Day: September 30, 2002

David M Johnson has some interesting thoughts on blogging tools as commodities:

Anyway, this made me start thinking about weblogging software as a commodity. If it is a commodity that means you can’t really make money selling weblogging software. You might be able to make money selling weblogging related services as weblogger.com does, or you might be able to make your existing software more valuable by adding weblogging features to it. Seems to me that weblogging features would make sense in an HTML editor/publisher, portal software, or even an e-Commerce suite. I wonder what other categories of software would benefit from weblogging features.

Sam Ruby announces Apache Axis 1.0-RC2:

I’m pleased to announce release candidate 2 of Axis release 1.  All unit and functional tests pass with this release.  The SAAJ and JAX RPC TCK tests pass.  All bugs reported as of this morning targetted for the 1.0 release are resolved in this drop.  Pending feedback from people like yourselves, this might very well be it!

• What is it?
• Where can I find it?
• What is the plan?
• Where should I send comments?

Axis is the Apache Group’s implementation of a SOAP server.

Russell Beattie:

Can’t…. post….

no…. bandwidth…. downloading…. Redhat… 8.0….

-Russ

I wish this were the case for me, I’m only getting about 20k/s out of my download.  🙂

Inbox Buddy: J. Scott Johnson’s latest project.  It’s a spam detector, color coded organizer, and a lot more For Outlook.  He’s also Blogging the product.  Great stuff!  I’d definately download it and try it out, except I don’t use Outlook at all.  I’m in front of so many boxes during any given day, that I find it easier just to deal with all of my email over a web-based interface.

Uche Ogbuji at WebServices.Org: “The Past, Present and Future of Web Services, part 1.”

Web services are somewhere around the crest of their hype cycle and currently the darling of the prevalent media. This cresting is like that of other technologies in that it precedes full development and maturity. Web services, an undoubtedly important technology regardless of media interest, have a good deal of development ahead of them. Those who find success using Web services will be those who understand the technology fundamentally: its motivations, the reasons why some components are winning out over others, and the likely course of maturity.

I’ll read the entire article this evening, but so far it looks like a very worthwhile read. [via Loosely Coupled]

See what David Carter-Tod is reading: He has posted his Amphetadesk page.  Voyeurism at its finest!

MIT Open Courseware went live today. [via Serious Instructional Technology]

Red Hat goes 8.0: “You’ve never seen Linux look like this.”  There are a few new features (besides the obvious desktop overhaul).  The full package list is here.

The distribution is a lean 5 ~675MB CD’s small.

Does anyone else remember installing Slackware from a bunch of floppies?

Newsforge has an article about Firebird, an open-source database that was born from a fork of Borland’s InterBase.  It is released under the Mozilla Public License, and can therefore be used in commercial apps free of charge.  There are some differences under the hood when compared to MySQL, but it looks darn robust.  I remember reading about this some time ago, but it’s nice to see random projects float to the surface every once in awhile.

How To Write JavaDoc Comments: It has been so long since I’ve had the need to write JavaDoc comments, that I thought I would point to a quick reference for them.  It brings back memories of learning Java 1.1/AWT and then having to scrap that and learn Java1.2/Swing.  That was a party.  Luckily pretty much everything that I remember from Java 1.2 has carried over to Java 1.3.

Oh, and Eclipse on Windows rocks nowadays.  It’s much easier to use than the Eclcipse/Motif I have installed on my Linux testbed and is leaps and bounds more stable (and quicker!) than the older version of Eclipse I had tried on Windows.

Brad Wilson on RSS 2.0:

So, why is the net wasting so much damn time on RSS 2.0? What’s wrong with 1.0 if you want an extensible, rich publishing format? It’s not like RSS 2.0 offers anything of value over 1.0, except that it’s “vaguely 0.9x-ish”. Sorry, but that’s hardly a compelling answer these days, given that it appears RSS 2.0 is going down the “break backward compatibility” route. If you’re going to break backward compatibility, just stick with RSS 1.0.

I have a feeling that as long as Dave Winer is involved, RSS 2.0 will not break backward compatability.  However the solution to not breaking backward compatability (and homegrown parsers) is to remove the namespace element.  This might just make a backward compatible RSS2.0 feed an RSS0.9x feed with version bloat.

OSNews has a review of Red Hat 8 and UnitedLinux.  The Red Hat review is more on user experience and new features (including the lack of mp3 support), while the UnitedLinux review focuses on installation.  It will be interesting to see how these two megadistributions do in the near future.