Friday, October 25, 2002

Canesta keyboards Canesta keyboards (if you can call it a keyboard) looks to the coolest thing yet for portable computing. Very, very, very cool. I hope they release a compact flash or SD card version of this so I can add it to my Toshiba e740. Funny... I'm taking a course at UCSD on ubiquitous computing - today was the first day our class met. I'll be sure to bring this up at our next meeting, as this sounds like it could be a killer app! [PSquad's Corner] Wacky geeky stuff.  Though I can't help thinking that a little bit of plastic that you could roll out on a surface (maybe with a little clip to keep your PDA upright) would be much easier to do. Though not as geeky though :) 11:06:04 AM    comment []

Ambivalence Ambivalence. I hate starting projects. Writing ANT scripts, setting up the directory structure, configuring the IDE settings, putting all the library jars in the right place etc. I find it all immensely tedious. I love starting projects. There's no code written, you are full of ideas, with an infinite solution space to choose from. The journey lies ahead. So to recap, I love hate love, have mixed feelings about starting projects. [Pushing the envelope] Why not try use Maven and let it generate everything for you :-) 10:54:53 AM    comment []

Cross-Microsoft-Platform What's in a Platform?. James Strachan questioned some of Alan Cooper's opinions in the recent XML & Web Services magazine interview, stating ".NET only runs on Windows". This is actually quite a common misconception, stemming partly from terminology problems. Alan was referring to the CLR, which is (by and large) an implementation of the CLI - an ECMA (currently) and ISO (soon) standard. It is the existence of this standard that provides the portability and multi-language capabilities that Alan Cooper was praising. Sure the language is a standard, but thats next to useless if the libraries are not open and cross platform. As for the cross-platform issue, it is helpful to first agree on a definition of "platform". I like to use the FOLDOC definition: "...a specific combination of hardware and operating system and/or compiler". Microsoft itself has several different implementations (the .NET Framework, the Compact Framework, and Rotor) of the CLI specs running on different platforms, i.e. different hardware architectures (Intel x86, StrongARM, XScale, etc.) and different operating systems (Windows XP/2000/>NET, Windows 98, FreeBSD, Windows CE .NET, etc.). More importantly, there are also third-party efforts (Portable.NET, Mono) aiming to bring the CLI to other platforms such as Linux/x86, Linux/PPC, StrongARM, SPARC, etc. Time & the market will be the judge of these efforts, but I believe that Alan called it correctly when he stated that the CLR creates opportunities for code portability and competition. [Peter Drayton's Radio Weblog] OK so we're not talking cross platform in the sense that it'll run on windows, Linux and mainframes. We're saying its cross-Microsoft-platform. So its about as cross platform as MFC and the Win32 API. Sure one day, maybe, there might be a non-supported, independent port of .NET that may or may not work and will be foreever playing catchup to MS. Most probably most of your software will only really work on Windows. Though with Microsofts history with independent ports (remember OS/2, Bristol Technologies, WINE and WABI to name but a few) I don't think anyone would seriously consider things like Mono as having much of long term future as a .NET compliant platform. .NET is, lets face it, an MS strategy to curb the threat of Java and to try lock software into a platform that MS controls to help preserve its Windows monopoly.  10:45:36 AM    comment []

Werkflow to be Avalon-enabled Server-Side Wet Dream. The Avalon Project over at Jakarta has blown my socks off over the past 48 hours. It is a server-side hacker's wet dream. I've always enjoyed the idea of component-oriented architectures. Unfortunately, most component frameworks decided to assume network-accessible distributed components. So, I always ended up avoiding them, using normal JavaBeans and hacking in my own lifecycle and broker patterns. Never the same way twice. Jason van Zyl kept promoting Avalon to me (plus, I'm going to have to use it on the Day Job(tm) anyhow), so I finally dug in. I decided to make werkflow be Avalon-enabled. Having Avalon... [bob mcwhirter] Cool. I've been looking for an excuse to play with "avalon" and it looks like werkflow could well be it. I do like "avalon" though I do think it could be made a little bit easier for folks to get into - it does seem to have quite a high intellectual (inversion of control) barrier of entry.  10:33:32 AM    comment []

XML -> Tanga XML -> Tanga. Here's a small XSLT file that will convert an XML file to a tanga file. It's based on the information... [<big>kev's</big> catalogue of this and that.] Excellent. I'm sure this will be very useful for condensing existing files. Once Tanga's JAXP SAX parser is operational the Tanga format should just be a drop in alternative to XML with tools like Ant, Maven and Jelly. 10:14:55 AM    comment []