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September 30, 2005
del.icio.us Social Bookmarking - Creating a reusable copy of a 'tagged' RSS file [via a post to my O'Reilly Weblog]
del.icio.us Social Bookmarking - Creating a reusable copy of a 'tagged' RSS file
As mentioned in the intro, the following code will create a local copy of the latest RSS feed for any particular tag on del.icio.us social bookmarking. The general idea (at least what I'm using for) is to take a bit of the load off the del.icio.us servers, make them available from a site that is focused more towards this particular tags content, and as a result be enabled to embrace-and-extend from there in any particular direction you feel appropriate.
Posted by m.david at 04:46 PM
entranced by 'entrances' [via Tantek Çelik's 'entrances' page]
entrances
Some believe a website should open straight to its logical menu of options. Perhaps - but I think personal sites are a bit different, and people that visit them expect to see something different, something personal, and not just a menu of options.
These are the entry pages (splash pages) that I have written and used. They're nothing more than an expression of what I was feeling at some moment, typically using a simple hack, sometimes left up for many, many months at a time.
These are all alternative entrances to the site, and thus all* take you back to the same place. The pages have been slightly updated - html validated, tags lowercased - but should look the same as they did originally.
Back in '96, the year I took my first contract with Microsoft, an effort was made to encourage everyone (blue and orange badge's combined) to use the words 'explore', 'explorer', or 'exploring' in anything and everything we did that in any way took on a 'Microsoft look-and-feel' (e.g. an email sent to someone that comes from an @microsoft.com email address qualifies for a Microsoft look and feel. Marketing collateral would obviously qualify, etc...) instead of using 'navigate', 'navigator', or 'navigation'. If you think back to what was taking place during this time frame the reason should be obvious.
While there's no ethical or moral problems with a company suggesting (and they did suggest, not demand) you use words, terms, and phrases that help promote their own products instead of a competitors, I must admit that I found this to be challenging. As was the genius of Netscape, using the term 'Navigator' for their browser ensured that the more common term used to describe the actions suggested by the associated words would in and of themselves be marketing material for their product.
But in what has turned out to be the even greater genius of Microsoft, 'exploring' the web neither attaches nor excludes itself from the concept of static 'structure'. The difference is subtle. So subtle that until you really sit down and think about it you may not even see and/or agree with my point. But even after you put some thought into it, whether you agree or whether you don't is of no great consequence. We're all entitled to view the world the way we choose to view it. But in reading the first paragraph of Tantek's 'entrances' page:
Some believe a website should open straight to its logical menu of options. Perhaps - but I think personal sites are a bit different, and people that visit them expect to see something different, something personal, and not just a menu of options.
has opened my eyes a bit to realize he's exactly right.
Now I'm not suggesting we all get rid of our menus and site navigation (< see) systems. But what I am suggesting is that in a world where instant publishing has become both possible as well as the norm, maybe its time we 'let go and let God' so to speak, building our menus and site navigation systems more around the concept of 'dynamically exploring' instead of 'statically navigating'.
What I like even more about Tantrik's entrances page is that he has built it using both concept's. He first showcase's a list of static 'snapshots' in his personal site's history while extending things by suggesting in no certain terms that the page in and of itself is a dynamic list of static snapshots, an ever evolving and growing way to look at things the way they once were without binding and gagging the site to one way and one way only at looking at his 'world on the web.'
As subtle in difference as the terms may be "exploring the dynamic web one static navigational snapshot at a time" is a phrase that I really like as it allows room for both sides of the collective genius to take their place at the Web's dinner table as we move forward into the ever growing and evolving 'WorldWideWeb', which of course allows for the genius of Tim Berners-Lee to continue in his spot at the tables head.
Mmmm... I wonder what's for dinner tonight? :D
Posted by m.david at 07:17 AM | Comments (0)
September 29, 2005
A Quote of the Day Worth a Double Quote
While Dr. Kay definitely has his share of Quotes in the Quote-of-the-Day section of this site, this one deserved a bit more attention via a pointer from the main feed:
I think an "uncatched exception" deserves three bug reports: one for the exception, one for not catching it, and one for abuse of the English language.
Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/BTW... do you think the "A Quote of the Day Worth a Double Quote" qualifies for abuse of the English language as well... Actually it probably qualifies for abuse of the human mind and conscience as well, huh?... Hmmm... well, that hasn't stopped me before, I doubt it will stop me in the future... So why let it stop me now? [cuz' its annoying!]
Um, whoever had the gall to just write that little snippy remark at the end there...
Good for you! Wait to stand up for all things horrible and wrong in blog titles... Now get the [expletitive deleted due to no profanity in the intro policy] off my blog!
Posted by m.david at 12:09 AM
September 28, 2005
Monad : MSH : Jeffrey Snover : If Ever I Were To Go Back On My 'No Corporate!' Policy, This Is The Man I Will Be Sending My Resume
As per my post from a while back, I've been using MONAD now for about two months. Guess what... While I've kept quiet on the matter (I know, a rare event) MONAD flat out ROCKS!!!
There are a million reasons why I have vowed to never go corporate...
Now I have one that can be added to the "well, if I could work for him... that policy might be reconsidered." Don't get me wrong... I have no plans or desires to do such a dastardly deed (meaning to go corporate.) I'm just suggesting that if the time came that I began to change my mind even a little bit on this matter, this is exactly the kind of PM I would want to work for.
Some people just get it. Based on what I heard and saw in this interview, Jeffery Snover is one of those who get it.
I like that.
[NOTE : Regarding MONAD : If anybody in authority at MS happens to read this, please know this one thing:
Take MONAD away from me... I'm gone.
GNOME has already won my desktop heart over, but I can't work on GNOME/Linux and still use the development tools I've become WAY TOO ACCUSTOMED TO to commit myself full time to a Linux/GNOME distro full time. There are a few other reasons as well... lack of any streaming audio services that offer a collection that includes something other than Lawrence Welk [speaking figuratively...], and the same goes for streaming video, although with as little time I spend watching movies on my PC, or for that matter, in general(I stopped watching TV years ago... Don't even remember the last time I turned one on. Oh wait... Sonics/San Antonio series from last season... that was the last time) I could do without that quite easily.
Anyway, back to my point. Like I said.... Take MONAD away and I can't think of one reason I wouldn't switch completely to a GNOME/Linux Distro...
[UPDATE(2005.10.03) err... What the hell am I saying here... If you feel or felt a bit confused, don't feel bad, I'm completely confused as well,... Am I staying because of Monad or not leaving because of Visual Studio? Lets see if we can make some sense of whatever point I thought I was making...]
If your'e Q: is: Your'e sticking with Windows because of MONAD?
A: Ummm... did you not read the part about the whole 'dev tool' things? Yeah, K, next question... ;)
[UPDATE[2]: Whoa! What? ... << rewind << ...]
No, to be fair, in some ways, Yes, MONAD is *THAT* good and has become that important of a part of my Windows dev life. But again, there are other reasons that keep me over here. But if this were to disappear.... OOOOHHHHHHHWUHUHUHUHUHHH... I SHUDDER at the thought...
[UPDATE[3]: Ok, this is where it comes back to something worth making note of. The bottom line... MONAD fills a much needed hole. If it suddenly were to disappear from existence I think I would definitely start to seriously consider shifting gears and begin moving towards Linux dev tools, in particular Mono Devtools, and even more specifically MonoDevelop. What if the Mono project were to develop a MONAD equivalent? Definitely would get my attention but there's atill a whole lot of tool in Visual Studio that, as of yet, just doesnt exist in the Linux/Mono world. What about Eclipse? For Java, sure... but I do my best to avoid Java as much as possible so it doesn't do me a lot of good beyond hacking at the Saxon code base for the latest Saxon.NET build. As far as .NET development goes, nothing even comes within spitting distance if VS.NET, and I'm not talking about VS.NET 2005 which ups the anti even further...
Even still... VS.NET or no VS.NET, I REALLY LIKE Microsoft Shell. Please don't take it away from me. Much love will be sent your way. Thanks! :D]
Posted by m.david at 07:48 PM | Comments (0)
As I Sit and I Stare, Yes The Words Are Right There > 'Microsoft, JBoss link server software'
Microsoft, JBoss link server software | CNET News.com
update Two companies on opposite sides of the open-source philosophical divide, Microsoft and JBoss, have signed a partnership to make their server software work together better.
Microsoft and JBoss said Tuesday they'll work to make JBoss' Java application server software work well with Microsoft's Windows and higher-level software.
Has anyone checked the current temperature in Hell? And does Hell freezing over have any other side effects other than ice, snow? And last, does anybody happen to know the vertical between here and hell? I'm guessing its *HUGE*...
Looks like it gonna be a FANTASTIC snowboard season after all...!!!!!!!!!
Although, I'm not sure what I think of the potential combination of "MS Boss"...
H'mmmm. Well, if the snows good because of it, I say "BRING ON THE BOSS BABY!!! WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! CHOWDA!!!, CHOWDA!!!, CHOWDA!!!" (I'f you can come even close to definining in proper CHOWDA' HEAD terms what that means you just won BIG PHAT POINTS! Big PHAT CHOWDA points even... :D)
[For fun, here's a little peak into a world that once was me [but has become less and less as the years have gone one...]
[
http://www.x2x2x.org/downloads/public/media/BRECK2003MD05.AVI]
]Posted by m.david at 12:05 AM | Comments (0)
September 27, 2005
UPDATE:Blinqx.net : Scaled back updates to RSS files to once an hour
After 4 days worth of samples there doesn't seem to be anywhere near the number of updates to the 'linq', 'xlinq', and 'blinqx' tags on del.icio.us to justify updating the feeds twice and hour. For now I have scaled it back to once an hour. If after a weeks worth of samples it seems like even this is too much I will scale it back even more.
If you have your feed reader set to access any of the following feeds twice an hour, please change that to once an hour as anymore than this is simply a waste of bandwidth:
http://blinqx.net/linq.xml
http://blinqx.net/xlinq.xml
http://blinqx.net/blinqx.xmlThanks everyone! I hope to have some time a bit later to add the blog and wiki as well as the front page which displays the latest updates to each of these three feeds. Once I do I will update this entry to let you know.
Also, regarding my usage of bLinqX.NET in text based reference:
I'm sorry.
The next day, after waking up and realizing what I had done, I smacked myself upside the head for using such a cheezy way of writing out the URL. Sorry, sometimes I do stupid things like this and don't realize it until I wake up the next morning with that "NO!!! Please tell me I didn't do that!" feeling that tends to happen when you either drink too much the night before and do something you now realize you shouldn't have or, as is the case with this, you use what at the time seems like a really 'cute' way to express something in text only to discover later you yourself have crossed the same line you have criticized others for crossing. Using the 'capatalized X emphasis method' in a logo is one thing. Forcing others to feel the need to type 'bLinqX.NET' when refering to the site by using this format EVERYTIME you refer to it in text is quite another.
If you felt the need to slap me upside the head for choosing this method, please, don't bother... already taken care of ;)
Posted by m.david at 12:46 AM | Comments (0)
September 26, 2005
Follow-up to 'You Know What I Just Love About The Mozilla Thunderbird Project?'
In a recent email responding to my previous post Bruce D'Arcus writes:
Your comments are off, so:I have to say I think you're off on your rant about Thunderbird. The
reason for the behavior is not logic per se, but rather just as
fundamentally, consistency. Most applications (not just mail apps)
I've used use q for quitting. So I'd say Outlook got it wrong, and as
someone who never used Outlook, I'd be both perplexed and annoyed to
find that non-standard behavior.I think this is a fair evaluation as I left out pieces in my post that should have made my point more clear. The post should actually be two separate posts.
1) The gripe regarding the keymapping usage of 'Ctrl-Q'
2) The OSS "We're free therefore we're better" rant.Both points need further clarification but let me first respond to the first part.
My initial response to Bruce began:
Hey Bruce,
and you would be spot on if you were the majority user. Much like
Firefox got it right by embracing and extending the IE key mappings,
Thunderbird should have done the same for the majority user profile
out there.I dont mean to sound like because your the minority your wrong. Just
that when the majority is used to a particular key mapping to do a
VERY common task, and that task instead kills the app without so much
as an "Are you sure?" with a check box to "Remember this?"<'snip/>
The snipped portion went on to state that I would make clarification to my comments which is what I am doing now.
Bruce then followed-up with:
But keep in mind my point about comparison here: it's not about email apps; it's about the behavior of all apps.
Thunderbird is trying to keep consistent with the latter (including
presumably, Firefox).
My response to this [NOTE: I just now read his follow-up response so this will become my official response of which I plan to point him to when I'm finished] is quite simply:
I recognize his point, but I also would be hard pressed to believe that the Mozilla/Thunderbird project has never had the thought of becoming an Outlook replacement. You can't write an email client without such a thought pop through your head as a majority of those interested in using your product will be coming from an Outlook/Outlook Express-based world. Not everybody obviously, but most. And when I say most I mean potentially hundreds of millions of people who in one form or another use Outlook(including Express) on a daily basis.
To be fair, Mozilla hasn't as of yet announced any plans to begin development of an office suite. Outlook is a part of MS Office(TM) so if Thunderbird has targeted anything related to the Outlook family it would be Outlook Express. But even with Outlook itself out of the equation we're still talking about potentially hundreds of millions of users, all in which have be accustomed to one or more of the Outlook specific keyboard mappings. As such, there needs to be at *VERY LEAST* consideration for this fact is the Thunderbird folks wish to have any sort of adoption rate and impact that comes even close to that of which Firefox has had.
