Mark Pilgrim: The History of the Tilde.
In fact, Jukka has written a lengthy treatise on why the tilde should not be used in URLs, a treatise which, I feel obliged to point out, contains a tilde in its URL.
Clearly, the tilde is underappreciated.
As with every piece Mark writes, you should read it. Now.
Ingo Rammer and several other people that will be atending the Web Services DevCon will be at the Boston .Net Users Group meeting Wednesday night. My plane gets in at about 4:30 Wednesday. Murphy willing, I might be able to attend Sam Gentile’s .NET/COM interop guest spot.
Russell Beattie is recovering from his data loss:
I feel like I’m using someone else’s computer. I’ve re-installed everything I can, but it’s far from the same. I’ve lost total momentum – though in a weird way, it does feel good to start from a clean slate. But I seriously spent the day in mourning… I’m such a geek. It’s just data, right? (Yeah, but it was MY data).
Both Sides of the Fence
Sonia Arrison released a new article today at Tech Central Station. It’s titled “Source Socialism.” (Observant readers of my weblog will also note that Sonia Arrison also wrote the piece that was the opposite of James Miller’s Let Hollywood Hack.)
“How can I make a living if everyone is using free software?” asked one student. That’s a good question, and Mr. Perens didn’t offer much of an answer. There is some employment in the open-source market (in service and support), he said, and he also argued that some forms of proprietary software wouldn’t go away.
The article also links to Bruce Perens’ new organization, Sincere Choice. From the Sincere Choice website:
We believe that there should be a fair, competitive market for computer software, both proprietary and Open Source.
Back to the article now:
Open source software products are usually free of charge and are created and altered by many different individuals. The Linux operating system, which can be used instead of Microsoft Windows, is an example of an open source product. Linux is popular with many technical folks because of its quality, but not all of them have political feelings about it.
I’m always getting myself in the middle of things. When I was growing up, I was constantly mediating arguments between friends. And here I am again.
I program in Java using Eclipse, an open source IDE. I also program in C++, usually in either Visual Studio 6 or Visual Studio .NET. I also do some VB. And some PHP. I run Windows, Linux, and various *BSDs. Now that’s a mix from both sides of the fence.
And so I’ve come to appreciate both sides.
There seem to be several pointers to books and articles on web services. Here’s what I’ve rounded up this afternoon:
Sam Gentile notes that there has been a lot of interest in Groove Experiments. I can’t wait to go home and open up the Groove space. What goodies will be there?
From the latest Washington Post article:
Officers in Montgomery and the District are stopping white vans and ordering their occupants out for questioning. Police armed with shotguns stood at some intersections in Montgomery. D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey said his officers had made “numerous” stops of vehicles matching the Montgomery County police lookout, but had not found any suspects.
Right now there are about half a dozen police cars and officers surrounding a box truck down the street.
Here’s a google news roundup of the shootings in Montogmery County.
No new information has been released in the last hour and a half.
I’m sorry
Someone was shot and killed about two blocks down from where I work. They think it might be the same person who shot and killed a man at a local supermarket yesterday. I hope they get whomever would do something like this. My condolences go out to the people affected by this.
5 people have been killed in the county that I live since 6pm last night. The supermarket shooting last night, a man mowing his lawn, a cabbie filling up at a gas station, a woman at post office in Leisure World, and the shooting down the street at a Shell station.
Aparently the person or persons doing this is driving a white Izusu box truck, with small back lettering on the side and damage to the liftgate. It’s possible that two people and high powered rifles are involved. Montgomery county schools are on lockdown.
I’ve never seen a local news anchor on a phone/radio while on the air, it’s a little eerie.
The WGAL Channel (This seems to be correct and current as of 11:04am):
Police in Montgomery County, Md., are trying to determine if they have a shooting spree on their hands.
Montgomery County police spokeswoman Capt. Nancy Demme told reporters that there is “an ongoing crime (spree) that we have not experienced before.”
Demme said starting Wednesday night about 5:20, there was a shot fired at the Northgate Shopping Center, but no one was hit. Then less than an hour later in the parking lot of a Shoppers Food Warehouse in Wheaton, Md., Demme said, another shot was fired, killing a 55-year-old man.
Then at 7:41 Thursday morning, in the 1100 block of Rockville Pike, in Rockville, Demme said a Hispanic male operating a lawn mower was shot and killed and at 8:12 at the Mobile gas station at Aspen Hill Road and Connecticut Avenue, also in Rockville, a man was pumping gas when he was shot and killed.
