Matt Croydon::Postneo

Month: December 2002

  • Two Articles From Peterme

    Two articles that I need to read by Peter Merholz.  The first is on collaboration:

    Anyone who has worked with others knows that the best collaborative tools are the simplest. It is likely that, in the last 10 years, the most creative thinking and innovation has emerged from sessions gathered ’round whiteboards.

    The other is on user interface:

    The Supernova conference was kicked off by Howard Rheingold, who put forth a thesis based on thoughts from Smart Mobs. It was a great way to start the show, rooting it in humanisitic and sociological notions, and not simply focusing on the tech.

    One thing that came up that I take issue with is this notion that there is a fundamental difference between “the kids”‘ abilities with new technologies, and their elders. This is a fairly hoary canard. Older folks don’t get new technologies, don’t understand how to use them, but that younger folks adopt it as if it were breathing. This is often put out there as a way to excuse old people from bothering to understand, and, I think, from excusing product designers from bothering to make products for people over 25.

  • J2ME/MDIP for Motorola T720 and Others

    Slashdot:

    r0.ini writes “Nice step-by-step introduction guide on how to make that cool app for your T720.” Worth a read even if you never intend to write a program for your cell phone, for the comparison between BREW and J2ME (and implicitly between Verizon and AT&T).

    I’d like to develop for as many phones as possible without locking myself into a specific manufacturer/platform (if possible).  It looks like the article covers developing for J2ME/MDIP, so it should cover any MDIP compliant device.

    It looks like WAP is the lowest common denominator: it works on the most platforms, though it is as limiting as HTML3.01 or earlier.  Most if not almost all of your processing has to be done on the server side.  This isn’t particularly bad, thought I do have a place in my heart for tightly written compact code that gets the job done.  I think developing for J2ME/MDIP is probably a good idea, though it looks like Nokia has a well designed SDK, and MDIP is in there.

    I’d like to urge developers to stay away from vendor-specific extensions as much as possible.  Ideally, you would be able to write code that would work on both Motorola, Nokia, and other platforms.  I haven’t done any coding for MDIP phones, so I’m not sure that this is the case.  I know that some java-enabled phones have more features than others, so it would be bad to limit higher end phones to lower end features.  However, do your best to “degrade gracefully” for lesser platforms.

    I plan to work in J2ME/MDIP in the near future, and I will blog whatever I find out.

  • Groove Web Services

    Sam Gentile is grooving with web services:

    Got the beta of Groove 2.5 and Groove Web Services up and going. It’s quite amazing to me, in the matter of minutes, to pull all the data out of my Groove space with a simple C# program.

    That’s what I really like about C#: it’s so easy to just open up a new project and use a web service.  It takes just a few minutes.

  • Jabber Journal #5 and Strucured Procrastination

    Matt Raible notes that Jabber Journal #5 is out.  Jabber is on my (long) list of things to do when I have free time.  It’s such a cool idea, a cool protocol, a cool way of doing things, I just don’t have the time yet.  Perhaps I’ll work it into a session of structured procrastination.

  • Traffic

    Whoa.  This weblog has generated over a gigabyte of traffic so far this week, and it’s not over yet.  I’ll try to post some stats tomorrow, and if this keeps up I’ll probably have to start paying more a month for web hosting.  Dave’s link and my javablog channel have both contributed to the rise in traffic.

    Welcome to my weblog if you’ve just started reading.

  • Cruise Control .NET

    Cruise Control:

    CruiseControl.NET is a functional port of CruiseControl to the .NET platform. CruiseControl.NET provides the benefits of Continuous Integration to .NET projects.

    [via Joe Walnes]

  • Blogconference

    Sam Ruby:

    Imagine a caravan full of RTP bloggers descending on Washington DC in June…

    Yes.  I’d like that.

  • Compressed Content

    0xDECAFBAD reminds us that decompressed content is longer than compressed content.  It’s these little gotchas that I stumble with moreso than the hard stuff, and it looks like I’m not alone.

  • Newswire

    Werner Vogels:

    I worked this week on getting the website set up for the Newswire project. Newswire is a system for collaborative real-time news delivery. It uses peer-to-peer techniques (epidemics, small worlds clustering, etc.) to construct a collaborative infrastructure that can guarantee delivery of essential news even in the presence of overload such as on 9/11/2001, or large scale internet failures. The screenshots are now also available. Below is my high-level summary of what the Newswire tries to accomplish.

    Wow.  The screenshots look impressive.  This could be the collaborative killer app, kids.

  • Really Simple Discovery

    Rogers Cadenhead:

    Radio Userland has been upgraded to support Really Simple Discovery (RSD), an XML-based protocol that enables weblog editing tools to easily find the Web services they can use to read and write a weblog.

