Tim Bray (and a bunch of other people) pointed out Technorati's new Favorites feature. I didn't pay much attention yesterday, but it does sound like the Reading List idea with all that nasty OPML. As an added bonus, it already works with the tools you have lying around, which certainly makes my life as a developer easier :)
I'll have to take a look at it and see what I think.
The roadmap actually encourages risk, but some people always seem to want to have their ideas accepted without taking the risk. They think they can make something better than RSS and shouldn't have to go through the same vetting process that RSS itself went through. Now, it may be possible that after three years in the market, that RSS 2.0 could be radically improved, but the roadmap says that no person or group of people has the exclusive right to improve it, and that no one can interfere with the stability of the platform. That's no different if you work for a small company or large, or don't work for a company at all.
He's referring obliquely to the RSS advisory board, (which has a public mailing list here) - which is trying to nail down a few things that are ambiguous in the spec (if you can call it that) for RSS. For instance:
Those aren't things that have gone through a "vetting" process; they are things that tool developers have suffered with for years, and - if Winer has his way - we'll continue to suffer with. RSS is marginally better defined than OPML and MetaWebLog API (this page 404's at the moment), which are other underspecified formats that Winer has produced. There's a reason Atom exists, and that reason is amply demonstrated every single time Dave speaks on the subject.
Duncan at the Blog Herald needs to read the title of this post. In a response to Steve Rubel, he wrote:
On another note Steve, I’m starting to worry about you, you are starting to sound more like Scoble every day…please don’t join the everything for free and damn the money crowd… some of us are trying to blog for a living.
He should also read Scoble's long post on this - it makes a lot of sense. I haven't unsubscribed to all the partial feeds yet, but I should - I tend to blip right over them. Why? Because I read most of my content in my aggregator, and I don't tend to bother with summaries (which don't tend to be teaser summaries anyway). I provide full content here (then again, I'm not trying to (directly) make money, either. However, it's instructive that I get more than 4x as many HTML readers on a weekly basis than I do RSS readers.
Digg is adding an RSS module that will add Digg specific information to items in their feeds.
Time to register for Smalltalk Solutions 2006 - this year it's being held in conjunction with LinuxWorld/NetworkWorld, so that we can spread our Smalltalk across a wider audience. You can see a list of the sessions here. Here's an example of the kind of content you can expect - Using GLORP (Monday April 24, 9- 12 (Tutorial)
GLORP is an open-source library for object-relational persistence. It includes some very sophisticated mapping and performance features, and current plans are for it to be incorporated as the core mapping layer in a future revision of Cincom's database toolset. This tutorial is designed to give an introduction to the concepts, capabilities, and best practices using GLORP. Alan Knight is the lead on the GLORP project, at Cincom Systems Inc., and has worked in relational persistence for many years. Previously, he was chief architect for the TOPLink family of products, and a member of the Sun expert groups on EJB 2.0 and JDO. He is co- author of Mastering ENVY/Developer (Cambridge, 2001) and has written and spoken extensively on a variety of topics. He is program chair of Smalltalk Solutions 2006.
Bear in mind that unlike past years, paying for the full conference covers an unlimited number of tutorials! Also, for my non-Canadian readers: the costs quoted on the registration page are in CDN, not USD.
If you have the VW 7.4 based development build of BottomFeeder, then you may have noticed that the Comment Tool is broken. That was a code integration failure on my part; I updated some code that Michael wrote, and managed to drop two classes. I've added them back in, and the update is available for dev users now. Sorry about that!
It's looking a lot like Sony went too far out on the bleeding edge with the PS3. Here's Mary Jo Foley reporting in Microsoft Watch:
Rumors are flitting about that Sony's PlayStation 3 ship date is slipping, with analysts suggesting that the PS3 may not launch in the U.S. and Europe until late 2006 or early 2007. At fault is overdevelopment; the Blu-ray Disc and Cell processor Sony is eager to succeed catapults the materials to a price a Merill Lynch report pegs at $900, or at least $400 over what the PS3 expected to sell for. In comparison, Microsoft's suspected loss of $126 per Xbox 360 console is practically deserving of accolades.
As I reported here, it's actually $800 - the sum on that site was incorrect. That's not that important though - the problem is, Sony is going to take a bath on each sale. Sony probably can't afford that either - their current financials look none too good.
Meanwhile, while MS and Sony are trying the old "make up the losses in volume" trick, Nintendo is actually selling consoles at a profit, and owns most of the revenue stream for their games. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see Sony knocked out of the game space in the next two years, and to see MS as the sole owner of the action game space. Nintendo won't care though; they'll just sit back and count the money. Sure, their revenues are down on game systems now, but that's because the Revolution buzz is quashing demand for the GameCube.
Gordon spots some damage - and for a change, it has to do with an Atom Feed (more properly, the way it's being served). And yes, the content that illustrates the damage is ironic.
You don't have to visit the extremes of politics to find the tinfoil hat brigade; Engadget has found that the ones who fear cell phones have moved on - they now fear WiFi:
some of them have found time to attack WiFi, and have had their first taste of success at a Canadian university, which has just banned wireless internet access. Officials at the school, Lakehead University, have banned WiFi, saying that they want to avoid "potential chronic exposure for our students." The officials point out that the "jury’s out" on the health risks from EMF generated by WiFi transmissions, and liken the risks of WiFi to those of second-hand tobacco smoke, which were not immediately apparent to researchers.
As Engadget says, someone should ask these clowns about cell phones, microwaves, TV's, and radios. There's no telling what those might be doing to their students either.
Patrick Logan points to Robert Sayre (who's responsible for the title I'm using - I wish I could take credit for it :) ). His take is that SOA using Web Services is very much over:
Eight years ago, Web Services wasn't an obviously absurd idea. The Web was for crashing Java applets and badges that claimed to work best in some crappy browser. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see it was a bad idea to try and abstract away application protocols using RPC calls tied to verbose, rigid, statically-typed languages mapped with a Rube Goldberg schema language that has a more flexible type system than said languages.