Now before anybody makes a statement such as "Its free software; aren't you being a little harsh on a project who's primary focus is promoting a free, standards-based platform in which embraces the standards set forth by the standards groups such that we can finally gain some consistency in our development lives." to which I would respond:
Comparing email clients and standards is taking things a little too far. By default, if you don't support a common MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) format, POP, and SMTP (which combined become the primary standards in which you absolutely MUST support to be considered a player in this space) you might as well forgot about even using the "adoption rate" as that's a pipe dream that most definitely won't be coming true.
Furthermore, if you are of the illusion that the Mozilla Corporation, Mozilla.org's recently announced for-profit creation, doesn't have any sort of aspirations as to give Microsoft a run for its money in regards to owning a significant piece of the future web-based desktop then chances are pretty good you weren't even aware they formed such a corporation. They did. This should showcase quite well what their true and real desires in this space are.
Don't get me wrong, this is not a bad thing! I LOVE the products that Mozilla produces, and keeping Microsoft honest by pushing even harder to develop competive products is a *GOOD THING*. In fact, it makes my keyboard mapping point even more valid as if you want to be a competitor you first have to recognize who and what your competition is.
But don't take my word on it. A FANTASTIC piece to help back-up my claim comes from none-other than Mr. Joel Spolsky, better known as "Joel on Software", in his article "Strategy Letter III: Let Me Go Back!" in which opens with:
When you're trying to get people to switch from a competitor to your product, you need to understand barriers to entry, and you need to understand them a lot better than you think, or people won't switch and you'll be waiting tables.
I'll let Mr. Spolsky take it from here.
Enjoy!
[UPDATE: One quick addition to this: You can do both. Meaning, you can support both camps; those coming at it from an Outlook-based world who might be used to using Ctrl+Q to mark an email as read, and those coming from another world who find Ctrl+Q (Ctrl-Q for all you Emacs fans out there ;) mapped to "Quit this Application!" completely normal and within reason.
Dev-tool companies do this all the time... they will set up several keyboard map's and ask you during set-up which you would like to use. I should note that not all of them do this during set-up but most, if not all dev-tools allow the ability to easily switch between keyboard mappings for the more commonly used tools as, with what should be obvious, those who write code tend to both use and write *A LOT* of macros and then map these macros to specific keyboard settings. As a developer when you become accustomed to one set of mappings and you are asked to try a tool that doesn't support these mappings in one form or another guess what happens... It gets uninstalled just as fast (hopefully faster!) as it got installed. And if not uninstalled, at very least forgotten about.]
Posted by m.david at 09:20 PM | Comments (0)
September 24, 2005
You Know What I Just Love About The Mozilla Thunderbird Project?
The fact that they just don't seem to care that 80% of us are used to the Outlook way of using Ctrl+Q to mean "mark a post as read" instead of "Quit this application!" causing the same 80% of us to swear that if that "damn thing closes on me one more time its over!"
I understand that Q can better represent Quit when thought of mapping the resulting function of the key combination(s) to the alphabet, that makes logical sense. But also remember then when your overly concerned with what something logically represents and instead what it acutually represents... which is an easy way of performing the same task over and over... Like marking an email as read.... it can really start to get on your nerves ...
Logic doesn't ALWAYS have to win over on Function. If this were the case we would all still be (and rightfully so I might add, but none-the-less ;) programming in Lisp. (actually, with Function as part of that sentence, it completely kills the Lisp part of this paragraph, doesn't it... see what I mean! ;)
Sometimes Worser *IS* Better...
Think outside of the box (or alphabet as the case may be)
Pick a phrase, any phrase... but pick one that allows you to get over your "It just doesn't make logical sense!" attitude and give into "it makes usability sense and THATS whats most important"
Please.
Just something to think about...
[UPDATE: Before someone states "well you can just change the keyboard mappings and everything will be just as your Functional heart desires" ... just after kicking your a$$ for being such a smart a$$ I would state:
"and I can just as easily go back to Outlook, too." which is exactly what has happened to a lot of would be believers and will continue to happen if software doesn't work out of the box, as expected (or maybe better stated "as people are used to")
You know what amazes me is what we are willing to go through in life just to save ourselves a couple hundred bucks. A COUPLE HUNDRED BUCKS! Now I realize that this phrase does represent a lot of money to a lot of people in this world. I'm not trying to downplay the idea that we're a filthy rich nation who just don't get how good we have it... This is a very true statement.
But when productive and non-productive can literally mean the difference of several thousand to tens of thousands of dollars lost, quite possibly more depending on how many unproductive people we are refering to, it just does'nt make sense to sit here and state "well yeah, buts its free!"
No its not.
In fact, its quite possibly [insert the thousands, etc... quote from above, here] of lost revenue because of allowing ourselves to believe that "free" is always better that "cold-hard-cash."
Sorry folks, its not. We (refering to the OSS communities as a whole) need to embrace the idea that its *NOT* because we don't charge for our services that makes us fundamentally a better software choice and therefore the rest of the profit-hungry software world fundamentally evil, and instead because the technologies we build help drive industries to be more productive because we are not driven by the all-mighty-dollar, and instead the all-mighty-passion to inject the necessary tools into the right hands such that these same hands can help built this better world that we wrongfully believe already exists because we have already created it.
We havent. And in some cases, we've made it worse.
Put that in your hash pipe and smoke it... oh, and while your trippin' too hard to care, can you map Ctrl+Q to "mark as read" as default, out-of-the-box for me.
thanks.
Posted by m.david at 09:07 PM | Comments (0)
September 23, 2005
Early Availability of Project Mentioned Last Night
As I hinted towards in last nights "From An Experts Point of View [via Oleg Tkachenko]" post I have been trying to put together the pieces of a project that is complimentary to Oleg's XLinq.NET project. The site is http://bLinqX.NET, and is based around del.icio.us Social Bookmarking, with a cronjob set to run a transformation process, polling the del.icio.us server at :15 and :45 past each hour for the tags "Linq", "XLinq", and "bLinqX" [used to tag content that is related to Linq and XLinq but not necessarily taggable as either.]
[NOTE: Another *HUGE* thanks to Uche for helping sort out the crontab issues I encountered this morning, and as such get this portion of the project working perfectly.]
At the moment you can access the result of each of these transformations at:
http://blinqx.net/linq.xml
http://blinqx.net/xlinq.xml
http://blinqx.net/blinqx.xmlSo beyond lightening the load a bit on the del.icio.us server, what else is planned for this site?
There are a couple ideas I am playing around with [and I would certainly love to hear about any other ideas anyone might have] The most simple of these is to render the latest feeds as part of the front entry page. The feeds can also be used to extend the services offered by del.icio.us (e.g. add a ratings system, add extended commentary capabilities through a blog and/or wiki interface as well as a forum in which the content contained at each particular link can be expanded, discussed, sample code posted, rants, raves, etc... Using a combination of client and server side XSLT, using XMLHTTP as a workhorse to get and post xml between the client and server. etc..., etc..., etc...
The one thing I don't want to do is to go past this general premise of sharing bookmarked links and extending the capabilties of del.icio.us with features that is in no way recreating or competing against what del.icio.us itself offers the community. I also don't want to compete against what Oleg is putting together, which seems it will be focused more towards developing content that in turn would be bookmarked on del.icio.us and tagged with one of the above tags to then use this site to simply access the links directly, add commentary, rate the link, etc...
While I don't want to limit creativity, if it goes beyond this scope then my guess is that Oleg's XLinq.NET project would probably be the better place to focus these ideas, keeping this site lean and mean and able to act as a central place to access the latest and greatest Linq and XLinq related content, building tools and what have you that will enable such things as mentioned above without ever actually having to visit the site and instead either pulling down the XML feeds for client-side processing, interacting with the server via REST or SOAP to fine tune the data that is being sent, post comments regarding links using the Atom Publishing Protocol and accessing responses to such posts via the associated Atom feed, etc... etc... etc...
If you have an idea that fits into this space, GREAT! I'd love to hear about it. If its a great idea, but goes beyond this scope, Oleg already has a simple form for you to post your idea to him directly. Between these two sites, my guess is that if you have interest in Linq or XLinq, you will be well served by both.
Regarding the site data feeds
As mentioned these feeds are currently updated at :15 and :45 past each hour so setting your reader to poll these feeds twice an hour, 30 minutes apart, will coordinate nicely with this configuration. del.icio.us specifically requests[1] that you do not poll more than every 30 minutes. If it seems that the difference between the XML returned when polling twice is minimal, at best, I will probably reduce the feed updates to once an hour as to free up that bandwidth for someone else with greater bandwidth needs. If that happens, I will let you know so you can adjust your reader to poll the bLinqX.NET server once an hour if you have it set to two. If you happen to take notice that there are even less updates than would require hourly updates, please let me know as the more of a community effort we can make this the more we will all benefit from one another while keeping our bandwidth usage to the bare minimum required to have an effective tool at our disposal.When I get some more time I will update the site with content, create a client-side transformation to render the data feeds within your browser when you visit the site directly, create Atom 1.0 feeds, add the blog and wiki engine, etc... With each major completion I will update this sites main feed to let you know.
In the mean time, enjoy!
---
[1] : See the bottom part of the about page, which states below the Feeds heading and just above the API heading [2] :» Please do not poll any single RSS feed more often than every 30 minutes. RSS feeds are not updated more than twice an hour, and you will receive an error if you try to crawl more frequently.
[2] : With xml:id recently reaching a recommendation can we please start adding xml:id attributes, or even just id [technically speaking 'html:*/html:@id'] [@name is deprecated, use html:*/@html:id or xml:*/@xml:id and you'll be all the happier later on when this becomes the norm] attributes to our XHTML? Doing so will allow us to create client side tools which can create links that point EXACTLY to the content we are refering to using the typical hash + id that has been around since the beginning (well, at least #nameofanchortag has been around since the beginning] Thanks! :)
Posted by m.david at 11:43 PM | Comments (0)
Blog Server Going Down For 15 Mins For A Quick Hardware Upgrade
See ya in 15 mins :)
Posted by m.david at 12:06 PM | Comments (0)
Top Five(5) Reasons darcs Kicks Source Code Control [-exp deleted as per blog 'intro' no-profanity policy]
I was first introduced to darcs by Bruce D'Arcus and, to be honest, my first impression was "Yeah, yeah, you just like it cuz' it sounds like D'Arcus." Of course I was being sarcastic, but it still took me several months to finally be convinced to look into what he continued to rave about...
Guess what?
Bruce was right...
darcs Kicks Source Code Control A$$. As such, here is my top five(5) list as to the reasons why:
Reason #5 : It's built around the concept of Decentralization : Decentralization, a central(ironically) concept to Grid Computing, is something I personally believe to be a massive piece of our computing future. So why not start getting used to the idea by using the technologies available now that are built around these computing ideals instead of waiting until the future *IS* now and being forced to jump in head first just to get caught up.
Adding to this, any darcs repository can be a Master repository. So if I "get" (darcs is partially influenced by HTTP-based verbs [1]) a repository and "pull" down the patch updates from one repository I am not forever bound to that repository for any and all future updates. If a buddy and I want to work on a certain piece of a larger project over the weekend and we would rather get things working between the two of us first before updating the projects main repository, no problem. Just tell darcs to "pull" or "push" the patches from the a different location by appending it to the command line.
So instead of:
> darcs pull
You would type:
> darcs pull http://my.buddies.darcs/repo-location
or to push (via SSH, another reason Darcs Kicks Source Control A$$)
> darcs push http://my.buddies.darcs/repo-location
Of course, just because s/he "push"ed me changes doesn't mean I have to accept them. But I'll let you look into how and why this is important via the community wiki or manual, two well written and immensely helpful resources.
Reason #4 : It's simple. simple, Simple, SIMPLE! : Another way to say it might be darcs KISSes A$$, but ummm... maybe thats not quite the term David Roundy (darcs Inventor) would prefer people using. I won't go into the exact details as to what I mean as alluded to above, there is already fantastic documentation on the subject contained at the community wiki and in its manual. I highly recommend both as a good starting point for all things darcs.
Reason #3 : Numeral Versioning is GONE!. : Instead, versioning is based on the textual explanation as to whats different about it. In other words, when I create a new patch, instead of having the SCC engine take my text based explanation and attach it as a note, it uses what would be the note and makes that the focus. The internals of darcs will take care of knowing which patch was added and when, and you can certainly abstract that meta information if you so please, but what does a number tell me beyond "this one comes after that one?" At the command line (GUI Tools are beginning to be developed as well) darcs requires you to give each version a text-based description, and even allows for extended descriptions which it then attaches to the patch such that you can add an entire inventory of changes if there happens to be a significant number added since the last patch.
Now this doesn't mean because number-based versioning isn't a part of darcs that you can't version your releases. But I don't think I need to explain to anyone reading this blog why "released" software is different from "under-development" software. Obviously "Windows 'This patch contains the fixes to ... as well as all of these new features ...'" is not something the marketing department is going to be buying into anytime soon.[2] But as I mentioned there is a big difference between "released" software and "under-development" software. I can probably leave you to fill in the rest.
Reason #2 : Built in software delivery mechanism and email updates : When you first initialize a darcs repository it asks you for your email address. The purpose? Because of the decentralized nature of darcs, David Roundy built into darcs the ability for people to email patches to the person who created the repository (or at least to an email address set aside as the proper address for updates to be sent for this particular repository.)