Demme said at 8:37 a.m. a Hispanic woman was shot and killed while sitting on a bench outside a post office in the 3700 block of Rossmore Boulevard in Silver Spring.
Demme said as she was preparing to update reporters, another shooting was reported at Connecticut Avenue and Knowles Street at a Shell gas station, and a person there is also dead.
Montgomery County schools have locked down all of their schools and have gone to a code blue emergency procedure. All doors have been locked. There are no field trips allowed, and students are not allowed to leave the campuses for lunch.
Police said they are looking for two men in a Isuzu type vehicle, a box truck with black lettering on it with damage to the tailgate.
It happened shortly after 8:30 a.m. The post office is next to the Leisure World retirement community in the 3700 block of Rossmoor Boulevard.
Police say it does not appear to be a suicide, and for now they are calling it a “suspicious death.”
They are not saying anything about the age or gender of the victim. But County fire spokesman Pete Piringer says the victim was an adult woman. He says she was shot in the head and was dead at the scene.
WBAL has some more coverage. Of course, coverage is spotty and two reports often contradict each other.
Police in Montgomery County, Md., are at the scene of two shooting deaths this morning that happened about 30 minutes apart.
The first shooting happened at a Mobil gas station at Connecticut Avenue and Aspen Hill Road, in Rockville. Police said a man has killed at that location.
The second shooting occurred about a mile away from the gas station in the 3700 block of Rossmore Boulevard in Silver Spring. Police said a woman was killed at that location.
Authorities said they do not know if the shootings are related.
Every time I do this kind of thing, I marvel at the high standard of release engineering that open source sets for itself. If you use open source stuff, you probably take this for granted. If you don’t, you’re probably don’t know or care. But it really is extraordinary. The process was, to be sure, not 100% smooth, and Google was an essential ally. Without it, I wouldn’t have found the signposts left by, for example, Jeffrey P Shell and Randal Schwartz.
The case for Linux in Universities:
Businesses and universities are hiring people with Linux skills, deploying Linux on servers to save money, and even evaluating Linux on the desktop. Microsoft’s pricing and security policies have made Linux an attractive alternative. Linux’s open source nature makes it an excellent tool for teaching. Linux now comes with free alternatives to Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office which work well enough for the average user. University IT departments should start planning to support Linux on the desktop in recognition of its increased importance.
I think that having skills in Visual Studio as well as the GCC toolchain would be great. I’m not 100% sure how that might fit into various curricula though. It’s sometimes confusing enough swapping languages between classes, let alone platforms. I’d have to say that a Red Hat 8-based lab would probably be a good way to go. Imagine all those bluecurves… [via Linux Today]
Mark Pilgrim: “When an engineer flaps his wings.” Read it if you’re interested in finding out why some weblog rankings went to hell recently.
CNet: Microsoft to detail new Exchange, Outlook:
On Tuesday, Flessner will announce plans to spruce up the stripped-down Web-based version of the Outlook e-mail program, adding new features to make it as comprehensive as the regular PC version, according to the company.
Web-based outlook is certainly cool, though I don’t use it often. I’m sure adding features to the program will definately help out the road warriors out there that need access to their email and calendaring but don’t neccesarily have access to their full Outlook install. I wonder where this will go.
Justin says he’s out, and it shakes Chris’ faith. Now that’s two people (Justin, plus someone else not in blog land) in the span of a week I’ve heard leaving software development for medicine (the other is already out of pre-med and into med school, but I just heard about it this week).
Could we be seeing more of stuff like this happening in the near future?
Speaking of being blown away – today we had our first request for a tool to import data from an existing Rational ClearQuest into JIRA. The fact that someone is willing to toss their CQ install (starting from $1295 per user) for a JIRA one ($800 per server) is a very good thing IMHO.
Congrats, this is definately A Good Thing. I’ve seen the JIRA site for Roller and it’s damn slick to the end user, and from what I’m hearing it is making developers’ lives much easier.
Jeremy Zawodny on James Gosling:
Used NetBeans IDE to show us the source to his Java-based presentation system. (Very cool, but I note a distinct lack of comments in his code.) It does reformatting on the fly–rather quickly. Makes good use of threading.
I love programmers. Critical of others’ code one second, praising them the next.
Based on an anonymous submission: The i386 -current branch of NetBSD now has support for symmetric multiprocessing (SMP). According to the NetBSD news page, “Frank van der Linden has merged Bill Sommerfeld’s i386mp branch into i386/-current. i386 SMP support should work fine on 1-CPU systems and quite well on a lot of multiprocessor systems.” Read on for Frank’s announcement of the i386mp merge.
Excellent!
