Day: December 11, 2002

  • Refactorings in C#

    Richard Caetano is back:

    As a new project on StronglyTyped, I started a section called Refactorings in C#.  This area will tie in closely with Martin Fowler’s book Refactoring.  I’m hoping to solidify my refactoring vocabulary with this project.  My goal is to cover 2 or 3 refactorings a week.  We’ll see how that goes =)

    I’m looking forward to it.

  • Noisy Macs

    Juha doesn’t think that the new Powerbook G4 is all that noisy.  I was in my local Apple store a few weeks ago and looked at the Powermac G4 desktops.  Man, they’re hurricanes compared to the older blue & white G3’s and Quicksilver and below G4’s that I’ve been used to.  It’s still a lot quieter than my main desktop machine (a 3dcool Tornado 1000 case with 4 fans), but it struck me as an ugly kind of unmaclike noisy.

    Don’t get me wrong, I’d still buy one in an instant if I had the funds.

  • Blogger 2 Notes

    Steve Jenson is going to change the prefix to the Blogger2 API to blogger2.*.  This was the first thing that jumped out to me as a problem.  So it looks like the Blogger API and Blogger2 API will coexist.  This is both good and crucial.  It looks like Steve is taking suggestions quite well.  Several things that were suggested are going to be rolled into the Blogger2 API.

  • Referral Gem of the Day

    Wow, I got linked in Japanese by Ryuji Abe [site translated to English] in The diary formerly known as Go ahead make my day:

    I’ll assume that Ryuji wasn’t calling me names and say thanks for the link. (Babelfish says: “By portable telephone blog”).  Ryuji’s site runs on a GPL’d program called hns (or the Hyper NIKKI System).  I don’t see any references to RSS, so I can’t keep track of this blog in my aggregator.  There are some good links in there.  Time to add something else to my list: learn Japanese before I die.  For the short term, perhaps I should break out some script-fu and scrape the babelfish translations once a day and spit out some (valid) RSS.  His diary reads much like an Advogato diary: Projects, Links, Life.

    Being the stupid American that I am, I just found out from Ryuji that there is a Slashdot Japan [rdf].  The eerie part: there’s a poll without CowboyNeal as an answer.

    OSDN Japan

  • Weblogs in Meatspace

    DaveNet: Weblog is Meatspace.  Let me know when, let me know where.  I’ll go to that left coast if I have to.  It’s hard to compromise on a specific place when you’re trying to accomidate a world full of bloggers.

    We should create a web app (with XML-RPC, SOAP, and REST interfaces, of course) that allows any blogger interested in attending WIM to ping with their location.  Then take that data and figure out where the geographic middle of that is.  It’ll change as more people ping, of course.  Where can I vote on the 24 hour day extensibility issue?

  • Sam Ruby on REST and Signal to Noise

    Sam Ruby on REST:

    Mark Baker: Figure out what are the identifiable objects in your system, give them all URIs, and make sure they answer GET requests. Much of REST will flow naturally from that.  That is a good first step.  The next step is to agree on common representations.  Sometimes consensus can be reached on these representations, and that is goodness.  Otherwise, extensibility and/or discovery mechanisms may be helpful in providing the right amount of coupling.

    And then:

    You want to catch my interest?  Say it in on a weblog.

     

  • RxLinux

    RxLinux 1.2.2 has been released:

    Rxlinux is a modular system. The base system fits in 25M of RAMdisk. Extra packages (software) can be installed on demand in RAMdisk. The /var partition which contains the application data can reside either on a hard disk or in RAMdisk. Rxlinux can be configure as a Web server, an X11 terminal, a database server, an openmosix cluster node, etc. It is distributed as a 10M bootable ISO file. You can configure it to include more packages in the ISO if you don’t want to download extra software at boot time.

    The changes are also really cool:

    Three new packages have been added: Jboss, Tomcat, and Jdk. Jdk as been bundled as a compressed ISO file (ziso), and can be mounted directly from the CDROM or installed in a RAMdisk. Rxlinux can now be customized as a diskless Web application server. A few minor bugs have been fixed. More code cleanup was done.

    I must say, that RxLinux looks like a pretty wicked way to put legacy hardware with a little bit of ram to use.  I know that there’s a machine around here somewhere that is just begging to have RxLinux on it.  I also like the openmosix clustering support.

