Matt Croydon::Postneo

Year: 2002

  • CNet/David Becker:

    After years of research, development and marketing hype, Microsoft is finally set to take the wraps off its latest attempt to change the way people use PCs.

    As long as it’s not a couple of grand…

  • I’ve been reading about extreme programming over at extremeprogramming.org.  It turns out that I’ve been using some XP ideas and doing some XP stuff without really knowing it.  I was completely wrong about other stuff.  I need to find an article called, “XP: Party of One.”

  • Brent Simmons is trying to raise user consciousness about RSS bandwidth issues:

    But, since I’m working on a new beta, and bandwidth is still an issue, I was thinking of adding another feature—a note on the Info window for a subscription that says whether or not the subscription is bandwidth-friendly.

    I personally think it’s a great idea.  I hope this makes it into the next version of NetNewsWire.  Other aggregators take notice.

    Update:

    Here’s a screenshot.

    Especially friendly sites are in blue; especially unfriendly sites are in red.

  • CNet: $399 Gateway.

  • OpenBSD 3.2 has hit the streets!  Also of note is the 3.2 release song: Goldflipper.  It’s available in mp3 and ogg format.  Lyrics are here.  The previous two release songs have made it into a few roadtrip mixes of mine… [via OSNews]

  • Serious Instructional Technology:

    Doing tedious, but necessary tasks today, e.g copying some Blackboard courses (5 minutes and counting for just one step right now).

    Blackboard is good in many respects, but it ain’t that good.

    I can’t say that I enjoyed Blackboard from the user end.  I was a student in a class that used blackboard, and while the idea was great, it seemed buggy and slow all the time.  I’m not sure if that was school or otherwise, but I didn’t like it very much.

  • Slashdot covers Jaluna-1, a real time operating system recently released as open source under a license derived from the MPL (Mozilla Public License).

  • Watch out for those computer programmers:

    A software programmer at Autotote, the company responsible for the computer systems that collected and processed wagers for Saturday’s Breeders’ Cup thoroughbred racing championships, manipulated software to trigger a winning $3 million payoff for a Baltimore man, company executives said today.

  • Doc Searls writes about his experiences on the Linux Lunacy cruise.

  • Phil Wainewright on web services:

    People who build web services using tools from the big vendors are tied to deploying on the same vendors’ platforms. And I’m not just talking about Microsoft here. Despite touting the openness of the J2EE architecture and their commitment to open systems and standards, neither IBM nor BEA support any platforms apart from their own if you build web services using their tools.

  • Mark Pilgrim:

    I need a break. Back in a few weeks.

  • Richard Caetano:

    I posted some snap shots of my NUnit setup.

    Nice!

  • I don’t understand why a Pentium 133 notebook still costs hundreds of dollars.

  • Paul Evans on Dealing with User Input in Python:

    You probably won’t be using Python long before writing a program which needs user input. As a wide-eyed, innocent new Python programmer, you may naively expect that you can simply ask users for input and they will just give it to you….[via trick-or-treat into mark]

  • Charles Miller:

    Dear Sun. By your own coding conventions, it should be arrayCopy, not arraycopy. Bastards.

  • xml-webservices.net has a nice list of free web services.  Cape Science also has a list of services that they offer.  eSynaps.com also has a listing of services.  I want more.  I want a minimalistic CSS-driven portal that will link to free or more importantly “open” services.  I might have to get off my butt on this one.

  • Some free to use web services that I’ve played with this evening include Web Services Tip of the Day:

    Another favorite is xmethods’ Weather Temp service, tho it’s for testing only:

    It’s a bit nippy here in Maryland right now.  The name TemperatureXP comes from a vb class I took.  I named every program that I turned in WhateverApplicationXP and it kept me amused.

  • The Need for Open (Web) Services

    I’ve been looking around the xmethods website looking for web services to interface in VB.NET.  There are a few test services, such as the temperature service, but not a whole lot that you can use in a production environment.  This made me think about what the BSD/Linux/Open Source solution to web services might be: open services.

    Open Services might be something trivial, such as a weather service, stock ticker, or similar service, or it might be something more complex.  A provider of an Open Service would (perhaps) unleash the service on the world in an open fashion.  He or she might release source code to the service in BSD or *GPL, or they might keep the source private.  What they might do next is taking things to their logical conclusion: have a web service running somewhere that is publicly accessible, and point to it for all to use free of charge.

    This might not make sense in an economical way, (some would argue that open source software doesn’t make any sense either), but what’s stopping people from doing it anyway?  It could be a box in a dorm room, a server connected to cable or dsl, or some spare bandwidth on a colocated box somewhere.

    I’d love to see open source software and web services converge.  Who knows if it’ll happen.  I’ll try to do my part and set up a box, create some services, and unleash them on the world.  Perhaps we need a web site to point to these Open Services.  Perhaps we need an Open Service License (OSL?).  Maybe we need several (GPL-style OSL, BSD-style OSL, etc)  I’ll do my best to gather things together in the next couple of days.  Looking at the list of web services at xmethods, it appears that many of the published services are homegrown.  What’s the next step?

    I’d love to hear what people think about this.

  • Richard Caetano on unit tests:

    “Unit tests. There’s nothing like doing drastic refactoring to the implementation of a class when you trust the unit tests to be solid. It’s so much easier. [Jon Shute’s Weblog]  Yes!! That’s the key.” [Sam Gentile]

    I concur with that statement!  I must admit, I have been half hearted with my unit test attempts in the past.  Mainly because I haven’t put the time into arranging the pieces to make it happen.  But with my last project, one that involves multi-threading, I went in with both feet.  Do you know what I found?  I found I was able to move along much faster.  I felt confident with my code.  The code was better organized because when I wrote my tests the organization of code was centered around “units”.  I used NUnit 2.0 and setup my VS.NET project with two targets one that ran the unit test and the other that ran my code in user mode.  I’m on my way to finishing this project but I can say that I will be using unit tests a lot more in the future.

  • Leo Laporte:

    There’s nothing more depressing than a luxury leather interior with burl wood accents that is totally immobilized.