Blogging Moved to KevinDangoor.com

Mon, 31 Dec 2018 10:43:45 -0500

I started blogging at Blue Sky On Mars back in 2001. Twitter, Facebook, Medium, YouTube, etc. didn’t exist at the time. I wanted to share random cool stuff I found online and, sometimes, longer thoughts about things. A lot has changed over the past 17.5 years. I do still want to share links to cool things, but a decontextualized collection of links seems more noisy and less useful than it did.

The sad disappearance of climate change information

Sun, 30 Apr 2017 18:33:09 +0000

A short article I wrote that worries about the fate of NASA’s Climate Kids site.

Stupid Security Things

Sat, 29 Apr 2017 02:38:53 +0000

Troy Hunt’s collection of stupid security things is kind of amazing.

Seth Godin on The Tim Ferriss Show

Tue, 16 Feb 2016 04:20:06 +0000

Tim Ferriss has done a bunch of great interviews or, more to the point, interviewed a bunch of great people well. On the latest episode, he interviewed well-known marketer Seth Godin. I enjoyed the whole show, even the bit about how to make chocolate at the end. This part about education at about 1 hour 35 minutes into the show resonated strongly with me: Sooner or later, parents have to take responsibility for putting their kids into a system that is indebting them and teaching them to be cogs in an economy that doesn’t want cogs any more.

Remix OS for PC: Android on the Mac

Tue, 12 Jan 2016 15:44:45 +0000

I don’t have any Android devices at present, but I am sometimes curious about various things going on with Android. For example, it would be nice to be able to try out the Khan Academy app for Android. Remix OS is a way to run Android (with a desktop-like UI) on various Intel-based computers. People have had some success getting it to work on Macs and here are instructions for creating the disk on the Mac.

The Jai Programming Language

Tue, 12 Jan 2016 15:01:51 +0000

Jon Blow’s videos about the development of his new game are really interesting. To build the game he wants to build, he decided to create the language he wanted to use to build the game (kind of like Mozilla created the language they wanted to use to build a browser). Blow’s language Jai has not been released, but Jorge Rodriguez has created a primer for the language based on Blow’s videos:

Ditching Scrum for Kanban

Wed, 06 Jan 2016 14:17:29 +0000

I’ve blogged about the switch we made on the Brackets project from Scrum to Kanban and also, more recently, on our use of Kanban at Khan Academy. This article by Grant Ammons mirrors my own experiences: Peter told me that indeed, many companies follow the same path that we did. They go from no system to Scrum, which teaches them the disciplines they need to properly develop software. Then, as teams fully understand Scrum, its disciplines and rituals, teams have the option to move to Kanban.

What is functional programming?

Mon, 04 Jan 2016 16:35:58 +0000

Kris Jenkins has one of the best little descriptions of functional programming that I’ve seen. A good link to send around when the questions come up. I put it to you that every function you write has two sets of inputs and two sets of outputs. Two? Only one, surely? No, two. Definitely two.

Side Effects vs. Promises

Fri, 02 Oct 2015 01:47:11 +0000

This past weekend, I saw Chris Armstrong (@radix) talk about Side Effects as Public API. From the description on the Strange Loop page for the talk: Haskellers have been isolating their side-effects from their pure code for decades, but most people write code in languages that allow ad hoc side-effects anywhere. In a lot of cases, these side-effects are practically a part of the public API — they put restrictions the way the code can be used, often obscurely, and have effects that are observable to the caller.

My onboarding experience at Khan Academy

Fri, 29 May 2015 14:27:46 +0000

I’m in my third week at Khan Academy and thought I’d write a little about my experience with the onboarding process here. I’m a remote employee and my first two weeks have been here at home, 2,000+ miles away from most of my coworkers. This means that I don’t have the benefit of in-office osmosis of thought or lunchtime talk with the others. My quick summary is that onboarding at Khan Academy works very well indeed.

The Tale of the Merry Squid: Teaching Programming with Minecraft

Tue, 19 May 2015 13:55:24 +0000

This past January and February, I taught a class that introduces children to programming through Minecraft. I called the class “The Merry Squid”, and this is my story of how it went. For the benefit of those who don’t want to read the whole thing, I’ll note up front that the class is available online. Programming in Minecraft There are so many things that I think are great about Minecraft.

The Changelog talks about TypeScript

Mon, 04 May 2015 20:00:51 +0000

Our guests this week are Anders Hejlsberg and Jonathan Turner. Anders is the language architect and Jonathan is the Program Manager for TypeScript, a typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript from Microsoft. I think Microsoft’s approach with TypeScript has been great. Check out this podcast episode for a detailed view into the project: #152: TypeScript with Anders Hejlsberg and Jonathan Turner from Microsoft – The Changelog

Measuring and patching phase for React components

Fri, 01 May 2015 16:42:25 +0000

On the latest episode of JavaScript Jabber, Amit Kaufman and Avi Marcus talk about how your web app performance is killed if you interleave your reading and writing from the DOM. For their now React-based app, they needed to measure certain elements for their layout work. Their solution sounds clever: components specify what information they’re going to need and they batch up all of the DOM reads and do them all at once and then they do all of the adjustments that come as a result of those reads all in one separate pass.

Joining Khan Academy

Fri, 24 Apr 2015 03:28:10 +0000

We’re about 20 years into the age of the Internet, and I feel like it’s just getting warmed up. The Internet and modern computing have changed so many things, but the potential still seems limitless. Any area related to sharing of information is undergoing massive change, and education is certainly about sharing information. I’ve been intrigued by Khan Academy ever since I first heard about it. Sal Khan’s “here, let me walk you through that” videos made for a solid base upon which Khan Academy has grown and tried new ideas.

Thanks to my friends at Adobe

Tue, 21 Apr 2015 19:05:34 +0000

My last day at Adobe was April 3rd. I am very fortunate to have worked at one of the best places to work during a phenomenally successful time as the company moved from packaged desktop software to a combination of software and services built as a whole. I had the chance to work on interesting projects. Most of my time at Adobe was working on Brackets, one of the top 20 starred projects on GitHub.

Ron Jeffries on Hours Estimation

Mon, 05 Jan 2015 14:24:24 +0000

Ron Jeffries kicks off the new year with the notion that small (1-2) day stories is best. So here we are, in my experienced if not wise opinion: Designing using tasks can have value. Building with tasks is almost always inferior. Estimates can trigger useful conversations. Tracking estimates is always inefficient and often harmful.

Custom messages for Jasmine expectations

Sat, 25 Oct 2014 03:19:21 +0000

jasmine-custom-message gives you a “custom failure message on any jasmine assertion”: describe('the story', function() { it('should finish ok', function() { since('all cats are grey in the dark'). expect('tiger').toEqual('kitty'); // => 'all cats are grey in the dark' }); }); Overall, I like Jasmine as a testing library, but this particular limitation has really bothered me.

Data Visualization with JavaScript

Sun, 19 Oct 2014 20:34:34 +0000

Data Visualization with JavaScript is a nice looking online book by Stephen A. Thomas: If you’re developing web sites or web applications today, there’s a good chance you have data to communicate, and that data may be begging for a good visualization. But how do you know what kind of visualization is appropriate? And, even more importantly, how do you actually create one? Answers to those very questions are the core of this book.

Faster Yosemite Upgrades for Developers

Sun, 19 Oct 2014 14:56:28 +0000

Faster Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite Upgrades for Developers Your Yosemite upgrade may take many hours if you’ve got anything non-Apple in your /usr folder (Homebrew, Texlive, or Mactex for example). I don’t think the solves the problem I had with the Yosemite install, but this article has good suggestions for anyone using Homebrew, etc. Note that this also applied to Mavericks so this might be useful advice again in a year.

My React-in-Brackets Trilogy

Sat, 18 Oct 2014 20:27:00 +0000

I started experimenting with React in February or March, blogged about my experiments starting in May, committed to landing a Brackets feature in September and the latest release of Brackets now ships with React. Here are my three posts on the subject, in reverse chronological order: The New React-based Brackets Project Tree React in Brackets? Simplifying Code with React I will likely be talking more about simplifying code soon, especially given my 1DevDay Detroit talk coming up next month.

Daring Fireball at XOXO

Sat, 18 Oct 2014 20:19:38 +0000

John Gruber spoke about his site, Daring Fireball, at XOXO. Daring Fireball looks almost the same as it did when it launched in 2002, but the way Gruber makes a living has evolved a good deal and the story behind that transition is well worth the listen.

The Brackets Scrum to Kanban Switch

Tue, 18 Feb 2014 14:51:57 +0000

The Adobe Brackets team has switched its development process from Scrum to Kanban. I thought that others might be interested in why we changed the process that we use to build an open source code editor built on web technology. From What to What? Wikipedia has a good article about Scrum. Boiled down, it goes something like this: Work is broken into timeboxed sprints (ours were 12 days) A sprint planning meeting determines what work will be done during the sprint, based on estimated “points” for a story and the expected “velocity” (number of points) for the sprint No one is supposed to change the work that is committed to for the sprint (we had some exceptions in practice) At the end of the sprint, we had a review meeting where we showed off the completed work for the sprint There would also be a retrospective meeting where we discuss how the work went and things we should do differently Daily meetings would keep people in sync Wikipedia also has an article about Kanban.

How the Web Evolves

Fri, 03 Jan 2014 13:56:36 +0000

Two years ago, I made a mistake in posting this overly succinct statement to Google+: Web SQL Database needs to die. The sooner IndexedDB is in the hands of developers the better. Tweet-sized statements often don’t capture enough of the nuances of a thought to communicate well. My big mistake was in not being clear enough about why Web SQL Database needed to die. I tried to explain why the proposed standard was problematic for some browser vendors and such, but fundamentally my opinion is really that we needed to have some standard way to store reasonable amounts of data for offline and online uses and to be able to access that data efficently.

Optimizing JavaScript Performance Through Custom Memory Allocation

Thu, 08 Aug 2013 13:09:11 +0000

Mozilla’s Kannan Vijayan had an intriguing result in running SunSpider ported to C++, asm.js and Dalvik. In the “Binary Trees” test, asm.js was the fastest by far. Kannan’s untested theory is that it boils down to memory allocation performance: In asm.js, the compiled C++ is executed using a Javascript typed array as the “machine memory”. The machine memory is allocated once and then used for the entire program runtime. Calls to malloc from asm.

Speaking at Adobe MAX (Extending Brackets)

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 14:36:36 +0000

In just a few weeks, I’ll be giving a talk at the Adobe MAX conference about extending Brackets with JavaScript. Web developers will find that Brackets is pretty easy to extend using techniques they already know. That’s probably why there are a lot of Brackets extensions already. People who come to my session will learn how to build Brackets extensions. I plan to have plenty of code samples drawn from real extensions.

Brackets Quick Open: That’s No Regex!

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 15:39:58 +0000

Ever since I first used TextMate several years ago, I’ve been hooked on “Quick Open” (the feature that lets you jump to any file in your project with just a few keystrokes). I have worked on Brackets’ version of this feature and I thought I’d take advantage of Brackets being open source to talk about how it works. The current incarnation of Quick Open in Brackets is the third. It started very simply, just matching substrings in the filename if I remember correctly.

