Matt Croydon::Postneo

Year: 2003

  • Loose Coupling as Pornography

    Doug Kaye says that loose coupling is like pornography.  He also posted a table from his upcoming book: Loosely Coupled: The Missing Pieces of Web Services.  It is supposed to come out in March.  I think I’ll have to read it, because when Doug posts about web services, I listen.

  • Cool SV 25

    Greg Klebus sure knows how to cool a Shuttle SV 25.  For the record, I still haven’t managed to put my VIA Mini-ITX in a case.

  • Recursive Ant Trails

    Ken Coar:

    We could drown in metadata, flounder in a morass of connexions so voluminous that determining relevance could be more daunting than when we did it ourselves.

  • Easily Install Oracle 8.1.7 on Red Hat Linux

    A NewsForge-brodcasted press release sounds quite useful:

    Version 1.72 of Installgen generates the scripts required to automate the installation of Oracle 8.1.7 databases on 8 releases of Red Hat Linux.

  • Are Web Services Too Complicated?

    WebServices.Org notes that the W3C Web Services Choreography Working Group has been formed:

    Existing specifications for Web services describe the indivisible units of interactions. It has become clear that taking the next step in the development of Web services will require the ability to compose and describe the relationships between lower-level services. Although differing terminology is used in the industry, such as orchestration, collaboration, coordination, conversations, etc., the terms all share a common characteristic of describing linkages and usage patterns between Web services.

    Does the web services world need yet another spec from yet another working group?  Are we looking at a future WS-Choreography spec?

    All of this complexity is making things worse, not better.  I predict that the really simple REST-like things that Sam Ruby and others have been exploring is the future of web services.  It needs to just work without complexity.

    We’re already seeing a backlash of simplicity.

    Yes.  I know that sometimes you need authentication, added security, reliability contracts and all that goblygook.  Other times you just want to connect your stuff, accomplish a goal, or add functionality to something.

    I just want it to work.

    One more thing: The WS-* specs need to talk to each other and play nice together.  From what Clemens observes, they don’t always:

    Because WS-Reliability is unaware of and not integrated with WS-Routing, it is only useful as a point to point mechanism.

  • Clemens Vasters on WS-Reliability

    Clemens Vasters weighs in on the WS-Reliability spec.  I trust his opinions on the subject after seeing the wicked cool things he did with web services in .NET.

  • MandrakeSoft Chapter 11

    OSNews: MandrakeSoft Files for Chapter 11 – it’s Official.

  • Eldred Looses

    Slashdot:

    hondo77 writes “In a 7-2 decision, The Supreme Court gave Disney what they wanted. Story just broke, no details yet.” They’re talking about the Eldred case, recently argued before the Supreme Court and mentioned on Slashdot many times. The upshot is that no works produced in the United States after the 1920’s will ever go out of copyright. Opinions: Majority opinion, Stevens’ dissent, Breyer’s dissent.

    From what I hear, Lessig did all that he could, though he is down on himself about the case.  I don’t think anyone out there could have done any better:

    So I’ve got to go get onto a plane to go to my least favorite city (DC). My inbox is filling with kind emails from friends. Also with a few of a different flavor. It’s my nature to identify most closely with those of the different flavor. David Gossett at the law firm of Mayer Brown wrote Declan, “Larry lost Eldred, 7-2.” Yes, no matter what is said, that is how I will always view this case. The constitutional question is not even close. To have failed to get the Court to see it is my failing.

  • Sam Gentile’s O’Reilly Book

    So here is another reason that Sam Gentile has been a little quiet lately:

    I suppose that this is as good a time as any to let you all know that I am working on a .NET book for O’Reilly along with co-author Tomas Restapo for later this year.

  • Attack of the Eriks

    I’m reading an article in JavaPro by Erik Hatcher.  Many thanks to Erik Thauvin for linking to it.

  • ETCon 2003

    Rael notes that O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference page has been updated with a list of speakers and talks.  It looks like a good mix of topics.  I don’t think that I’ll be able to afford to go (even with the student discount), but I’m there in an instant if I win the lottery or something.

