Year: 2002

Juha over at Universal Rule also has two excellent blog entries on books and writing.

Getting feedback on your writing:

Having immediate feedback on your writing (and your thoughts) encourages you to keep on writing. The feedback also helps in the creative process. In micropublishing like weblogs you don’t have to publish a polished text, you can start with half-ready ideas and get feedback where to go from there. The weblog community is not individual writers fighting for the place on the printed page.

Reviewing books:

During the last four years I have reviewed about 60 books in the Tietoyhteys magazine, where I have been editing the book review column. Most of the reviews have been written by me, although I have been fortunate to find a couple of colleagues interested in reviewing books. Writing a book review is never a straightforward task, but it can be very rewarding. Writing a review forces you to ask: Did I understand what the writer intended to say? Often you find that you didn’t.

This is how Graham Glass writes a book.  He makes it sound so easy, tho he’s had a bit of experience.

I know I shouldn’t be excited, but I’ve got 5 moderator points at Slashdot… I feel like a weak geeky god.  They’re burning a hole in my pocket.

If you need to know exactly what tools you need to build development snapshots of MySQL, Jeremy Zawodny has the answer.

Sam Gentile read Ingo Rammer’s book this morning.  I have the opposite problem.  I need to do less reading and more coding.

I remember reading a blurb about this a few days ago, but I didn’t realize how far along the project was.  Slashdot has the coverage of DotGNU Portable.NET.  It’s interesting that Linux has two major CLI implementations (the other being Mono).

Matt Raible is slogging through Tomcat 5:

It sure would be nice to have a binary version of Tomcat 5. I tried building it this morning, and the process is still going – you have to download about 5 different libraries (so far) just to get it to build! I find this is typical with Jakarta project. Hopefully there will be one soon. I’ll try to document the process so others don’t have to experience my pain.

I remember similar headaches while trying to install Axis on Tomcat 4.  Many libraries were included amd getting the server operational was easy.  I ended up having to track down several more libraries in order to work on the client side.

Of course, you could always just sit a box in the corner and have Gump run every 24 hours…

Pretty busy day at work.  Every time I tried to sit down and catch up on my RSS feeds, we got busy again.

Scott Rosenberg has the details about the recent press that Salon has been getting.  If you think you know the story, check your facts here.

John Burkhardt:

In preparation for the upcoming launch of Groove Web Services, we’ve made our wsdl and xsd files available on our public server. This will give those of you who are eager to start looking at the product a chance to see how our APIs are designed. You can now read all about it on the Groove DevZone. (Note the new Groove Web Services section there).

Read the rest of his blog entry for the gory (geeky) details.

New Scientist has an interview with Brewster Kahle, the guy that brought you the Wayback Machine.

Phil Windley is thinking about the “communications Hub”

OSNews announces unOS (that u is supposed to be the one that means ‘micro’) version 0.95.

Scott Mace on micro ISPs, broadband hosting, and embedded Linux.

Chris Sells:

.NET Refactoring Tool Enters Beta. “C# Refactory is a revolutionary new tool which enhances Microsoft’s Visual Studio.NET IDE. It performs a number of complex refactorings automatically, allowing you to shape and re-shape your code as needs arise. It also helps you identify code which needs attention by calculating metrics, from ‘lines of code’ all the way up to ‘cyclomatic complexity’. It is fully integrated with the IDE – no external tools means that refactorings are always ready at your fingertips.”

As I’m writing a bunch of book code just now, I’m not a good beta tester for this tool, but the descriptions of what it does look yummy. I would especially love Extract Method and Rename Type.

Blogroots: Blog resources.

Reverand Jim has stumbled upon Phrame, which implements a modified version of the Model-View-Controller design paradigm.  Watch his weblog to see what he does with it.

Mark Pilgrim has been tweaking his site, and also tells his tales of XHTML1.1.  It’s top notch reading as always.

This is the obligatory link to the infamous Ellen Feiss interview at Brown.

Well, Brent, be careful what you wish for.

system.verbs.builtins.radio.weblog.metaWeblogApi.rpcHandlers.getRecentPosts changed on Fri, 22 Nov 2002 09:59:12 GMT: Return an array of the most recent posts. Per recommendation from Brent Simmons.

Dane Carlson has a secret.  Let the rumors begin.

Tweaked the item template on the site, added a little ~> to make the title stand out from the post a little bit.  It was bothering me.  Those in RSS-land probably won’t notice.  I also ditched a few <br>’s that were littered about, I’m a little happier with the visual part now.  My focus is on content, but having it look pleasing to at least my eye is important too.  I need to get rid of the tables in the item template, but that will have to wait.

It looks fine in IE6 and Mozilla on Windows and fine in Mozilla under Red Hat 8.0.  The tilde looks a little silly in Lynx, and I’m slightly worried about mixing up content and visual stuff.  We’ll see

Brian Graf pointed out one of the coolest services I’ve ever seen.

It’s extremely rare that I have the opportunity to be as completely satisfied as a consumer as I was last night. After seeing some testimonials on the DOTNET-WEB list, I decided to give Mimeo a try.

I took a look at the demo, and it looks wicked cool.  I’ll definately use them the next time I need a big document printed or binded.  The prices are right, the service (from Brian’s experience) sounds great, and it’s damn quick.  Is this on anyone’s killer app radar?  The prices I saw seem to be a fraction of what Kinkos charges, plus you have complete control over everything.  So cool.