Test driving Brackets

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 20:01:17 +0000

I got test infected a number of years ago, so it was perfectly natural for me to want to test-drive changes to Brackets, now that I’m back into writing code. In fact, I had a perfect bug to work on for test-driven development: improving the QuickOpen heuristics. This code needs to be able to return proper matches with reasonable scores, something that is very easily tested. When I started working on this bug, QuickOpen did not have any tests.

My next career step: Adobe’s Brackets project

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 14:50:38 +0000

Mozilla has been an extraordinary place to work over the nearly 4 years that I have been with the organization. Many times that I’ve been out and about wearing a Firefox shirt, random strangers would talk to me about Firefox. Some of those times, it has proven to be a great opportunity to tell people about how Mozilla is a non-profit organization that’s out to make the web better for everyone.

Web developer personas (are you in there?)

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 15:53:46 +0000

User personas are a useful tool for when you want to discuss needs that users have and, ultimately, features that meet those needs. Personas help keep you talking about real people versus some random “user”. I’d like to build up a collection of web developer personas that we can use in our product and feature planning. The idea is that each persona will represent a (largely)1{#refmark-1.fn-ref-mark} distinct collection of web developers.

r2d2b2g is becoming the Firefox OS Simulator!

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 16:28:04 +0000

It’s been a month since Myk Melez posted an introduction to r2d2b2g, a prototype Firefox add-on that makes it easy to try out B2G (Mozilla’s new, completely web platform-based mobile OS) on your desktop/laptop computer. Just as B2G is growing up to become Firefox OS, r2d2b2g is growing up to become the Firefox OS Simulator. The work of Myk, Harald and Matt is coming along nicely, and you can try it out today by picking up Wednesday’s r2d2b2g 0.

New device and a multifactor nuisance

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 01:08:16 +0000

Two-factor authentication (2FA) is great. Thanks to 2FA, even if someone manages to figure out my password, they still need to have physical access to my phone. Well, I actually have two phones that I switch between, so they need access to one of those two phones. I just got a new phone to replace an aging one. I use three different services that support Google Authenticator. Guess what? Now I need to reset the 2FA on all three of those services so that my new device has the secret.

What is a “developer”?

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 19:30:07 +0000

My goal as a product manager at Mozilla is to represent the needs of web developers well and make sure that Mozilla is doing what we can to help them. I came to the realization last night that when I talk with others about what “developers” need, the picture of that “developer” that appears in different people’s minds can be quite different from my own. In fact, while I may imagine someone sitting at a keyboard getting frustrated at trying to make something work, someone else may be thinking of a company that “wants” to get an app into Mozilla’s Marketplace.

GitHub adds a command line, and so should you!

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 15:19:07 +0000

Yesterday, GitHub announced their new “Command Bar”. I am a fan of command lines, and this is an awesome addition for navigating GitHub. I love being able to get more done without pulling my hands away from the keyboard. You may remember that we’ve added a command line to the Firefox developer tools. It’s currently in beta, slated for release in about 3 weeks. My reason in bringing this up is that if you want to add keyboard controlled command line goodness to your webapp, you can do so easily.

An Important Role for SVG

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 12:49:38 +0000

Yesterday, I came across a link to JustGage, a JavaScript library that uses Raphaël.js to create attractive, dashboard-style gauges. Since it uses Raphaël, which in turn builds upon SVG, these gauges will be resolution-independent. Thanks to vector-based graphics, they’ll look smooth at basically any size. This morning, I saw John Gruber’s ode to lots of pixels. When Apple introduced the iPhone 4, their first product with a “Retina display”, they took the first massive, single-step leap in pixel density since we started reading off of glowing screens decades ago.

Seen on Mars #2

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 14:00:29 +0000

Update: on Google+, Aaron Shaver points out that there was nothing from Mars in this post! D’oh! In a week filled with news from Mars, on a blog with “Mars” in the name, I really have to include something. So, here we go: did the Curiosity rover photograph the crash landing of the spacecraft that took it to Mars? I now return to the previously written post: This week, I managed to keep my link gathering going, but I didn’t do as good a job cross-posting these links to Twitter and G+.

Editing HTML in the browser

Mon, 06 Aug 2012 18:43:02 +0000

Live editing of CSS in the browser works great. You get to see your changes immediately, and there’s nothing like live feedback to keep you rolling, right? The Style Editor in Firefox makes it really easy to edit your CSS and save when you’ve got everything looking just right. CSS is purely declarative, which makes it a bit more straightforward to implement live editing. Swap out the rules and the new rules take effect without weird side effects.

Seen on Mars #1

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 14:00:22 +0000

Back in control Recently, I’ve seen a fair number of articles where people are complaining about having the data under the control of one for-profit entity or another. That tension will always be there. One thing I can control, though, is this blog. With better software than I’ve had in the past, I hope to maintain my interesting sets of links (with commentary) on my blog in addition to Twitter and G+.

The Two-Way Conference (MozCamp and more)

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 19:34:50 +0000

A week ago, I had the good fortune of attending and speaking at MozCamp Latin America in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I really enjoyed meeting a whole bunch of new people and appreciated the chance to talk about the Firefox developer tools shipping today and in the near future. The organizers clearly put a lot of effort into getting this conference together (thanks!) This MozCamp was filled with excitement about B2G and the many other initiatives Mozilla has going on.

When to Build Performance Measurement Tools for Firefox

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 15:22:52 +0000

We’re well on our way to having a full-featured set of tools for web developers that ship with every release of Firefox, in addition to the already great Firebug add-on. In our roadmap, I talk about building “bundled tools for the most common tasks”. Lately, people have been asking me about tools to help web developers improve the performance of their applications. Firefox is very fast. In fact, Firefox and its competitors are so fast that most web developers only care about one aspect of web application performance: network access.

Thinking About the Developer Experience for the Web

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 15:35:05 +0000

I’ve been working on developer tools for a while now, and I’m really proud of what we are shipping in Firefox today and the new features that are right around the corner. Browser tools are one of the most important parts of a web developer’s toolbox. But, there’s a lot more that goes into web development than the browser tools. The video above and the text that follows are some thoughts on the whole of the web developer’s experience.

Firefox 2012 Roadmap for Developer Tools

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 18:56:56 +0000

Firefox in 2012 This week, the Firefox 2012 Roadmaps went live. Mozilla has a lot going on and huge goals for 2012. We have a lot to do and the web will be in a better place as a result. Developer Tools in 2012 It’s been two months since I posted the 2012 developer tools roadmap. I thought that the new attention on the larger Firefox roadmap gives me a good opportunity to reflect on where developer tools is now and what’s coming in this year.

Firefox Developer Tools Input Summary Jan 26

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 14:19:44 +0000

Lots of Feedback Firefox Aurora has a fairly small audience, but it represents a good time to start collecting feedback on new features. Firefox Beta has a much larger audience. Both Aurora and Beta have a handy “Feedback” button in the toolbar, and I thought that now was a good time to dive into that feedback since we’re reaching the end of the Firefox 10 beta cycle. Firefox 10 is a big deal, because it adds the Page Inspector and related tools for web developers.

Future Firefox Developer Tools Updates Nov 17

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 13:55:15 +0000

Information Gathering and Organizing Since my last update, I had some back-to-back busy-ness. First, I was prepping and presenting at the 1DevDay Detroit conference. I spoke about a number of web developer tools there. That was followed by a work week in San Francisco and Mountain View. Mozilla’s product team is working on the product roadmaps for 2012. You should start seeing drafts coming out for review and comment soon.

Tools for Web Developers (1DevDay)

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 00:46:24 +0000

This past Saturday, I had the pleasure of speaking at 1DevDay Detroit 2011. The event was held at the fantastic Compuware headquarters in downtown Detroit. It’s a beautiful building, and the training center facility works well for events like 1DevDay. I spoke about “New Tools for the Open Web”. My goal was to show off a bunch of tools that people might find useful and to talk about tools for the future.

Future Firefox Developer Tools Updates Oct 27

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 19:05:02 +0000

Unlike most organizations, Mozilla’s product management is open. You can see what we’re building now and planning to make in the future just by looking at our feature pages. Open, however, is not always discoverable and it should be easy for interested people to follow along as plans are revised, help make those plans better and make it easier for everyone to spot features they’d like to get involved with.

Students Seeking Jobs: Show Of Your Code

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 14:52:51 +0000

This past Monday, I attended my first career fair on the employer’s side of the booth. I’ve done a fair bit of hiring in my career, but this was still a new and fun experience for me. Career fairs have gotten a lot bigger than they were when I was a student, and the three of us manning the Mozilla booth had a constant flow of students to talk to (sorry for anyone who didn’t get to talk to us before the 4pm cutoff!

Making sense of Bugzilla data

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 14:07:25 +0000

tldr; I have created a project status page for Mozilla developer tools and a library called Buggerall that helps to make pages like this. Poor Bugzilla. It started life as an innocent bug tracker and has come to be counted on as the source of truth for a collection of significant software development projects, and the workflow tracker of Mozilla’s development process. As manager of Mozilla’s developer tools group, I was responsible for keeping an eye on how our projects were moving toward completion.

New role at Mozilla: DevTools PM

Wed, 06 Jul 2011 14:30:26 +0000

Yesterday, I got back to work after a nice vacation, stepping into a new role after about a year as Manager of Developer Tools. I’ve had a lot of fun this past year and learned quite a bit along the way. A year ago, I knew very little indeed about Firefox development. I’ve come to have a good handle on the process, which has changed dramatically along the way, and a decent grasp of the technology used in Firefox and how it all fits together.

Browser-based command lines are awesome

Wed, 25 May 2011 01:42:45 +0000

Command lines are an amazingly great way to get things done using the keyboard, and using the keyboard is a way to do many things faster than reaching for the mouse. Of course, I’m a geek and not everyone likes command lines. But, many geeks do… and, I think that what we think of as a command line can move way beyond what a command line was in the ’70s.

The Firefox 4 release

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 02:18:48 +0000

Initial thoughts on Eclipse’s Orion

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 16:01:57 +0000

Last week, I had the opportunity to join a planning meeting for the newly coming together Orion project. Orion is a new take on the IDE coming from some people with a raftload of IDE experience with Eclipse. Orion is also a new take on the web-based IDE, which is something Iâ€™ve enjoyed exploring a bit through the Bespin project. The meeting brought together people from the Eclipse Foundation, IBM, SAP, Microsoft, Nokia, RIM, GitHub, Nitobi and I represented Mozilla there.

More challenging puzzle for the devtools job

Wed, 02 Feb 2011 15:20:01 +0000

Yesterday, I posted about the Developer Tools Engineer position we’re hiring for at Mozilla. The response to my little puzzle has been terrific, but “it’s too easy” was a common refrain. So, I decided to add two more little puzzles that follow the first. The puzzles are not intended to be time consuming, but they do use a couple of modern browser features. Give it a whirl and say hi if you make it all the way through.

Work with me at Mozilla! Solve the puzzle

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 15:14:42 +0000

My first two years at Mozilla have been great fun and an amazingly positive experience. This year promises to be even more fun, where I define fun as going after some ambitious goals. This year, we’re going to be building some very cool tools and setting the stage to push the boundaries of web developer tools even farther in 2012. Now is your chance to get in on the ground floor of this work.

