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Monday, 9 September 2002 |
Heh. Gerhard Froehlich is jesting that Sun's Project ACE will mean he is going to be unemployed again. I suspect otherwise, however. As near as I can tell, ACE is in effect a Domain Specific Language for describing J2EE systems (probably with a graphical syntax layered over for usability).
The likely fall out from this - a visual basic like plugin for NetBeans/Forte/Sun ONE for J2EE systems - will actually increase our available work, not decrease it.
Why? J2EE systems can be applied to a large chunk of problems, and if they can all be specified in ~300 lines of high level spec, then you can charge a pittance (relative to normal enterprise system charges, anyway) and still make money.
The question is, are the ACE team looking into the web services area, because that's where the action is about to happen. Wait and see I suppose.
7:56:20 PM 
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New JavaBoutique Article. Yay, my new article is up on JavaBoutique. This one is about writing servlet filters, kind of an introductory-level topic, but I don't think filters are exploited enough. [kief.com]
Looks like its a good article. Will read properly soon.
On a side note, Keif, it looks like MT's RSS feed is generating bad title links. Or something. Anyway, the link I get in Radio is to http://kief.com/Syslog/index.html, instead of the post's permalink. Erk. Not good.
5:43:44 PM
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Anyone know of a decent window manager for Win2k, preferrably free? I miss Linux. I miss enlightenment. *sob*
5:15:19 PM
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It's a synonym of ‘flayed’, you know.. One of the User Interface fads that emerged in the 1990's was [OE]skinnability[base '], the ability to customise the appearance of an application right down to its controls and window decorations. Skinning continues to be a big hit amongst computer users who can now make their entire computer look like their favourite cartoon, but it presents a challenge to User Interface designers.
Paradoxically, skinnability reduces the expressiveness of a user-interface. It does so by restricting the vocabulary of the interface to those things that can be expressed compatibly with all existing skins (or even all potential skins). This is a minor problem for applications, and a huge problem for platforms.
Read the rest in Being Skinned, or if it's still sitting in the queue on kuro5hin, go vote for it. [The Desktop Fishbowl]
Since when has fashion been about usability? Haute couture has come to the PC. God rest it's soul.
5:13:29 PM
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Reaching the crossbar.... I came across Crossbar today. It is an interesting idea. Instead of integrating reporting into your application, it is an open source WAR you can deploy in your container that will generate reports from any database or Lucene store. Cool.
The docs are a little light at the moment, but it is still early days. Also it looks like a great candidate to integrate with Jasper for PDF reporting. [rebelutionary]
Could be interesting. But does it do graphs? :)
10:43:00 AM
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Disk Space. I was just going through my blogs...
Brett Morgan asks whether we need 320GB hard disks. That's an easy one: YES. And I'm a pretty confident guy (read his post). I discovered how silly I was thinking that an extra 3 or 4 gig on my hard drive would be fine for editing video. I just got my new firewire card installed and imported some video from my Cannon Ultura Digital Camcorder... Yikes. Like 5 minutes of video took up 450 megs of disk space!!! WOW! I had a Firewire card before and remembered it was a lot, but I don't remember it being THAT much. Holy crap.
I desperately need to upgrade my computer.
-Russ [Russell Beattie Notebook]
Russ, do yourself a favour, and set up a tower linux/freebsd box with raid 1/0, fill it with ide disks, and hide it in a back room. Sure, not quite as sexy as 320GB disk in your desktop, but a hell of lot more extensible.
9:13:43 AM
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Heard on the train:
Oh, channel 10 is the only one not loaded with september 11 crap.
Gee, are people sick to death of the horror rehash story or what?
9:09:30 AM
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Clemens Vasters, Ingo Rammer, and Brad Wilson are all debating binary XML. [News from the Forest] I agree with Justin's comment that anything destined to last longer than a transitory message should be in XML 1.0, complete with angle brackets. I've been back and forth as to whether a binary XML format should be tied to a schema, but in the end I don't think it should, however you should be able to take the schema and produce an optimized reader if you want to. You could intern all the strings, and make the end element marker not require the element name to compact down the representation.
If you're interested in reducing HTTP message sizes, and can't wait for some people to ship this, then deflate encoding is the way to go, most HTTP servers have some support for this, and the toolkit folks are starting to take advantage of it, SOAP::Lite has supported this for ages, It'll be in the next release of PocketSOAP, and I saw a patch for Apache SOAP not too long ago. [Simon Fell]
In computer science we have an easy way of moving ahead. Instead of re-inventing the wheel every 30 seconds, we abstract and layer the problem and solution spaces, thus allowing re-use of solutions in new problem spaces. Sure, it may not be as efficient, but it sure is faster.
7:45:06 AM
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The Aussies, again. Tridgell gets AUUG special achievement award which also mentions Peter Miller (of Recursive Make Considered Harmful fame). The Aussies are certainly taking over. Maybe it's time to move south.... [bob mcwhirter]
You are certainly welcome Bob.... :)
7:36:36 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Brett Morgan.
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