Sunday, 6 July 2003

The Future of Mozilla Application Development. Recently, mozilla.org announced a major update to its development roadmap. Some of the changes in the new document represent a fundamental shift in the direction and goals of the Mozilla community. In this article, David Boswell and Brian King analyze the new roadmap, and demonstrate how to convert an existing XPFE-based application into an application that uses the new XUL toolkit. David and Brian are the authors of O'Reilly's Creating Applications with Mozilla. [O'Reilly Network Articles] Something else to read. Mmmf. 3:58:09 PM

Out The Door. Axis 1.1 via [Glen Daniels] 3:57:32 PM

WebKit: Embedding Safari. Apple have made the WebKit SDK for embedding Safari's rendering engine available on Apple Developers Connection. [chomp] Cocoa hacking reminds me just how much I dislike Swing. It took me longer to post this blog entry than it did to write the above “My First WebKit App”. Like so many things Apple, it Just Works. Except... manual memory management. Eugh. I am so spoilt by garbage-collection. [The Fishbowl] Part of me desperately wants to play with java on MacOS X. It looks so purty. And Apple actually respects it's developers... 3:32:31 PM

JSTL Resources via [paradox1x] 3:16:37 PM

DocBook publishing DocBook XSL: The Complete Guide. Bob Stayton has released DocBook XSL: The Complete Guide, an online book covering "all aspects of DocBook XML publishing tools, including installing, using, and customizing the XSL stylesheets and processing tools." [xmlhack] I wonder if DocBook is up to the point where LaTex was ten years ago yet? ;-) 3:09:11 PM

Async IO. Finally. J2SE 1.4 Article: New I/O Channels. I'm writing a series of articles for the Oracle Technology Network (OTN) about the J2SE 1.4 features that affect enterprise developers. The first has gone out covering New I/O's Channels. [Servlets.com Weblog] An article on New IO. Cool. 2:58:37 PM

AI-Junkie Programming Contest [GameDev.net] Nothing like an AI coding contest. 2:42:34 PM

Syndicating Whuffie. ... there's excellent knowledge in blogs if only we had the tools to extract it. What sort of tools? Relevance and reputation based feeds and aggregators for one. The problem of quickly finding what's good from among the great muck of the blogosphere is, if you ask me, a far more urgent problem than seeing the correct authorship or harmonizing dc:date and pubDate before I even read the thing. ... facilitate P2P trading of RSS from desktop to desktop as well as server to desktop -- you subscribe to 1000 feeds, aggregate them, rate them (explicitly or by statistical filtering based on past use patterns) and then rebroadcast your new rated feed. Aggregators could then /use/ redundant items from feedback loops because each RSS source has a reputation rating that weights the contained individual item ranking; repeated items add their rankings. Source:TeledyN: Echos of RSS Yes. This is it. This is what I want to see come next from aggregators and blogs and syndication and all this mess. It's what I've been tinkering with in small steps for most of a year. It's what I intend BookmarkBlogger to facilitate, as well as AmphetaOutlines and the homebrew aggregator I'm hacking around with right now. At first thought, I'm not sure whether or not building and republishing RSS (or Echo) feeds is where it's at. But, the more I think about it, the more it seems perfectly elegant to me. All the elements are there, except for an extension to capture ratings. Extend aggregators to consume these rating-enriched feeds, and instead of just spooling the items up into your view, extract and assimilate the ratings into a growing matrix of rater versus rated. Apply all the various algorithms to correlate your rating history with that of others to whose ratings you subscribe. Mix in a little Bayes along with other machine learning. As for the interface... well, that's a toughie. At present, I think I could sneak ratings into my daily routine by monitoring my BookmarkBlogger use and watching the disclosure triangle clicks and link visits in my AmphetaOutlines based news aggregator. I could easily see adding an iTunes-like 5-star rating interface, but unless I get some pretty significant payoff from painstakingly rating things, I'll never use it. At least in iTunes, I get to have playlists of my faves automatically jumbled together, if I remember to use the ratings in the moment. The cool thing will be when sites like Technorati and Feedster start using these ratings, but the even cooler thing is when all that's on my desktop. This could be easy, though, couldn't it? What do we call it, Syndicated Whuffie? (Which reminds me: Eventually, we really gotta get back to the subscription problem. All these agents polling files everywhere will get to be nasty. Obviously. This has been talked about already, but little has happened. We need some ?PubSub, maybe some caches and concentrators. All stuff that's been mentioned in passing before, and left by the wayside as unsexy.) [0xDECAFBAD] Must think about this. 2:41:47 PM

Samsung bans cameraphones. Banning phones from the same factories where they're built. [Erik's Weblog] Bwahahaha. 2:17:23 PM

VoIP goodness Voice over IP Thrives in Africa, with Adversity. With missing physical infrastructure, voice over IP (VoIP) thrives in Africa despite government opposition: It's an odd battle in which telecom monopolies occasionally use government enforcement to shut down and/or imprison those running VoIP services, whether for their own purposes or as a telecom operation. Still, Wi-Fi makes VoIP more practical by bypassing missing copper infrastructure to create the network over which VoIP runs.... [Wi-Fi Networking News] It is funny to think that VoIP could act as the wedge that drags the internet to the rest of the world. 2:08:13 PM

Sony Invades Martian Territory. Sony to offer $600 Wi-Fi fileserver with 20 Gb storage (in German): The folks at Computer Woche (Computer Week) report that Sony should be offering a 20 Gb Wi-Fi fileserver with an optional $60 Ethernet cradle, and the ability to support 250 Wi-Fi users. (That is, the ability to feed out 250 NAT-provided addresses, but not necessarily the networking capacity to handle that.) Oddly, this is clearly Martian territory: the folks at Martian offer the nearly identically featured NetDrive Wireless for $399 (40 Gb) or $479 (120 Gb) as well as in no-drive kit form ($379). Of course, theirs includes Ethernet in the basic model, and offers Rendezvous-based options for Mac users, including iTunes music sharing. Full disclosure: Martian has sponsored this site twice. [via Lockergnome]... [Wi-Fi Networking News] So when is Sony going to start selling Zeroconf entertainment hubs that do VoIP and jukeboxing my cds and dvds? Controllable remotely using xml-rpc? Surely that would be a hot seller... 2:02:17 PM

Blah XML blah blah. Programming vs. XML. The API discussions during the last week showed clearly that a lot of programmers are not ready for XML. They prefer XML-RPC because they want to send and receive data structures that are in native form for their programming language. Yet everybody seems to agree that when you are creating a new data format, it should use XML. … [Sjoerd Visscher's weblog] For dealing with XML it would be nice for parts of XML to become first level constructs, and have the programming language deal with making sure that the generated XML doc is valid. There is research in that field already with Cduce that makes XML a first class citizen, and then there is the Haskell XML binding HaXml that enforces XML validity via haskell's type system. But the reality here is that XML basically is ugly. I have spent a month writing tree transforms in XSL, and it blows goats. It is hard to tell the logic from the data - namespaces really don't show up the difference at all well. I hate to say it, but I think XML will turn out to be yet another silver bullet that was basically useless. Sorry about that. 2:00:22 PM

© Copyright 2003 Brett Morgan.