Paver is now on GitHub, thanks to Almad

Fri, 12 Nov 2010 03:11:57 +0000

Paver, the project scripting tool for Python, has just moved to GitHub thanks to Almad. Almad has stepped forward and offered to properly bring Paver into the second decade of the 21st century (doesn’t have the same ring to it as bringing something into the 21st century, does it? 🙂 Seriously, though, Paver reached the point where it was good enough for me and did what I wanted (and, apparently, a good number of other people wanted as well).

Paver: project that works, has users, needs a leader

Tue, 09 Nov 2010 19:44:07 +0000

Paver is a Python project scripting tool that I initially created in 2007 to automate a whole bunch of tasks around projects that I was working on. It knows about setuptools and distutils, it has some ideas on handling documentation with example code. It also has users who occasionally like to send in patches. The latest release has had more than 3700 downloads on PyPI. Paver hasn’t needed a lot of work, because it does what it says on the tin: helps you automate project tasks.

The Point of Diminishing Features

Fri, 22 Oct 2010 02:02:01 +0000

Making software products is a great business. You release version 1 and start selling, followed by new major versions from time to time that generate further upgrade revenue. A good product can give you a nice ongoing business. It seems like a lot of products, and not just software products, are really exciting when they first come out. People go gaga over the product and buy it by the truckload. Then comes the next version, and it’s got some huge improvements and people happily snap it up.

Next steps for Mozilla Developer Tools

Thu, 21 Oct 2010 14:16:40 +0000

I’m going to use this opportunity to make a couple of observations about Mozilla and planning. If you really just want to know about what we’re thinking of doing next in Mozilla’s developer tools group, you can take a look at the current draft of what we’ve got in mind for later this quarter. There are links in that document to join the dev-apps-firefox list or to email me. If you have feedback, let me know.

The Open Web App Prototype

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 18:34:09 +0000

For some time, I’ve thought that many applications written as native applications for many different platforms could be done just as well as cross-platform web applications. I understand why people would make a unit conversion sort of application as a native iOS app, to give one example, but I’ve thought it’s a shame. Some others within Mozilla gathered up a lot of opinions, put in a bunch of thought and then put together a prototype which they’ve announced today: Prototype of an Open Web App Ecosystem.

UNIXy/VPSTree’s $0.99 VPS

Mon, 11 Oct 2010 16:59:20 +0000

A $0.99 per month VPS? Yes, it is here and ROCKING! For USD$0.99 per month, you can get your own virtual private server (VPS) for LIFE Only 5GB disk space and 20GB of data transfer, but it’s $12 a year! Holy cow. Not sure how much you can stuff into 64MB of RAM, but I’d imagine you could fit a cute little node app in that.

blobastorus: free storage for client side JS apps

Sat, 09 Oct 2010 03:27:25 +0000

blobastor.us is a free data storage service that is optimized for HTML5 web applications. The service is designed to be interfaced from javascript in the browser and to eliminate the need for a server component for most little HTML5 apps. Twitter is used to provide authentication and user identity. Lloyd amped up an idea that Atul put forth just a few days back. 20K per user per domain of free storage for JSON blobs.

Generosity in Marketing and Open Source

Sat, 09 Oct 2010 03:19:31 +0000

Seth Godin has written a number of times about being generous, most recently differentiating between “free samples” and “generous gifts”. Seth himself has given generously and benefitted handsomely. For one, just look at his great blog to which he has posted wonderful ideas, free for the taking. Another interesting example: recently, I received a copy of The Mesh: Apparently, I received this book because I had bought Seth’s Linchpin.

Brad’s Zoomy slide deck

Wed, 06 Oct 2010 12:58:21 +0000

Brad Neuberg on his new HTML5 slide deck: I’ve created a 3D slide deck that uses HTML5, CSS3, and a bit of SVG (video). The main idea behind this deck is to be able to ‘zoom’ into topics to as deep a level as necessary. Slides are nested, like an outline. The last presentation I did was also HTML5, using dzslides. The ability to dive deep into topics or skip over is a really cool feature of Brad’s slides.

Breadcrumbs for Code

Tue, 05 Oct 2010 12:13:45 +0000

Laurian Gridinoc has an interesting idea for navigating through code in an editor… make a stack of breadcrumbs at the top of the editing screen. Seems like an idea worth exploring.

Rust: Convenience, Speed and Safety

Tue, 05 Oct 2010 02:12:20 +0000

From Patrick Walton’s introduction to Rust’s type inference: Although Rust isn’t a scripting language, it’s designed to bring much of the convenience and readability of scripting languages (dare I say “agile development”?) to large-scale projects.

JSConf.eu 2010: a weekend of awesome

Fri, 01 Oct 2010 01:51:33 +0000

Last year, I was disappointed to have to cancel my trip to JSConf.eu. This year, my luck was better, and I spent this past weekend in Berlin, along with two of my Mozilla Developer Tools colleagues, Joe Walker and Patrick Walton. Mozilla was out in force at the conference. Axel Hecht, who has been incredibly helpful bringing my team up to speed with localization, was in attendance. Oh yeah, and that guy from A Minute With Brendan was there.

Introducing the Web Console

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:28:56 +0000

David Dahl has been leading the work on Firefox 4’s Web Console feature and has blogged about the work along the way. Over the past month, we’ve landed a whole bunch of improvements to the Web Console in Firefox 4 Beta, and I wanted to give my take on what the Web Console has to offer for web developers. What is the Web Console? I first learned to program a computer in BASIC on a TRS-80 Model III.

Mozilla DevTools coming out of hiding

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 19:02:37 +0000

OK, we weren’t actually hiding, but we have been spending a lot of time learning, coding and figuring things out. We’ve been so busy creating things that we haven’t had much time to talk about the things we’ve been creating. A little more than a month ago, I announced here that Mozilla officially has a Developer Tools group again, with tooling for both Firefox and the open web in general in our sights.

MichiPUG’s 5th Birthday!

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 18:25:28 +0000

The Michigan Python Users Group turns 5 with the September meeting. Woohoo! Come and celebrate with food and lightning talks! Thursday, September 2nd at 7pm at SRT Solutions. RSVP today to save a spot! While you’re at it, pitch in with a lightning talk of interest to Python users.

A Renewed Developer Tools Focus at Mozilla

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 14:41:13 +0000

When I joined Mozilla at the beginning of 2009, I was a part of Ben and Dion‘s “Developer Tools Lab”. As part of Mozilla Labs, the plan was basically that we’d try out a bunch of ideas for developers and see what we could learn from them. The biggest of those ideas was the Bespin project, into which we’ve put a good deal of effort. When Ben and Dion left to join Palm, the Bespin project was rolled into Labs directly and the various other bits of experimentation fell by the wayside.

Bespin and jQuery

Tue, 25 May 2010 16:21:37 +0000

Yesterday, we announced that the Bespin server is going to be rebuilt from the ground up in node.js with a decentralized model in mind. I’ve seen a lot of positive reaction to that, which is great because I think it’s an important step forward for Bespin. We also mentioned on bespin-core that we have changed from SproutCore, which we adopted during the “reboot” of the Bespin client side code, to jQuery.

JSConf 2010 Day 1

Sat, 17 Apr 2010 13:30:25 +0000

I missed ScurvyConf entirely, much to my dismay. I got on the plane on time, but then they said they needed to swap out a computer. And then they swapped it out again. And then they gave up, hauled everyone off the plane, had us trudge across the airport and then loaded us up on another plane. I finally arrived at the hotel close to midnight, which is a drag given that I got up at 6:30am.

Ending SlowNews Experiment #1

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 14:01:00 +0000

The great thing about experiments is that they teach you things. Trying something and having it not work is not a failure. It’s information. I still believe in what I said in my “What is SlowNews?” post: the move toward real-time random links and news is a bad move, in general. That basic part of the experiment is not why I’m dropping my weekly SlowNews posts. This blog is more than 8 years old, and I’ve always posted to it for myself.

SlowNews: Declarative Events in JS, Redis, Mono, Facebook x2

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 14:00:37 +0000

Ending This SlowNews Experiment This is the last issue of this SlowNews format. I may or may not try a new format. I’ve written a bit more about why. Reactive JavaScript: Declarative Programming for Events When a problem space is well understood, adding declarative forms can really save on a lot of work. Here’s an interesting look at the Reactive Extensions to JavaScript, created by the team at Microsoft that creative the Reactive Extensions for .

SlowNews: IM in JS, XHP, ePub

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 14:00:43 +0000

Ajax IM: Open Source IM, Totally JavaScript The MIT-licensed Ajax IM library lets you add instant messaging to your site and features a new node.js server side. This is certainly a good use for an async framework like node! The one thing I noticed while sitting on their site is that it has an unpleasant way of tacking things onto your browser’s history without actually going anywhere. Should you want to roll your own messaging, you could fire up Faye on node.

SlowNews: HipHop, Redis, Riak, Weave, Homebrew

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 14:00:28 +0000

HipHop Compiles PHP to C++ What do you do if you have to serve up 400 billion PHP page views a month? You don’t, because you’re not Facebook. But, for Facebook speeding things up can make a real difference on their compute costs. Their newly open sourced tool HipHop translates PHP to C++ and then compiles the result with g++. Net benefit? Apparently 50% less CPU usage. Nice! Also, check out Paul Biggar’s take on PHP compilation and how HipHop impacts the phc project.

SlowNews: iPad, zeromq, open source, toppcloud

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 14:00:46 +0000

Apple iPad: Open and Closed Obviously, the iPad was introduced this past weekend and probably a million words or more about it have spilled out onto the net. Here’s just a few of those words. Yehuda Katz takes the open side in “A GREAT Day for Open Technologies”. Actually, Yehuda takes both sides. Apple has created a closed platform while at the same time creating a very powerful platform for the Open Web.

CommonJS: the First Year

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 14:53:34 +0000

A year ago today, I posted “What Server Side JavaScript Needs”, inviting people to come and turn JavaScript into a competitive platform for applications on the server. Quite a few people answered the call. While the focus of the group has been on JavaScript in non-browser contexts, we’re ultimately shooting for as much of a standard that can cross between server, browser, GUI and command line applications as possible. That’s why we changed the name to CommonJS in the second half of the year.

About

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 14:00:56 +0000

Blue Sky On Mars was Kevin Dangoor’s blog from 2001-2018. To see more recent writing, head over to KevinDangoor.com.

SlowNews: Sikuli, Letters.app, Pintura, Firefox 3.6

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 14:00:00 +0000

SlowNews on BSOM: An Experiment This is my first SlowNews issue. Read What is SlowNews?, if you’re curious about it. Sikuli: Picture-Driven Scripting Sikuli The Sikuli project out of MIT has to be seen to really get a feel for it. The short of it is that it’s a scripting language for controlling applications that works by taking screenshots of the various controls that need to be clicked on or otherwise manipulated.

What is SlowNews?

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 14:00:00 +0000

The move toward real-time everything is wrong. We have enough interruptions in our days without having random links and news sprayed at us 24×7. Not to mention that there’s no real thought that goes into real time, and generally very little thought that gets compressed into 140 characters. Length also does not guarantee quality, and too much text can be a waste of time. The trick is to be concise.

