Year: 2002

Jeremy is taking up gliding again, and blogging every bit of it.

TechWeb: PHP5: Ready for the Enterprise? [via Keith who got it from LWN]

Bill Humphries [a.k.a. more like this weblog]:

[ via Zeldman ] The W3C explains how they do a three column, tableless layout on their front page.

Phil Windley’s public service tip number 1: Process is more important than results.

I dare you to read this out loud:

A PhD candidate in ecology at Stanford University has done an ecological analysis of humans and vampires in Sunnydale, the home of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He took some initial assumptions on rates of population growth, vampire feeding, etc and plugged them into a differential equations model. What he got was an equilibrium human population of 36,346, and an vampire population of around 18, and furthermore the equilibrium is stable. His conclusion was that even though the show’s designers are not ecologists, they managed to come up with ideas that actually made ecological sense. Scroll to the bottom of the page to see a pretty cool spiral graph of human population vs vampire population.

Mike points to HEP:

Hep Message Server is software that transfers bits of information between different messaging sytems on the Internet. When it’s done, you’ll be able to use Hep to transparently route messages between e-mail, weblogs, and instant messaging.

I remember stumbling upon HEP some time ago.  It looks like it is maturing.

O’Reilly Mac DevCenter covers Learing the Terminal in Jaguar (part 1).

I need to do more of that.  I know that I’m a better pointer than writer, but I really need to get in the habit of getting a few paragraphs of real content out there once in awhile.

I found out something about myself last night.  I’ve worked in many programming languages in many environments over the years.  I love loosely typed languages such as PHP, Perl, Python, and other scripting languages.  It’s so easy to get stuff done without having to deal with plumbing and details.  At the same time, I find myself frustrated when debugging these loosely typed languages.  I find myself wanting to go back to Java, C#, or other languages where I have to specifiy what I want.  It’s more work, but when I can deal with concrete structs and variables that aren’t going to be changing type based on context, I feel much better.

This applies even more when working with web services.  The scripting-like languages are great for simple implemenations of web services.  They’re great for examples.  It’s so easy to say, “Grab the info from this web service, and then print whatever comes back.”  But when I’m trying to get at just a specific nugget of information, the pseudostructarrays that I’ve had to deal with cause my head to spin.

I’ve also noticed that loosely typed languages make no so perfect web services servers.  They’re great for simple clients, as I’ve stated before, but most of the client/server implementations in these scripting languages dont’t support WSDL or other advanced features, moreso in SOAP than XML-RPC.

I’ve found that Cook Computings XML-RPC.NET has made my life a lot easier on the XML-RPC client side.  It allows me to work in any Visual Studio .NET language, though most of my time has been spent in C# lately.  I have to create structs.  Data is passed back and forth in these structs.  I know what’s going on.  I don’t have to figure out what the heck I’m doing wrong that caused a parse error on line 28.

Any discussion of debugging web services is not complete without mentioning both Simon Fell’s TCPTrace and Mindreef’s SOAPScope.  Both of these utilities allow you to see exactly what XML is passing over the wire.  TCPTrace is basic and free.  Mindreef’s product is worth every penny that they charge for it.  It has a slick UI, coverts XML over the wire into pseudocode (great big picture stuff), and has advanced logging and other crazy stuff that I can’t recall at the moment.  If you’re getting paid to write and debug web services, buy SOAPScope.

I’m glad I learned what I learned about myself last night.  I may not be the best programmer on the planet because I can’t deal with some of this stuff.  But that’s okay.  I’m sure if I was pair programming or working with a team of developers, someone would say something to make it all click.  Someday.

Infoworld:

HEWLETT-PACKARD ON MONDAY will formally announce it is joining the Microsoft Visual Studio .Net Integration program, which, when coupled with the company’s Java support, is intended to promote multiplatform development of OpenView management applications.

The company will build and integrate XML Web services developer tools and components into Visual Studio .Net, according to HP.

CNet reports that Seagate is planning an IPO.  Is this a smart move?

Matt Raible thinks his 667MHz Powerbook is a dog:

I’ve been using my G4 Powerbook all week to write this security chapter. Today I started coding and writing at the same time. This post is meant to vent that this laptop/OS is a DOG! It’s so fricken slow! I have Eclipse, Word, Mail, Terminal and Internet Explorer running and I feel like I’ve lost hours for these apps to respond.

Very cool.  Jeremy Zawodny is going to play with terabytes in MySQL:

It sounds like I’ll be helping with some multi-terabyte MySQL tests in the not too distant future. This is good not just because I get to play with neat toys, but it’ll finally help me to answer the “how well does MySQL deal with BIG data sets?” question. Until now, I’ve had to appeal to my knowledge of how MySQL works as well as some second or third-hand reports of what others have done in this area. It’ll be nice to have some concrete data and tests that I understand and can explain to others in detail.

Stay tuned for more.

Rock!

Man, I’m such a geek.  I heard “Celebrity illustrated Beowulf” over at Boing Boing, and thought, “celebrity clusters?  huh?  cool.”  Nope, it’s the other Beowulf.

John Udell: Script locally, publish globally.

Chris Gulker is using web services:

In short, without much hype or fanfare, I already rely on Web services. It’s an ad hoc thing, with no commitment or passion or arguments about .Net vs. Sun One or whatever. It’s just happening, organically, using easy things like HTML and javascript. Hmmm… may be a column, here…

Somebody beat me to a Slashdot review of Prey.

Sam Gentile pointed to this:

Groove Web Services. Groove Web Services is going to be a Big Deal. I don’t think I’m violating any NDA’s by telling you that John Burkhardt did an in-house demo yesterday in which he took an empty C# project and, in 5 minutes, wrote a complete Windows app that listed his Groove Contacts. Oh, incidentally, another developer was running a command line Linux app, which did something similar. Don’t want to use Windows to use Groove? Get a cheap Windows PC, install Groove, plug it into your LAN, and go hide it in a closet. Better yet, just set up an account on someone elses’ Grooved PC. Build whatever interfaces you really need, out of .NET/Java/Perl/Fortran, and access it from your Mac/PalmPilot/WebTV/Commodore 64. Jon Udell likes GWS. [Webslice]

MSNBC:

International Business Machines Corp. on Friday said it would buy Rational Software Corp. for about $2.1 billion to expand its software development offerings.

Hmm.  I’m trying to decide if this is a good move or a blunder. [via Clemens]

Freshmeat announces that OpenMosix 2.4.20 is out:

openMosix is a a set of extensions to the standard Linux kernel allowing you to build a cluster of out of off-the-shelf PC hardware. openMosix scales perfectly up to thousands of nodes. You do not need to modify your applications to benefit from your cluster (unlike PVM, MPI, Linda, etc.). Processes in openMosix migrate transparently between nodes and the cluster will always auto-balance.

It looks like a minor bugfix and kernel sync update:

This is a port of openMosix-2.4.19-7 to 2.4.20. Improvements include Load Balancer updates, minor code cleanups, and minor updates. This version is initially only available from CVS.

Have you messed around with clustering?  With OpenMosix you don’t have to dedicate specific machines to a cluster.  OpenMosix uses machines when it is needed, and doesn’t when they’re not.  It’s pretty wicked cool technology.