In regards to software delivery mechanism, you just have to start using it and you will begin to see what I mean. Againg, its simple, Simple, SIMPLE!
SIMPLE!!!
Reason #1 : darcs is built using Haskell : As many people are beginning to understand because of the Linq and XLinq technologies recently announced by Microsoft (which have an extensive amount of Haskell influence, Erik Meijer, one of the central designers of Linq and XLinq is also one of Haskells language designers. Obviously this had an influence in Haskell finding its way into Linq and XLinq.) As Kurt recently stated in an IM conversation "Haskell is a helluva language!" Another good friend of mine, Dimitre Novatchev, stated a while back "I have Haskell and XSLT, why do I need anything else?" In case you don't already know, Dimitre's FXSL Functional Language Extensions for XSLT 1.0 and 2.0 are DEEPLY rooted in Haskell. Of course, any platform that has a Haskell compiler means that darcs will run on that platform. Last time I checked, that was a lot of platforms. ;)I don't know about you, but when people like Dimitre, Erik Meijer, and Anders Hejlsberg spend as much time as they have building Haskell-like extensions into two of my top three favorite languages (Lisp, XSLT, C#, in that order :) I stop questioning and simply accept what they are telling me.
Now you might ask "If Dimitre, Erik, or Anders told you to go jump off a bridge, would you?" to which I would reply "Um, yeah..." with a "what are you, a fucking idiot"-based undertone to it.
'Nuff said.
---
[1] : A listing of darcs (1.0.3) verbs is as follows:
C:\Documents and Settings\M. David>darcs
darcs version 1.0.3 (release)
Usage: darcs COMMAND ...Commands:
initialize Initialize a new source tree as a darcs repository.
get Create a local copy of another repository.
add Add one or more new files or directories.
remove Remove one or more files or directories from the repository.
mv Move/rename one or more files or directories.
whatsnew Display unrecorded changes in the working copy.
record Save changes in the working copy to the repository as a patch
unrecord Remove recorded patches without changing the working copy.
amend-record Replace a recorded patch with a better version.
revert Revert to the recorded version (safe the first time only).
unrevert Undo the last revert (may fail if changes after the revert).
pull Copy and apply patches from another repository to this one.
unpull Opposite of pull; unsafe if the patch is not in remote repo.
rollback Record an inverse patch without changing the working directory.
send Send by email a bundle of one or more patches.
apply Apply patches (from an email bundle) to the repository.
push Copy and apply patches from this repository to another one.
replace Replace a token with a new value for that token.
tag Tag the contents of the repository with a version name.
setpref Set a value for a preference (test, predist, ...).
diff Create a diff between two versions of the repository.
changes Gives a changelog style summary of the repo history.
annotate Display which patch last modified something.
optimize Optimize the repository.
check Check the repository for consistency.
resolve Mark any conflicts to the working copy for manual resolution.
dist Create a distribution tarball.
trackdown Locate the most recent version lacking an error.
repair Repair the corrupted repository.Use 'darcs --extended-help' for more detailed help.
Use 'darcs COMMAND --help' for help on a single command.
Use 'darcs --version' to see the darcs version number.
Use 'darcs --exact-version' to get the exact version of this darcs instance.---
[2] : Although, as Rory Blyth recently pointed out the following [seen at the PDC] “IT’S THE MOSTEST INNOVATIVEIST BIGGEREST EXPLODINGIST MAJOR COMPUTAR PROGRAMS ON THE PLANET THAT WILLS MAKE YOUR EYES POPS OUT OF YOUR HEAD AND GIVES YOU A TESTICULAR HERNIA WHEN YOU USE THE MOUSE TO MAKES THE FOLDARS OPEN BIG AND INNOVATIVELY(EST)!!!!” maybe the current Windows marketing department would at least be up to listening as to why this might be a better way to market software. Then again, if this is the kind of "versioning phrase" they would be willing to consider, then I think its best if you avoid explaining to them "well, yeah, we could do that if you really wanted to, but...". Trust me, no matter comes after the "but", once a marketing type hears "we could do that if you really wanted to" they're mind is already a million miles away and the "but" has absolutely no meaning at this stage, so don't waste your time. Better yet, never say "we could do that if you really wanted to" and instead "hmmm... thats an interesting idea... while I have my doubts, I guess if we pushed out the addition of [insert this particular marketing types favorite feature] for another couple of years we might be able to make it happen... but again, I have my doubts." Actually, you can probably just stop just after "pushed out the addition of [insert this particular marketing types favorite feature] for another couple of years" because, trust me, thats when they're going to get the "Ooohhh, no, we can't do that" look on their face and again, will stop listening to what comes after.Just trying to help where I can ;)
Posted by m.david at 08:39 AM | Comments (0)
From An Experts Point of View [via Oleg Tkachenko]
Being excited about XLinq I couldn't stop myself from grabbing XLinq.NET domain name. I'm going to try to build a community portal for the XLinq technology. The goal is basically to push XLinq by growing a community around it. There is definitely a need for Microsoft-independent easily accessible place where developers can find XLinq resources or share their experience. Well, that's my vision at the moment. There is not much content at the site currently, just basic info and links. If you've got any ideas/suggestions about what would like to find at XLinq.Net, please drop me a line.
Excellent! Whats even more excellent is I had a similar, yet non-competing and instead complimentary idea that I am working on as we speak. Should take all of about an hour or so to build and, with testing in mind, as long as everythings seems like it should work and work well I will post the result sometime in the next 12-24 hours.
Stay tuned.
Posted by m.david at 03:05 AM | Comments (0)
Another Effective Text Ad
Saw this ad in the Register story from my last post:
It definitely got my attention.
Posted by m.david at 02:47 AM | Comments (0)
Grid technology stalls Wiki vandals [via The Register]
Grid technology stalls Wiki vandals | The Register
Currently, scientists wanting to use the Grid have to get a digital certificate that identifies them to the Grid as bona fide boffins. GridSiteWiki extends this so that all Wikis can use digital certificates to identify their contributors.
This link was just forwarded to me from Russ with the paraphrased note "this sounds a lot like what we are doing with the Credentia project" and he's right, it does.
The Credentia project is another one of the x2x2x.org projects related to the LLUP [1] Decentralized Messaging Protocol, (which, by the way, is coming along quite nicely. Its amazing the progress that can be made when people like Don, Uche, Russ, Sylvain, and Kurt are involved :) with a focus on seeking out the best possible (and pre-existing; we don't want to re-invent or design/build ANYTHING we don't absolutely have to) solution to bring the "I am who I claim to be; see, here's proof" world of digital identification to the masses.
Maybe this is exactly what we need... More soon...
[1] In regards to the LLUP project as of late we have decided to focus more of the focus on the term "Blip"; various reasons for this, one of which is we are all sick and tired of acronyms and the thought of adding another one to the acronym hell we call the Tech Industry has been enough for us to want to put the focus more on the implementation side of things (Blip) than on the architecure (LLUP))
Posted by m.david at 01:20 AM | Comments (0)
September 21, 2005
This Post Has Been Brought To You By An Official XSLTBlog > DataDirect Attitude Reset : Clic-clic-clic-clic boom!
Well Yo y'all ready for DataDirect
(Pump em' up M.)
Well Yo y'all ready for DataDirect
(Pump em' up M.)
Well Yo y'all ready for DataDirect
(Pump em' up M.)
Well here I go here I go here I here I go
Don't you just love variations to Will Smith beats on a cold, rainy, and windy day in Downtown SLC?
It's too bad I can't hear ya' cuz' I'm about to go:
Boom? Where ya get that idea? Ya'll are crazy I tell ya! CRRAAAZZZzzzzyyy Talk come from your side of this bitpixel lake in front of me...
Anyway, as I was saying before you totally threw off my groov'
It's too bad I can't hear ya' cuz' I'm about to go:
Back on my flac'
(come on M., don't do that!)
Cuz DD'z got me back
(yo, they pay ya to say that?)
Not at all, step on back...
This orig'inal stack will impress even that
Now it's time to be smooth
How do I know? because the crowd went ooooohhh
In response to the way that I was kicking it
XSLT Divisional
Flames always original
Like the dr. jekyl man and this is my hyde side
I am the driver and you’re on (the other side of the screen I guess...?)
So fellas (yeah)
Are y’all wit me (yeah)
I said fellas (yeah)
Are y’all wit me (yeah)
Why don’t you tell DoubleD what y’all wanna do
We wanna ooh-ahh to the XQuery ooooooooh
Just remember where you heard this [pop-chartin' [pop chartin'? Let's try 'chart-toppin' instead] track first, K?
Welcome back DoubleD! Seems while the rest of us were yackin' it up you were hackin' it up cuz' with what I've seen so far, I'm diggin it...
Um. The post is over, why you still here?HELLLLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO... Why you still staring at my screen!!??
You in shock?
Hmmm, well, while you deal with your bad a$$ catatonic self I'm going to go play some more with the DataDirect XQuery engine cuz' like I just said, it seem DoubleD's back, although I really don't think they ever left us from a quality of software production standpoint and instead they became an easy target given they were the only ones out there trying to drive up the stock in what really is a good programming language that everyone else was playing down... and, like I said, this really is a really good implementation from what I've seen so far... So, good-on-ya DoubleD... Welcome back to the XSLT:Blog family... we [we? while there are undoubtedly those who just proclaimed "I knew there was more than one person inside that head" I assure you its just me... quite possibly five of me, but they're all me ;)][1] missed ya' (although I guess I can't blame ya' for wanting to ignore this part of the blog-o-sphere for a while.. ;)]
And in case anyone just has to ask... No, no one has paid me a cent to say this! Get over it!
Enjoy your (DataDirect XQuery-enabled?) Day! :)
[1] : If you find yourself wondering what I could possibly mean by that and how such a statement separates me from a schizophrenic then you obviously are having troubles with what a schizophrenic person is in the first place. We all have different moods, different times where we are just a different person than we normally are. That doesn't mean that we all then are schizophrenic. schizophrenia is a disease that cause us to quite literally believe we are somebody different than who we actually are, changing into these people at various times and at for various reasons. Don't take this the wrong way... I don't mean this as a rant nor have I ever been concerned that others fear this as a possibility. If you know me from more than this blogm from a truly personal level you already know that I'm just someone who loves life in whatever mood or situation I happen to be in presently. I do get the occasional believe that "he must be high on something... you can't just be like that all the time without help from the medical profession, street pharmacist or Walgreens inclusive" to which I will respond with a .. actually by now half way through that sentence I already stop paying attention to you so I probably won't respond at all... Here's my secret... when your'e mad, get it out and get on with life... when you wanna sing, sing loud and if necessary purposely offkey just cuz' its fun... when you want to cry... CRY!!! And when you're around people who are constantly feeling the need to drag you down, run as fast as you can as far away from them as you can. You don't have to put up with that shit, so don't. Let them be miserable on there own if thats what they choose to be, but don't let it effect who you are because of how they are.
When I say growing up with five sisters has had an effect on me, I truly mean that... you try spending that much time with that much estrogen and let me know how easy it is to simply learn to let your emotions out when you have them... its a great philosophy which fortunately as a Man I have the power built in to get over the emotion fast... Women? Well... lets just say there were times I would come home and before my hand even touched the front door knob I could sense the tension of the drama contained inside and found ways to quickly remember that "thing I forgot I was supposed to do that one time and just remembered it so I better go do it now before I forget..." Trust me, when theres drama, turn around, walk away, come back in a few hours and show immediatte worry and empathy, nodding your head and say "wow! you're right. I am so sorry" and wait until they leave the room. Do this and in 5 mins (+the several hours away from the drama) your time will be yours again... Don't do this... youre now a new pawn piece in the new chess game of the new drama.
Theres a real reason I am 33, unmarried, with no worries if it never happens. Why? Because I know better. In fact, all five of me know better. :)
Posted by m.david at 10:21 PM | Comments (0)
[Part 3] Assets, Atom Feeds, and AspectXML - The Triple Threat of Web Development?
From the post I published about 30 seconds ago on my O'Reilly blog comes the belated follow-up to "[Part 2] Assets, Atom Feeds, and AspectXML - The Triple Threat of Web Development?" creatively customizing things a bit and calling it:
[Part 3] Assets, Atom Feeds, and AspectXML - The Triple Threat of Web Development?
Wow! Its been a combination of both fun and crazy all rolled into one over the last week and a half, the result of which is still being baked, but is getting closer and closer by the minute for the initial release. However what I am refering has nothing to do with the content of this post, that of Assets, Atom Feeds, and AspectXML. Before I get ousted from the good graces of the O'Reilly development community (a membership in which I greatly cherish!) I want to quickly post the updates I made a week or so back to the AspectXML source files.
Russ Miles, the original mastermind behind AspectXML, and overall AOP expert (one of the few that I am personally even aware of given that AOP is still a very "new" programming paradigm to many of us) plans to follow-up from my post, bringing the focus to AOP in general to ensure we have all the bases covered before pushing things forward before the community as a whole might be ready for it...
Russ and I plan to work together on this series from this point forward, a wonderful blessing to have his expertise help lead and guide these ideas from my standpoint, and a fantastic AOP-expert added bonus for those of you who find great interest in this programming paradigm and are ready to take things to the next level... something Russ is more than capable of helping you with.
For now I plan to leave things in the capable hands of Russ, and when he feels we're ready to move forward with the next piece in this series... well, I'm already well into its development so I will definitely be ready when he feels we're ready to take things to that next level.