    That’s probably what caused a nasty 500 Internal Server Error when I booted up the weblog this morning.  I have a feeling that the mail aggregator root update got hosed at some point, as I had to comment out mailAggregator.init() or something in order to get Radio to work this morning.  I need to wipe the system that Radio is on and restore, but I’m afraid.  I’m subconciously putting it off as long as possible.

  • Tapestry

    Mark Pilgrim is wrong, you’ve got at least my interest:

    This is likely of interest to very few, but… before Windows 95, before Debian GNU/Linux, before the Pentium chip… before Scripting News or DaveNet or the world’s first weblog… I was writing Mac programs and releasing them as Free Software under the GNU General Public License.

  • Caching

    Scott Hanselman:

    Justin and Thomas Wagner are talking about Caching in a Web Farm.  Justin has proposed an extension to the his cache server idea includes a .NET Remoting server that fire events to the local web server caches telling them to invalidate.

  • Mac Junk

    Tomorrow morning is the Washington Apple Pi Winter Garage Sale.  This is the best chance for anyone in the region to buy macs, mac junk, spare parts, random fun stuff, or anything else apple or mac related.  I’ll be there around 8:30 or so.  Find me or email/text me if you’ll be there.

  • The Bad News

    Tenorman:

    One of my rabbits is still fat.

  • Brown Goes Wireless

    CNet:

    The shipping giant, which calls itself “Brown” in its advertising, is beginning to deploy a tracking system that combines the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless technologies. Bluetooth can carry data over several feet, while Wi-Fi has a 300-foot range, making it a popular method of extending Net access in many homes and business.

    UPS representative Ginnie Myhr said 55,000 package handlers eventually will get Bluetooth bar code readers that are worn on the finger like a ring. The ring scans a package label and sends the information to a Wi-Fi radio attached to a handler’s belt. The radio then sends the information to a central computer.

  • SDL .NET

    SDL .NET (1.1):

    SDL.NET is a set of language bindings for SDL and SDL_mixer written in C#, which allows easy development of games using Microsoft’s .NET framework. It should work on any .NET-capable machine.

    Changes include Mono support as well as music and sound callbacks support.

  • DBVisualizer

    Masukomi:

    Can I just say how much ass DBVisualizer is kicking for me? If you’re a java programmer who works with Databases a lot you have got to check that out. Hell, you should check it out if you’re any kind fo programmer who works with databases a lot. Hopefully I’ll be able to upgrade to the unrestricted version in a few months ($79). I don’t think I’ll be able to afford it any time before then.

    From the DBVisualizer site:

    DbVisualizer is a cross-platform database visualization and management tool which entirely relies on the JDBC, Java Database Connectivity APIs. DbVisualizer enables simultaneous connections to many different databases through JDBC drivers. Just point and click to browse the structure of the database, characteristics of tables, etc. Arbitrary SQL statements can be executed and saved between sessions. DbVisualizer supports a variety of databases including Oracle, Sybase, DB2, MySQL, Informix, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Cloudscape, McKoi, SAP DB, Mimer and InstantDB.

    Very cool.

  • Kablog

    I just recieved an email from Todd Courtois from Rawthought:

    Hello,

    We’ve just released KABLOG, a blog posting tool for your PDA or smart phone device.  Based on your website postings, we thought you and your blog readers might be interested in using this software.  KABLOG runs on J2ME/MIDP 1.0-compatible devices (including Handspring Treo and PocketPC), and currently supports posting to Movable Type 2.51 or later. (It may also work with other blog servers that support a similar XMLRPC interface.)  Among other features, KABLOG allows you to write blog entries wherever you are, even when you don’t have a network connection, and upload those entries when you have network coverage.

    This shareware and more information at:

    http://www.rawthought.com/projects/kablog/
     
    Thanks for your support!

    Nice!  I like the MDIP 1.0/J2ME part.  I havent’ checked out Todd’s product, but the screenshots look pretty nice.  Congrats on the wicked project, Todd.

  • An Interview with Jim Kent

    O’Reillynet interviews Jim Kent:

    Jim Kent was a graduate student in biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), when he wrote the program that allowed the public human genome team to assemble its fragments just before Celera’s private commercial effort. His program ensured that the human genome data would remain in the public domain. Kent wrote the 10,000-line program in a month because he didn’t want to see the genome data locked up by commercial patents.

  • IBM AltiVec

    MacNN:

    IBM confirmed that its PowerPC 970 processor, which is scheduled to begin shipping in the second half of 2003, has AltiVec-compatible execution units, as noted by a MacNN reader: “The 970’s multiple execution units including an AltiVec compatible vector processor are fed by an up to 900-MHz processor interface bus, which can deliver data at a rate of up to 6.4 GBps…In addition to high performance general -purpose processing, application-specific acceleration (such as multimedia) can be achieved through the AltiVec vector engine. Codeveloped by IBM, this engine extends the PowerPC instruction set with 162 Single-Instruction, Multiple Data (SIMD) instructions.”