Month: October 2002

  • John Orr:

    Lately I’ve been thinking about choosing software for an organization based on the way the software license strategic fit. I think that the software license needs to fit with the long term strategy of the organization. An example, from government, would be a software license that encourages stability in interfaces. Government needs at least a 10 year run from the technology adopted.

    I’m pleased with the licensing shepherded by the Java Community Process so far. I think it’s great that the JCP is showing good support for Open Source.

    Java has been a great fit in my organization. Over the 4 years we’ve been developing with Java the API’s have proliferated but little of what we’ve written needs to be replaced for obsolescence. And it keeps on chuggin’ day after day.

  • Gordon Weakliem:

    Rickard Öberg has published a rebuttal to the much publicized report from The Middleware Company on J2EE and .NET Application Server and Web Services Benchmark. I suppose that the only way to bury this topic for good is to have the Open Source crowd put together their own benchmark suite, but they probably have better things to do with their time. At this point, I doubt that too many people are going to change their minds over yet another benchmark. Greg recounts some of what went on at Galileo when the decision was made to go J2EE over .NET here. I’m most likely not at liberty to say the real reason, but I think I can safely say that it came down to money – and I’m not talking about OS and App server licensing costs. When businesses make these decisions, there’s a lot more that goes into it than just technical considerations. That drives technologists nuts, but we aren’t the ones signing the checks.

  • Mindreef’s SOAPscope is installed.  I’ll have to play with it tomorrow.

  • Eweek interviews Darryl Taft of Microsoft:

    Charles Fitzgerald, Microsoft Corp.’s general manager of platform strategies, is considered one of the company’s top “big picture” thinkers. Fitzgerald, who focuses on Windows and .Net and bringing together all of Microsoft’s complementary technologies such as XML and Web services into a unified infrastructure, spoke with eWEEK Senior Writer Darryl K. Taft earlier this month about issues ranging from the Redmond, Wash., company’s odd-couple Web-services relationship with IBM to standards to Microsoft’s platform strategies. [via WebServices.Org]

  • MacSlash reports that Apple now ranks 5th in the server market.  Pretty impressive for a new player.

  • Sam Gentile:

    The consistently excellent Dino Exposito has a nice introduction to .NET Remoting. Unfortunately its in VB.NET but he’s a great writer and teacher and it looks good.

  • CNet/John Spooner:

    The new AMD Developer Center, located at the company’s Sunnyvale, Calif., headquarters, will give software developers and hardware manufacturers access to AMD’s engineers, software and testing facilities.

    AMD is doing everything they can to make x86-64 work.  I wish them luck, I’d love to have an Opteron on my desktop someday…

  • Chris Sells mentions that Mindreef’s SOAPscope goes beta:

    “SOAPscope is designed to help diagnose problems developing XML Web Services by logging message traffic and helping you find problems with the SOAP messages and WSDL.”

    Mindreef did a very cool demo of their diagnostics tools at the DevCon and it was a big hit. Recommended.

    Mindreef’s demo at the Web Services DevCon was wicked cool.

  • Newsforge: Film Gimp gets $1,000 from LinuxFund.org.

  • Ed Cone:

    Tara Grubb’s weblog was discussed high in the story, which was headlined “Grubb’s ‘hits’ don’t faze Coble.” The lede: “If Internet page views were votes, US Rep. Howard Coble might be quaking in his loafers.” The top of the article dwells on Grubb’s “innovative use of the Web.” Grubb’s opposition to the P2P bill is discussed, as is Coble’s concern for copyright protection.