If you use Apache Axis against a web server that uses Relative References for redirects, you're in trouble. Web browsers happen to deal with it, but Axis throws a MalformedURLException. I was able diagnose the problem pretty quickly when I encountered it, but I think that counts for pretty intimate interaction with HTTP. Oh, also the API I was talking to used strings to transport SQL-esque statements. Thank goodness for that type-mapping.
Heh. I love the way so many static typing advocates dodge around those rules, all the while touting their value :)
Scientists have managed to make chickens with mutant genes (their wording, not mine) grow teeth. I want to see chicken lips.
I decided to take a detailed look at the daily access logs, and see whether any post in particular had been requested a lot. Well - there was one specific page request that had a lot of requests. So I tried bringing it up, but no dice - it didn't exist. Not only did it not exist, but the request page ID (which is actually a timestamp), refers to a very strange date:
June 4, 1911 19:05:36.000
Well. I don't know about you, but I wasn't doing much blogging 50 some odd years before my birth :) I took a look at the referers - yup, they were all for pr0n sites. The impressive thing is, that out of 813 requests for this (non-existant) page, 654 of them used a different IP address as their origin.
I must be popular - I've got my own spammer :)
Either Dave Winer is extraordinarily pig headed, or he just can't read with comprehension. It's definitely one of those two though. The RSS advisory board (public mailing list here) wants to get a handful of currently ambiguous things in the spec nailed down. It's not a long list, and the idea isn't to invent anything new. Here's what's being discussed:
This effort is pretty small beans, actually. No one is out to redefine RSS, or make massive changes. What's happening is an effort to nail down areas that could use nailing down. Winer's response to all this? Change the subject to how much money has been invested in RSS (irrelevant) and whine:
And why should we care? Well I care because it would help to explain to my colleagues in the XML world why it isn’t so easy to reinvent RSS. Do the math. Let’s say the actual number is, for the sake of argument, $8.2 billion. What does that look like?
back when I worked at ObjectShare (before Cincom bought the Smalltalk business), I had a manager who was fond of remarking on situations like this as follows:
"Either I've got s*** in my mouth, or you've got s*** in your ears"
What we seem to have here is an ear problem. Maybe we all need to use smaller words or something.
I guess the whole "prior art" thing is just passé down at the patent office - some clown claims to have invented "rich media applications delivered over the internet", and the PTO was just stupid enough to believe him. Here's what the bozo, a guy named Neil Balthaser, claims to have invented:
The patent issued on Valentine’s Day covers all rich-media technology implementations, including Flash, Flex, Java, Ajax, and XAML, when the rich-media application is accessed on any device over the Internet, including desktops, mobile devices, set-top boxes, and video game consoles, says inventor Neil Balthaser, CEO of Balthaser Online, which he owns with his father Ken. “You can consider it a pioneering or umbrella patent. The broader claim is one that basically says that if you got a rich Internet application, it is covered by this patent.”
I think I'll go patent the process of collecting money in exchange for goods. Now that prior art has been abandoned as a requirement, I'm sure that the PTO will grant it. Then I can play the game of "shake down rich companies for work I didn't do" just like this guy. He filed the patent in 2001. Gee, I think JavaScript predates that by just a bit.
We must still be in the "denial" stage with respect to the mainstream media and blogs. Here's the Chicago Tribune, bucking itself up with survey results that make the case that few people read blogs:
Gallup finds only 9 percent of Internet users saying they frequently read blogs, with 11 percent reading them occasionally. Thirteen percent of Internet users rarely bother, and 66 percent never read blogs. Those numbers, essentially unchanged from a year earlier, put blog-reading dead last among Gallup's measures of 13 common Internet activities. E-mailing ranks first (with 87 percent of users doing so frequently or occasionally), followed by checking news and weather (72), shopping (52) and making travel plans (also 52). Gallup concludes that while the amount of time people spend online has risen, "it appears the online public is simply doing more of the same activities, rather than branching out and trying different Internet offerings."
Well, I completely buy the number, insofar as it means anything. It's almost certainly the case that few people go out specifically looking for blogs to read. However, if you're a typical, non-insider, what do you make of Jeff Jarvis' site? Do you think of that as a blog, or as an op-ed page? I'd guess that a fair number of people read blogs without classifying them that way.
Another thing - let's do a Google search for "Sony DRM" - the first result (and many of the others) are from blogs. People find stuff on the web via search - heck, it's how I found this article in the first place. In many cases, blog entries pop up as prominent search results. Did the participants in that survey realize that they were hitting blogs when they followed search results? I very much doubt it. I very much doubt that they cared, one way or the other. The Tribune cares, and they want to play the public's lack of concern as meaning something.
CNet gets to the meat of the issue:
The estimated total bill of materials for Sony's next-generation game console will be between $725 and $905, according to various estimates. In comparison, the Xbox 360 from Microsoft comes with a component bill between $501 and $525.
Though Sony hasn't disclosed the price of the PS3, analysts figure it will have to be in the ballpark of $299 to $399--the price for the two versions of the Xbox 360. PS3 pricing speculation has heated up in recent days, along with rumors that the long-awaited game console could be delayed for up to a year.
The current price for the 360 is the one that matters. Sony cannot price much (if any) higher than that, so the question that remains is this: how much damage will they take with each sale? If the PS3 is delayed, MS will likely be able to reduce the price of their console (admittedly, some of the pricier components in the PS3 could drop in price during that interval as well).
The big questions are going to be asked in Sony's boardroom. The company is not performing that well at the moment, and hemorrhaging from the game division could easily attract negative attention.
