. [Davos Newbies]

Watching the local super companies mis-manage their funds under trust here in Oz makes me think only one thing. This is going to make one hell of a class action suit one day.
6:42:59 PM    


File under D for d'uh

Basic Goals.

No doubt these tools have potential, but without a solid understanding of what must be accomplished, it is next to impossible to predict how successful these initiatives will be. Customers don't care about the latest technology if it doesn't satisfy their basic goals."

Chris Weeldreyer, "Learning from the mistakes of Internet banks," cooper.com, July 2002. Via Tomalak's Realm

[design notes]

There is one successful bank on the Internet. PayPal.
6:40:49 PM    


Funny thought

Will Microsoft use the FreeBSD Kernel?. In his status report on .Net at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference Steve Anglin suggests that Microsoft might use the FreeBSD kernel for a future version of Windows. [...] [Bright Eyed Mister Zen]

<Bitch> Prime reason this will never happen: Microsoft will not be able to force people to retrain every two years because 20 year old unix manuals will suddenly be relevent. </Bitch>

I suspect .NET was an attempt to rise above the drag that is trying to support 20 years of legacy API's. The problem is that all their applications are intermingled in that legacy.

Unix is too easy to understand. It's all just files, after all.
6:38:55 PM    


XML editor for Eclipse

sunBow plug-in preview version 5 available

A new version of the sunBow plug-in is available for download. The main improvements are:

  • Enhanced XML-Editor: completion proposals for tags generated from associated XML schemas, automatically insertion of closing tags, formatting the XML document dependant on adjustable parameters
  • Sitemap editor: directly open referenced files from the editor, Drag and Drop support with schema validation

A whole overview of the sunBow features can be found in the documentation.

The preview version has a 30 days trial licence. It has been tested with eclipse release 2.0. Before installing remove any older version of the sunBow plug-in from your eclipse/plugins folder. Unzip the file sunBowPlugins_P5.zip to the eclipse/plugins folder. If you have running eclipse restart it to activate the new plug-in.

[Martin Dulisch's Radio Weblog]

This looks very useful. My only real question is what license this is under ...
6:32:36 PM    


Flies

This horsefly kept charging me while I was painting:
[101-365]

Dontcha hate that?
6:19:31 PM    


Java HttpClient fun

Getting HTML text with timeouts rediculously hard in Java. Creating a web crawler in Java is easy - if you don't need to set timeouts shorter then the defaults.... [paradox1x]

A rumble through the pain that is writing a web spider. About the only thing you forgot to mention is the fact that Jakarta Tomcat is dense code. Written in a style that reminds me of why I left C all those years ago.

If I get really bored I might try refactoring HttpClient to work on top of NIO. That could seriosly fry some brain cells.
5:51:39 PM    


XML-RPC / SOAP vs IMAP / POP3 / SMTP

XML-RPC e-mail. Would the developers of the world have any interest in using a XML-RPC based API to send and receive e-mails? XML-RPC email would be nifty, but SOAP email would rock. Using Glue and James this would take a weekend to build. 'course IMHO a bigger problem is that there are no clients for it [rebelutionary]

Whenever I see something like this, I apply the "problem" test. What problem does this solve?

[The Desktop Fishbowl]

I do this sort of silly juxtaposition project meme hacking because I can. I do it to think about the pros and cons. To try out new technologies and see if they solve things better than old technologies. The extensibility of an XML-RPC interface is the main gain compared to POP3/IMAP.

That, and I'd be guessing you have never had to maintain pop3 servers. Secure they aint. Backwards compatability? Feh. How many bugs have turned up in qpopper? How about UW imapd?

The joy of using XML-RPC/SOAP is that the wire protocol stuff is being written and tested by a bunch of geeks who care about it, and will stand a much better change of getting it right than I ever will.

So the real answer is, it gives us a chance to understand. And in IT, that's what stands between you and the unemployment queue.
4:05:17 PM    


Nanocatalysis and fossil fuels

Using Nanocatalysis to extract oil from coal:

The distribution of world coal reserves is dramatically different from world oil reserves, being concentrated in countries such as China, the US, Russia, Australia and India. Economic extraction of transportation fuel from coal could thus completely alter the balance of power in terms of world energy supplies. Russia in particular, especially with its close relationships with other countries in the former Soviet Union, looks set to benefit from any shift in power through its access to major coal and natural gas reserves.

Intriguing.
3:39:35 PM    


© Copyright 2002 Brett Morgan.



Click here to visit the Radio UserLand website.

 


July 2002
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
  1 2 3 4 5 6
7 8 9 10 11 12 13
14 15 16 17 18 19 20
21 22 23 24 25 26 27
28 29 30 31      
Jun   Aug

[Macro error: Can't call the script because the name "previousDayLink" hasn't been defined.]

[Macro error: Can't call the script because the name "nextDayLink" hasn't been defined.]

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