Enjoy Your Potentially AspectXML/AOP-enhanced Programming Day! (made all the easier with the latest 6.2 of <oXygen /> XML from George Christian Bina, and SyncroSoft. A wonderful piece of work! As always, thanks George!)
Posted by m.david at 01:31 PM
September 20, 2005
Yet Another Fantastic Set of Feature Enhancements to What is Already The Best XML Dev Tool On The Market
XML editor - XML Editor & XSLT Debugger What is new in
XML Editor 6.2 Version 6.2 of the
XML Editor gives a whole new editing experience with the introduction of a dockable framework that allows free configuration of the editor layout. Along with this major change there are also a lot of other additions and improvements. I LOVE OXYGENXML!!!! x 6.2
=
I LOVE OXYGENXML!!!!
I LOVE OXYGENXML!!!!
I LOVE OXYGENXML!!!!
I LOVE OXYGENXML!!!!
I LOVE OXYGENXML!!!!
I LOVE OXYGENXML!!!!
I LOEnjoy Your <oXygen /> XML 6.2-based Development Day! I know I am mine :)
Posted by m.david at 05:33 PM | Comments (0)
God Bless the Mono Project [via Atsushi Eno]
I'm not sure how complete this is, but based on previous experience with the work of Atsushi Eno my guess is that if he's blogging about it theres at very least some substance standing behind his post.
Wow!
Posted by m.david at 02:00 PM | Comments (0)
In or Out? How about Source, Result? Better yet, how about just XML in, XML out, shaka, shaka, shaka your XML inside out?
I have previously questioned the what seem like weird method names in Java’s newish ProcessBuilder API. It turns out that its not-newish-at-all close personal friend Process is little strange too: it has getOutputStream and getInputStream which respectively get you pipes to the process’ standard input and output. Data comes out of the Process and you want an InputStream, so it has to be getInputStream. But how can getOutput get you the input while getError gets you the error? OK, call me anal, I can take it. But I’m writing a class right now kinda like Process, and I simply absolutely can’t bring myself to call the input the output and vice versa. So I have getTaskInput, getTaskOutput, and getTaskError, which produce output, input, and input streams respectively. We all have to deal with the confusing nature of reality in our own ways.
[NOTE: When you get to the end of this post hopefully the title will make a bit more sense... For now, just go with it :)]
One of the pleasentries of working on the Saxon.NET project came when I discovered the beautiful simplicity that is used in Java's JAXP XML processing extension project (it now ships as part of Java 1.5, but previous to that it was an extension project.)
Of course before the official 0.10[1] release of IKVM, to gain the benefit of JAXP it required some "creative-splicing" of various open source projects to get this to work [this changed in the 0.10 release, made evident by this response to an email response Jeroen sent confirming that JAXP was now a part of IKVM.Gnu.Classpath.dll, something he would later reveal was the fantastic effort of Mark Wielaard(the GNU Classpath developer/admin that imported GNU JAXP.)] Before this blessed event took place the previously mention spliced-libraries had to be compiled as part of the Saxon.NET assembly to gain the JAXP functionality (and even the spliced-libraries required some extra hacking here and there to get things to sit right.)
Why not just make them their own assembly? Too long of an explanation with very little value given that this is simply no longer a requirement. The point of even going through this painful explanation is this:
When I first discovered the beautiful simplicity that JAXP's Source/Result implementation brought to the XML document type table I realized then that no matter how many sleepless nights of hacking it took, I was going to get JAXP integrated into Saxon.NET, or quite possibly die trying... Coming from the .NET world where, even though the entire framework was built on an XML foundation, you were always fumbling with conversion from one XML document type (reader, writer, reader/writer combo, forward only, backwards only, 'only if a child with the attribute of "whodahellcameupwiththisnastiness" existed' reader, writer, and reader/writer combo of his royal nastiness, etc...) to another.
While I cant really say for sure, I'm guessing the desire(and in all honestly, need!) for extensive optimization was the reason that so many XML document type's, the oodles and oodles of constructors for things like XslTransform(), etc... etc... etc... came about in the first place. But with optimization particular to each situation encountered came the price of increased complexity.
But no matther the reason, I'm sure you can easily understand why the concept of one input document type and one output document type made available via the Source/Result implementation of JAXP was a .NET XML hackers dream come true. But unfortunately it doesn't seem as if the inclusion of JAXP as an official part of the Java language had any real effect on the rest of the language. I would have hoped that maybe the rest of the Java Platform and Class Library development team would learn a thing or two from the JAXP extension project, embracing its simplicity and extending this into the Java platform even further.
But as made apparent in this post, it doesn't seem that XML is really something that is seen as a crucial element in Java's future, at least from the standpoint of the original creator of the language, James Gosling. Don't get me wrong... The man is flat out amazing... I just don't think he's sees much need for XML in the long term picture and as such has taken a "well, lets see how the future plays out" standpoint.
That's fine. But I'm not sure he's going to like what he sees when that future arrives. Actually, in terms of the Java language, I'm guessing that XML will probably win over in the end. But when you have one side of the development language pioneer world questioning the value of XML in the future of the Java language, and on the other side you have language pioneers, visionaries, and all-together software legends at the very top of the software legend stack who have not only shown their commitment to XML from .NET's very beginning, but have continued down the XML path, pushing things 1000 XMiLes (eXtraMiLes for those wondering... shhhussh... just smile and go with it :) further by bringing XML to the top of the data type stack, making it a first class data type within C# and VB.NET, ridding the framework of the complexities of XML data types nearly in one gigantic swoosh of the language pioneers broom.
But lets not stop there! Now that we can treat XML just like XML why not take it even further by bringing forth Linq and XLinq, which in a nutshell allows you to use either a SQL or XQuery-styled (or both if you'd like) syntax embedded directly into your code-base and as a result not only has the XML document type all but been eliminated thus ridding us of the inherent document type conversion complexity, but they've added to this the ability to query, transform, requery, retransform, pipe it in, pipe it out, shaka, shaka, shaka, your XML all about (thus, the title... Hey, I never said you would agree with it. Just that it would make a bit more sense... :) and then start the process all over again if your heart so desires without ever having the need to leave the cozy and well understood site of your original XML document structure.
I like it! :)
[1] 1.0 for those not accustom to the [Unix | Linux | OSS | I-am-sure-it-doesn't-stop-here | chances-are-good-others-use-this-version-variant-as-well] form of versioning... It took some convincing, but it grows on you... at which point it tends to be preferable.
Posted by m.david at 07:53 AM | Comments (0)
September 19, 2005
Does <atom:category ... /> Have Hidden Inside The Secret to Unlock The Potential That Exists In A RPV-styled Description Language?
Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Questioning RDF
In a recent post Dare Obasanjo writes:
Uche is one of the few RDF heads whose opinions seem grounded in practicality (Joshua Allen is another) so it is definitely interesting to see him begin to question whether RDF is the right path.
I completely agree with both statements:
- Uche is one of the few RDF heads whose opinions seem grounded in practicality
- it is definitely interesting to see him begin to question whether RDF is the right pathIn fact just this last weekend Uche advised me on a particular topic regarding a sub-topic related to the semantic web and as such I am now indebted for two conferences worth of drinks. Now I have no idea how much Uche can drink. If he's anything like me that wallet of mine is in for a good 'ol fashioned whoppin... [UPDATE: It occured to me that this might come across the wrong way... I "owe" him two conferences worth of drinks not because that was the "deal" go into seeking his advice but because I felt compelled to show at least some sort of gratitude for all the time, energy, and potentially gobs and gobs of cash he saved me with his advice. Uche always has and I am sure always will help a fellow hacker understand things better if the opportunity presents itself to do so and doesn't have any sort of "now you owe me" attachments to anything he might do or say. Just wanted to make sure I didn't put his advice into the wrong light... Uche is a *VERY* giving person as I'm sure many of you are aware.]
But its a whoppin I am willing, able, and most definitely happy to take compared to the whoppin' it would have taken had I not looked to him for advice and received it with the open honesty and willingness that I have come to truly appreciate in Uche. As Dare states, Uche has his head grounded in practicality. He's one of those hackers in whom when he speaks, I simply shut-up and listen because I know what he has to say is based on experience and understanding, both of which come from working in the hacking trenches, building the technologies that many of us have come to simply take for granted.
Moving on to the next paragraph in Dare's post he states:
I definitely think there is some merit to disconnecting RDF from the Semantic Web and seeing if it can hang on its own from that perspective. For example, XML as a Web document format is mostly dead-on-arrival but it has found a wide variety of uses as a general data interchange format instead. I've wondered if there is similar usefulness lurking within RDF once it loses its Semantic Web baggage.
Hmmm... Well, either I don't understand what he means by "XML as a Web document format is mostly dead-on-arrival" or I completely disagree. But its not the kind of disagreement thats devalues the content in the rest of his post and I have often and quite recently had the same sort-of thought in:
I've wondered if there is similar usefulness lurking within RDF once it loses its Semantic Web baggage.
Here's a crazy idea that I posted to the LLUP working group list a week or two back regarding the ‘atom:category’ element which allows for the attributes ‘term’ ‘label’ and ‘scheme’ without definition for what these must be:
Has the Atom working group thrown in a possible RDF-replacement easter egg given that <atom:category term="foo" label="bar" scheme="http://foobar.org/Hello_Resource+Property+Value">MyCategory</atom:category> could easily be used to represent all three of these values with the added bonus of a text node made available between the start and end tags of this element that can be used as the basis in which the contained attributes can be applied?
Don't get me wrong. I'm not making accusations that anything evil or backhanded has taken place. In fact just the opposite. In a world where many of us can see great advantage to the RDF-styled RPV and yet great disadvantage to the implementation to RPV that the current state of RDF has put forth, it seems that the Atom Syndication Format could have contained within it exactly what is needed to do RPV right, ridding itself of the complexities contained within RDF, focusing instead on simplicity. In other words:
Could <atom:category term="foo" label="bar" scheme="http://foobar.org/Hello_Resource+Property+Value">MyCategory</atom:category> give us a good starting point in which we can start over with a new RPV-based description language, from scratch, this time based on a solid, well-defined syndication format that, when implemented according to the specification, dump's the loosey-goosey'ness of RSS and gives us a solid foundation in which has the potential to last for generations with need for little, if any, changes? Furthermore, can this be be done in a simple, easy to understand and implement way using the above mentioned atom:category element and its associated attributes?
I think it can.
[NOTE: Think of it this way: Isn't the general idea driving the semantic web built around bringing context to the content in which it is associated with? And isn't "category" a simple and easily understood term in which we can use to "categorize" the content that is represented, using either a pre-defined categorization such as what we find in DMOZ or something completely dynamic, similar to the way Technorati has made popular use of the term 'tags'?]
Posted by m.david at 03:48 PM | Comments (0)
Follow-up to 'Google enters the blog-search-tool-o-sphere'
Yahoo! Groups : feedmesh Messages : Message 471 of 496
In catching up with my various email accounts I noticed that the original FeedMesh thread started by Bob Wyman regarding blogsearch.google.com had grown considerably over the weekend. In quickly glancing through I found the culprit for the onslaught of responses to this thread, a message from Alex Khesin of Google's blogsearch team. Please visit the link above to view the follow-up responses to what has proven to be a very positive and encouraging response to my original concerns of how blogsearch.google.com will effect the FeedMesh project.
Good-on-ya Google... You have made and continue to make some excellent choices to support the work of those who have come before you in this space. Excellent work!
The original post from Alex Khesin:
From the original Yahoo! Groups-based conversation:
Hello from Google Blogsearch team! Now that the product is no longer
a secret, it is refreshing to be able to participate in public forums
finally.Sam, thank you for pointing out the problem with the feed formatting -
it should be fixed now, please let me know if anyone sees any other
issues. (And to preempt the obvious question - of course we will
switch to Atom 1.0 very soon!)As to our Feedmesh plans, we are great believers in the concept and
are planning to bring up a Google node before too long. Just have to
finish dealing with those post-launch fires first. :)- Alex Khesin
Posted by m.david at 10:28 AM
Jon Udell : PDC Interview with Bill Gates | Revisited
Computerworld | Gates on new directions at Microsoft
In going back to read the Jon Udell : PDC Interview with Bill Gates this part *LEAPED* out at me which for whatever reasoned it hadn't during the first pass through a few days ago.
As Kurt recently pointed out in his piece entitled "Interesting Times", things are really beginning to look, sound, and even smell a bit different on Microsoft campus than they have in the past, a conclusion drawn to mean something possibly quite good, as opposed to something potentially quite bad, a conclusion that is no stranger to the writings of Mr. Cagle. [NOTE: with as good of friends Kurt and I happen to be I find that statement "writings of Mr. Cagle" a bit wierd, but Kurt deserves the implied respect, so I'll leave it as is...]
In particular, I found the following snippet (and that in which follows it) quite interesting and worthy of highlight:
A snippet from the above linked interview
Jon Udell: Right. Speaking in terms of data, I liked the point a lot about the need to get to higher-level semantics around business objects. It seems more and more that the strategy is to define those things in terms of CLR types, CLR objects throughout your various systems. And in fact, looking at the LINQ demos today, and also thinking back to the XAML stuff that I've seen before, it appears that from a standards perspective, there start to look like sort of two parallel paths where you have -- well in the case of LINQ a lot of stuff is very reminiscent of let's say XQuery, or a newer standard called ECMAScript for XML, right? In the case of XAML, a lot of presentation stuff, people originally actually confused with being an extension or a derivative of HTML with CSS, kind of assuming that that was the direction of evolution, and instead it's a different thing. So, do you think that this is true that in fact developers are kind of being taken down two parallel paths here in terms of standards and techniques?