I'm with Dana VanDen Heuvel on this one - what on earth is Google doing introducing a basic HTML page builder that has no connection to Blogger? Do they think it's 1997, and their name is Geocities?
I have to ask "why?" What do we need this crap for and where's Blogger at? How come they didn't make this functionality with blogging in mind.
Dave Winer, Center of the Universe:
You've said you're concerned because Microsoft is making a strong move into RSS. That's a concern I share, so that's common ground. You've even found reasons to be concerned, things they've done that we need to talk about with them. So define your group on those lines, you're a study group, or a documentation project, or you're designing a tight profile of RSS that's intended to maximize interop, these are things I can support. I hope you see now that my support is worth something, that you can't just blow by me in RSS, and ignore what I say, that that just isn't going to work.
I think ignoring anything Dave says would be an excellent idea. Actual progress might happen then.
Here's a message I just received from STIC on Smalltalk Solutions 2006:
Smalltalk community and STIC members HAVE YOU HEARD!
Smalltalk Solutions 2006 is in the fabulous city of Toronto, April 24-26, 2006 and has joined LinuxWorld & NetworkWorld Canada.This year we are delighted to offer you more than ever before ... more sessions, more tutorials, more networking and much much more ...
Your Smalltalk Solutions conference pass includes:
- All Smalltalk seminar sessions
- All Smalltalk tutorials
- All Smalltalk invited special guest sessions - Join Brian Foote & Avi Bryant
AND
- All LinuxWorld & NetworkWorld seminar sessions
- All LinuxWorld & NetworkWorld tutorials
- All Exhibit Keynotes - IBM, Novell, Samsung, HP
THERE IS MORE
- The Smalltalk Solutions Pavilion on the exhibit floor
- All of the LinuxWorld & Network World Exhibits
- including the new Open Standards Desktop Live!
DID YOU THINK WE WERE FINISHED?
25% off listed conference fees for STIC members - Including the early bird and the advanced.Register for the early bird through March 17 and save $231.00. See the registration form for the advanced rate.
DID WE TELL YOU THE FEES ARE IN CANADIAN DOLLARS!
For details check the PDF here - fax in your registration or visit the web site and go to Register on the secure online registration site
Make sure you visit us at this year's Smalltalk Solutions 2006 - come up to the exhibit floor and visit the STIC booth and Cincom, GemStone and Instantiations.
We look forward to seeing you in Toronto!
PS... Oops! We nearly forgot. Be one of the first 200 to register get a Kensington Ultra Wireless Pocket Mouse - see details on the registration form
Via Bill de hÓra, I ran across this from Michael Champion:
I've yet to see compelling, detailed, practical examples where real business are solving the problems that WS-* addresses with only HTTP+XML (unless one ignores the bazillion person-hours and immense amounts of code that industrial-strength web sites have so far had to deploy). And I'm still waiting for pragmatic guidance on exactly how to put these ideas in practice for an organization that needs something more complex than a stock quote service.
Which problems is WS* appropriate for again? It looks an awful lot like the exact same problems that CORBA was (and is, for that matter) approriate for. Which is to say, a small number of problems that a small number of people run across.
Here's the dirty secret that most developers - and most assuredly, most development managers - don't want to have to admit: Most of the problems they are confronted with just aren't that complicated. The complexity comes from the developers and managers themselves, who insist on reading the latest set of buzzwords with near reverence - and who then decide that all the software they currently have written in X needs to be redone in Y because... well, because it would be cool.
Sure, there are some hard problems out there. However, most people aren't working on them. They are instead making the simple complex with a vast array of overly complex crap, like the full J2EE stack or WS*.
Phil Windley took notes on Alan Kay's talk in Utah. His first talk is one I've seen (although it's evolved, with new events as examples, and the work in Croquet that he speaks to). Here's perhaps the best quote:
The good guys (late binders) lost in the late 70’s. The early binders won.
Good ideas don’t often scale.
Most people who graduate with CS degrees don’t understand the significance of Lisp. Lisp is the most important idea in computer science. Alan’s breakthrough in object oriented programming, wasn’t objects, it was the realizing the the Lisp metasystem was what we needed.
Phil Windley also took notes on this evening lecture. I've not been a huge fan of this initiative, and these two paragraphs explain why:
Half the price of a typical laptop is the marketing and distribution. Get a non-profit and drop that. Half of the remaining cost is Microsoft, or more generally commercial software vendors. Free and open source software more than adequately covers the computing needs of most people, particularly children. The fact that there are $122 DVD players says you can build a $100 laptop. The cheapest hard drives are too expensive; so use flash memory.
One big problem is the grey market. They’ll be diverted from children unless you do something to protect the laptop. A few ideas: an RFID card keyed to the specific owner helps. The device is networked, so the owner of the device has to log in every few days to get a token to keep it working. The color (green) helps. The child’s picture could be embedded in the plastic case.
The cost of that DVD player includes sales and marketing as well. What's driven the cost down is the free market at work - commoditization. Using Flash memory is fine, so long as you don't want to store a lot of stuff - and the open source alternatives to word processing packages aren't going to save on space (or performance. Pretty much the same thing goes for other open source efforts as well - in general, size isn't something that the developers have been trying to optimize for.
I like that he's recognized the problem of the grey market - but I think his proposed solutions will drive up cost without actually accomplishing much. If you are trying to introduce an item of value into an area that, in general, cannot afford the extant commercial products, then a lot of your target audience will try to sell the item. It's really that simple.
Having said all that, I like this summation:
The important question surrounding the $100 laptop is “will it be more than a mere technological artifact?” The answer depends on whether the content, and especially the mentoring, can be brought along with it to have real impact.
If they pick their target markets correctly, and are able to provide the right content, it could work. On the other hand, if that market exists, I expect that one or more commercial vendors will end up serving it.