  • K5/kpaul: Portrait of a Blogger.  I thought the article was way off until I read the techblogger section:

    Percentage of blogger population: 20%
    Hours spent blogging: 56/week
    Habitat: Usually a messy desk type area with lots of caffeine nearby. Techie Bloggers have been known to be nomads, though, with the advent of wireless internet technology. You may see them anywhere as a result, although most tend towards urban areas.
    Average Age: 20 something
    Favorite hangout: Slashdot
    Last Book Read: Understanding the LINUX Kernel: From I/O Ports to Process Management
    Favorite Offline Activities: Microsoft jokes, computer swap meets, hacker conventions.
    Mode of Dress: Varies wildly, but you will usually notice at least one obscure reference to linux ruling and microsoft sucking.
    Psychological profile: INTP
    Typical post: select extract('epoch' from now()) as unixtime; Recompiled the kernel from CVS today. Blech. While waiting for it to compile, I worked some on my project to turn GIMP into an auto-dynamic IP range modifier for my Sega Dreamcast box. The boxen are doing ok, but the 486 piece of crap is pulling too much juice and overheating so I’m thinking of rerouting the fan and mounting it inside my refrigerator. Yeah, yeah, I saw the /. article, but mine is going to be way cooler. More later, my Mac is beeping…

    I think I’ll take the 5th of that.  I haven’t booted my 486/netbsd box for awhile (I added an extra case fan), tho my mac does beep every so often.  I actually don’t have a monitor hooked up to it, I VNC in.  At one point I thought a 4 port KVM would be more than enough…

  • Keith Devens pointed out The Unix Programming Environment, by Mark Burgess.  It covers shell scripting, C, Perl/CGI, network programming, and a lot more.

  • Linux Journal/Louis Iacona: Dogs of the Linux Shell

    Could the command-line tools you’ve forgotten or never knew save time and some frustration?

    There are some good ones in there, including head, tail, tac, fold, and others.  You don’t always have to write a perl script to get the job done…

  • Peter Drayton is moving to Seattle to keep the CLR in check.  Sweet!

  • IM Conversation of the day

    MattSchwackAway: You can dream about some weird effed up stuff if you read a computer programming book right before you take a nap.
    adam: LOL
    adam: oh man, it’s funny you say that.  i actually did that just recently too
    MattSchwackAway: 🙂
    MattSchwackAway: it’s scary sometimes
    adam: what did you dream about? (i’m curious)
    MattSchwackAway: I don’t remember, but it was event-driven and object oriented.
    adam: LMAO
    adam: oh man

    (Adam’s screen name changed to prevent AIM spam.)

  • Jeremy Zawodny’s continuing PHPCon coverage, Dirk Elemendorf’s closing keynote:

    He then threw us a bit of a curve ball by revealing that a sizable chunk of their PHP code is being replaced by Python. The silver lining in the story is that SOAP is allowing them to keep much of the customer-facing stuff in PHP and the back-end code in Python.

    Yeah, PHP!  Yeah, Python!  Yeah, SOAP!

  • VIA Eden Invisible Case Mod

    I’ve spoken about it several times, so here’s a perfect example of how NOT to run your VIA Eden itty bitty motherboard:

    Don’t try this at home, kids.  Now it’s back to cleaning up my room.

  • Rogue Books

    Here are a bunch of books that managed to sneak off my bookshelf and were partying at different parts in my room:

    If you can’t read any of the titles, click on the image for a 640×480 version.  And yes, they’re sitting on top of a Sparc 5 (170MHz, 128MB RAM, 2+ gig hd).  Here they are from top to bottom: Learning Perl, Web Services Essentials, Programming Web Services with XML-RPC, Python Cookbook, Using Samba, Core Java 2, Volume I, TCP/IP Network Administration, AXIS: Next Generation Java SOAP, Java Development With Ant, Java How to Program, Core PHP Programming, Oracle8i: The Complete Reference.

  • Keith Devens: PHP one-liner for Weblogs.com for RSS:

    XMLRPC_request(“rpc.weblogs.com”, “/RPC2”, “rssUpdate”, array($name, $address))

    Of course, that uses Keith’s XML-RPC library.

  • Jeremy Zawodny reports on Rasmus Lerdorf’s PHPCon keynote:

    On Thursday morning, Rasmus Lerdorf (now working at Yahoo) gave the opening keynote. (Expect it to appear here someday.) He covered physics, rocket science, the web problem, and a little bit of PHP along the way. One of his main points was that the web problem isn’t fundamentally difficult. Unlike complex web software from various commercial vendors, PHP provides the basic tools to need to build solutions to “the web problem” without feeling like you need a degree in rocket science to get started.