Watch this space.

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 02:26:30 +0000

This is just a test post while I’m setting things up.

Heroku at a2div

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 01:53:29 +0000

Last night was the third a2div meeting. Majd Taby spoke about SproutCore at the inaugural meeting in September, and I spoke about CommonJS in October. November’s meeting, which was to be about Google’s Closure library, was canceled because of a confluence of factors… Three JS talks in a row led Trek Glowacki to declare that so far a2 has turned out to be “A2 Javascript Lovefest” While I certainly like JavaScript, that wasn’t intentional.

Rebooting Bespin: Embedded and SproutCore

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:40:59 +0000

This post is a collection of random thoughts about the Bespin Reboot project so far. The past summer, the Bespin team at Mozilla (Ben, Dion, Joe and me) started thinking that the time had come to make some significant changes to the Bespin project code. These changes would make it easier for others to use and contribute to Bespin and also make it easier for Bespin core contributors to add new features.

Go: reasonably high level programming, but with performance

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 15:37:13 +0000

I’ve always thought that it should be possible to design a language that is both usable and performant. JavaScript performance has improved tremendously, but it is still quite a distance behind C and even Java. Of course, programmer productivity is certainly more important than raw performance for most applications. It’s only as you try to scale up services that you really wish you could squeeze out more performance. In fact, being able to squeeze out more performance is one way to avoid the complexity shift of moving from one box to two/many.

Exploring Google Closure: a2div, GTUG joint meeting

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:40:23 +0000

Due to Thanksgiving falling on the same day as the normally scheduled date for a2 ‘s monthly meeting, we decided to find a different date and possibly join up with another group for a complementary topic. And, indeed, that’s what we’ve done! a2 and the Google Technology User Group will have a joint meeting on Tuesday, November 17th. The meeting will be at the SRT Solutions office at 7PM. I realize that there are conflicts that day, but there is so much going on during the month that it’s hard to find a date without conflicts!

October a2div meeting: CommonJS: JavaScript everywhere!

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 19:52:49 +0000

For the second a2 meeting, I’ll be talking about CommonJS: JavaScript everywhere. There’s more information on the form below. As with the first meeting, the meeting will be at 7PM on the 4th Thursday of the month at SRT Solutions in downtown Ann Arbor. That’s October 22nd @ 7PM (see the a2div site for more information). Loading…

Good luck, Ben and Dion

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 17:05:36 +0000

My now former colleagues Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer have decided to join Palm to help push the mobile web platform forward for developers. I’ve had a great time working with them on Bespin, a project that they brought to Mozilla. And while I know that they’ve got some really cool challenges in front of them at Palm, I am personally excited about the next phase that Bespin is about to enter as we solidify the core of Bespin and drive it to become a tool that people will use day to day.

a2div meeting #1: SproutCore with Majd Taby

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 13:30:11 +0000

A few days back, I announced the creation of the a2 group: devoted to learning new tools and techniques for building the best webapps. Meetings will be on the 4th Thursday of each month, so the first meeting is on September 24th at 7PM at the SRT Solutions office in downtown Ann Arbor. Meetings are free, so join us (please let us know that you’re coming using the form below — reason for that in a minute).

Bespin 0.4.3: “deploy” to your website!

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 18:38:53 +0000

Bespin 0.4.3 (“Chuck Finley“) is live and it includes three new features that are worth mentioning (plus a handful of other changes that I won’t bother with for now). One is the start of an often-requested feature: deployment from Bespin to other servers. Initially, the only way to get projects out of Bespin was to export the project as a zip file or tarball. Then, we added version control system support, which meant that you could push from Bespin to some repository and update a site from there.

Introducing a2div web development user group

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 19:46:54 +0000

I’ve been interested in doing cool stuff with web technology for a long time. I still think that web development is harder than it should be, but new tools, processes and ideas come along all the time to make it easier and more fun. Many people probably view me as a “Python guy”. Sure, I’ve done a good deal of work with Python over the past few years. But, there are many, many good ideas on the server side that come from places other than Python.

4th anniversary MichiPUG meeting tomorrow!

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 17:38:32 +0000

I kicked off the Michigan Python Users Group (MichiPUG) in September 2005, so this month’s meeting marks 4 years since the group began! This month’s meeting is going to be one of our “topic free” meetings. Despite the lack of a topic, we never have trouble finding Python things to discuss. If you’re going to be around Ann Arbor Thursday evening and have a burning Python question, do stop in!

Python packaging/install: what I want

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 18:48:51 +0000

Python packaging and deployment can be annoying. It’s been nearly 4 years since I released the first TurboGears release as an early adopter of setuptools/easy_install. Since then, there’s been the release of virtualenv, pip and zc.buildout. Somehow, it still seems like more trouble than it should be to get development and production environments set up. On Bespin, I’ve been using a combination of virtualenv and pip (scripted with Paver) in development and production environments.

Project Bespin Summary for August 28, 2009

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 17:45:46 +0000

“This Week in Bespin” returns as “Project Bespin Summary”. It was clear to me some time back that weekly was not the right pace for delivering condensed Bespin news. But there is also interesting backstory and plenty that happens in between major releases, so we wouldn’t want major releases to be the only time for people to learn about what’s going on with the project. The last major release, Bespin 0.

Project Bespin needs you

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 02:46:56 +0000

I work in Mozilla’s Developer Tools Lab, where we’re working to make things easier for web developers and to explore what is possible using open web tools. It turns out there’s quite a bit that’s possible, and we’ve just scratched the surface with what we’ve done with Bespin so far. I’m really happy with the team that I’m working with, both within Mozilla Labs and in the Bespin community. I’m also really happy to report that we’ve got an opening on our team!

Camtasia for Mac arrives and brings real competition

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 15:20:37 +0000

I’ve done a good deal of screencasting, including a very popular video (the TurboGears 20 Minute Wiki) and even a screencast DVD that I offered for sale. When I first started screencasting, the only viable choice on the Mac was Snapz Pro X, a simple screen recorder. This was a far cry from Camtasia Studio on Windows, which was the top-of-the-line tool. In 2007, ScreenFlow appeared on the Mac and added an elegant editing experience to Mac screencasting that closed the gap with Camtasia enough.

One Python-based version control system to rule them all!

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 02:35:31 +0000

We’ve just released Bespin 0.4, the major new feature of which is the first bit of the collaboration feature. Bespin 0.4 includes a ton of other changes, including one that I’m going to focus on here: Subversion support, which Gordon P. Hemsley kicked off for us a few weeks back. Bespin’s initial version control support showed up in 0.2 with support for Mercurial. Knowing that we wanted to support multiple version control systems (VCS), I took an unorthodox approach from the beginning.

MichiPUG July meeting tonight! Python in vfx, Impressive, 3.1

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:11:40 +0000

The next MichiPUG meeting will be on Thursday, July 2nd at 7PM. Ryan Burns will talk about the Impressive presentation software (which was used at Tuesday’s Ignite Ann Arbor) and Terry Howald will talk about Python’s use in scripting visual effects.We may also talk about the Python 3.1 release. The meeting will be in downtown Ann Arbor at the SRT Solutions office.

MichiPUG: using Python to run reports in Hadoop clusters

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 20:01:58 +0000

Zattoo’s Marshall Weir will be talking at this week’s MichiPUG (Thursday evening at 7PM at SRT Solutions in downtown Ann Arbor). In his own words: I’ve been working on a python module for running reports in Hadoop. Its sort of a wrapper around the pig data processing language and some smarts for running reports on a hadoop cluster and pushing and pulling data to it. It’s designed primarily to make it easier and more efficient to run complex sets of interdependent reports – I’ve been using it to do business reporting on our customer behavior at Zattoo.

MacSpeech fails the version number test

Fri, 15 May 2009 12:00:38 +0000

MacSpeech Dictate 1.5 has just been released. In the process, they made a major product management blunder: they chose the wrong version number. How can you mess up with a version number? Simple: you misalign your own expectations with those of your customers. MacSpeech Dictate is really the only viable speech recognition software for the Mac today. Their original iListen project wasn’t so hot. So, they licensed the Dragon NaturallySpeaking engine and put a Mac UI on top to produce Dictate.

MichiPUG May meeting: non-relational DBs

Tue, 05 May 2009 11:23:41 +0000

The next MichiPUG meeting will be on Thursday, May 7th at 7PM. The topic for this week is newfangled non-relational databases (with demos of Couch DB, Mongo DB, Tokyo Cabinet, Persevere, and Redis promised) via Welcome – Michigan Python Users Group | Google Groups. As usual, the meeting will be at the SRT Solutions office in downtown Ann Arbor.

JSConf 2009: the best conference you couldn’t attend!

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 18:17:06 +0000

(sorry for the lack of links in here. I wrote this on a plane and haven’t had a chance to do anything else to it…) I just returned from JSConf 2009, the first JSConf conference. It was possibly even the first conference to feature JavaScript as a general scripting language in the same vein as Python or Ruby. Overall, it was a very good conference. The organizers did a terrific job and paid great attention to detail.

Speaking at JSConf on Saturday at 1:45PM

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 13:01:58 +0000

JSConf is coming up on Friday, and I’ll be there. I was too late to get a normal “track A” talk in, but I am scheduled in the “track B” room for Saturday at 1:45PM to talk about a standard library for JavaScript development outside of the browser. It’ll be a 30 minute session, and I’m hoping to have some cool stuff to show! I hope to see you there!

Paver 1.0 released!

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 13:10:23 +0000

At long last, I’ve released Paver 1.0. Here’s the announcement that I sent to python-announce: After months of use in production and about two months of public testing for 1.0, Paver 1.0 has been released. The changes between Paver 0.8.1, the most recent stable release, and 1.0 are quite significant. Paver 1.0 is easier, cleaner, less magical and just better all around. The backwards compatibility breaks should be easy enough to work around, are described in DeprecationWarnings and were introduced in 1.

Paver 1.0b1 released

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 13:15:47 +0000

I’ve just released Paver 1.0b1. This new release adds a fun little feature. A typical setup.py script looks like this: from distutils.core import setup setup(name="Foo", ...) With the new version of Paver, you can now rename setup.py to pavement.py (or run paver -f setup.py) and then do: from paver.setuputils import setup setup(name="Foo", ...) That gets you going quite quickly, doesn’t it? Of course, you’d likely want to add from paver.

Paver 1.0a3 released

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 16:14:26 +0000

I have just released Paver 1.0a3. This has some good refinements on the way to 1.0 final and a couple of nice, new features (the “auto” task and the “pushd” context manager): Added automatic running of â€œautoâ€ task. If thereâ€™s a task with the name â€œautoâ€, it is run automatically. Using this mechanism, you can write code that sets up the options any way you wish, and without using globals at all (because the auto task can be given options as a parameter).