This is from a political site, but it's too funny to pass up:
Me: "Why would the on-off switch on a quantum computer have two positions? Shouldn't it just have one, labeled INDETERMINATE?"
He: "Only when you're not looking at it."
One of the things that has set of a furious round of politics on the RSS Advisory list is the <enclosure> element - does it allow multiple enclosures in a single item or not? Here's the text from the spec:
<enclosure> is an optional sub-element of
- .
It has three required attributes. url says where the enclosure is located, length says how big it is in bytes, and type says what its type is, a standard MIME type.
The url must be an http url.
<enclosure url="http://www.scripting.com/mp3s/weatherReportSuite.mp3" length="12216320" type="audio/mpeg" />
That doesn't say anything about it, which is why there's discussion. I thought it might be useful to have a look at actual practice - how many multiple enclosures do I see in the wild? Well, this is admittedly anecdotal - I'm looking through my own subscription list, and I'm not big into podcasts - so out of my 316 feeds, it's not a huge selection. Still, let's have a look. First, all the items that have at least one enclosure:
withEnclosures := OrderedCollection new. RSSFeedManager default getAllMyFeeds do: [:each | | with | with := each allItems select: [:eachItem | eachItem enclosure notNil and: [eachItem enclosure size >= 1]]. with notEmpty ifTrue: [withEnclosures add: (each ->with)]]. withEnclosures inject: 0 into: [:subTotal :next | subTotal + next value size]
That code, when inspecting the results, gave me this:
Ok, so there are 18 feeds, out of 316 feeds total (with a total of 17,968 items) that have even one enclosure. In that group, there are 327 items with at least one enclosure. That's more than I thought, actually. How many of those 327 items have more than one?
That little snippet of HTML was produced by this code:
stream := WriteStream on: (String new: 100). multiples := OrderedCollection new. withEnclosures do: [:each | | feed bigger | feed := each key. items := each value. bigger := items select: [:eachItem | eachItem enclosure size > 1]. bigger notEmpty ifTrue: [multiples add: (feed -> bigger)]]. stream nextPutAll: '<ul>'; cr. multiples do: [:each | stream nextPutAll: '<li>Feed: ', each key title, '</li>'. stream cr. stream nextPutAll: '<ul>'; cr. each value do: [:eachItem | stream nextPutAll: '<li>'. stream tab. stream nextPutAll: eachItem title. stream tab. stream nextPutAll: eachItem enclosure size printString. stream nextPutAll: '</li>'; cr.]. stream nextPutAll: '</ul>'; cr]. stream nextPutAll: '</ul>'. ^stream contents
The reason it looks like a lot of code is the production of the HTML mixed in there. All I'm really doing is looping over the data I produced in the last go-round, and getting numbers out of it. As it happens, there are 4 items in 3 feeds (out of 327 items in 18 feeds with enclosures) that have more than one enclosure - with a total of 11 enclosures across those 4 items.
So what does that show? Possibly that using multiple enclosures just isn't that common. On the other hand, the three feeds that did use them are quite popular.
So I almost forgot to mention the cool part. All that code was executed in a workspace in the runtime for BottomFeeder - not in the development environment. The tool is written in Smalltalk, and I can simply ask the domain objects questions at runtime. Pretty cool, IMHO.
More Seaside news, from the ESUG list:
netstyle.ch and ESUG are pleased to finally announce the new Seaside hosting service. Seaside-Hosting is a free hosting service for non-commercial Seaside applications. This service provides a simple to use web interface with FTP access to set up and run your Seaside applications. It allows you to put your own application online within minutes. The service is a Seaside application and is itself running on Seaside-Hosting too.
Seaside-Hosting currently offers 128 MB of file-space for saving the Squeak web-application image and static files, e.g., pictures or style sheets which you want to use as part of your application.
For general discussion we propose to use the Seaside mailing list. For specific questions or problems please contact us directly at seasidehosting@netstyle.ch.
Oh boy. My wife volunteered our house for a Girl Scout cooking demonstration - I'll have a house full of 7th grade girlscouts trying to cook. Oof.
Sometime this weekend is upgrade time for my notebook. It's plenty fast for my needs, but the HD space is cramped (just under 20 GB). So I asked for help, and our IT department sent me a 60 GB replacement drives. It's one of those USB cloning setups, so I need to do a backup and defrag before I get to it - I think I'll have a look at that tomorrow. At least I won't be short of space all the time for a bit.
If Dave isn't involved, it's bad
This post tells you everything you need to know, if you've ever wondered why the Atom group went off and created a new spec. I didn't get it back then; I most certainly do now.
BottomFeeder downloads dipped a bit, down to 192 per day last week. Here's the detail:
| Platform | BottomFeeder Downloads |
| Windows | 463 |
| Sources | 246 |
| Update | 176 |
| Linux x86 | 141 |
| Mac X | 100 |
| CE ARM | 50 |
| Mac 8/9 | 49 |
| HPUX | 35 |
| Windows98/ME | 34 |
| Solaris | 21 |
| AIX | 9 |
| Linux Sparc | 8 |
| CE x86 | 5 |
| Source Script | 3 |
| SGI | 2 |
| Linux PPC | 2 |
Better luck next week, I guess :) On to the HTML page accesses - traffic there was up last week, and, as I noted here, I discovered that I've attracted my very own spammer. I can feel the love :)
| Tool | Percentage of Accesses |
| Mozilla | 47.3% |
| Internet Explorer | 26.4% |
| MSN Bot | 6.5% |
| Everest-Vulcan | 5.9% |
| MSRBOT | 5.1% |
| zibber | 3.5% |
| Megite | 2.5% |
| Gigabot | 2.4% |
| Other | 0.4% |
More bots this week - that's interesting. On to the RSS results:
| Tool | Percentage of Accesses |
| Mozilla | 23.7% |
| BottomFeeder | 17.6% |
| Net News Wire | 9.5% |
| BlogLines | 8.7% |
| Google Feed Fetcher | 4.7% |
| Safari RSS | 4.4% |
| Other | 4.3% |
| Everest-Vulcan | 2.9% |
| Internet Explorer | 2.5% |
| SharpReader | 2.2% |
| RSS Bandit | 2.1% |
| MSN Bot | 1.9% |
| Planet Smalltalk | 1.6% |
| BlogSearch | 1.6% |
| Feed Reader | 1.5% |
| Magpie | 1.5% |
| NewsOutlook | 1.5% |
| NewsGator | 1.4% |
| Liferea | 1.2% |
| JetBrains | 1.1% |
| Attensa Online | 1.1% |
| Java | 1% |
| News Fire | 1% |
| Feed Demon | 1% |
Tool diversity here isn't getting any less, either - and it looks like my weekly RSS accesses are up - both raw and unique IP addresses.