Bill Gates: Say again what you think the two parallel paths would be?
Jon Udell: So one would be... Well in the world of data, it would be, let's say XQuery, ECMAScript for XML, things which are standards, in the world of presentation, the future evolution of DHTML and CSS and things like that, as you're actually even using yourselves...well you have been for a long time, but you're using now in a new context with these gadgets on the desktop. So that's one style of doing things.
Bill Gates: Who did DHTML?
Jon Udell: You guys did. You guys did, I know that.
Bill Gates: Okay. And you know, it's there. Other browsers did the same thing, that was great. In terms of this Atlas runtime stuff, other browsers may well do the same thing. Actually, a lot of the Atlas stuff is even independent of that. So I'm not sure of the parallel path you're drawing. Certainly when you look at something like LINQ, there's always going to be these query type things that are outside of normal programming languages. And great, we'll support those things. But the complexity for a developer of having this funny query utterance which is separate from their functions and their logic, that's never going to be as simple as being able to have the set-type operators right in the language itself. And so the two will co-exist. If somebody wants to have that big XSLT thing or XQuery thing inside their source code or just a reference off to another file that has that, great. We support that. The brilliant thing is giving you a choice of having that right there in the logic in a way that's readable. That's the breakthrough, is that the impedance between -- okay, here's my data mapping logic and here's my business logic. Those two things can be in a readable piece of code.
Jon Udell: That part's really sweet. Anders has done an excellent job with that.
Bill Gates: And he's been working on this for years.
Jon Udell: I know, he's been talking about it for years.
Enjoy your day!
Posted by m.david at 09:50 AM
'Security Warnings' of the 'Huh?' Kind
Just had the following warning pop-up when trying to click a link from blogsearch.google.com:
My Question: Why, when I click a link for a site that I list as "trusted", do I get a security risk warning, and yet when I click a link for a site *NOT* listed in my "trusted" zone I glide right in without any sort of "concern" showcased by IE. Maybe I'm just not seeing the obvious danger that exists in listing a site as "trusted" to then have the nerve to want to visit that site at a later date. But either way I am having a tough time with the concept that listing a site as "trusted" should invoke a warning where as clicking a link that is not listed as "trusted" doesn't present any sort of concern what-so-ever. Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting I want to have to list every site I visit as trusted before IE lets me view the content (I get enough of that when using Windows Server 2003, which, by default trusts *NO ONE* except localhost and forces you to add a site to your "trusted" list via a pop-up dialog when you visit a site thats not listed in your "trusted" zone. On Win2k3, speaking strictly from a server standpoint, I completely understand the need to do this. But that doesn't mean I want to deal with this from a WinXPPro desktop standpoint as well.) I am just having a hard time understanding the need for a pop-up for "trusted" sites, and no pop-up for "as-of-yet unlisted as trusted" sites.
If you happen to know the answer to this, please let me know. Thanks!
Posted by m.david at 06:07 AM | Comments (0)
Uh oh, ummmm... I'll get the 0.3 feeds back online pronto... [via Dimitre and now Dare]
[UPDATE [2005-09-19T14:18:00Z] : Done. Please see the entry to each section for access to the Atom 0.3 format (atom-0.3.xml) if your feed reader does not currently support version 1.0 of the Atom Syndication format, the native Atom format of the atom.xml file contained in the root for each section.]
[Original Post]
Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Donald Knuth vs. the W3C HTML ValidatorI first learned of this "flame" to the W3C Validator group via a link that Dimitre sent to me in email. Finding it amusing I set it aside as something to post to this blog as soon as I had a free chance. Of course I hadn't even considered the implications this had on my own recent actions to dump the Atom 0.3 versions of the Atom feeds for this site and replace them, without warning, with Atom 1.0 versions. Of course I realized how this "flame" from Dr. Knuth applied directly to me (and the rest of the Atom 1.0 loving/Atom 0.3 shunning community in general) when I read this post from Dare, which starts:
Recently, Sam Ruby announced that the Atom 0.3 syndication format would be deprecated by the Feed Validator. When I first read his post I half wondered what would happen if someone complained about being told their previously valid feed was no longer valid simply because it was now using an "old" format. This afternoon I found an email from Donald Knuth (yes, that one) to the www-validator@w3.org mailing list complaining about just that. In his mail note from Prof Knuth, he writes
[NOTE: Please see Dare's original post for the body of Dr. Knuth's message to the W3C Validation list.]
Umm.... Oooopsss... "Lookz likez I'z gotz' sum workz' to duz...." I'll fix that this evening.
Sorry bout' that everyone!!!
Posted by m.david at 02:49 AM | Comments (0)
September 17, 2005
[via Nikhil Kothari and MS's PDC > Atlas Architecture Overview ] | Excellent Overview Of What Could Very Well Be MS's First Real Open Source, Open Platform Product Release
Nikhil Kothari's Weblog : Atlas Architecture Overview
This post presents a high level overview of whats in Atlas today, along with the architecture diagram from yesterday's PDC session.
I like to think of Atlas as an end-to-end framework, rather than simply being "yet another AJAX library". Atlas is designed to be an end-to-end application framework spanning client and server development, and the communication between the two. In addition it provides an application framework that enables developers to put together components, and wire them up together. It can be used both declaratively (using XML-script) and imperatively (using JavaScript). Finally it addresses how script functionality can be integrated into asp.net apps as well as HTML pages in a clean, and unobstrusive manner.
Actually, maybe the title is overstating things a bit in regards to the server side ASP.NET portion of the Atlas project; something I think we can safely assume will not be "officially"[1] released as open source.
However...
...unless you obsfucate and/or compress the Javascript that is sent to the browser, you can safely assume that this portion, by default, will remain quite open. But, then again, when the code is directly bound to ASP.NET and the underlying CLI-assemblies it makes things quite a bit less portable, and quite possibly, depending on how the Javascript is emmited and passed to the browser for dynamic evaluation could make this a completey moot point given the fact that to keep things nimple, light, with the ability to adjust the scripting code sent to each browser based on that particular browser implementation of ECMAScript, even that could be extremely limited in what is exposed and what is kept within the confines of the compiled assembly, or, maybe even external XML configuration files that store the proper information for each browser and each version of ECMAScript that any given version of that browser may support. With this in mind that title pretty much is a bold face lie. Not on purpose, but its definitely pushing the limits of something that could even remotely fit into the Open Source space as the title suggests. So why don't I just change it? If I did all of this text I just wrote would go to waste.... and you don't want me to just throw away perfectly good text, do you?
Actually, its not such a bad point... Well, anyway, the above linked article is a good one... If you just ignore all of this and read that I'm sure you'll be all the better for it.
If you've made it this far, Enjoy!
[1] A mere technicality really when you consider the fact that any CIL-based assembly whos' source has not been obsfucated can be viewed in all of its open source glory using Lutz Reoder's Reflector project in which through either built-in and/or add-on support can be transformed and viewed as the equivalent source code in most, if not all of the current main stream .NET-enabled languages as well as several non-main stream niche languages. In many ways the fact that Lutz is a Microsoft employee who is currently working on an incubation project (see the entry to his blog for more details), reporting directly to Eric Rudder, the original visionary and ongoing force behind all that is the .NET platform adds quite a bit to the idea that MS's CLI implementation, in many ways, is already as open source as you want it to be. Just takes a little extra effort on your part to make it so... I know, thats a lot to expect. You're right MS is PURE EVIL! Those .Bastards! What do think, we've got all the time in the world to have to spend all the time it takes to double click and exe, load the assembly of interest, and then look at the result in the source code of choice by having to go the "Extra Mile" while we painstakingly push our mouse to the applications menu bar to then have to click a menu item, to then further have to select the language we want to view it in.
Its like they don't even care, huh!? How depressing... :(
[NOTE: Please, please, please don't be the one person is reads this and thinks what I just said was in any way shape, or form, a real rant. And furthermore if you were actually nodding your head in agreement, getting all worked up and upset by those evil Redmond "CloseSourced HillBillies of the software industry"... you may want to look into professional help. Really. It might do ya some good. ;)
Laugh!
Posted by m.david at 07:48 AM | Comments (0)
High Density Recording Materials and Technologies >>> BOOM!!! <<< WiMAX and Internal 512Mbits/sec WiFi
Oh. Okay. Fine. I won't [expletive deleted. -ed] buy one of them either! [expletive deleted. -ed] �
Instead of making any attempt at adding to Norm's comments[1](see the above link to gain access to the links referenced in his post) I will instead quickly make note to the idea that it seems there is a head-on-collission that, similar to the "Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo" steam roller scene in Austin Powers, or even better played out in the "Ohhh nnnn-n-n-nooo Kkkk-ken's cc-comming to ggg-get mmm-mme" played in perfect part by Kevin Klein in the airport scene in "A Fish Called Wanda", has been in process for so long that when it actually happens (and it will happen) you will simply wonder how on earth anyone didn't think ahead and realize:
"Wait. What are we doing? By the time either of these standards reach the market theres a very real chance that between WiMAX, internal 512Mbs WiFi, and solid state holigram based drives [2] who's capacity now reaches well beyond that of both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD; 6 times the capacity in fact (see same [2] link from previous sentence); the storage capacity benefits that seem fantastic in comparison to today's DVD capacities will no longer matter: The benefit gained from the solid state property of Holographic drives coupled with the capacity and write speed capabilities of these same drives will take the shorter-life-spanned, higher energy consuming electronic equipment required to spin the DVD's, reading the pits and converting them into 0's and 1's, bits and bytes that could just as easily be accessed by simply shining a combination of lights and lasers on a non-moving surface, measuring the distances, refractions, etc... to determine with amazing precision the encoded data contained inside, and completely obliterate any need for the expanded DVD technologies all together. And this doesn't even touch the mentioned WiFi delivery mechanism's already in place and, by the time the new Blue Laser DVD technologies hit the market will most definitely be a fairly standard appliance in the average American, Asia, Australian, and European household... "
And we care about Blue-Ray and HD-DVD because...?
Again, based on footnote [2] you should gain an even greater understanding to the fact that this is nothing new. In fact its quite ancient in technology terms, dating back to "Polaroid researcher Pieter J. van Heerden in the early 1960s" or even, if some accounts are accurate, "to Nobel laureate Dennis Gabor's original theory of holography in 1948". Both of these quotes come from last months MIT Technology Review [3] and when you consider these facts, and just how long these technologies have been under development in various forms and stages, limited, until recently, by the high cost of manufacturing that made the then low precision results even less of an attraction to the big market manufacturers, it makes you wonder the same, questioning:
"With all this in mind: Do Blu-Ray and HD-DVD even matter anymore?"
It seems that the best route is in the FD area, which expands the capacity of the DVD to around 11GB, giving Hollywood the much needed added capacity it longs for, and with a much less expensive red laser and zero royalties to pay to either Blu-Ray or the HD-DVD group. With the recent announcement that MS was working with the FD technology it seems Redmond is planning and playing their moves from a very calculated "prepare for the worst, hope for the best" standpoint. Pretty smart move.
For whats its worth, there you have it.
Enjoy your Solid State Written, Stored, and Retrieved Data Brought To You At The Speed Of Light (or 512Mbs second if thinking in wireless terms... Light may have a ever-so-slight speed edge in this area.. but either way... its Solid State Baby!) Day!
[1] Similar to the final what-else-can-or-even-needs-to-be-said effect a comment from Michael Kay can bring to any given discussion on XSL-List, When Norm Walsh (Tim Bray falls into this same category) makes his point on any number of given topics the same what-else-really-can-or-even-needs-to-be-said rule is easily invoked. Kind of comes with the territory when you reach the level that these three industry icons have reached -- The VERY Tippy Top of the Tippy Top.
[2] 8 years ago, when working for the WindowsCE team, I sat in a meeting led by JoeQ [4] who had recently met with a group led by the same man that helped create the original CD technology who had retired in nearby Issaquah and, deciding to take these to the next solid-state level, coupled together highly advanced data pattern compression algorithms and advanced screen printing technologies to imprint the data patterns of various sized dots placed on a credit card sized piece of transparent plastic, a quarter inch or so thick, in various distances from each other to then be measured by various light sources, crunch the measured distances of the resulting patterns made by the light sources, with the result of the equation representing many times over what the standard CD could represent within the same amount of material surface area with the added solid state benefit.BTW... I would never throw out information gained while under NDA just for the hell of it, even though I'm now well passed the expiration of my last MS non-disclosure agreement date, expiring in December 2001 -- at this stage, with the latest incarnation of this technology having moved into the Holographic arena, the latest of which was showcased in last months MIT Technology Review, I think it safe to say the above story can be scene from the nostalgic viewpoint I was intending to highlight.
--
From the MIT Techology Review Holographic Memory Story:"Now his team of 60 engineers is gearing up for a pilot launch in September 2006 and, if it goes well, a full release to follow. The initial product: a holographic disc drive that reads and writes 300-gigabyte discs."