MichiPUG meeting tomorrow, March 5th

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 12:44:07 +0000

The monthly Michigan Python Users Group (MichiPUG) meeting is coming up tomorrow! This month, we’re going to do something a little different: sprinting on a project to help out a new coworking space that is being set up in downtown Ann Arbor (see below for the full description from Bob Kuehne). As usual, the meeting starts at 7PM at SRT Solutions. proposal for 03/02/09 – Michigan Python Users Group | Google Groups

This Week in Bespin March 2, 2009

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 14:32:51 +0000

For the week of February 23rd: Roberto Saccon ported Bespin to Dojo! Dojo leader Peter Higgins helped to clean things up a bit. This has significantly changed (and improved) the use of namespaces in the frontend code, which will make Bespin much easier to drop into other pages. For people keeping score at home, there is now a 0.1 branch in the Bespin repository that we will be using to update the server.

Embarrassment Driven Development

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 14:03:09 +0000

Googling “embarrassment driven development” (EDD) does not return as many hits as it should. I think it’s a very powerful development technique. I first heard the expression from the Plone guys at PyCon 2006, and Google did turn up this match: [ArchipelagoSprint] Time to get cracking on Plone 3.0! Wrt. timelines, I was hoping that we could try to have a “Tech preview” release before the Plone Conference 2006 in Seattle (October 25-27) – I’m going to be on-stage there talking about the exciting new features of Plone 3.

Paver 1.0a2 released!

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 15:23:34 +0000

I’m happy to announce that Paver 1.0a2 has been released! And, unlike Paver 1.0a1, it installs (thanks to Greg Thornton for the patch for that!). I’ve been quite busy with other projects over the past month, so I appreciate the help of Marc Sibson and Greg Thornton in making 1.0a2 a nice improvement over 1.0a1. Paver 1.0 is still for the slightly adventurous, because it has not yet seen testing by many people.

280Atlas looks amazing

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 02:48:39 +0000

If you haven’t seen it yet, you really should watch the demo of 280Atlas. It’s basically Interface Builder written for the browser. Just watch their demo and tell me that that doesn’t look like a great way to build webapps (and I do mean apps and not sites). A lot of work goes into designing good software. 280North are taking the great design work put in on Apple’s developer tools and making it available to people building browser-based apps.

Introduction to the Bespin Python backend

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 01:44:57 +0000

It’s been less than two weeks since Bespin was introduced, and there’s already been an impressive amount of activity around the open source project. There are at least 3 entirely new Bespin servers that I’m aware of. The current Bespin server that we at Mozilla are maintaining is written in Python and appears in the backend/python directory in the Bespin source. To help people get up to speed with the code, I have created a screencast to help people get started with the Python backend and give them an idea of how the code is set up.

This Week in Bespin (Feb 23)

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 16:43:13 +0000

I’m crossposting this from the Bespin googlegroup. Before moving on to the week that is coming, let’s look back at the week that was: Week of February 17th: Version 0.1.2 of Bespin was released. Notable changes: System clipboard copy and paste now works in WebKit. Firefox will almost work. Vote up this bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=407983 Project names now need only to be unique per user. Previously, they had to be globally unique.

Creating a web framework with WSGI video

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 02:54:14 +0000

Creating a web framework with WSGI on Vimeo The Michigan Python Users Group (MichiPUG) meeting topic from February 2009, presented by Kevin Dangoor. This screencast video shows us using WSGI components to build up a web framework piece-by-piece. By the way, for people who are interested in working on the Bespin server, this is the kind of “web framework” that the server is built upon.

Bespin: code in the cloud

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 01:30:19 +0000

Despite working for an open source company, I have been pretty quiet here about what I’ve been doing in the Mozilla Labs web developer tools group. No more. We’ve gone public! Mozilla Labs Â» Blog Archive Â» Introducing Bespin Bespin proposes an open extensible web-based framework for code editing that aims to increase developer productivity, enable compelling user experiences, and promote the use of open standards. I started working on Bespin as soon as I joined Mozilla, hitting the ground running with a new Python server.

Extended warranties come to downloadable software

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 18:57:56 +0000

You know those extended warranties that they always try to sell you at electronics (and other) stores? Remarkably, the concept has just been applied to downloadable software! What Is eDS? eSellerate Download Service (eDS) is an extended download service that you can purchase to protect all downloadable software in your order. With eDS, you will be able to re-download exact copies of the software you purchased, for a period of 1 (one) year after the date of purchase.

Product Activation sucks.

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 12:52:03 +0000

The music industry has figured out that DRM doesn’t work and does more to annoy real customers than it does to stop thieves. If they had paid attention to history, they would have found that in the 80s and early 90s, the software industry had already learned that lesson. Recently, I moved from an older Mac laptop to a new one. I used the Migration Assistant and everything came across just fine and appeared to be working just fine.

ServerJS: one week into building a better JavaScript

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 14:08:51 +0000

It’s actually been 8 days now since I introduced the ServerJS group. As Peter Michaux mentions in “A Bright Future for Standardized Server-Side JavaScript”, the group has gotten off to an absolutely blazing start. As it stands this morning, there are 224 members who have posted 653 messages in 8 days. There’s something more important than the numbers, though. Many people who have joined the list are deeply experienced in JavaScript-outside-of-the-browser.

MichiPUG meeting Thursday: WSGI web frameworks

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 13:08:31 +0000

Reminder of Thursday’s MichiPUG meeting: The next MichiPUG meeting will be on Thursday, February 5th at 7PM. Kevin Dangoor will lead a discussion/demo on building your own custom web frameworks with WSGI. As usual, the meeting will be at the SRT Solutions office in Ann Arbor..

Server JavaScript wiki and IRC

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 14:05:31 +0000

The server side web development chatter over the past few years has been centered around Ruby, Python, the latest frameworks in Java and Groovy, plus the endless swirl of activity in PHP. At least, that’s the chatter I’ve been seeing. Clearly, there is pent up demand to make JavaScript into a not only competitive but truly awesome server side web dev environment. I launched the ServerJS mailing list yesterday and as of now it has 136 members and a lot of active discussion.

Paver 1.0a1 recalled

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 15:03:35 +0000

It turns out that both pip and easy_install have trouble with the Paver 1.0a1 package. I’m going to look into that, but in the meantime I have removed the Paver 1.0a1 tarball from the cheeseshop so that people don’t accidentally get it. Sorry about that! As a side note, it is unfortunate that easy_install and pip both will pick up alpha and beta releases in preference to release versions. I would think that a nicer default would be to prefer the current release version unless there’s a flag saying “give me the test release”.

What Server Side JavaScript needs

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 14:00:00 +0000

Server side JavaScript technology has been around for a long time. Netscape offered server side JavaScript in their server software back in 1996, and Helma has existed for a number of years as well. But, server side development has changed a lot over the past few years. Aptana’s Jaxer gives an innovative view of how you can leverage a JavaScript environment running on both sides of the wire (client and server).

Paver 1.0a1 is out

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 20:59:57 +0000

I have just pushed Paver 1.0a1 up to the Python Cheeseshop. This is very much an alpha release, so beware. That said, I’m successfully using it in my own projects and have been for some time. I have significantly changed the way Paver works, and I think the new structure is simpler and more flexible because it is no longer tied to distutils. In fact, Paver’s task running capability is in paver/tasks.

WSGI goodness spreading to other languages

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 18:33:01 +0000

In Python, we’ve been enjoying the convenience of mixing and matching various things that follow the WSGI convention for a while. More recently, Rack brought those good features to a very similar interface for Ruby. And now I see: Jack: Rack for JavaScript echo “Rack provides an minimal interface between webservers supporting Ruby and Ruby frameworks” | sed -e s/Rack/Jack/g -e s/Ruby/JavaScript/g Jack comes from Tom Robinson, one of the developers of Cappuccino/Objective-J.

Moving to a new Mac: everything but Python

Fri, 23 Jan 2009 13:39:32 +0000

With my new job comes a new MacBook Pro (the latest generation, very slick!). The Setup Assistant did a great job of making my new MBP just like my old one, carrying across all of my applications and settings from my latest Time Machine backup. Everything in /usr/local/bin made it. Ditto for my MacPorts stuff in /opt. One thing that didn’t make it was the Python libraries that I had installed in the system-wide site-packages directory (/Library/Python/Version/2.

Making custom web frameworks with WSGI

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 16:24:35 +0000

At the next Michigan Python Users Group (MichiPUG) meeting, we’ll be talking about building custom web frameworks using WSGI bits and pieces. I’ve done this a couple of times now and think it’s a powerful and straightforward approach that works well for certain kinds of projects. I’m figuring we’ll take a look at some available components and glue stuff together to build a framework during the session. As usual, the meeting is the first Thursday of the month (February 5th, in this case) at 7pm at the SRT Solutions office in downtown Ann Arbor.

Build desktop apps with web UI and Python

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 14:33:08 +0000

The next release of Appcelerator Titanium (PR2, due January 23rd) is slated to include support for Python and Ruby! Titanium is a completely open source competitor to Adobe AIR. It lets you build installable desktop applications that build their GUIs via a built-in WebKit renderer (in other words, you can use HTML/CSS/JavaScript to build a GUI, just like you do on the web). The next version of Titanium is going to include support for Python and Ruby, which means that you can use something other than just JavaScript for creating your desktop apps.

Making web development suck less

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 14:02:36 +0000

We make shitty software… with bugs! old Living Videotext slogan, as reported by Dave Winer I love that quote. On the surface, it sounds disparaging about the software you have today, but it’s actually more of a statement of hopes for the future. The status quo, in fact every status quo, is less than ideal. It’s great to be proud of your products and where you are, but it’s even more important to keep in mind how much more there is to do.

A change to my blogging

Mon, 29 Dec 2008 00:40:39 +0000

First of all, my blogging has been very sporadic of late. Well, it’s always been irregular, and that’s not going to change. I do plan on blogging more frequently than I have been over the past couple of months. I have recently concluded a very busy job search (more on that in a separate post) and can get back to a bit more writing. Blue Sky on Mars (BSOM) has been my blog for everything for several years now.

Beyond the Source: Growing Your Community

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 15:10:56 +0000

I have just recorded a screencast version of my php|works/PyWorks 2008 opening keynote: Beyond the Source: Growing Your Community. They gave me the option to talk about anything I wanted to, and so I decided to do a talk on marketing of open source projects.

Dinner Tuesday @ PyWorks?

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 01:30:06 +0000

My flight to PyWorks arrives around 6:20pm on Tuesday, and I anticipate needing dinner after I get to the hotel. Anyone want to meet up for dinner there? Update: I may not be coming in on Tuesday after all. We’ve got some illnesses going around in the family, so it’s looking like I’ll come in on Wednesday. Update 2: I’m coming in today after all.

Google App Engine Hack-A-Thon Ann Arbor 11/17

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 00:39:02 +0000

I started the ball rolling on this a few weeks ago, and I’m thankful that some folks picked up that ball and ran with it. I’m reposting Matt Simmons’ announcement here: The Michigan Python Users Group (MichiPUG) in conjunction with Google are happy to present: Google App Engine Hack-a-thon: Ann Arbor What: An App Engine developer event for Google App Engine! Learn about Google App Engine: We will have talks on the major features of Google App Engine at different points throughout the day.

Changes coming to Paver

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 13:59:04 +0000

Paver is the Python-based build tool that I released several months ago. It uses a Rake-like approach; you create a .py file that is filled with “tasks” which are basically just functions that can be invoked from the command line. Paver has largely been focused on automating Python projects. Last week, I got together with Marshall and Matt from Zattoo. They’ve been working on a tool called pytoss which is focused on deployment.