I'm hardly the target demographic for MySpace.com, but Jupiter Research is raising questions about it that have crossed my mind as well - how much of the supposedly huge community there is real?
"Certainly there are a large amount of people spending a large amount of time on this site," said Nate Elliot, an analyst for Jupiter Research. "When you look at the huge numbers they throw out there -- 50 [million], 60 million registered users -- those are a mirage."
Elliot admits that the site generates a lot of activity, and that it may indeed have tens of millions of registered users, but those numbers can be deceptive and only tell part of the story.
"They're promoting the number that is most advantageous for them to promote, but the simple fact is that only a fraction of the registered users ever go back," said Elliot. "And only a fraction of them use the site on any kind of regular basis, and then another fraction of them are responsible for the traffic."
It could be a lot like Blogger - filled to the brim with splogs, with the serious users migrating off the site once they realize that they are serious users. Free services tend to get filled with opportunistic spammers - email is simply the best example.
With an eye toward gathering some more facts on how relevant this is, I decided to take another walk through my feeds. I posted some data on enclosure usage the other day; today, I figured I'd take a look at the distribution of formats being used in my collection of feeds.
So, I subscribe to 316 feeds. I ran some simple workspace code to get an idea of what formats are in use:
| Format | Count for that format |
| RSS 2.0 | 215 |
| RDF 1.0 | 41 |
| RSS 0.91 | 23 |
| Atom 0.3 | 20 |
| RSS 0.92 | 8 |
| Atom 1.0 | 4 |
| RSS 0.93 | 4 |
I'm not surprised that RSS 2.0 is the most prevalent, but I take that data point as an argument in favor of clarifying the RSS 2.0 spec in the areas that are ambiguous - which is opposite the tack that Dave Winer takes. Right now, Atom answers questions about things like number of enclosures and format of the content (description) field conclusively. Which means that tool developers have a default answer that is correct for that format - they don't have to make a (personal) judgement call (which, as Rogers Cadenhead pointed out on the mailing list, varies widely across tools).
Now, I suppose that I could just ignore this, on the following grounds:
Sadly, the same thing can't solve the other problems - questions about what is or is not valid for description or title elements. Perhaps developers could simply take the Atom answer for titles, but for content, Atom relies on a description in the field. That means that developers can't just apply the Atom answer and have done with it. What it does mean is that every developer has to come up with a strategy, and (as we've seen to date with enclosures), those answers will differ. I suppose that leaves the end user in the driver's seat as far as deciding which answer is best, but it's not the best way to come up with an answer. Having the spec clarify what is and is not allowed would be a whole lot simpler.
So I just received a notice from the AAA that my membership was up for renewal, and - since I had signed up for auto-renewal, they were simply going to charge my credit card on file. All fine and good, until I read further:
Your AAA membership is due for renewal on 5/1/2006, and our records indicate that you are enrolled in our Automatic Renewal program. Previously you requested that we charge your annual membership dues to your (Credit Card Name) credit card, which ends in the following digits - #### and expires 12/31/2005. Please be advised that your renewal dues will be charged to your credit card on the first business day of the month prior to your membership renewal date.
I suppose having an auto-check on the vailidity of the date would just be asking for too much...
Ismaeel Nakhuda has an interesting post, apparently taken from newspapers in the Lancashire (England) area:
A Preston museum is holding a unique exhibition of rare photographs and items to mark the 150th anniversary of the end of the Crimean War.
Now that's something I'd love to see. I wish they had a web viewing available - ad sponsored, paywall, whatever - sounds very interesting.
I'll be going offline for a few hours - I need to defrag my Windows drive, and Windows really, really sucks at that. Then I'll be cloning the HD so that I can replace this overly small one with a reasonably sized (60 GB) one that corporate IT sent me. I'm sure BottomFeeder will load up with tons of stuff when I turn it back on :)
Well, the new HD isn't quite what I thought it was. It's not a replacement HD - it's a small external (USB) HD. That's ok - I can always use more space. The trouble started when I hooked it up to Windows. It was recognized, but it wouldn't mount. That was a bit confusing. I slapped it across the room to the Mac, and discovered why - it had no file system on it. The Mac was able to format it as a Windows drive though, so I can now use it for either system. It's small enough to pack in my bag, so I could presumably install Linux on it, set my notebook to be bootable from USB, and have a Linux system at Smalltalk Solutions in April. I'll have to see about doing that - for today, I've had enough system maintenance :)
Well, here's a fascinating rumor: Google buying Sun. I'm unconvinced, but the site does lay out some interesting facts:
- Google stock has been experiencing a number of non-disclosed acquisitions.
- Sun has had investors exiting to the tune of eight figures on a market cap of ten.
- Microsoft meanwhile, sits more comfortable than both at a price/earnings way below the industry average and with a product - Windows Vista - which everyone is talking about coming out later this year.
