Day: March 7, 2003

The J2ME Wireless Toolkit 2.0 seems to have taken a lot of headaches out of J2ME development.  I messed around with the Wireless Toolkit 1.x a few months ago, but didn’t get much further than the basic demo.

I really like that I don’t have to drop to the command line in order to build or deploy.  I don’t have to write a jad in a text editor, it’s generated for me.  All of the basic properties are easily accessable.

Of course, if I were working on a project in a production situation, I would probably use Antenna, a collection of ant tasks for Ant 1.5.x that allows you to build, preverify, create JADs, and do all the other stuff that all the cool kids are doing.  It’s released under the LGPL.

I’ll definately have to look into this.

Brent has released a new version of his Cocoa XML-RPC implementation.  It’s BSD’d open source.  If you are using XML-RPC on the OSX platform, you should probably look at Brent’s code over Apple’s WebServicesCore:

At this writing (7 March 2003) the implementation of XML-RPC in Apple’s WebServicesCore has a crashing bug. Whenever a method response contains an empty element, there’s a crash.

Scott Johnson is the man.  He has put together Roogle, which indexes RSS feeds and makes them searchable.

Very cool indeed.  I’d also like to nominate Scott for disclaimer of the year:

This page is not sponsored by Google, affiliated with Google and will probably get me in trouble.

Via InfoWorld:

Good Guy Hacker Adrian Lamo got ahold of us a few weeks ago to let us know of a few security holes he found. We checked through the logs and none of them appear to have been used before Adrian found them. We have fixed the security issues and Blogger is better for it. Adrian rocks for not only finding the problem but also for letting us know about them so other people won’t be affected. Thank you, Adrian.

Dave Winer:

World of Ends is a Cluetrainish manifesto by Searls and Weinberger. Of course what they write is right. The Internet is not complex and it resists being made complex.

That reminds me, I’ve managed to loose my copy of Cluetrain before I had a chance to read it.  It’s probably buried somewhere.  Either that, or I left it in Boston.

How can this be applied to the web services universe?

Rogers Cadenhead:

I’m writing this post using FM RadioStation, a new Windows application that provides a different user interface for Radio UserLand (screen shot). It can be used to publish a weblog, read RSS news feeds, and browse the Web (using a built-in version of Internet Explorer 6).

I saw the announcement pass by radio-dev either early this morning or late last night, the two seem a little blurred.  It looks like this puppy has a lot of potential.  A few people have had various problems with it, but remember, it’s a preview release.

System requirements:

Requires IE 6 being installed and seems to like systems with more than 128 MB RAM.

Well of course, we all like systems with more than 128MB of RAM.  It sounds a little bulky, but look at all those tabs!  Cool.

Local radio station WTOP reports that sons of Osama Bin Laden have been captured in Pakistan.

I’m really only posting it here because I wasn’t able to find any news reports on the net yet.

The traditional web is still too slow on breaking news.

Update: I’m going to leave this here, but it looks like so far, the US is not confirming this story.

Erik pointed out a good overview of IBM’s Wireless Toolkit.

To take this to its logical conclusion, Nokia’s Developer Forum points to kXML-RPC, a J2ME XML-RPC implementation which looks really lightweight.  Of course, you could always use kSOAP if you really wanted to.

Brain: Pinky, are you pondering what I’m pondering?
Pinky: Uh, I think so, but how are we going to fit a SOAP stack AND a monkey in a cel phone?

Speaking of burnout, I might have to remove the AP feeds.  I’m suffering from information overload.

Here’s your next-gen aggregator: an aggregator that automatically trawls your RSS feeds and generates a ‘front page’ ala news.google.com.  You can drill down into sections, but the content that you are going to be most interested in will be ‘above the fold.’

The aggregator might goof a little in the beginning.  After you’ve trained it, it’ll be able to sniff out content that you are interested in better than you can.  I’ll bet that every once in awhile it will give you a list of new sources that you might want to keep track of.  Or perhaps, it will add those sources, a few at a time, and remove them if you don’t seem interested.

The revolution will be aggregated.

InfoWorld confirms:

“I think we’re suffering from standards burnout,” and Suttor.

What next then?

“In the future, the Web is going to escape the browser, and I think that’s going to be a very good thing,” Suttor said.