Category: Web Services

Wi-Fi News:

See the USA with a Wi-Fi array: I’m trying to hard to fit the jingle to the story, but automotive Wi-Fi may take off, with units in the car talking to mobile components to transfer music, misc. Imagine having a gateway in your car that provides an Car Area Network (CAN). Imagine bridging the CAN to GSM/GPRS as needed. Imagine bridging the CAN to a hot spot location when you’re near one. Imagine that you can do that today with…a Macintosh running OS X or a Windows XP box with the right hoo-ha. But in-car, permanent components would be better. [via TechDirt]

I wouldn’t use CAN, as CAN in Automation has that acronym covered.  I wouldn’t use CANOpen either.  I stumbled across the technology which is usually carried over an RS-232 or similar connection and usually connects components and sensors at a very low level.

Random: I found out about the stuff at a real time and embedded conference several months ago.  How about WAAN?

Russ:

Be smart and have longer battery life. Works for me.

Wi-Fi News has some greate coverage of the future of 802.11(insert something here).

CNet:

Linux advocates will convene at a trade show in New York this week to promote their wares, tout customers, swap business cards and make their case that the operating system is growing up.

We’ll see.  Recent ‘trade shows’ that I have attended in recent years have been a poor imitation of conferences past.  This holds true for PhotoPlus East and PCXPO.  Linux is getting bigger and bigger though, so I’m not sure how the show will be.

Jeremy Zawodny:

Controls in the cockpit that do very different things should look and feel different. Ask and usability expert abou that one.

I finally did it.

After years of having several (broken) toy digital cameras, I actually bought a real one.  It’s frickin’ tiny, made by Sony, and shouldn’t suck too much.

The batteries are still charging.  I’ll definately be using it to cover LinuxWorld Expo this week.

<happy digital camera dance/>

Megnut:

“For years, our customers have asked us to make and sell various items with our animals on them. We are pleased and proud to present our first collection of official O’Reilly animal swag.” So, if you’re a geek and you know it, um, buy a t-shirt (and clap your hands if you want to, too).

John Burkhardt:

It looks like we’re really close to shipping Groove Web Services. Things have turned out quite well. Between the beta and v1 we were able to move closer toward the feature that Jon Udell mentioned. It was tricky and it makes programming to GWS a bit harder, but the benifits are huge. Basically all we did was to move the user information out of the service URL and into a header. (Yes, more SOAP headers. Yummy!) What this does enables is the ability to share URLs obtained from GWS with other users. As long as the other user has authority to access the same resource in Groove they will be able to resolve the URL.

Chris Heilman posted a sweet picture of the moon on his weblog this morning.  Rock on!

I have previously reported on the Minolta-Konica merger.  Here’s the latest from a letter that I recieved at work this afternoon.  (Any typos or misspellings are my fault not theirs): 

January 14, 2003

To all Minolta Consumer Products Group Dealers,

 

Recently you heard news of a merger between Minolta and Konica.  While you may have learned most of the information already, let me review the basic facts.

The Boarts of Minolta and Konica have agreed that they will bring the two organizations together into a single entity.  This was announced formally on January 7th.

The extreme competition that exists in our business world has made this alliance neccessary.  Minolta and Konica each bring strengths to this new association.  Together we will be positioned to grow and prosper.

You may have questions about specifics, but it is a bit too early to have all the answers.  The merger will not be final until August of this year and the integration of the business units will start in October.

You will be kept informed by a series of communications that will elaborate on every detail as it unfolds.

This may seem like a very sudden and dramatic change, however, changes are often neccessary for growth and success.  We pledge that there will be no disruption in our service or supply to you as we proceed with the merger.  With this new organization, we will be able to deliver an even stronger value proposition to you, our valued dealer.

Best Regards,

Yoshi Ito
Executive Vice President, General Manager
Consumer Products Group

Ace’s Hardware has a good article up about how to survive a Slashdotting.  It looks like they’re using UltraSparcs, though I thought I had read a piece several months ago about them trying to migrate to Intel.  Oh well.

Slashdot reviewed David Brin’s Kiln People this morning.  My review: one of the best Brin books that I’ve read (and I’ve read them all).

Classic Kenneth Hunt:

Agonize over the graphics card, but don’t pick bleeding edge. $400 is always to much. $75 is too little unless you are adding multiple cards for multi-headed use.

[…]

The idea is to relish the assembly, why should Dell get all the fun?

OSNews pointed to a ZDNet article about old software.  It made me miss MultiMate [Dan’s 20th Century Abandonware] again.

Wow.  802.11g is going to take over the world.  Just look at the prices Amazon is offering on Linksys stuff.  $130 for an access point and $70 for pci/pcmcia cards that go 54Mbit is well worth it.  Plus it’s backwards-compatible with all of your 802.11b stuff.

This stuff has the specs and is priced right.  You’ll see me and a million other people going 802.11g.

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.

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.

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.

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.