These kinds of anomalies are typical in the behaviour of companies where acquisitions have been strategically arranged and are still in the 'preparation' phase. Google has to do as much of a job in showing benefits of acquiring Sun as it does in proving its own capability to turn things around there - and what better way to do it than show the growth potential of the company it is preparing to acquire?
Well, I'll believe two things when I see them: Vista shipping this year, and Sun getting bought by Google. I fail to see the point, unless Google is looking to move back to the 19th/early 20th century business strategy of vertical integration (i.e., secure their own high end hardware manufacturer. I don't see the Sun software suite being of much value to Google - heck, I don't think it's helping Sun much at this point.
Interesting conjecture though.
Via Scoble, I ran across this Seattle PI story about the MS Origami - a device that's still under development, so all the rumors swirling around should be taken with a rather large grain of salt.
Having said that, I'll toss my 2c in anyway. Look at the penetration of the Sony PSP and of the Nintendo DS. The PSP is doing ok, but the DS is a huge hit. Why is that? I think it's because the DS isn't trying to be too many things at once. It's a portable game platform first, with any and all other functions being secondary. That doesn't split the focus of the device, which is something that Sony has had a few issues with. That's the kind of use model confusion that could crop up based on this:
The video is still worth seeing. It validates the notion that the Origami project is headed in the direction of a miniature "lifestyle" computer, not only for playing music but also for other functions. Internet access, messaging, photo editing, and video gaming are among the uses depicted in the video.
I guess we'll find out.
Ars Technica has a post up on the challenges faced by PS3 developers due to the use of the new Cell processor from IBM. It sounds to me like they may well have jumped "a bridge too far" for a device they want to ship this year. To develop against the Cell without tools, the author says:
What IBM has in mind is what I would call a tiered approach to Cell. At Tier I, there's the "expert programmer" (IBM really means "expert programming team") who codes to the bare metal, manages memory alignment and traffic flow issues like NYC's finest, and just generally makes all the parts of the Cell scream in perfect harmony. This guy, if he exists, is going to be worth his weight in gold. No, scratch that. He'll be worth Marlon Brando's weight in diamond-studded platinum.
As to the "sweet spot - i.e., a compiler that mostly manages the vectorizing for you:
Finally, on Tier IV is the programmer who just wants to port his single-threaded x86 program to Cell in as painless a manner as possible. This person doesn't even care to know anything about "heterogeneous multiprocessing" or any of that fancy stuff. He just wants to see "Hello World" greet him on the screen. Ok, just kidding. IBM claims the following for this highest level of Octopiler hand-holding:
The compiler provides user-guided parallelization and compiler management of the underlying memories for code and data. When the user directives are applied in a thoughtful manner by a competent user, the compiler provides significant ease of use without significantly compromising performance.Getting Tier IV to work where the money is at. It's also going to be quite painful for IBM to achieve their stated goal of "not significantly compromising performance." I think they, or someone else, will get there eventually. Meanwhile, the PS3 is still due out in 2006.
Sounds to me like they really, really have their work cut out for them. Keep in mind, if development of games for this system is hard, that's only going to drive up costs more - and on the end (the buying of games) where - based on the unit cost of the PS3 - they are going to need to sell a bunch of games to each PS3 buyer just to break even. Based on some back of the envelope calculations, a friend of mine was setting that number at 16 games per buyer. That's steep already.
The proliferation of language runtimes (virtual machines) both fascinates and frustrates me. Here on my Windows machine I use the .NET Common Language Runtime, the Java VM, the Flash player, and one VM per dynamic language (e.g., Python, JavaScript). Over on my Mac, subtract .NET but don't (yet) add Mono. On servers, add the PHP and Ruby VMs.
When people "port" applications and frameworks from one language to another, what they're really doing, in many cases, is transferring capability from one VM to another. Case in point: TrimPath Junction, a "clone or port of the terrific Ruby on Rails web MVC framework into JavaScript." Language preference wasn't the reason to emulate Rails in JavaScript. Rather, the motivation was to bring Rails-like capability to the only VM available in the browser, and thus to enable single-page applications.
That frustration is why I like to say that design is language specific - unless you want to do a ton of work to take a language capability and port it. Multi-language VM's are a pretty hard thing, too - the VM's that exist were very much designed with their main language in mind - Java on the JVM, C# on the CLR. Sure, there's a port of Python to both - and in the case of the CLR, it sounds like the author is, for all intents and purposes, creating a new VM on top of the CLR - i.e., treating it as another hardware platform.
We looked seriously at using the CLR as a place to run Cincom Smalltalk, but found that it was utterly unsuitable - we would have had to treat the CLR as a new platform, and write a new VM on top of it. The CLR simply doesn't have suitable support for a language like Smalltalk. Don't even ask about the JVM - it's been frozen for years, and any Smalltalk running on it is going to be slow. Really slow.
Neither Microsoft nor Sun are acting truly motivated to support dynamic languages - at least, not if you look at what they actually do.
I'll give MS some props for pointing to this parody video - "What if Microsoft designed the iPod box?"
I'll be in New York City on March 1st, addressing the user group. I'll be in customer meetings during the day, but expect to get to the meeting location around 6:30 pm.
I'll have plenty of Cincom Smalltalk Non-Commercial CD's with me
No, this has nothing to do with politics or current events :) I found this story, about an "open source" crypytanalysis effort interesting. The group cracked a previously un-cracked Enigma message (German Naval) from WWII - they have two more they plan to work on. Pretty cool stuff
Joi Ito points out the power of tribalism in what seems (from the outside) as a very monolitic country: Japan. Kind of makes me wonder how many old tribal feuds still simmer in other "monolithic" nations - and I'm not considering places like the middle east or the Balkans, where those cracks are all too visible.
