O’Reilly has an excellent tutorial on using the PEAR SOAP module in PHP:
Web services allow you to exchange information over HTTP using XML. When you want to find out the weather forecast for New York City, the current stock price of IBM, or the best-selling DVD according to Amazon.com, you can write a short script to gather that data in a format you can easily manipulate. From a developer’s perspective, it’s as if you’re calling a local function that returns a value.
Joe Gregorio has posted an RFC for a (not)echo-based API. It is a streamlined, simple (yet extensible) REST-based API. It is beautiful. It is good.
I’m sure that little things will change while the format matures, but if the API looks as simple, clean, and useful as this, I’d endorse it 100%. I hope that such a simple yet robust system can work for all involved.
Think technical, not political.
Leslie Walker at The Washington Post has a great article on a recent Ebay convention:
ORLANDO — Gary Neubert made sure everyone knew his eBay trading name; all the better to sell to them later. The Tampa shipping-supplies dealer walked around the floor of eBay’s user convention here last week in a polo shirt with his auction-trading ID imprinted in large letters on the back.
The article is an outsiders view of some of the most elite sellers on Ebay. These are the people that started off selling on Ebay part time and now have employees below them to handle their flow. We’re talking people with 10,000, 30,000, and even 300,000 postitive feedback points.
The article also has a photo gallery from shots that Leslie took around the conference with her digital camera. Yes, that really is “Weird Al” Yankovic.
Leslie is almost a reporting weblogger, posting pictures from her digital camera on the website of a major newspaper.
Most webloggers fall in to the opposite category. We’re reporting bloggers. We were there, we took pictures, we observed what happened, we might have some insight. We post it on our sites. Others link to it. There is a discussion.
It’s no suprise that the lines are becoming even more blurred. She gets paid, we don’t. Or do we?
I could stare at the UseCases of echo for hours. If this thing is done right, it could end up pretty much everywhere.
Sean Bonner’s mobile photo blog is absolutely amazing.
It’s fine art among fingerpaintings.
Also check out his main blog.
CNet:
Advanced Micro Devices released software on Monday aimed at speeding up mathematical calculations on its Opteron processor and other future chips that use the AMD64 64-bit instruction set. The new Opteron is popular with high-performance technical computing users. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company hopes the new tool will make it easier for programmers to create software for financial, engineering, mathematical and scientific tasks.
It’s interesting to note that Blogger is scrapping their already-complete Blogger API 2.0 in favor of an echo-based API. More information can be found on their site.
It’s interesting to note that Joel’s RSS feed currently weighs in at 14181 bytes, while his experimental (not)echo implementation weighs in at 18878 bytes. Both feeds offer full content.
I thought I’d double check as I noticed that the format is a little bit more verbose about post authors and such. It’s no big deal, as you could easily gzip your feed and make the size difference a non-issue.
Sam Ruby:
I’ve taken a 2003/07/01 snapshot of the maximal example of the format previously known as echo.
Joel has an example up, as does Mark. I get good vibes when I read these example feeds. They’re clean. Zen. The question is, when this format stabalizes, will we be able to parse necho feeds in a simple way using a namespace-aware parser? Is everyone going to produce well-formed and valid necho?
We shall see. Looking at this spec freeze, I’m quite happy. All of the political BS aside, this is good. We have RSS, an entrenched syndication format that will most likely be used for years to come. We also have (not)echo, a bleeding-edge format that will do syndication as well as posting and comments. All is well in the world, at least for this brief moment.
Thanks to Clarity for mentioning it: Linux to Symbian file transfer.
very cool.
Update 2: I have removed the namespaced elements from all of my RSS feeds. Since there is no way in RSS 2.0 (as-is) to specify both the excerpt and the full text of a post, the feeds now only contain excerpts. Also, I switched from using
linkto usingguidfor item permalinks, as discussed recently.I look forward to publishing a feed in the new format (once the physical model has been nailed down) that will be as complex and feature-rich as my needlessly-complicated-RSS feeds used to be.
Aparently in reaction to praise from Dave Winer, Mark has rendered his RSS feeds fairly useless to most people. See Scott Johnson’s blog for details.
