vcard see also: groovelog boing boing tomalak searls voidstar bricklin & friends winer weinberger commonme gillmor sit infoanarchy disinfo vowe archives: 2002 May 2002 April 2002 March 2002 February 2002 January 2001 December November October September August July June RSS 0.92 powered by RSSify at VoidStar RSS 1.0 powered by Syndicate Your Page |
Friday, December 21, 2001Cabezal is closed until 2nd January.
Thursday, December 20, 2001Mark Pilgrim writes good stuff about the Model-View-Controller architecture, but misses one of the main reasons to use it: asynchrony. An MVC application is inherently capable of running asynchronously, with very weak coupling between the model, view and controller. If you're building an Internet-scale application, latency is horrible and unpredictable, and RPC-driven patterns make the latency problems visible.
The groovey mindmap is back up and running - just. Several new and nasty bugs have appeared. The biggest is that Groove doesn't shut down properly after running anything with the Adobe SVG viewer embedded. I'm not sure who to call on this one: it's most likely an Adobe problem, but anyway I submitted a bug report to both Groove and Adobe in the hope that they'll sort it out. SVG is good, flexible, and standard, so I hope we can get SVG-driven Groove tools in wider use.
Talking about Groove reminds me of a recently-discovered feature: those funky COM-wizards now have a way to create real (co-creatable) coclasses - STA and free-threaded - using only XML and JavaScript. And to get the code distributed to devices that need it. It's pretty cool. I guess we'll have to wait a while for full documentation, though.
Finally, Cabezal is listed at groove.net "featured partners".
The Blendobox is doing very cool things with a QTVR user interface. (via langreiter.com)
Yes, Mac OS X looks lovely. And it's Unix. But it's still only running on proprietary hardware, so I'll stay with Windows and GNOME, thanks.
Doc coins a nice phrase: "Hotel California Lists, or HCLs, are my new label for email lists you can check out of, but never leave". I'm on one of those, from PCDJ.
Tuesday, December 18, 2001Did you know that the Windows 2000/NT command shell can do command completion? Still nowhere near bash standards, but useful enough.
The SourceForge Most Active throws up some good stuff. CrystalSpace caught my eye - having been playing with 3D environments quite a lot recently. It looks good (check the screenshots); plenty of features, and seemingly very well designed.
Monday, December 17, 2001Maybe I'm getting paranoid. Bear with me for a minute or two.
Thursday, December 13, 2001The PinBoard just got a whole lot groovier. If you're running Groove, do install the latest build (here) and try dragging things in the preview pane. Try, too, with "navigate together" selected and several people in the space. It's really incredible - add a little smooth awareness, and suddenly many more possibilities open up. I'm so pleased with this tool. (Other people are too, which helps!)
So, the Ghost of Usenet Postings Past is now a reality. Egosurfing, I'm first there in 1993. Not that I really wanted to be reminded...
Wednesday, December 12, 2001Seen the Segway? Meet the Megway - human-scale transportation from 0sil8 Heavy Industries.
Tuesday, December 11, 2001Google now has 20 years of Usenet, online, searchable. Incredible. (Meanwhile: their predecessor and erstwhile competitor, the once-great Altavista, is reduced to silly, annoying, intrusive moving cartoon advertising on the front page. Did anyone tell them it doesn't work? And the grandaddy of them all, Lycos, seems to be some anonymous portal or other. With a dog.)
Thursday, December 06, 2001Reflections - a challenging little flash game. Hours of fun! (via vowe)
"Workspaces with Soft Edges" (.doc, .pdf)
Tuesday, December 04, 2001On the subject of software design versus evolution, here's a superb treatment of the "Big Ball Of Mud" anti-pattern. This is the sort of thing I wanted to find at the Portland Pattern Repository (but for some reason I kept getting lost in a maze of twisty little wiki-spaghetti...)
KPMG not only have a silly musical Flash movie homepage, they also seem to have people with nothing better to do than this.
Then I spotted a link to "The Gluetrain Manifesto" in Dave Gurteen's letter, and mistook it for a typo. Indeed not...:
I was writing about Differential GPS and location-based authentication (or even location-targeted encryption, which sounds a good bit harder) when IE crashed. Oh well.
Monday, December 03, 2001(via decentralization) the uServ project at IBM is a neat system to give transient content (files on peer machines) persistent location addresses (Web URLs).
(via diveintomark): Compare two very different software development strategies: NASA (expensive, precise, almost "perfect", with functional specifications weighing in at around 50% the size of the code) and Linux (ad-hoc, evolution over design). I've always been on the side of evolution, for the simple reason that it's easy to spend enormous amount of time building exactly the wrong functionality. With incremental development - starting with the sketchiest ideas of the required functions, building something to play with, asking the customer where they'd like to take it next - the formal specification phase doesn't turn a committee's guesswork into tablets of stone. Lots of Notes/Domino systems are built incrementally because it's possible to build them this way: evolvable data structures, very quick deployment, and little separation between the user environment and the development environment.
|
||