This morning I stumbled on this post, which gives some advice on optimizing your blog for search engines. I have a mostly negative attitude toward the entire SEO field, and particularly with SEO as it relates to blogs. You want your blog to be noticed by the engines? Write regularly about topics that you are interested in and know something about. Over time, you'll build an audience, which will generate back links - and page rank. To be blunt, SEO tricks are an attempt to get out of doing the hard work of writing.
Anyway, here's the trick being advocated today:
Why would you ever want to make a post sticky? Because it’s an easy way to improve the keyword prominence on a category page or tag page. If you’re not familiar with the concept of keyword prominence, it’s simply this: the higher up on the page your targeted keyword is, the better you’ll rank. So, having keyword-rich intro copy that consistently appears at the top of a category page or a tag page will give you good keyword prominence and help you maintain a stable keyword theme for the page even when old posts fall off the page and new posts appear.
Well, that only works if people visit that category page and link to it. Now, I can see some value in making a post sticky - I've never done it (heck, I haven't added support in my blog server, although it would be pretty easy to do so). The problem, as I see it, is that if you are trying to attract people (and engines) to a specific category, then that's something you write about regularly. Do you really want the new content to be stuffed beneath an older post? Most people make decisions about whether to read a page in seconds (some people say less). If I spot "old news" at the top of a page, I don't bother scrolling down - my assumption is that everything under the old post is even older.
I rather think that this strategy will end up having as many negatives as positives, because it works against people's expectations about content presentation on a blog.
I got my hardcopy of SDTimes a few days ago, but have been waiting for it to go online before writing about the special report on the CLR. The article is written by Larry O'Brien, and I think he's a bit too breathless in his praise for it. Some of the inconsistency starts early. He makes a point about how most developers prefer type systems like what C, C++, and Java have - which, based on practice in the industry, is certainly true:
Certainly, the programming community has voted repeatedly to embrace languages that derive from C. This preference is a combination of an appealing syntax (explicit typing is appealing for programming in the large), professionalism by association (real programmers use curly braces) and performance (all popular C-derived languages have rejected “everything is an object” for at least some primitive types).
While I'd call those flaws, most people in the industry don't agree with me. So why do I say that the inconsistency starts early? Well, Larry is writing about LINQ (Language INtegrated Query) like it's the second coming for software developers. Here, let me quote him:
To understand the power of LINQ and how it seems foreshadowed in the evolution of C#, forgive a quick foray into code. Consider Listing 1 (page 29), which gives a hint of a LINQ-like function called “FindAll.” After the initial “using” statements (which make available important classes), we define a new type of function called a Predicate. Predicates are functions that take a value and do some calculation that results in a Boolean evaluation. In C#, function signatures such as this are first-class language features called “delegates.” These have been a feature of C# since the beginning. Our Predicate function, though, works on any type; we don’t need a separate definition for functions that evaluate integers, or strings or customer records. This “generic” functionality was added to C# in the 2.0 version.
If you take a look at FindAll, you see that, for convenience, it’s “static” (using it does not require an instance of type “Program” to have been instantiated) and publicly visible. Ignoring the parameterized type “T”s that sprinkle its signature, it should be clear that FindAll outputs a List after taking as input a List and a Predicate. The passed-in Predicate evaluates each of the values in the passed-in list to build the returned list (the predicate is applied with the call to function(value)). Note how generic it is: It makes no assumptions on the type of values it operates on and no assumptions on the workings of the supplied Predicate.
After telling us how valuable explicit typing is, the first thing you notice is that the example is using generics to avoid explicit typing. Kind of makes you wonder how valuable it is, if the real power is available only if you chuck the concept. Here's the code listing he refers to, and that's where I really wanted to make a point:
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
delegate bool Predicate<T>(T value);
class Program
{
static public List<T>FindAll<T>(List<T> inList, Predicate<T>predicate)
{
List<T> retval = new List<T>();
foreach (T value in inList)
{
if (predicate(value))
{
retval.Add(value);
}
}
return retval;
}
static void Main(string[] args)
{
List<int> intList = new List<int>();
for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++)
{
intList.Add(i);
}
for (int modulus = 2; modulus < 5; modulus++)
{
// Notice how a new function is defined here
List<int>evenList = FindAll<int>(intList, delegate(int i)
{
return i % modulus == 0;
});
Console.Write("The even multiples of "
+ modulus + " in range[1..10] are = ");
foreach (int i in evenList)
{
Console.write(i + " ");
}
Console.WriteLine();
}
Console.In.ReadLine();
}
}
What that does is take a list of numbers from 1 to 10, then iterate over them, pulling out first the numbers that are 0 modulo 2, 3, and 4. The above is supposed to be a model of simplicity, showing the power of LINQ in the CLR. Here's Larry again:
By combining delegates, generics and the closurelike "anonymous delegates with outer variable capture" you can create very concise expressions for working with collections. Of course, there is much more to LINQ. A complete SQL-like query ability is much more complex than what is shown here. The structural issues of selection and extension go beyond C# 2.0’s capabilities. And ultimately there’s a qualitative difference between a querying API and query built into the syntax of the language. Nevertheless, there’s a distinct feeling of design decisions made years ago contributing to a capability only now being previewed.
Well. The problem is, this - they had to build it into the CLR with a bunch of syntax. The equivalent Smalltalk?
| list | list := #(1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10). 2 to: 4 do: [:index | | answers | answers := list select: [:each | (each \\ index) = 0]. Transcript show: 'values equal to 0 modulo ', index printString, ' ', answers printString. Transcript cr]
Gee, that's simpler, isn't it? And unlike the CLR, Smalltalk didn't need to bake that query into the syntax - it's just a library message that any collection understands. Meaning, it's generic without all that extraneous syntax. Microsoft, like Sun, is grasping weakly at the power that Smalltalk already has via added complexity. Apparently, the "value" of explicit typing is such that you need to saddle developers with a pile of syntax in order to deliver "power".