[3] Available online, but well worth the rediculously low cover price of $4.95 USD, even less if you subscribe for home delivery. Better yet, subscribe to the Tecnology Insider for even more in depth coverage of all that is great and wonderful in the world of research and development. I assure you its worth every penny -- and these links are in no way encoded to give me a kickback with each subscription... These are straight from the main site, of which both publications subscription forms have long since been filled out and each delivered in timely precision each and every month for many, many years now. If not obvious I LOVE THESE PUBS!
[4] Anybody whos been on campus for a while knows who JoeQ is... While others had there disagreements with Joe, I wasn't one of them. JoeQ flat out KICKS A$$... Says it like is and lets you deal with it from there. If anybody happens to know where Joe is now, and furthermore how to contact him, PLEASE let me know, or let him know to contact me, either way, doesn't matter.. I just need to catch up with him someday and someday soon... BTW... he knows me as Mark and I doubt would know who you were refering to if you said "M. David Peterson is trying to track you down to say hello and to catch up on life." For various reasons Joe and I simply both got and more than likely will still get along quite well. What can I say, I appreciate someone who doesn't feel the need to fuck around with stupid shit. Joe doesnt fuck around with stupid shit. Gets the job done and done right and gets on with it. I learned a lot from that man... A WHOLE HELLUVA LOT! :)Posted by m.david at 12:05 AM | Comments (0)
September 16, 2005
More on LINQ: A Terrific Q/A With The Creative and Management Talent Behind This New MS Query-Language To Be
DDJ>Visual Basic 9.0: Looking Forward
[NOTE: Remember my "The Density of Smartness" Theory post from a while back? Not that I want to bring up a post that turned out to have the opposite effect of what I had hoped, actually offending a few people I had no intention of offending... and I most certainly had no knowledge of LINQ or XLinq at that point... but none-the-less this is pretty much the point I was trying to make...
While there are definitely other dynamics that must be accounted for (like the fact that all of those responsible for the development of LINQ and XLinq happen to have the same employer and therefore the exact same goal of world domi, errr, I mean world... ummm... PEACE! World Peace!!! (phew... barely pulled than one off, eh? eh? Hellooo....)
Ah hell, here we go again ;) Well... moving forward :)
The point is that when you put together a small group of hackers who's development language pedigree is deeper than an average months worth of post's to this blog, you get results; the results are what you both want and need; and these aforementioned results happen extremely fast...
Are they for the better good of the development community, specifically those interested in open source, open standards, open community... Well, the CLI is arguably all three of these, and Mono is a perfect example of how open source, open standards, and open community the CLI can get... So, yeah... they are.
[Quick, before you get all glary-eyed and start sending me hate-mail, if this just so happened to be Sun, or better yet, Apple, would you be annoyed, even in the slightest, if the above comments were made regarding the results of one of these two "ok fine, we'll throw some open source out there to keep the hounds at bay..." companies...
Just >> shift-the-bits >> and its amazing how one companies "evil minded priorities" are another companies charm...
Sorry, but having spent many years among the folks in Redmond, and seeing the result's of the vision of Eric Rudder and the understanding of this vision and a true visionary in and of himself in Miguel de Icaza [btw... he recently posted a fantastic summary of the PDC, keynote and all... a MUST read!] as well a Nat Friedman, Edd Dumbill, etc... etc... etc..., the creations of people like Erik Meijer and Anders Hejlsberg , and the countless hours of dedicated effort put forth by the aforementioned and linked Mono-Project community to bring forth both these as well as their own creations in both language creation and extensions to the open source community in a completely cross-platform manner... I simply find it hard to see the point of making any attempt at trying to point fingers in Redmond's direction as the source of anything but fantastic and wonderful achievements that extend well beyond the shores of Lake Sammamish...
[Rant-Officially-Over]
From the above link:
At Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference 2005, Scott Swigart was able to sit down and chat with Microsoft's Amanda Silver, Erik Meijer, Paul Vick, Rob Copeland, Alan Griver, and Jay Roxe about some of the changes coming Visual Basic 9.0. Specifically, VB will have SQL keywords added to the language to support "Language Integrated Query" (LINQ). Here's what the folks working on this feature had to say:
Definitely a must read. As is Miguels coverage of the PDC...
Posted by m.david at 04:37 AM | Comments (0)
September 15, 2005
New Yahoo! User Group for SVG Open 2006 [via a recent IM with Kurt]
Kurt just passed the above link on to me in a recent IM conversation...
In his own words:
"I'm putting together an SVG working group for now for the conference, just to get the ball rolling on it."
The above link contains the following intro:
Greetings one and all - this group will act as the focus for planning and coordinating the SVG 2006 conference to be held in Victoria, British Columbia. Your moderator, Kurt Cagle, is also the host of the conference. Please use this site to ask questions, volunteer, find resources, and so on.
SVG has already proven itself as one of the hottest topics of the year; With announcements regarding SVG rendering engines and development tool support coming on a near daily basis *NOW* is the time to make your presence known for what will prove to be a standing room only crowd in beautiful Victoria, B.C. [1]
Enjoy! :)
[1] I think I missed my calling in life as a travel brochure writer... If this hacking gig' were to ever fall through, I think you can safely assume where you'll find me next...
I wonder if TravelBrochuresBlog.com is still available? ;) :D
Posted by m.david at 08:14 PM
MS-Support for XSLT 2.0? - I'll Let You Be The Judge
mikechampion's weblog : Project LINQ and XML - Some reflections
I have specifically held off from posting commentary regaring LINQ and XLINQ because I simply don't have ANY time at the moment (if you only knew how serious 'ANY time' truly is... but I'm loving every second of it and hopefully you will too when you see the results...) to give such a massive topic the time it needs for proper coverage. Suffice it to say I think its absolutely FANTASTIC and can't wait to get my hands on it ASAP. A lot of people deserve a ton of credit for pulling this together and I assure you that when the time is right, proper credit will be given and then some.
In the mean time, I thought you might enjoy the following snippet from a comment that was left on Mike Champion's post from yesterday attributed to "XML Team" in which an assumption regarding future MS-sponsored XSLT 2.0 support should be quite easy to establish.
Also, take note of what is said regarding XQuery:
no matter how geeked up we might be about LINQ/XLinq, if the market wants XQuery they're gonna get XQuery. The market spoke (well, actually it SCREAMED) that it wants XSLT 2.0 as soon as the spec is final and we can release a good implementation.
Two things:
- If you want something bad enough, SCREAM IT so Microsoft can hear you... The XSLT community did just that and it seems pretty obvious to me what the result is going to be... NICE WORK XSLT COMMUNITY!!!
- Whether the naysayers will swallow this one whole or not, Microsoft *DOES* listen. If the XQuery community wants XQuery support beyond that in which is available in SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server Express (free, slightly limited functionality client-side version of SQL Server 2005) then it seems pretty obvious that if they/we speak-up and let their/our voices be heard, that too will be delivered as requested.
'nuf said.
For the sake of keeping a local record I will copy the entire comment below. But please visit the above link to Mike Champions post and if you feel the need, leave a comment of your own.
---
On the question of how XLinq affects the chances for XQuery in the .NET client .... First, XLinq is a statement of a vision, not a concrete product plan. The idea is to get feedback from outside the rather small group that has worked on it so far. For example, it would be interesting to hear from XQuery fans on what XQuery does that LINQ doesn't, other than run on multiple platforms of course.
Ultimately, decisions such as this are BUSINESS decisions; no matter how geeked up we might be about LINQ/XLinq, if the market wants XQuery they're gonna get XQuery. The market spoke (well, actually it SCREAMED) that it wants XSLT 2.0 as soon as the spec is final and we can release a good implementation. So far, the market seems to be whispering that it might possibly be interested in an XQuery client-side implementation, someday.
I know that *my* loss of interest in trying to convince Soumitra that XQuery should go back in .NET coincided with learning about what we now call LINQ once I started at MS. It will be very interesting to see if other people have a similar reaction or not.
XmlTeamPosted by m.david at 05:10 PM
Google enters the blog-search-tool-o-sphere
As per my recent post to the announcements section of this blog regarding Bob Wyman's (pubsub.com; FeedMesh project pioneer) recent post to the FeedMesh Yahoo! Groups-based mailing list it seems that Google has finally launched their Blog searching tool, blogsearch.google.com. I must say I was pretty excited to notice that when searching for XSLT that the main feed of this blog was listed at the top of a two blog "Related-blogs" list; buts thats beside the point.
So what is the point?
Good question. At this stage I'm not really sure what the point of this post is beyond the fact that this is quite potentially a *GIGANTIC* event who's impact could be felt both far and wide.
Off the top of my head here's the far-and-wide places I can see this impacting:
* Better, Faster searching of blogs for the latest information regarding any given topic.
* Depending on the direction Google chooses, either:
* The promotion of the FeedMesh project and as such bringing this project to the top of the heap.
* The near immediatte destruction of the FeedMesh project as well as a near immediatte destructive impact of projects such as Technorati who, as far as I know, does not participate in the FeedMesh (I could be completely off in regards to this... If I am I will correct this.)
It would be neat to see Google take a "community" approach to this and support the FeedMesh project, following in the footsteps of the Google Talk project who has built their entry into the Instant Messaging space upon standards such as XMPP/Jabber and what seems to be SIP, via the Gizmo Project (see this post for more details.) However, with a first run through the Q/A entry number five has me doubting that this is going to happen:If your blog publishes a site feed in any format and automatically pings an updating service (such as Weblogs.com), we should be able to find and list it. Also, we will soon be providing a form that you can use to manually add your blog to our index, in case we haven't picked it up automatically. Stay tuned for more information on this.
Again, it is my understanding that weblogs.com (which seems to be down at the present time... ) does not, as of yet, participate in the FeedMesh. So to make the comment "(such as Weblogs.com)" leads me to believe that the chances are greater that Google and Weblogs.com[1] or possibly even Technorati.com[2] are working together on this. As such it wouldn't surprise me in the least if a more formal arrangement, possibly even a buyout of one, or even several of the above companies, was announced in the not-to-distant future. Please note that this is pure speculation and is founded on nothing more than what could be one of several hundred possible conclusions made based upon the current data at hand.
I guess time will tell... but it seems to me that the potential shakedown in this space is quite substantial bringing Google to the top of the Blogosphere search tool heap, quite possibly bringing the pioneers in this space to their knees. Is Google now taking on the role that Microsoft played in the late 80's and 90's, either buying up any potential competition, or simply using their power to completely eliminate any and all competition all together?
Again, time will tell...
[UPDATE: As a simple check to see just how quickly Google picked up my last post I searched for XSLT again and, lo-and-behold, less than 20 minutes later (could have been sooner, but thats the amount of time that passed from the time I posted this to the time I searched for XSLT using blogsearch.google.com):
Pardon me for saying so, but thats pretty damn fast!
]
---
[1] Dave Winer, the pioneer behind blogging in general, as well as the force behind RSS, in particular RSS 2.0, is the man behind Weblogs.com.[2] Based on the fact that when you visit Adam Bosworth's blog he has a link to Technorati, a Technorati-based "Blogs that link here" as well as, interestingly enough, a 'FeedBurner' subscription link)
Posted by m.david at 03:05 AM | Comments (0)
MS Atlas project already a part of Mono
For those wondering the MS Atlas project is MS's answer to Ajax. See this post for more details.
In updating my local SVN repository I noticed that the Mono project has already responded:
http://svn.myrealbox.com/source/trunk/mcs/class/Microsoft.Web.Atlas/
Thats unbelieveable response time! My hat goes off to whomever took on this task and responded as quickly as you did... Thats flat out amazing in my mind...
Cheers :)
[UPDATE: It seems that Chris Toshok is the man responsible for the Atlas implementation. Amazing work Chris!]
Posted by m.david at 01:25 AM | Comments (0)
IKVM 0.20 Now In SourceForge Repository
IKVM.NET Weblog - Sunday, September 11, 2005
Having my head down for days on end doesn't lend well to staying on top of such important things as a new IKVM release...
IKVM 0.20 Released
I released 0.20 to SourceForge.
Please visit Jeroen's blog for the link.
Posted by m.david at 12:56 AM
September 14, 2005
Effective Text Banner Advertising
In reading Micah's late XML-Deviant (the final one... how sad. its the end of an era, something that deserves some thought and then a post of its own) I noticed the following banner ad that I *REALLY* liked. This coming from someone who *REALLY HATES* banner ads:
The only modification I would make if I were to try and make things just slightly more effective would be the addition of two vertical blue lines, giving the ad more of a three column look as such:
Why am I bringing this up? I guess I'm hoping that those in charge of the creation of banner ads will realize that out of all the banner ads I see on a daily basis this is the one that I actually paid attention too. I realize I'm one of many millions likely to visit XML.com (or any other site that show's banner ad's; a *HUGE* number I realize. I just visit very few sites on the web, and XML.com is the one I probably frequent the most often) but maybe others feel the same way and this post might help bring such feelings out.
For whats its worth, there you have it :)
Posted by m.david at 11:46 PM | Comments (0)
Follow-up to 'Long Live... Visual Basic?'
In follow-up, the colleague who had forwarded the link that I pulled the Visual Basic comment from followed-up further to ensure that I had a better understanding as to the points he was bringing out of that article. Because I still haven't enabled comments since the "Slashdot attack" from a few weeks ago, I am just going to copy and paste his entire email response into the extended portion of this post along with some additional follow-up links he has sent:
The main thing here is LINQ and not VB. This is the terrific hit of MS in C# 3.0 and VB.9.0
This is the ultimate result of C-Omega.
