Eric Raymond's Rootless Root Unix koans are an "enlightening" read :-)
Master Foo and the Ten Thousand Lines
“And who better understands the Unix-nature?” Master Foo asked. “Is it he who writes the ten thousand lines, or he who, perceiving the emptiness of the task, gains merit by not coding?”Upon hearing this, the programmer was enlightened.
Blast Theory's can you see me now ? is a fun game, where real world wirelessly connected runners chase online players who play on a map of a real city.
Wired has an interview of one of their co-founders, Matt Adams.
Tantek Celik has some good tips for blog markup, and his XFN proposal is an interesting alternative to FOAF.
Scoble's post about Tom Peter's new book, Re-imagine, makes me want to read it.
Especially this bit, which is my biggest thought focus these days.
I wonder what I'll be doing in 15 years. How will we deal with the continued commoditization of our industries and our jobs? That's what this book is all about.
Commenting on John Battelle's RSS Marches On...Net-based Aggregators.
RSS readers are a fascinating area, and I think the right mix between client and server processing has not been found yet.
There's clearly some room for innovation left in this area.
I started with Radio, which has an integrated RSS reader as a local daemon, with the UI in the browser. I also tried AmphetaDesk, which is based on the same idea.
Then I've tried NewsMonster, a pure client side solution, with some projects to define a reputation system and collaborative filtering on the server side later. I found the ideas interesting, but the execution pretty poor.
I've tested blogstreet who have an interesting idea for offline use: they ley you get your subscription via IMAP. If your IMAP client caches the mails, you have an offline RSS browser, while still being able to use the web UI if you're online.
It's the same idea on the server as Abe Fettig's Hep on the client.
Bloglines is pretty good for just the web stuff, but it lacks a solution for offline use, such as IMAP access in blogstreet.
Today I use NetNewsWire, a pure client side solution that works only on a mac.
O'Reilly Network: Moving Toward the Ideal Digital Photographer's Workflow
A visit from St. Mc Neely
It's marketing fluff but it made me laugh: a few good rhymes (enterprise java with baklava), and close enough to the original.
Daniel Steinberg's preso is a good read.
I got trapped by one of these Mac java integration tricks last friday when using the excellent SQuirrel SQL client: I succeeded into adding the Mysql driver, creating an alias to my db, and connecting to it, but when I quit the application, the configuration data was not serialized to the config file.
This puzzled me for a while, but I wanted to be able to use that app on a regular basis, to manage my roller database (inside my company's firewall, for my personal weblog I use MT), so I followed the geeky way and found a brute force solution for my problem: the application has an option to serialize itself to XML. I did my configurations again, then serialized the whole app to an XML file, and then just copied the relevant sections of the app XML to the config file, to have the right JDBC driver and alias entires (this is yet one more very cool benefit of using XML for configuration serialization :-).
Everyhting worked fine and I felt better. Then I noticed that the File menu had an exit option: I had used the cmd-Q shortcut to quit the app, which triggers the Mac specific Application Menu, with about and quit. The SQuirrel SQL team may not have customized their ApplicationAdapter to call the code that is called on File/Exit.
Using File/Exit serialized the config changes to the config file fine.
The world we live in is so baroque :-)
2 very interesting links in the chandler design mailing list about some approaches to make the email client more helpful in managing email overload: IBM Research and
Microsoft Research
No silver bullet against the inherent limits of email, and its problems, well described by Ray Ozzie (read the Gelerntner article he mentions).
If you're doing a critical process in e-mail now, you won't be doing it there for long.
Another interesting fact in Chandler's recent evolution: in november OSAF hired Ted Leung to work on the Chandler repository.
It should be an interesting year for Chandler.
http://www.webmink.net/2003_12_14_oldblog.htm#107149709947824680
http://www.scifihifi.com/weblog/software/ProjectLookingGlass.html
http://www.scifihifi.com/weblog/software/OnceMoreLookingGlass.html
Daniel Glazman talked about it a few hours before it happened., and he gives the links to the Washington Post and ZDNet articles about it: AOL laid off 450 California employees, among whom 375 from the old Netscape Mountain View campus.
This time my last friend left there was part of the layoff: I reveived an email from him this weekend.
I used to be his manager when I was still working at Netscape, and looking back at this period of time, processing his green card paperwork was the most useful thing I did during my tenure there. I remember arguing with him that he should consider the paperwork as a more prioritary item than the scripts he was working at then. Today we both have forgotten these scripts, and I doubt that the fact that they were a few hours late makes a difference in AOL's earnings. But I'm sure the green card makes a difference in his reaction to the layoff.
When assessing your long term successes as a manager, all that matters is how you helped people who worked with you grow.
See Claude Bullard's answer to Berald Bauer's worries about Microsoft trying to patent XUL: RE: [xml-dev] Prior Art For Microsoft's XUL Patent Wanted.
I wish there was an international agreement to legislate software patents: the current situation is just plain silly.
Microsoft's Robert Scoble points to Sun's Simon Phipps.
Simon Phipps (who works at Sun Microsystems) is showing off Sun's new 3D desktop.
Why am I pointing to this? After all, Simon and Sun is trying to put me out of business. Because I want to be an authority on the operating system industry and to become an authority you must point to ALL stuff, not just that that's friendly.
Heck, Sun's doing some cool work here and it should be paid attention to -- particularly by Longhorn evangelists.
[The Scobleizer Weblog]
From geronimo-dev mailing list, Alex Rupp's message Important article you should all read.
When googling about AOP I found this page about a forgotten Deep Purple albumDeep Purple : specials/RAH99-CD/r-andreasthul.html
Where the following extract made me laugh:
Ian Gillan - "Via Miami", "That's Why God Is Singing The Blues"
Ian Gillan starts with "Via Miami", a song of the "Accidentally on Purpose" album he did with Roger Glover about ten years ago. As "AoP" is my favorite Deep Purple-spinoff-album, I was really glad to see this song being included in the setlist - especially in such a good and fresh version.
This is serendipitous Google poetics: "Accidentally on Purpose" is a happy alternate definition for AOP
If architecture were to be the tower of babel, configuration is its language