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October 31, 2002

Googlisms - hours (well, minutes...)

Googlisms - hours (well, minutes...) of fun.

Vignette acquires Epicentric.

Vignette acquires Epicentric.

October 30, 2002

Chandler

Yoz Grahame writes Chandler: The return of Lotus Agenda some good reasons to keep an eye on OSAF.

We tend to think of software functionality as being on a linear good-bad scale. Good tech evolves and thrives, bad tech dies. Yet this is one case where some obviously good technology had to sit in the dustbin of history for many years before being revived; it's lucky it's being revived at all (and it still may not be, given Chandler's current non-existence).

October 29, 2002

October 28, 2002

Not fade away

Steve Gillmore: Not Fade Away - a long and winding ramble through Web Services and stuff. He's quoting Groove's John Burkhardt

Groove is being transformed by edge services. "[Microsoft] is trying to figure out how to build massively scalable applications that they're going to run on these megaservers that can handle millions of clients hammering on this thing," Burkhardt says. With Groove, he says, "now you have your own little, personal SOAP server."

October 22, 2002

evilfinder

More from sweetcode: evilfinder. Type the name of your bogeyman-du-jour. Refresh, repeat.

Local news

"As file sharing and internetradio bring better music than ever straight into your home, there is still one reason left to listen to your local radio stations: local news". Matrix Public Net gives a way to do this. (via the incomparable sweetcode)

October 21, 2002

Wear-fi

(via Hoejberg) Wifi's Next Hot Spot: You. Am I alone in feeling this -- anything with near-skin-contact 802.11 -- might get a little too hot? There are better technologies (lower power, different band, even non-RF) for the purpose.

On the other hand, I wish my new toy camera had (a) 802.11b, and (b) a Web server built in. "http://camera/". It has a chunky enough processor and tons of memory, after all.

Pix

For the curious: a few photos. 1, 2, 3, 4. Nice place, this.

More OSAF

Don Park says "What I am afraid of is the erosion in the sense of value for software... I believe OSAF is a richman's Destructive Crusade against Microsoft's monopoly". Maybe so.

Of course I'm totally in favour of selling software (having spent a large part of my working life at companies which primarily sell software rather than services). I think there will always be software worth paying for, on whatever grounds you justify its cost. Also, it'll always be possible to build various network-centered control points - think servers - in any interesting system; those can turn an application into a service line. Subscription games. Hosted facilities.

Open source infrastructure, or commodity tools, are a great thing. Publishing free software creates a commodity category (and often the best, if not the most used, products in that category). Ximian Evolution is quite close to a commodity app; it's roughly feature-parity with the market leader. But I think OSAF will be significantly different: we haven't seen a massively-successful Agenda-style application, ever. This is not (at least initially) a commodity play.

They're making a what?

Mitch Kapor has a weblog where he introduces the Open Source Applications Foundation and its future product. (The technology is more interesting than the feature list). This could be quite interesting.

October 18, 2002

'1'+'2'

Sam Ruby asks a good question in Dealing with Diversity: what's '1'+'2'? A great story; provocative, too.

Even the really base datatypes are so hard. Strings, I talked about a while ago. Dates? (I clearly remember an erudite three-page essay in "misc/time.h" many years ago). Numbers: don't even get me started on numbers.

Then the kids come along and spoil things. Dylan started playing with Python. What happens if I write "abc" * 5, he asks. Well, son, that's.... (eek! abcabcabcabcabc I was not expecting.)

October 17, 2002

Predictions

(via Scott Loftesness) Gartner's ten predictions for the next eight years. My take on some of these:

  1. Bandwidth becomes more cost effective than computing. No. Bandwidth does increase fast - and in bigger jumps than desktop performance. But the edge is more mobile than the center.
  2. Most major applications will be interenterprise Yes, but "soft" interenterprise interactions are far more tractable (with stuff like Groove) than "hard", process-driven, structured integration.
  3. Macroecononic boost from interenterprise systems Yes, I hope so :-)
  4. Successful firms in strong economy lay off millions and I hope not...!
  5. Moore's Law continues to hold true through this decade Yes. There are some limits in wait, though. I don't think we'll see multiprocessor desktops in abundance, because of the margin those guys take. And 32-bit NT/XP has a 2Gb RAM limitation, so we'll be moving to 64 sooner rather than later.
  6. Banks become primary provider of presence services by 2007 Interesting. Unlikely, but interesting...
Cheap hosting

I'm looking for cheap Linux web&mail hosting, to move this site away. Hubnut have done well, but had problems recently, and I'm feeling the pain of my server being across the pond. Any suggestions?

REST and cache

John B writes:

One advantage that people have claimed about REST is that it can take advantage of caching, but its debatable whether or not this really makes sense in a Web Service.
I wondered the same, when I read one of Roy Fielding's posts:
Why is this important? Because [a REST-ish "network-based API" vs. library-based API] differentiates a system where network intermediaries can be effective agents from a system where they can be, at most, routers.
- there seems to be some contrast between the REST and end-to-end arguments. What are the arguments in favour of active intermediary agents (beyond introducing latency)?

October 13, 2002

Terabytes

John Robb:

The inevitable: we will all eventually have the vast majority of books, movies, and music ever produced on our hard-drives. How it gets there is the only question left.

October 09, 2002

XDocs

Microsoft XDocs may look like FrontPage, but sounds really quite interesting: a proper schema-driven XML editing environment. Now, if that were the native format for Sharepoint, could be fun. Or plugged into a distributed XML environment?

October 01, 2002

Happy Birthday To Groove!

It's Groove's fifth anniversary - Ray has written some thoughts, including some really fascinating background material.

Web Services

Uche Ogbuchi: The Past, Present and Future of Web Services. Part 1 covers the past: part two next week. Must reading.