Anders Hejlsberg will have a presentation about all this, but the man
standing behind this colossal achievement is Eric Meijer -- one of the
creators of Haskell!In the text of the Lambda the Ultimate entry he lists a lot of Haskell
great achievements that were implemented in LINQ (and thus in C# 3.0
and VB 9.0).If I were to write about this I would quote completely the following text:
"If you look closely at the new features introduced to C# and Visual
Basic in the context of LINQ, you will recognize many familiar
concepts that are regularly discussed on LTU ranging from monads, to
meta-programming, lambda expressions, XML programming, to the
relationship between static and dynamic typing.The LINQ project consists of a base pattern of query operators
(compare to the monad primitives) such as Select (map), SelectMany
(concatMap), Where (filter), OrderBy (sort), and GroupBy (groupBy) on
top of which Visual Basic and C# define query comprehensions (compare
to monad comprehensions) that facilitate querying objects, relational
data and XML. The C# syntax for query comprehensions is similar to
FLWOR expressions, while the Visual Basic syntax stays close to SQL
including aggregation.In addition to the language extensions and base operators, LINQ
provides two supplementary domain-specific APIs namely DLinq (compare
to HaskellDB) for SQL relational data access, and XLinq (compare to
HaXml) for XML hierarchical data access. Besides query comprehensions,
Visual Basic provides deep XML integration with XML literals and XML
late binding on top of XLinq (compare to Haskell Server Pages, XMl,
Comega).Both Visual Basic and C# have added several additional language
extensions in support of LINQ, including local type inference (the
type of local variable declarations are inferred from their
initializers), lambda expressions (with type inference), local
functions, anonymous types, object initializers, extension methods
(static methods that can be called using instance method syntax), and
meta-programming via expression trees (compare to type-based quote and
quasi-quote). "Additional links:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/future/linq/
http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=c066dca0-7ead-4f0b-a3ea-347499bcbd0e
http://blogs.msdn.com/xmlteam/archive/2005/09/13/465040.aspx
Posted by m.david at 10:24 PM | Comments (0)
Images of Simple
Images: New looks for Vista, Office | CNET News.com
New looks for Vista, Office The September 2005 edition of Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference gets under way with a keynote address by Bill Gates and a "live preview" of the next version of Office.
At first glance, at least in regards to the new interface for Office, it seems that "K.I.S.S." has found its way into mindset of the UI developers... Excellent!
Posted by m.david at 12:45 AM
September 13, 2005
Long Live... Visual Basic?
Visual Basic and LINQ | Lambda the Ultimate
In the mean time, I was busily working with the SQL, XML, C# and the Visual Basic teams on language integrated query, or as it is now called project LINQ. In particular since early this year I am collaborating with Amanda Silver, Paul Vick, and Rob Copeland and Alan Griver on what has become my programming language of choice Visual Basic.
Posted by m.david at 09:50 PM
Enter Python
Brendan Eich Discusses Python for XUL Scripting - MozillaZine Talkback
Brendan Eich sent us a link to his weblog post about using Python for XUL scripting. At the moment, only JavaScript can be used for scripting in XUL applications but Brendan describes how Mark Hammond is adding support for the popular Python programming language as well. Support for Python in XUL will land in the Mozilla 1.9 timeframe and is expected to be used primarily by developers of extensions and standalone XULRunner applications.
Like Uchi, I fear the lashback (or backlash, however you want to say it) that will result from the Perl and Ruby communities when, as this post makes apparent, Python finds its way into the browser developers hands before these two scripting gems.
But as the post continues:
Work is currently ongoing to allow languages other than JavaScript to be used for DOM scripting, which is a necessary step to enable Python support to be implemented. In theory, this will also allow support for other scripting languages to be added to the Mozilla framework. However, there are no plans to support any languages other than JavaScript in webpages.
This still requires that work be done by any particular communuity to bring over the support for any particular language; but this certainly is the right step in the right direction.
Will be an interesting dynamic (< Sorry, couldn't help myself :) to watch...
Posted by m.david at 02:00 AM
September 12, 2005
A KISS In The Desert, A Simple Reminder For Us All [via Derek Denny-Brown]
only this, and nothing more: Keep it simple...
KISS = Keep It Simple Stupid
Posted by m.david at 12:28 AM
September 10, 2005
On Javascript : A Hot Topic Which Could Soon Become Scorching
Kurt doesn't touch on Sylvain's concerns about portability, security and development environment, and those are still matters that need serious discussion (for one thing, they are issues that have always interfered with my productivity in Web development). I see Kurt's post as a bit of advocacy to underscore for developers why some of the pain is worth enduring. I look forward to more posts on the topic.
Uche is speaking about Sylvain Hellegouarch, a hacker in whom I am fortunate enough to be working with on several projects, who recently brought up to a group of us his frustrations regarding Javascript and its lack of cross-platform support from a standards-based standpoint. He then posted these same concerns on his blog to get a feel for what other might feel regarding this topic. Kurt Cagle, another good friend and partner in many-a-hacking crimes (the good kind, not the bad ;) took the task of answering a question Sylvain posed at the end of his rant, "Is Javascript Dead?". Being taken to task by one of his readers Kurt came clean (if you read the previous link you'll see that was a cheezy attempt at tieing the comments with Kurt's confession -- sorry ;) as to the reason(lack of sleep) things were not as clear as they normally are and followed with clarifications to his previous comments.
So?
Good question :)
The reason why I believe things are about to get a little bit hotter in this area is due to a project in which I was recently given early access to the beta bits, and if all goes well with the documentation process, will find come Monday morning a link with access to the first Release Candidate for a project called TurboTIBET. I don't want to talk too much about things until I have a chance to play with the RC. But if what I have seen so far says anything about what to expect in the RC... lets just say AJAX is about to get its dirty little face scrubbed (hey, I'm not the one that created an acronym matching a well known bathroom cleaning products, don't blame me for exploiting the opportunity presented when the time was right to do so :) with the pristine and spiritually clean TIBET project, a project that takes the technologies that give AJAX its acronymic base and brings them to the Enterprise Application level with built in support for a wide variety of existing web services tecnologies and frameworks including Amazon (and about 10 or 12 more), XML-RPC, XML Schema, XForms, XPath, XSLT, Xeverything else, wrapping them into a common-base of cross platform Javascript-based API functions, and bringing the ability to give your web-based applications a true "application" feel to them.
Add to this the fact that E4X brings to the world of ECMAScript the ability to process XML within the browser in a much more natural, NON-DOM type way, treating it as a first class data type (if such a thing actually existed in ECMAScript -- I guess first class object would be the proper term to use here. I think.) and we have ourselves a whole new ball game in the world of client-side browser-based scripting.
For now its a wait-and-see game. But if things continue to progress it wouldn't surprise me a bit to see ECMAScript to continue forward as a popular weblication development language, finally losing the "rollover" label that has been, for the most part, its most common use on the web thus far.
[UPDATE: I'm about to shoot the announcement out on the announcements feed of this blog, but in reading the release notes for the Mono 1.1.9 release I noticed this little snippet regarding the Mono-Project's JScript.NET Compiler progress:
Progress: JScript now passes 4586 tests of the Mozilla ECMAScript test suite out of 5994 (76.51%)
I have no idea what percentage of the Mozilla ECMAScript test suite Microsoft's JScript.NET implementation would pass -- based on my own experience, probably not much -- but with Mono's cross-platform capabilities, including Windows, I'm thinking outloud and wondering what this could mean in regards to developing a multi-use source code base scenario in which you could use the same JScript[1] in your browser-based apps, to then compile it into CIL, possibly exchanging out the HTML for XAML, which of course is also now available as part of the Mono-Projects offerings to the .NET world of software development.
Might be worth looking into a bit further...
[1] : If any of you are wondering, JScript is the marketing name Microsoft gave to their own implementation of ECMAScript -- you can't blame them... Javascript was the marketing name used to bring greater attention to what was termed LiveConnect, or Live Script, the names originally used for this Netscape backed scripting language (developed by Brendan Eich, now of Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation Fame) that would eventually become standardized by the ECMA and termed ECMAScript. With Netscape looking to capitalize on the increasing popularity of the Java programming language you can't really take MS to task for choosing not to use a marketing name that promoted what, at that point, was a GIGANTIC threat to Microsoft from a competitive standpoint.Posted by m.david at 12:57 PM | Comments (0)
Oh the Irony...
[via Technorati Blog Finder: XQuery]
Posted by m.david at 05:20 AM | Comments (0)
September 09, 2005
[via Tim Bray] Big Medicine Gives BigTime
Britt Blaser is posting news of a remarkable offer from Pfizer; emergency, free prescription filling for all their products for Katrina survivors. Good on ya Pfizer, and since I haven’t seen this in the mainstream news, other bloggers might want to pass the word on. [Update: Huw Gilbert of Pfizer adds: “Also, it is important to note that free medicines are available to all those without prescription drug coverage (regardless of general health insurance status)”.]
Definitely good-on-ya Pfizer... We're all in for a long haul in regards to the after effects of this catastrophic event; but none greater than those who were there when Katrina hit shore, have lost everything they've ever had in ways none of us will probably ever truly understand, including the very city in which was the very essence of their combined soul.
There is a lot of people who undoubtedly will require ongoing treatment in various forms and practices in medicine... As generous of an offer as this is, the potential for long term medication needs could even break the bank of someone as big and as strong as Pfizer. Let's all make sure we don't let that happen...
Cheers Pfizer. You deserve a big round of applause from all of us, and if you listen for it, I assure you it will be heard.
Posted by m.david at 12:53 AM
September 08, 2005
The Mono Project : Mono users meeting at the Microsoft PDC.
As recently found at the above link:
[NOTE: While I have copied the text directly into this post, please visit the above link for a *FANTASTIC* graphic entitled "How CROSS PLATFORM is your .NET?"]
Mono users meeting at the Microsoft PDC.
Date: Tuesday September 13th.
Location: Sheraton Downtown LA hotel, a short walk (map) from the Staples Conventions Center.
Time:The meeting will start at 6pm and will go until 9:30pm.
Pass the word to other fellow .NET developers.
At the meeting we will talk about the Mono Project's current state, milestones, new developments, platform support and upcoming releases. Various Mono developers will be there to answer your questions both members of the community and Novell employees working on Mono.
The evening surprise is the unveiling of the new Mono T-Shirts design by Finnish artist Tuomas Kuosmanen. We will be giving out t-shirts to the attendees.
We will showcase some of the Mono-based applications we have built for Linux:
* iFolder file sharing and synchronization,
* the Banshee media player,
* our new photo management software,
* the desktop search,
* the MonoDevelop IDE and
* the GTK# GUI toolkit which is the API we use to create all of these applications.We will also showcase the new vector-based rendering APIs available for developers (completely cross-platform) as well as the new OpenGL-based windowing system.
We will answer your questions on how to bring your .NET applications to Linux, MacOS X and Solaris and how to take advantage of the Mono and Linux-specific APIs.
Finally, we will demo some of the the new Mono software funded by Google's Summer of Code:
* XBuild: the open source msbuild implementation for assisting you in rebuilding your new projects on Mono.
* Ruby.NET and PHP.NET compilers.
* The DIVA Movie editor.
* The new ASP.NET editor.
* The .NET bug finder.
* The Cecil libraries for reading and writing CIL images.
* Mono's XAML compiler.Wait, do my eyes deceive me?
While I was aware of the XAML compiler because of the *FANTASTIC* work of Gerald Bauer and his XAML-Talk Yahoo! Groups project, I had no idea that Ruby.NET was a part of and as such a result of "Google's Summer of Code."
Excellent!
Say what you want regarding your own feelings on the matter... But the CLI flat out kicks a$$. Adding to this, as the CLI becomes even more deeply embedded into XML via language projects such as COmega, through the watchful eye of Oleg Tkachenko we've recently learned that James Gosling, the creator of the Java programming language is "Java's father is skeptical about native XML support" as the post is entitled.
This doesn't surprise me in the slightest. Anybody who has known me for long enough knows that I have always believed that Java's greatest competition doesn't come in the form of an OO-based language such as C# or even the CLI in general. Instead Java's biggest competitor is none other than XML.
"What? Did he just compare Java and XML and suggest they were actually in direct competition with each other?"
Yep, I sure did. And if you really think about it, applying the entire premise that the Java language was founded upon, that of being a cross-platform, "Write Once, Run Anywhere" language [as it was marketed in the early days] and then compare that to the primary purpose of XML: that of being a platform-independent data-interchange format such that any platform, regardless of what languages are natively supported, can have the ability to inter-operate with other systems of a different type, allowing for such platforms to continue forward doing what they were designed to do, taking full advantage of all the OS/Platform and hardware have to offer, by allowing natively compiled binaries to perform just as they were designed; and without compromise due to the need to be "cross-platform."
Take that completely rediculous run-on sentence, using this as a comparison to the write once, run anywhere focus of Java... and you've got yourself some direct competition taking place.
It seems that Mr. Gosling would like a world where we all programmed in his language of choice, which he just so happened to be the creator of. You can't blame him... we're all the same way; we have our language preferences and I can promise you that if I had invented a language that was being used by a good 50% of the software development world, I would probably feel like I was a pretty cool cat, as should he. But unfortunately we don't all feel the same way when it comes to our language of choice. Some language concepts come easier to some and not to other and vice versa. Or maybe its the syntax of one language we prefer over another. But whatever it is, we like what we like and theres not a whole lot that can be said about it.