  • Personal Web Proxy

    Les Orchard (0xDECAFBAD) has hacked together a personal web proxy in Python.  He’s having fun working in a language that he hasn’t spent a lot of time in.  I’ve recently had similar fun romping in Perl and C#.  I’ve always used Perl for a few things around the *nix boxes, but nothing like the little wapblog script I hacked up the other day.  Similarly, I’ve been partying in C#, which seems (java) so (java) errily (java) familiar, but is just different enough to feel new.  I will give C# and .NET props for taking a good base and improving upon it.  From what I’ve been reading in the java.blog community, Java is trying to catch up to C# in some areas.

    And while I’m on the topic of Java, I’m still not over learning Java 1.0/1.1/AWT just to find out that EVERYTHING was different for 1.2+/Swing.  I’m still a bit bitter about that, though I don’t usually hold a grudge.  I’m almost over it now.  Okay, I’m overreacting.  I was young and impressionable back then, and the switch from AWT to Swing was a big deal when I was learning Java.

  • Open Source Web Services

    Paul Krill at Infoworld covers open source web services:

    Open source presents a viable option for developing Web services if developers are willing to work with tools that are not as easy to use as commercial products, a consultant said during a Web services conference here Tuesday.

    There’s more in the article, including the usual interlinking to other infoworld content on the most random words possible.

  • Make and Ant

    Keith is just getting around to learning make (though I don’t know make except how to use it, so he’s a step ahead of me).  Keith: this is your reminder to use ant if you’re ever building Java projects.  There’s a book by two bloggers that I reccomend highly.

  • Freezing Rain

    I hear the sound of water or ice falling on ice  It’s dark out, so I can’t see, but this can’t be a good thing.

  • Haircut & Google

    Matt's Hair #2 Matt's Hair #7 Matt's Hair #6

    It has been several months since I got my last hair cut.  I think I lost a few pounds in the process.  It feels good.

    In other vanity-related news, I’ve jumped from the eighty-somethingth Matt to the 45th Matt at google.  Did I mention that this blog went live in July?

  • Boot Keys

    Bill Humphries points to Macintosh boot keys:

    Always handy to have a list of all the special key sequences available when starting a Mac.

    I remember some of these from my days as ‘keep the macs running’ guy.  It’s always a good list to have handy when you need it though.

  • Smoothwall 1.0

    OSNews:

    SmoothWall 1.0 has been released and LinuxOrbit has a related article. On another distro release, for BeOS this time, Developer Edition v1.1 is out. It includes many new drivers and system improvements.

    Release notes are also available.  I know there were some issues with the Smoothwall team (I think some spintered off or something), but my (limited) experience with Smoothwall was good.  I didn’t actually end up using it as a router, as the hardware I had sanctioned for it ended up being needed elsewhere.  The fact that it installs from a CD is great, the hardware requirements were modest, and the setup procedure was clean.  The smoothwall team was also very good about getting patches out, and (more importantly) making the end user aware of the patches and trying to prompt them to patch.

    Great project, congrats on the 1.0.

  • Why ES for .NET?

    Clemens Vasters posted a series of articles under the title of Why you want to use Enterprise Services for your .NET application.  You can read them here:

    An amusing and informative series of articles, Clemens.

  • Blogger API 2.0

    Steve Jenson announced to the bloggerDev list:

    Hi everybody,

    I’ve uploaded the Developer Preview documentation to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bloggerDev/files/documentation.html and I’m waiting for a DNS change to propagate before I give it a permanent home. Once that dns update is finished, I’ll open up access to what I’m calling the API Validator; it will allow you to test API 2.0 clients without needing a Blogger account.

    I think it’s important to note that I don’t consider API 2.0 set in stone. I’m incredibly open to hearing what people like and dislike about this new API and it’s datastructures.

    Let me cut to the chase, here are the methods available:

    blogger.newPost(Struct login, Struct post, Struct actions) => Boolean success blogger.editPost(Struct login, Struct post, Struct actions) => Boolean success
    blogger.deletePost(Struct login, String postid, Struct actions) => Boolean success
    blogger.getBlogs(Struct login) => Array of blogs (String ‘blogid’ -> String ‘blogName’)
    blogger.getPost(Struct login, String postid, Struct filters) => Struct post
    blogger.getRecentPosts(Struct login, String blogid, Struct filters) => Array of Struct post’s, unordered
    blogger.getTemplate(Struct login, String blogid, String templateName) => Struct template
    blogger.setTemplate(Struct login, String blogid, String templateName) => Boolean success
    blogger.getUserInfo(Struct login) => Struct user
    blogger.setUserInfo(Struct login, Struct user) => Boolean success