In the market for a job

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 19:05:04 +0000

Short form: I’m looking for a job. Are you doing something interesting? And hiring? Send me email! kid @at@ blazingthings.com. I’ve opened up my LinkedIn profile to make it easier to get a quick rundown. I bring a lot to the table: 20 years of experience in product management, management and software development. Some of my work in Python is out there and well-known. In September 2005, I released TurboGears, which led to an interesting and fun flurry of activity for me (talks at PyCon 3 years running, plus talks at EuroPython, CodeMash and the upcoming PyWorks conference, the Prentice-Hall book with Mark Ramm, the self-produced and published DVD, etc).

Rapid Web Apps with TG in Chinese

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 18:28:16 +0000

I just got a mysterious package in the mail from Pearson. It felt like it contained a book… and, indeed, inside there were two copies of Rapid Web Applications with TurboGears in Simplified Chinese: I can only assume that Benjamin T. Hamilton, who is prominently quoted on the front cover, is saying good things about TurboGears and Python 🙂

Python without explicit self

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 18:02:21 +0000

A month ago, Bruce Eckel wrote about wanting to remove the explicit self parameter from function argument lists in Python. Personally, I don’t mind the explicit self. To me, it makes it feel like all function objects are equal, even those that happen to be methods on classes. That said, Guido wrote an in-depth response, and I certainly recommend that you check that out if you’ve ever considered getting rid of the explicit self.

PyWorks and php|works opening keynote

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 22:52:37 +0000

We are excited to announce the keynote speakers for this year’s php|works and PyWorks conference to be held in Atlanta, Georgia in November. In the opening keynote, Kevin Dangoor, the founder of the TurboGears Python web framework project and, more recently, the Paver Python build tool project, will be speaking about growing your open source community. [From php|works/PyWorks Keynotes Announced ] Though it’s been on the schedule for a couple of weeks, Elizabeth Naramore has officially announced that I will be giving the opening keynote at the first PyWorks conference (I’m not sure how many years php|works has been going).

Dojo, DWR, freebies and me at the Detroit JUG tomorrow

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 18:13:47 +0000

The Detroit Java Users Group is meeting out at ePrize tomorrow for a talk about DWR and Dojo. I’ve been wanting to learn more about DWR, so this is a good chance. I’ll be heading out there to the meeting and SitePen has provided me with some Dojo goodies to give away (t-shirts, books and stickers). I hope to see you there!

Reinhardt: a client-side web framework

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 12:16:09 +0000

At PyCon in March, I spoke about how applications can be browser-driven. For the past few months, I’ve been involved with a browser-driven app. Remarkably, some of the same kinds of problems crop up when making a browser-driven app as when you’re making a traditional server-driven webapp. So, today I introduced something called Reinhardt, a client-side web framework. Using Dojo’s Django Template Engine implementation (dojox.dtl), Dojo’s data model (dojo.data) and Reinhardt’s new Django-inspired URL dispatcher you get something that approximates a server-side web framework all on the client side.

MichiPUG meeting on Thursday, 10/2

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 22:54:51 +0000

Our regularly scheduled MichiPUG meeting is coming on Thursday, October 2nd. The meeting will be at its usual time (7 PM) and at the usual place (SRT Solutions). This month meeting topic is Python 2.6. A few months ago, we discussed Python 3.0 and all the new features that had to offer. It seems to make more sense to focus on Python 2.6, because it’s a release that we can likely use sometime soon.

links for 2008-09-26

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 09:03:12 +0000

WordPress Mobile Alex King has a plugin for WordPress that sounds great: make a lightweight mobile interface for your users. (tags: plugins wordpress iphone alexking) Delight language A statically-type, Python-inspired language written in D. Promises speeds that are close to D (which itself is pretty close to C). (tags: python d programming languages delight)

Quick and dirty hack to get syntax coloring in Keynote

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 15:27:37 +0000

I figured I’d toss this out in the event that someone has a better solution in hand. I tossed this together quickly and it works. It requires that you have Pygments installed and pygmentize on your path (which is silly, because I could have just imported pygments as a libraryâ€¦) It also requires that Safari is running. But, hey, it works. import os import sys def go(): if len(sys.argv) != 2: print "

McCain can’t win on the issues

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 13:05:45 +0000

George W. Bush’s approval rating is just a shade above EPIC FAIL. As much as he’d like to claim to be an agent of change, McCain’s policies are much, much closer to GWB’s than he’d like to admit. If this election was all about the issues, McCain would lose, of that I have no doubt. So, rather than campaigning on the issues, John McCain has thrown all integrity out the window.

Let’s meet up in Atlanta at PyWorks!

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 15:27:02 +0000

This year has seemed like a big year for Python conference activity in the US. Of course, there was PyCon in March, which topped 1,000 attendees. I’ve also seen announcements for a bunch of regional Python gatherings (like PyOhio, which was close by but I couldn’t attend). This year, we also get PyWorks, which is joined at the hip with php|works in Atlanta in November. This is the first year for PyWorks, and they’ve got a good lineup going.

Inside the Dojo Toolbox

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 17:02:10 +0000

My latest article is up on the SitePen Blog: Inside the Dojo Toolbox. I walk through some of what we encountered while building the Dojo Toolbox AIR application. If you’re thinking of building an AIR application, particularly using JavaScript, check out this look at the technology.

MichiPUG September Meeting: Titus reveals secrets of the PSF and MSU

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 12:41:10 +0000

The September meeting of the Michigan Python Users Group (MichiPUG) is coming up on Thursday, September 4. This meeting marks the third birthday of the group! Titus Brown will be presenting to us on a Python Software Foundation-related project, as well as some of the things he has going on in his classes at Michigan State University. If you’re taking one of Titus’ classes, this might be a good way to get a head start 🙂

Ten health experiments that you’re probably participating in

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 01:45:49 +0000

Science is great. According the Wikipedia entry on the scientific method: Scientific method refers to the body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. It is based on gathering observable, empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning. A scientific method consists of the collection of data through observation and experimentation, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses. Research and new developments have come up with many, many ways to improve our lives.

Negative advertising works

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 16:58:48 +0000

Al over the place, there was news of Obama and McCain moving into a dead heat in the polls. Earlier in the summer, Obama had more than 320 electoral votes according to the polls (270 are required to win). Now, Obama and McCain both have less than 270. If you check out the graphs at electoral-vote.com, you can see that 2008 looks suspiciously like 2004, with the Democrat leading and then losing ground after the negative ads kicked in.

The Tech of SitePen Support

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 11:07:03 +0000

I’ve just posted an article with some details on how SitePen’s Support system is built. We use Python on the server and Dojo-driven JavaScript on the browser to create a responsive system. The model we use is similar to what I described in my PyCon 2008 talk where the client is driving the interaction rather than the server. SitePenâ€™s Support service is built using a variety of interesting techniques and technologies.

A change in Dojo leadership

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 01:08:04 +0000

Alex Russell has announced on his blog: Two days ago I dusted off the rarely-used voting procedure for Dojo Foundation projects in order to kick off a transition that Iâ€™m very excited about: as of this afternoon, the committers of the Dojo project have elected Peter Higgins the new Project Lead for the toolkit project. [From Dojo Transitions | Continuing Intermittent Incoherency] So far at SitePen, I’ve had more of an opportunity to work with Peter than with Alex.

links for 2008-08-08 [delicious.com]

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 10:30:32 +0000

Files iPhone app Copy files across your lan to the iphone and then view them on the phone. I'm looking for a good PDF viewer. This apparently keeps track of the last position you looked at in the file, but does not have page forward, page back or go to page (which could be a drag in a big PDF). Someone will come out with a good ebook reader at some point.

Back to Safari/WebKit

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 10:51:12 +0000

As an experiment, I had switched to using Firefox once FF3 was released. I like the Awesome Bar, and the browser definitely feels a bit peppier than Firefox 2. The biggest advantage Firefox 2 has over Safari remains: the add-ons. However, Safari feels so much faster than Firefox that I’m switching back because I find the basic browsing experience to be nicer. I still have Firefox around for the times when I really want to use one of the extensions… but the most important extension, Firebug, has been ably duplicated in WebKit’s debugger.

links for 2008-08-06 [delicious.com]

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 09:30:20 +0000

The MacBook. All USB Ports Are Not Equal | Gadget Lab from Wired.com I've been puzzled by this behavior with my MacBook Pro as well. I have a USB hub hooked up now and it works fine, as long as it's in the port on the right side of my MBP. (tags: mac usb) Macworld Review: Firefox 3.0 I've been using FF3 as my primary browser.

MichiPUG this week: TurboGears 2

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 13:00:38 +0000

TurboGears 2 is currently out in alpha test releases and is rapidly approaching maturity (I know a few people using it in production already). This week at MichiPUG, Mark Ramm will be showing off the good stuff in TG2. The Michigan Python Users Group meeting will be Thursday, August 7th at 7PM. See you there!

iPhone 2.0 apps and synchronization

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 02:17:34 +0000

I’ve installed a number of iPhone applications, some of which I’m already using quite regularly. Unlike Apple’s own applications, third party apps cannot synchronize data via iTunes. That’s a real shame, given that Apple clearly has built support for such a thing. It’s possible that iTunes itself is not set up to handle third party sync while still ensuring that Apple controls what’s getting synced to where. Whatever the reason, developers have had to come up with their own means for syncing data between desktop and phone.

links for 2008-07-30

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 09:33:28 +0000

Small Not For Profit Web Presence — What to do? Nice suggestions for modernizing a not-for-profit. I agree with most of what’s written here. (tags: nonprofit it) Pushup : Pushing up the web Nice idea: Add some javascript to your site that gives a nice little prod to the user about upgrading their browser. (tags: ajax browser javascript webdesign web ie)

Thanks to Mark for channelling me at PyOhio

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 20:32:53 +0000

I had lunch with Mark Ramm-Christensen today, and he gave me the scoop on PyOhio which was last Saturday. It sounds like a good time was had by all. Mark guessed there were 80 people there, which is a good turnout for a regional event like PyOhio! Congrats to the organizers! It sounds like you did quite a job getting the word out and building the turnout. I couldn’t be there because my daughter’s 5th birthday party was on the same day.

links for 2008-07-29

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 09:35:28 +0000

Ponoko â€“ Buy Make and Sell Jewelry This company will manufacture products that you design. (tags: make product manufacturing diy)

links for 2008-07-26

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 09:33:00 +0000

Yirmumah A webcomic *and* the guy will draw anything for $2. Neat. (tags: comics drawing funny graphics illustration humor)

Nose and Decorators: be careful!