    Congrats to Sam Ruby who will be speaking there.  The speaker list is top shelf.

  • SVG 1.1

    xmlhack covers recent SVG happenings at the W3C:

    The W3C has released the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.1 Specification and Mobile SVG Profiles: SVG Tiny and SVG Basic as Recommendations, along with some much more exciting demos than is typical for the XML world.

  • LinuxWorld Expo Blogger Dinner

    Yesterday I asked if any bloggers out there would be attending LinuxWorld Expo January 22-24.  I haven’t heard anything, but if you’d like more info or might attend, you can visit (and modify!) the wiki page I set up for it.

    I finally got around to installing MoinMoin on my web provider.  The installation was really easy.  If you’d like, you can poke around the wiki root at Matt Croydon::Postwiki.

    Update: Oops, the wiki page now actually points to the wiki page.

  • Scripting Languages Year In Review

    Slashdot pointed to a really cool scripting languages year in review.  It covers several scripting languages.

  • Windley on Web Services

    Phil Windley spoke about web services in DC today.  I wanted to be there, but I wasn’t able to get out of work.  I’m going to look at his slides and pretend that I was there.

  • PyCon 2003 Update

    I just got an email from the Pycon interest mailing list by Guido van Rossum.  Here are some details on pricing:

    • $150 early bird (registered and paid up to 4 weeks before the conference)
    • $200 regular pre-registration (registered and paid up to a few days before the conference)
    • $250 all on-site payment (pre-registration is still strongly recommended when paying on-site, to ensure your space and to speed up badge creation)

    There is also an IRC channel on irc.freenode.net called #pycon.

  • Freshmeat Roundup

    Here are several programs that I think are worth mentioning or taking a look at.  These have been released or updated in the last day or so.  I regularly try to point out notable freshmeat releases in individual posts, but there are a bunch today:

    fn 0.0.1 was announced on freshmeat today.  Here’s the project description:

    fn (FetchNews) is a non-interactive command-line tool for downloading and aggregating xml-based newsfeeds from web sites. It is suitable for use in a cron job to gather newsfeeds and generate reports at regular intervals.

    It looks like this bad boy is written in C for the following reason:

    A program like this should really have been done in a scripting language like perl or python, but when I started writing it I was bored with both those languages and was looking for a challenge.

    Good stuff.  The author has made some output from his program available.

    pycURL 7.10.3 (and the underlying cURL/libCURL 7.10.3) has been released.  Looks like a bugfix/tweak release from here.

    JCTerm, a Java SSH2 terminal emulator, 0.0.2 has been released:

    New features include sftp support, function keys and arrow keys support, and improved rendering speed.

    TkVNC, a VNC viewer written in pure Tcl/Tk (!!!), 0.9 is out.

    Qt# 0.6 is out:

    This version improves support for Portable.NET and Ximian Mono, corrects the ctor signature for QTabWidget, now explicitly names all anonymous enums, includes boxing constructor access modifiers, adds missing methods to QComboBox, corrects ctor syntax for the examples, adds byte[] to QByteArray conversion, adds a new qmake-based build system for qtc distributions, adds a new csant-based build system for Qt# distributions, and includes a QFractals sample, a port of a Java quantum fractal generator to C#.

  • Linking to Your RSS Feed in Radio

    Sam Ruby encouraged me to link to my RSS feed, which Mark Pilgrim had suggested before I started blogging with Radio.  Mark pointed to instructions by Dave Winer on adding this, rsd, and blogroll support to your Radio template.  It’s as easy as adding a little macro to the head of your template, Radio takes care of the rest.

  • New Edition of Py (the zine)

    NewsForge notes that Py (the zine) 1.3 is out.

  • KeithDevens.php

    Keith Devens has been playing with PHP 4.3.0.  At first he had to squash some quirky behavior that the upgrade caused, but now he’s exploring new undocumented stuff like debug_backtrace().