Kids: Don’t make me turn the internet around!
Mobiletracker notes some software speedups that could change mobile phone internet access here in the States:
Cingular has launched the world’s first EDGE network, oddly enough in Indianapolis Indiana. EDGE stands for Enhanced Datarate for Global Evolution and is a software tweak to GPRS . Data speeds peak out at 170 kilobits per second and average at 75-135 Kbps.
That’s significantly more throughput than I can get on my 3650. Aparently EDGE phones will also be able to work in a vanilla GPRS environment. Quick slick, actually.
MyHeadlines 4.2.2, a security release, is out. MyHeadlines allows you to embed content from sites via RSS using PHP and MySQL.
Intel officially released six new Itanics today. SFGate:
The Santa Clara chipmaker is offering three versions of its new Itanium 2s, each running at 1.5 GHz, 1.4 GHz and 1.3 GHz. Their wholesale prices are $4, 226, $2,247 and $1,338 respectively.
[…]
In addition, Intel is also releasing three new Xeon MP microprocessors, each running at 2.8 GHz ($3,692), 2.5 GHz ($1,980), and 2 GHz ($1,177).
Where did I put my Hammer, er, Opteron?
It’s sad when someone like Katharine Hepburn passes away.
It’s sad when anyone passes away.
Via PHP.net:
The PHP development community is proud to announce the release of PHP 5 Beta 1. Both source packages, and a Windows build are available in the Downloads Section. A list of changes can be found in the ChangeLog file.
Notable features include a new version of the Zend engine, a new XML library, and other fun stuff.
It’s a beta. Put it on a test box and play with it. Don’t put it on a production server. Don’t do it, man.
I set up a moblog with textamerica today. With Yummie RSS too.
I’d like to set up a moblog on my colo’d server, but for now, I’ve got instant moblogging gratification.
Jena 1.3.0 has been released. From the freshmeat page:
Jena is Java toolkit for developing semantic Web applications. It includes an RDF API, ARP, an RDF parser used for the W3C semantics Web sandbox, RDQL (an RDF query language and processor), and a DAML API.
The web page at HP Labs is very informative. Also of note is the next generation Jena2 project.
Erik out-blogged me about this already, but I’ve set up a Wiki page for the software that I have installed on my new Nokia 3650. It includes everything that I currently have installed on the phone (though I’ve got a lot more installing to go) as well as a wish list of software I’m looking at as well as a place to suggest stuff for me to check out.
CNet reports that AMD is trying to reduce costs of manufacturing in some interesting ways:
In the Athlon64 line, for instance, the 3700+, 3400+ and 3100+ chips will initially come with 1MB of cache. In the fourth quarter, however, the underlying structure of the 3100+ will change: Its clock speed will substantially increase, but its cache will be reduced to 256KB, or one-quarter the original size.
Also:
AMD’s plans for the Thorton chip, an upcoming member of the Athlon XP family, suggest it will be the same size as the Barton chip, but half of the cache on the processor will be disabled. (It will also be paired with a slower bus
I understand that given the current economic outlook, you’ve got to cut costs by any means neccesary, but I’m not too thrilled by how they appear to be doing so. I know back in the early Thunderbird days it was easier to make a faster chip in a smaller process and then clock it down. That’s fine, but reducing the cache so significantly without making note of it to the end consumer is not, IMHO.
I’d rather have a slightly slower chip with a 1MB cache than a higher speed chip with less cache. It’s why Celerons (especially older ones) can lag out sometimes. Granted, the newer Celerons and Durons are much better than in the past, but if you’re going to cripple a chip, put a sticker on it or something.
Minirant aside, I’m still totally stoked about the Opteron and the Athlon64, and I’d like to have one on my desk as soon as it’s reasonably affordable. For the record I run a mix of AMD and Intel chips among my computers, some by choice (My oldschool Athlon 750) and others by virtue of extremely good deals that I couldn’t pass up (Dual PIII733’s and a PIII850). The Celerons, PII’s and K6-II’s that I still run are mostly Linux/BSD machines, and they don’t complain one bit.