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 03:50:58 +0000

One theory of unit testing is that your tests should all be entirely independent. I’ve heard that Google actually has a test runner that randomizes the order of the tests on each run, so you’re guaranteed that they’re independent (otherwise they fail). I want my test files to be independent, but I find that having one test lead into another is often a good way to reuse fixture and avoid making my test fixture more complicated than it needs to be.

links for 2008-07-25

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 09:32:19 +0000

Crowdspring: Global marketplace for logo design, business card design, graphic design and website design | crowdSPRING A much prettier Design Outpost. Seems to be pretty active. (tags: design graphics illustration service crowdsourcing freelance webdesign)

links for 2008-07-24

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 09:31:19 +0000

Rands In Repose: The Taste of the Day The Rands version of getting things done. This actually gels a bit better with my own experience than the traditional GTD approach. (tags: management productivity gtd) SitePen Blog Â» Getting Started with Persevere Using Dojo A great introduction to using Persevere in real life. Easiest way to get a database going with a grid view that automatically updates as other users change the data!

links for 2008-07-19

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 09:30:57 +0000

DesignEyeForTheItGuy – BarCampGR A bunch of nice design links (intended to help us left-brained people not screw up so badly) (tags: webdesign design) Macworld | iPhone app maker hit with Major League cease-and-desist order Alas, trademark law actually requires enforcement of trademarks, otherwise you lose the mark. Our friend Mark Knopper wrote an iphone app with tons of baseball stats, and the MLB wants the logos off.

Everyone for President (and so can you!)

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 02:54:02 +0000

News 3 Online has got the scoop: That’s entirely too funny. (Before the grammar police come after me, the post title is a play on “I Am America (And So Can You!)” (Stephen Colbert)).

links for 2008-07-18

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 09:32:20 +0000

Running for Office: It’s Like A Flamewar with a Forum Troll, but with an Eventual Winner I think I like xkcd-style politics. We need more of that. (tags: comedy humor geek internet marketing politics)

The Onion nails it in January 2001

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 01:36:49 +0000

This article from The Onion in January 2001 shows why The Onion remains among the best satire around. As absurd as this article sounds, it has proven all too true… Under Bush, we can all look forward to military aggression, deregulation of dangerous, greedy industries, and the defunding of vital domestic social-service programs upon which millions depend. [From Bush: ‘Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over’ | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source]

Sorry, Planet Python folks

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 14:42:21 +0000

I tend to watch the Unofficial Planet Python rather than Planet Python. The Unofficial Planet Python was only getting my Python feed, which is good. The official one, however, is getting everything. I’ve asked for this to be changed, so hopefully soon the official Planet Python will only be listing my posts that are actually related to Python. To make matters worse, WordPress seems to have decided that it doesn’t want to email me the comments that were showing up on my del.

links for 2008-07-17

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 09:32:08 +0000

Email Marketing Solutions from Constant Contact Inexpensive service for managing email campaigns (tags: email marketing newsletter tools business service)

Twitter Updates for 2008-07-15

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 03:59:59 +0000

@sillyevar i thought the ACLU was outlawed with the PATRIOT act (kidding, of course) # Powered by Twitter Tools.

links for 2008-07-15

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 09:32:39 +0000

ZooKeeper Distributed, versioned configuration for groups of computers. (tags: yahoo zookeeper distributed architecture) The Outlaw Presidency – washingtonpost.com On November 3, 2004, I put up a blog post entitled “I told you so”. I’ll be bringing that up again this year, but this article brings together much of what I was talking about. (tags: politics) Protocol Buffers: Leaky RPC :: Steve Vinoskiâ€™s Blog The anti-RPC view of Google’s Protocol Buffers.

Twitter Updates for 2008-07-14

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 03:59:59 +0000

i wonder if Comcast is always experiencing higher than “usual” call volumes and wait times. # wow. that comcast guy was actually helpful. # now to figure out why comcast thought we were sending out email at 4am a couple days ago. (no Windows machines here to do that!) # @stevedress i think the higher volume just becomes a Comcastic! number of calls. “We’re experience Comcastic numbers of calls.

Twitter Updates for 2008-07-12

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 03:59:59 +0000

Aqua Forest is a very nifty iPhone game. # @cleverdevil agreed. Newsgator on the web is faster. # Powered by Twitter Tools.

links for 2008-07-12

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 09:32:29 +0000

Phatch – Photo Batch Processor Convenient looking tool to easily do stuff to a collection of images. (tags: freeware OpenSource photography photo graphics images)

Twitter Updates for 2008-07-11

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 03:59:59 +0000

I’m glad I downloaded iPhone 2.0 yesterday. Install worked fine, and I’ve happily turned my phone into a lightsaber (and can sync OmniFocus) # @markramm AT&T can only afford the new $199 price for the phone by not actually providing service. Didn’t you read the contract? 🙂 # @mpirnat urbanspoon looks cool. # Just posted the Dojo Toolbox 1.0.1 to fix a bug in the Builder tool.

Twitter Updates for 2008-07-10

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 03:59:59 +0000

@mpirnat Just think, though: we’ve traded the 4th amendment for Corporate Get out of Lawsuit-Free cards. Isn’t that a good deal? # Powered by Twitter Tools.

links for 2008-07-10

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 09:31:11 +0000

10 Ways to Take Stunning Portraits Great tips. Rands suggests replacing “photography” with “writing” in these rules and applying them there too. (tags: photo photography tips tutorial) bit.ly, a simple small url service I wondered why people would talk about a URL shortener service. Now, I see. Extra features (like stats and a simple, useful API) make this service a winner. (tags: Analytics free statistics tool tools web) Fat Cat Software – PowerTunes Software to manage multiple iTunes libraries on a computer (copy music between them, maintaining metadata, etc) (tags: itunes mac software) WordPress Themed Categories Plugin | Mikeâ€™s Downloads Page Lets you set a different theme for different categories.

Twitter Updates for 2008-07-09

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 03:59:59 +0000

twhirl needs to support cross-posting to identi.ca # @bethdean to echo what mpirnat said, I’ve created 12 googlegroups and been quite happy. # Powered by Twitter Tools.

Dojo Toolbox around the web

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 17:29:39 +0000

Rey Bango at Ajaxian says that “This is a â€œmust-haveâ€ for Dojo developers.”. I also enjoyed jdalton’s comment “I totally love this. I donâ€™t even use Dojo and I totally love this. Well done :)”. Adobe AIR evangelist Ryan Stewart mentions that “itâ€™s basically 100% Dojo”. I did get an email from someone who was curious about what it’s like to create an AIR app using JavaScript. It’s really just like creating any JavaScript-intensive webapp, except you only target one, very capable browser engine (WebKit) and have additional APIs available for things like files, sqlite databases and native windows.

links for 2008-07-09

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 09:35:11 +0000

House Industries Studio Lettering typefaces look very nice. $160, though, so not for a non-professional like me 🙂 (tags: fonts) The3dStudio.com – The 3D Resource Site – 3d models, texture, tutorials in 3ds max lwo c4d obj fbx x dxf dwg stp igs ma mb A large, large number of models, most of which are for sale. (tags: 3D design models graphics) 3D Models, Plugins, Textures, and more at Turbo Squid Another large 3D model site.

What I’ve been up to: The Dojo Toolbox

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 17:29:35 +0000

Today, we unveiled a project that I’ve been quite busy with the past few weeks: The Dojo Toolbox. Check out my First Look article to learn more about it or watch my 5 minute screencast: The short story is that it’s an Adobe AIR-based app, built with Dojo itself, that gives you a zippy offline API documentation viewer and a graphical user interface for running Dojo builds. This was my first interaction with the development side of AIR and my overall impression is quite good.

links for 2008-07-08

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 09:32:36 +0000

passpack Host-Proof javascript library Host-proof means that the data is encrypted client-side. (tags: javascript library webdev)

links for 2008-07-07

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 09:31:56 +0000

Michael Bay’s Rejected “The Dark Knight” Script – The Spill.com Movie Community This movie would be kind of funny if it got made. (tags: comedy funny humor movies parody batman michaelbay) PyWorks 2008 – Python Developers Conference New Python (and PHP) conference coming in November. (tags: python)

The Big Moo Canoe wrapup

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 20:13:27 +0000

As I had reported earlier on, my cousin Rob was planning a charity canoe event called “The Big Moo Canoe” to support Heifer International. Last month, he burned a solid 22,000 calories to complete the 250 mile route. He has a nice wrapup page for the event. Donations are still open until July 20th, and Rob is hoping to turn this into an event that more people can take part in next year (send him email if you’re interested!

Twitter Updates for 2008-07-03

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 03:59:59 +0000

trying identi.ca. will it work? will it last? (will anyone else join the federation?) # identi.ca seems slow to me. granted it just launched and probably has like 1 server. at least it’s up 🙂 # Come see my ZODB talk tonight at the MichiPUG meeting # note to self: if cmd-tab stops working, killing the dock might do the trick # Powered by Twitter Tools.

Twitter Updates for 2008-07-02

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 03:59:59 +0000

a bunch of small flying ants in our living room. nice way to start the day. # Writing an article for SitePen’s Key Insights newsletter for support customers. This will be ameatier issue than the last one. # Powered by Twitter Tools.

links for 2008-07-02

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 09:32:29 +0000

TextMate Blog Â» Working With History in Bash Great collection of tips for managing your history in Bash. This has already helped me out. (tags: bash terminal tips development) JSON Diff Self-explanatory, and a useful tool. (tags: browser development javascript json tool) WikidBASE | Nick Blundell – Projects A Django-based combination wiki/relational database tool. (tags: python programming OpenSource database wiki)

links for 2008-07-01

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 09:35:11 +0000

When is Good Easy to use way to peg a time that works for a bunch of people. (tags: calendar collaboration) GottaDeal.com – Why Pay Retail? – Hot Deals, Coupons, Forums & More Nice looking deal site (I usually look at dealnews.com before making a largish electronics purchase) (tags: shopping money) Hot Coupon World Found this site via the same article that lead to my last link.

MichiPUG this week: ZODB

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 11:57:46 +0000

The Michigan Python Users Group (MichiPUG) monthly meeting is coming up this Thursday, July 3rd at 7PM. This month, I’ll be speaking about the Zope Object Database (ZODB). Unlike last month’s meeting, where I led us in a random experiment with Google App Engine, I actually have some experience with the ZODB. I’ll be demonstrating use of the ZODB and will talk about concurrency, replication, packing, etc. If you’re not familiar with the ZODB (and you’re somewhere near Ann Arbor!

Twitter Updates for 2008-06-26

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 03:59:59 +0000

Obama needs to get behind the FISA filibuster, not support unchecked executive power: http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/06/21/ … # ahh, never mind the filibuster. i missed the cloture vote articles. Obama needs to vote against FISA support and get others to go along # Powered by Twitter Tools.

links for 2008-06-24

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 09:33:11 +0000

Looks Good Works Well: Announcing: Jiffy Firebug Extension for Viewing Client Side Performance Data (tags: browser development firebug javascript firefox performance tools optimization)

Twitter Updates for 2008-06-23

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 03:59:59 +0000

back from vacation, caught up and digging in! # Powered by Twitter Tools.

Feed testing… please ignore…

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 12:37:55 +0000

Sorry for the noise.

links for 2008-06-23

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 09:30:58 +0000

Macworld | Sync your iPhoto libraries (tags: iphoto mac software)

links for 2008-06-14

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 09:32:31 +0000

Dr Long Ghost – Validanguage This is like something that I prototyped but never carried beyond that stage. It’s a validation package that offers a JSON interface, which means it should be possible to integrate with server-side based validation packages (have them generate the appropr (tags: javascript validation development json programming webdev)

Twitter Updates for 2008-06-12

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 03:59:59 +0000

ScreenFlow won two Apple Design Awards. Congrats to the folks at Vara! It’s definitely one of the best apps I bought last year! # Powered by Twitter Tools.