With this in mind, and the simple fact that the CLI has taken the "Any Language Can Run Here" approach [speaking in terms of a CLI runtime implementation, or CLR, interpreting Common Intermediate Language (CIL) bytecodes, compiled to the aforemention CIL using a compiler capable of emmitting such bytecodes for any particular language of choice.] then with XML's ability to act as a way of intercommunicating between platforms, or even within the CLI Class Library Framework, it gives us the ability to write code the way we want to, using XML as the source format of the data that needs to be processed.
Isn't that what computing is all about? Processing data?
Maybe I'm mistaken, but I'm pretty sure I'm not... ;)
Enjoy your .NET "My Language, My Way"-enabled (oh, and because of the Mono Project, completely cross platform-enabled too :) Day!
[UPDATE: Brian Ritchie does a fantastic job of keeping up a list of known .NET-enabled languages for those of you interested in seeing just how many languages, full and partial, have the ability to be compiled to CIL and run via a CLI runtime implementation such as .NET, Mono, and Portable.NET. Also worth noting, for those interested in running Apache on a Windows box while still being able to run ASP.NET-based web-sites, there is the Apache HTTP server cli subproject, A.K.A mod_aspdotnet.]
Posted by m.david at 11:31 AM
September 07, 2005
Interview with XML [via Dan Zambonini and XML.com]
I am bustin' a gut over Dan Zambonini's latest post:
I pulled a few strings and managed to get an exclusive interview with XML, who's really hot right now. Sitting in a café just off Venice Beach, this is what she had to say:
Me: Hi XML, thanks for talking to me. I know you're not usually very flexible with these kinds of things.
XML: No problem, I am:
- Glad to be here
- Pleased to meet youMe: I wanted to ask about your relationship with HTML, which has been in all the papers. It's on, it's off, it's back on again... What's the story? In the photos I've seen, you don't seem like a very happy couple.
The entire post is quite good, covering the topic of web navigation after the "interview" with XML.
In regards to this I happen to agree with his premise that the way web naviagation on web sites is currently structured just doesn't make any sense. Why? In a nutshell, any given web page can be navigationally categorized under various "topics." Blog's seemed to have adopted the date structure, something similar to:
/archives/2005/09/07
This works well from the standpoint of information that I may have posted on my blog today, but doesn't lend well in describing to the visitor what that information is about nor does it allow the ability to easily navigate your blog based on category, or keyword, or channel, or however else you want to term the idea of "tagging" your post's with hints towards the content.
Traditional web sites don't seem to have adopted much of a convention, using every possible scenario under the sun, and in many cases avoiding the "path" structure all together and instead using the all too often cryptic query string as a means of building the content of a page, or redirecting the visitor to the static location of the requested content. This of course can be done internally, rewriting the URL, accessing it, and attaching it to the response stream as opposed to an actual redirect, something that requires an additional step from the browsers perspective and causing all too much confusion to the visitor as they get bounced around visually while wondering what all those "clicking" sounds are for.
So whats the answer? Whether we like it or not, URL's are something that we can't just hide from the user. In many ways we all have become dependent on using the location or address bar to "gather are bearings" as to our current location on any given site, or even the web in general. But Dan is correct; if we focus on the 'path' as a way of laying out our site structure we are limiting our visitors to use a somewhat archaic heierarchy system coupled with the search box as their way of getting around our site. But then again, if we don't use the 'path', we are confusing our visitors, forcing them to use our own personal encoding system embedded into the query string of the URL to try and decipher where they happen to be at the present time.
So what to do?
We do both. In a day where Atom and RSS, and the general idea that brought them about, are beginning to build momentum, we are now facing a situation in which we can use the 'path' as the query string with confidence that we will be able meet the navigational needs of our visitors with ease and simplicity by simply using the 'path' as a query system into our content.
Of course this presents the dillemma of choosing just how exactly we plan to implement such a system, how the path will be passed to the query system (as a whole string, broken up intos its pieces and matched against 'navigational' attribute values, etc.. etc.. etc..) which is something that obviously requires a bit of forethought and planning. [NOTE: while technically that wasn't a plug for Uche and Chime Ogbuji's consulting business, it might as well be as they have been consulting in this general area longer than most of us have even been thinking about it. If you are in the market for this kind of consulting work, they would by far be the best choice of anybody I have any personal experience with.]
But with the proper forethought and planning, whatever system we choose in regards to using the 'path' as our navigational query system is going to be a far cry better than the rigid/static system that is currently in place. In fact I am mid-way through an update to this site (visit the main page of this site to see what I mean) that implements a system built on this exact premise, taking it one step further by getting the client involved in the "action." If you are interested in this area, keep an eye out over the next few days for some fairly dynamic changes. If you have thoughts or ideas on how to make it better, please don't hesitate to let me know.
Cheers :)
Posted by m.david at 06:19 PM
Dear Google Alerts, As much as I like both Bob and Micah are you sure articles dated 2003 still qualify as an 'Alert'?
In checking my email I noticed the following alert from Google Alerts notifying me that:
"In his latest Transforming XML column Bob DuCharme explains XSLT 2.0's Temporary
... Micah Dubinko, author of XForms Essentials, compares W3C XForms and ..."
Hmmm... Interesting, although didn't Bob cover "Temporary [trees]" (I'm assuming trees, as the sentence is chopped) a while back? Oh well, I guess it due time to cover them again...
Or maybe not:
You know, I don't think the timestamped web could possibly arrive too soon...Posted by m.david at 05:59 PM | Comments (0)
September 06, 2005
Ooooohhh... Very New, Very Nice UI for Mono-Project.com... Just One Teensy-Weensie Suggestion if I could...
What is Mono?
Mono provides the necessary software to develop and run .NET client and server applications on Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, Windows, and Unix. Sponsored by Novell, the Mono open source project has an active and enthusiastic contributing community and is positioned to become the leading choice for development of Linux applications.
This is the lead in to the brand new, *EXTREMELY* well designed mono-project.com.
Take a look:
Of course I couldn't help myself from having a look around to see what other little UI treats might have been integrated into the design. While my hat goes off to whomever the site designer happens to be, I do have a teensy-weensie suggestion for the non-UI portion of the site; the code-behind, if you will, that drives the snazzy new interface...
One word: Dogfood.
It's tough to sell the web technology you've developed (a.k.a. ASP.NET; mod_mono; XSP) when you're not even using it to power your own site.
I don't mean to come across the wrong way; I use the Mono implementation of ASP.NET 1.1 and 2.0 quite often and its flat out fantastic. In many ways you've got the best of what makes Apache such a fantastic HTTP server (and beyond!) coupled with what many, including me, believe to be, flat-out, the absolute best web development platform that currently exists on this planet in ASP.NET; which of course is driven by, flat-out, the best development platform/framework that currently exists on this planet in the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI), better known by its marketing name, the .NET Framework.
So I guess all I'm saying is that when you have such a fantastic web platform that you have painstakingly handcrafted, why not use it?
I realize that the actual code driving this site is MediaWiki[UPDATE: See Footnote One], which is built upon a PHP foundation. And I realize that with the roots of PHP in OSS by default its a much more prevalent and understood web technology within the ranks of those working on other OSS projects, such as Mono. So with this in mind it makes it a slightly different situation than if say, Microsoft were to have this same error exposed on the .NET Framework Development Home on MSDN; or any of the other .NET-related MS sites for that matter. So, again, its tough to make too much of a fuss about things...
Either way (PHP/MediaWiki or ASP.NET), keep up the great work! I absolutely love what this project has accomplished, and the premise in which it has been built upon. I can't wait to see where the Mono community takes us next... should be fun :)
Cheers :)
[1] : I should have added to this the fact that, as far as I know, the only real OSS Wiki engine built on top of ASP.NET is FlexWiki. And while I recognize the fact that there is a lot of power that is sitting behind the front-end of this Microsoft sponsored, SF.net hosted open source wiki project, the "out-of-the-box" U.I. is not exactly what you would call "User Friendly." Its seems to me that as the project began to develop those who focused on the UI portion were already quite comfortable with the idea of accessing the underlying content using the "Title Bar" for navigation (if you have used FlexWiki you will know what I mean. If you haven't, visit FlexWiki.com and sooner or later you'll start to realize what I mean by "Title Bar Navigation" as well as why I believe this chosen method was a mistake and a hinderance to the projects overall success thus far) and as such continued forward with a "minimalist" approach, believing others would simply "get it" and think it was the greatest thing in the world, worthy of some sort of usability award of some sort, but I'm not so sure Jakob Nielsen would feel the same the way.
Which reminds me, whats up with all the posed photos made available in ultra high resolution (http://useit.com/jakob/photos/)? I mean, I realize he's recognized as the leading web usability expert and that he is highly sought after for presentations, keynotes, etc... but DAMN!(make sure you click the magnifying glass in Fx or N/S/E/W arrow in IE, to get the full "DAMN!" effect.) If the man has any problems with self-confidence, it sure isn't made evident by his personal "Action-Jackson" Me-Myself-&I photo collection; made conveniently available in near life-size proportions for ANYBODY who might want to make a cardboard cutout or a poster to hang in their cubicle. Even better would be a "Would Jakob Approve?" desktop background to "keep you in line" while your'e designing the layout and functionality of a website. In fact I just so happen to have such an item; you know, to keep me in line when I'm developing Web UI's and stuff (Think thats enough "happy, happy, joy, joy" bullshit to keep his lawyers off my a$$? Ahh, fuck it, who cares... they're in the public domain with no licensing terms listed... that means they're free game :))
Click the image for a 1024x768 image, a convenient size for those who wish to use this as desktop wallpaper; again, click the magnifying glass or N/S/E/W arrow to view the resized image (that is if your browser is set to resize images automatically; by default, most are.) Or you can just right click this link and choose the selection that seems the closest to "Save target as..."Enjoy your Jakob Nielsen Approved? Day!
[Further Update: I guess "Each of the following photographs is available in a high-resolution version for use in print publications or for import into graphics programs when creating new Web illustrations featuring Jakob Nielsen." is kind of sort of something that could be considered licensing terms, although I'm not so sure how legally binding they would be. Besides, the above image falls perfectly into the "for import into graphics programs when creating new Web illustrations featuring Jakob Nielsen." portion of that statement... Its a good thing too... I can't imagine life without my "Would Jakob Approve?" desktop wallpaper to "remind" me not to stray too far from the "ways of the Jakob Nielsen approved" web design method; whatever that means. (don't email me to tell me; I already know... and in 99% of the cases he's right; this isn't a post suggesting that his approach to web design is wrong... I'm just not so sure the need exists for such an array of personal photo's; but who am I to suggest otherwise... If you just so happen to need a JN photo, if not before, you most certainly are now fully aware of where you can find one; or fifty.]
Posted by m.david at 02:39 PM
September 02, 2005
Hurricane Katrina - What You Won't See on CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, etc... Seen In Ways That Are Both Gut Wrenching and Awe-stricken
Google Earth - Hurricane Katrina Imagery
Hurricane Katrina Imagery The Google Earth team is working on adding imagery of the impact of Hurricane Katrina. We will be posting links to this imagery for viewing as "image overlays" in Google Earth.
Technology may not save the world from the inevitable forces of nature, and depending on which news report you happen to be tuned/buy into "Sponsored by Chevron, You're Friendly Neigborhood Dodge Dealer, and Delta Airlines ('We Love to Burn Oil and It Shows')" you may actually believe that Global Warming "may not truly be the cause of the ever increasing natural disasters taking place in greater force and in unequaled numbers." But technology can sure as hell tell you the truth about whats really happened and whats really happening because of our insistence that with "freedom" and "independence" comes justification for "selfishness" and "greed."
Greed?
Install Google Earth and download and view the images of the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina and then come and talk to me about how greed, or in the case of how it applies to this situation, your/our insistence that driving our own oil burners, by ourselves, where and whenever we damn well please has nothing to do with being greedy, and most certainly has nothing to do with the destruction caused by this "natural" disaster.
BTW... If you're brave enough to do this, don't blame me for the ear lashing you end up with. If you're stupid enough to both believe that I'm wrong and take me to task on it, then you most certainly deserve the response you will most definitely receive. And you're not going to like it... I promise.
One of the things that drives me nutts when I listen and watch people protest the war in Iraq is when I see these same people get back into their cars and drive away from the rally's against the war, not giving the slightest thought to the fact that the act of doing so is yet one more contribution to this exact war they are protesting. A war which, in part, is based on the fact that Iraq has oil, and we want oil.
Don't like the war in Iraq and would like to find an effective way to protest against it. Then stop driving your car and take the bus to work. Or find 4 other people in your neighborhood who feel the same way and carpool. Or better yet, get your ass on a bike and ride it to work. But don't cry that "Bush is responsible for crimes against humanity and should burn for what he's done" and then hop in your car to drive 1/2 mile to 7/11 for a Big Gulp and some Twinkies and claim "its not my fault, I didn't vote for him!" Um, pardon me twinkie face, but every time you turn the ignition on your'e voting; and with something much more powerful... you're dollars; and your lack of sense.
If the images of the Iraq war don't sicken you enough to find alternatives to your murdering and earth destroying habits, then whatever it takes for you to justify getting in your car tomorrow morning, starting it up, and driving to work in a 5 passenger car solo, maybe the images that are being added and updated to the Google Earth site on a regular basis might help you realize that maybe its time to "rethink" your transportation stategy. Maybe it won't... but it should.
Posted by m.david at 05:17 AM
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