I don't really need to go to the trouble of defining the generic function up front, because #select: is already in the library. But wait - there's more! Say I wanted to add a new query "function" to all collections? Easy - I find class Collection in the system, and I add the method. Bam - there it is. I can make sure to version it off in my own package so that only people who need it will have it loaded as well.
The thing I find interesting is the Java/CLR approach to power - it always involves adding a pile of new syntax to the language - which is why the books defining those systems keep getting thicker. You need a scorecard just to keep up with the syntax.
At the end of an associated column on Iron Python, column, Larry brings up something I addressed the other day:
#Smalltalk (pronounced Sharp Smalltalk, and available from www.refactory.com) seems to be close to a full implementation of the Smalltalk language but does not have the workspace/browser environment that many consider the heart of Smalltalk’s power. Similarly, while there are a few Lisp-like languages for .NET, there’s not a CLOS environment for the CLI. Whether this is because the CLI erects technical roadblocks of progress or because there’s insufficient motivation for commercial or open-source development of such environments, it’s regrettable and only serves to further the dominance of C# on the platform.
As I stated the other day, we actually looked at the CLR as a host for Smalltalk. It simply wasn't suitable, given the level of investment we would have had to make.
Dave Buck demonstrates the power of a Smalltalk development environment with a screencast. Oh, if you're wondering about the red circle that pops up - that's due to a parcel Dave has loaded for Windows CE support. That circle is an artifact from that, not a feature of the standard environment.
Correction from Dave (in comments) on the red circle: the circles are an option in Camtasia video capture software that allow people to see when I click.. It's an artifact of the screencast software, not part of the Smalltalk environment.
Notice how he works with the debugger? That's the power.
Last week I was emailing with an architect at one of the major enterprise software companies, a huge company with offices all over the world. She told me that RSS 2.0 has become the framework for all their work now, completely replacing J2EE.
Ok, I don't really understand that, at all. I get using RSS as a default data format to be passed around, and using HTTP instead of SOAP. J2EE is a technology stack though, not a data format. This is the kind of mindless buzzword passing that too many people in the industry do - "replace your (insert technology here) with XML!"
My wife is facing that kind of situation at work, where a bunch of non-technical managers have read one too many magazine, and decided that XML is the "language of the future". No wonder she sometimes grinds her teeth.
Brad Wilson points to a report that's going to be very, very bad news for Sony: the cost of an HD DVD player is going to be half (or less) the cost of a Blu-Ray device:
Toshiba, the principal backer of the HD DVD format, planted its stake firmly in the low-end of the high-definition hardware market, unveiling a $499.99 HD DVD player at the Consumer Electronics Show here Wednesday.
The new model, dubbed the HD-XA1, is slated to hit retail shelves in the U.S. in March, along with a more fully featured model, the HD-A1, which carries a list price of $799.99.
Toshiba’s aggressive pricing strategy seems designed to put maximum pressure on backers of the rival Blu-ray Disc format, which is expected to carry much higher sticker prices when the first players hit the market sometime this summer.
Among Blu-ray manufacturers, only Pioneer and Panasonic disclosed initial player prices, with consoles weighing in at $1,800 and $1,000, respectively.
Sony has bet big on Blu-Ray as part of the PS3 - and with price differentials like that, this looks like it'll be VHS versus BetaMax all over again.
This is a very cool outlet gadget - it's simple, but boy, would it solve a lot of problems. Have a look - the rotating outlet:
I have lots of devices who's power plugs eclipse the nearest outlet (on powerstrips and on walls). Very cool.
Steve Rubel posted about a Fortune article on blogging. Unlike the scare-mongerers at Forbes, these guys seem to get it. To wit - the big points:
Update your blog often, and make liberal use of hyperlinks. The more sites you link to, the more sites will return the favor....
As for what not to do: Don't wait until a crisis hits to set up a corporate blog -- it needs time to build up trust. Speaking of trust, whatever you do, don't let your corporate flacks write your blog. "They will take any life out of your writing," says Scoble.
Whoever does end up writing the blog, don't keep them anonymous or hidden behind some cutesy character. For example, if you blogged for Coca-Cola, don't be "The Coke Guy."
Other tips: Don't shut down existing employee blogs. If they are positive about the company, Rubel suggests turning these evangelists into a voluntary sales force. If they are negative, you might have a larger morale issue that needs to be addressed. And don't use search engine trickery to boost the profile of your blog. People will find out.
Staying current is absolutely critical. If you can't post on something that resembles a regular schedule, then it's probably best not to bother at all.
Larry O'Brien responded to my LINQ post here, saying that he couldn't leave a comment. I suspect that the new JavaScript comment editor is at fault there; I might want to remove that. Anyway, a few points in response to his response:
Anyhow, as is the norm for net communications, I came off as much harsher to Larry than I actually intended to, and for that I'm sorry. I may not always agree with what he writes, but I do read and enjoy it.
Off to New York in a 1/2 hour - I'll be visiting customers during the day, and then presenting to the NYC STUG this evening. I'll have NC CD's with me, so come and get some!
Well - Gary Gygax himself is lending support to an effort to put a version of D&D online. That's interesting. Of course, old time hardcore gamers who designed their own magic system will scoff :)
I had a good customer meeting this afternoon - Cincom Smalltalk powers the most advanced financial application on Wall Street. So now I've chanced on a free WiFi signal, while I wait for my cappuchino before the NYSTUG meeting. If you're in NYC, I'll be here at 6:30 pm.
I've seen some comments about the Javascript editor eating comments when you use preview. It's a WYSIWYG editor anyway, so I just yanked preview from that page. I also yanked the "Custom Markup" option, since it's not needed with that editor. If you want to use simple text entry, just follow the link at the top through to that option.
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