Why Do I need To Sign This? : Alex Russell on contributor agreements

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:52:10 +0000

Anyone who runs a significant open source project should read this, especially if you don’t currently require your contributors to send in any kind of agreement: So why have it? Why create the barrier to entry for newcomers who just want to pitch in? I have great sympathy for the impatient potential contributor huffing â€œwhy do I need to sign this, anyway?â€, so this blog post is an effort to boil it down.

links for 2008-06-11

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 09:33:17 +0000

Installing lxml on OS X Leopard Â« The Offbytwo Blog Just what I needed! Concise instructions for installing lxml on OS X. (tags: xml python mac)

Articles of Impeachment against Bush

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 17:54:49 +0000

news.google.com had among the top stories that Dennis Kucinich has filed Articles of Impeachment against George W. Bush. You wouldn’t know it from looking at CNN.com, which includes such politically charged stories as John McCain promising to “veto every beer”. Maybe Lee Stranahan is right and what’s needed is iPeachment ’08 (3G). Though Bush is certainly worthy of impeachment, I cannot imagine these proceedings getting very far during an election year.

Apple didn’t ship anything!

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:30:01 +0000

I’m an Apple fanboy. Not for any religious reasons, mind you. I’m a fanboy because they’ve been doing an amazing job of design these past few years. Yesterday was the latest of Steve Jobs’ signature keynote addresses. I didn’t watch it, but I saw the play-by-play from MacRumors. I need not go into the details of what was announced, given that Apple gets millions in cheap publicity whenever Steve does one of these keynotes.

links for 2008-06-07

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 09:32:40 +0000

Boy Dies Of Dry Drowning After Leaving Pool And Walking Home I didn’t realize that this risk exists, and it’s certainly a good thing to be aware of. Our daughter is just getting into swimming now. (tags: health water parenting)

Twitter Updates for 2008-06-05

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 03:59:59 +0000

3 hours to MichiPUG meeting. Tonight’s topic: Google App Engine! # Powered by Twitter Tools.

Easy, Repeatable Building/Deployment of Python+Dojo Projects

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 12:33:37 +0000

My latest substantial blog post is now up: SitePen Blog Â» Easy, Repeatable Building/Deployment of Python+Dojo Projects Dojo on the client and Python on the server make for a great combination. They’re easy, productive and powerful. In this article, I’ll show you how to use Python + Dojo to cut the number of requests to your server by 95% and simplify development and deployment while you’re at it.

links for 2008-06-05

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 09:31:00 +0000

Reia programming language A new Python and Ruby inspired language that targets Erlang’s VMs and concurrency oriented programming. (tags: concurrency programming python erlang)

Twitter Updates for 2008-06-04

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 03:59:59 +0000

@crazybob Her run has raised her profile, but an article a few days back said that majority leader is unlikely. shes #35 in seniority. # Seems redundant to say it, but I’ll say it anyway. Obama FTW! # It will be interesting to see the performance of Adobe AIR apps once Squirrelfish gets integrated # Powered by Twitter Tools.

links for 2008-06-04

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 09:33:12 +0000

Surfinâ€™ Safari – Blog Archive Â» Announcing SquirrelFish WebKit, after tons of performance improvements, gets a bytecode VM that makes it 1.6x (on average) faster. (tags: javascript apple development programming performance optimization webkit) Twitter + Complex Event Processing discussion at Scripting News Interesting discussion on some technologies used by financial institutions to handle much larger transaction counts than Twitter has. (tags: twitter database cep)

Twitter Updates for 2008-06-03

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 03:59:59 +0000

I don’t think it’s a safe assumption that just because Obama couldn’t win over certain voters vs. Clinton that he won’t win those vs. McCain # @edleafe not so much regular logic vs. Hillary logic, but just a commentary on what all of the press seems to be saying about those voters # @mpirnat that could just be a temporary primary-season result. let’s see as we head toward November.

MichiPUG on Thursday: Google App Engine

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 14:36:03 +0000

We’ve settled on a topic for the coming Michigan Python Users Group meeting: Google App Engine. We do not have a speaker, so this will be a combination of discussion and exploration. I have written some App Engine code, and I’m guessing that others that will be attending have, too, so it’s not all trial-and-error. Following our usual formal (first Thursday of the month), the meeting will be on June 5th at 7PM at SRT Solutions in downtown Ann Arbor.

Twitter Updates for 2008-06-02

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 03:59:59 +0000

It’s blogging time. Paver, Python, Dojo, Eggs. # Powered by Twitter Tools.

Twitter Updates for 2008-05-30

Sat, 31 May 2008 03:59:59 +0000

just got a ScanSnap S510M. Wow. That plus that included FineReader make for some fine paperlessness. # just discovered that my annoying %00 in URLs problem with Twhirl is an interaction between AIR and WebKit nightlies bug. Back to Safari! # @voidspace my ScanSnap came with FineReader 3 for the Mac. It works just dandy. I just press the Scan button on the scanner and then FR- … # @voidspace FineReader Mac seems to be deprecated (go to their site and try to buy), but at least it’s universal and works fine on Leopard!

links for 2008-05-28

Wed, 28 May 2008 09:32:57 +0000

Cubit: Approximate Matching for Peer-to-Peer Overlays (tags: bittorrent p2p search distributed azereus) DISCIPLINING BOTHERSOME BEHAVIOR: GENERAL TIPS Useful tips from Dr. Sears. (tags: parenting drsears discipline)

Twitter Updates for 2008-05-23

Sat, 24 May 2008 03:59:59 +0000

@dalmaer Watch Star Wars ep 1 again and see if you have that same impression. I thought Crystal Skull was better than Temple of Doom # @ianlandsman re: music as teen: true for many, not for me. I’ve picked up tons of music since the 80s lotsa new favorites. (recently: Robyn) # Powered by Twitter Tools.

links for 2008-05-23

Fri, 23 May 2008 09:31:24 +0000

globalEval javascript function A function that works in every browser for evaluating JavaScript code in the global namespace. Oddly enough, it’s in a comment attached to Dean Edwards’ blog post about sandboxing code so that it’s *not* in the global space. (tags: javascript programming)

TurboGears Web Services gets a new maintainer

Thu, 22 May 2008 11:36:50 +0000

Justin Davis has just announced that Christophe de Vienne is the new maintainer of the TurboGears Web Services (TGWS) project. Thank you Christophe for carrying this project forward! I consider it a good sign for a project’s health when it can make the transition between maintainers, which is something both TurboGears and TGWS have done. TGWS, if you’re not familiar with it, is a multiprotocol web services extension for TurboGears 1.

links for 2008-05-22

Thu, 22 May 2008 09:32:34 +0000

Gradle Groovy-based build tool that seems to occupy a similar space as Paver. (tags: java make buildtools programming)

Twitter Updates for 2008-05-20

Wed, 21 May 2008 03:59:59 +0000

clinton/obama ad from SNL: http://tinyurl.com/6he8de # @dalmaer has just confirmed the new iPhone lands June 9th 😉 # @GothAlice hopefully Paver 0.8 fixes your TG2 install problem. # @dylans you might want the Automatic Upgrade plugin for wordpress: http://tinyurl.com/2ghuau # Powered by Twitter Tools.

Paver 0.8: new options features, doctools features and bug fixes

Wed, 21 May 2008 02:28:39 +0000

For various reasons, I released Paver 0.7.3 on Friday and Paver 0.8 yesterday. I have an idea of what the coming 1.0’s zc.buildout integration will be like, and I think it will be quite cool and useful. In the meantime, though, I’ve got some new features that set the stage for things I need to do in 1.0. Specifically, you can now pass in a dictionary in your options search ordering.

Hillary Clinton, Democratic Presidential Nominee

Wed, 21 May 2008 01:53:49 +0000

“The states I’ve won total 300 electoral votes. If we had the same rules as the Republicans, I would be nominee right now” Hillary Clinton That may be true, though I’m sure she’s counting Michigan and Florida despite the fact that Michigan didn’t even have Obama on the ballot. So it’s actually “if we had the same rules as the Republicans and if I hadn’t agreed to punish the states that went early.

links for 2008-05-20

Tue, 20 May 2008 09:36:18 +0000

Amazon byteflow: Hgshelve Python module to easily store versioned JSON data. (tags: hg mercurial programming python) Video: McCain’s YouTube Problem Just Became a Nightmare Never say anything on camera if you don’t want it to be quoted back at you. McCain looks like a major flip flopper. (tags: politics video) codepad A pastebin that *runs the code*. Very cool, with a well-thought out security setup that makes the remotely pasted code secure.

Twitter Updates for 2008-05-19

Tue, 20 May 2008 03:59:59 +0000

@ianlandsman because long messages are annoying. Maybe this is why Twitter has been successful with only 140 characters? # Powered by Twitter Tools.

links for 2008-05-17

Sat, 17 May 2008 09:31:33 +0000

Lightning Source … The Power of One on demand publishing, book fulfillment, ebook sales (tags: book business publishing service)

Twitter Updates for 2008-05-16

Sat, 17 May 2008 03:59:59 +0000

@ianlandsman I predict you’ll need to shell out $499 on a new phone 🙂 # @ianlandsman i’m thinking that the release of iPhone 2 software, new phone hardware and new sw for iPhone is likely it # Powered by Twitter Tools.

links for 2008-05-15

Thu, 15 May 2008 09:35:37 +0000

Web-based spreadsheets with OpenOffice.org and Dojo – Java World (tags: dojo ajax spreadsheet)

Twitter Updates for 2008-05-14

Thu, 15 May 2008 03:59:59 +0000

Retiring Hillary’s campaign debt ($20M) means more fundraising for her. She needs to give up and stop wasting money that can go for election # @ianlandsman the weather we had yesterday has probably just arrived where you are (Chicago is a preview of comming attractions for me) # why is it that iMovie can record live from my HDV camera but Final Cut Express and Adobe Premiere cannot?

Twitter Updates for 2008-05-13

Wed, 14 May 2008 03:59:59 +0000

as of r4568, TurboGears 2 now uses Paver for its builds # @markramm: here’s a static language rebuttal (not too convincing IMHO): http://beust.com/weblog/archives/000483.html # @mpirnat file a bug report. i happen to know some folks that keep up with stuff like that 😉 # cross-domain js is a pain # @voidspace xdomain js loading is possible, Dojo has an XD build: http://dev.

links for 2008-05-13

Tue, 13 May 2008 09:40:35 +0000

Stevey’s Blog Rants: Dynamic Languages Strike Back Steve Yegge on dynamic languages and why their performance is ultimately going to rock. (tags: software development dynamic languages performance)

Twitter Updates for 2008-05-12

Tue, 13 May 2008 03:59:59 +0000

@cgseller yes, apple kb is great. I’d recommend it. Nothing bothers me about it so far. # @dalmaer: LiveScribe is interesting except I don’t write things out by hand and don’t use Windows and most software folks I know are similar # @dalmaer yeah, i saw the bit about the Mac version coming. For what it is, their impl. does look super slick. # Powered by Twitter Tools.

Rob Bean’s Big Moo Canoe

Mon, 12 May 2008 12:20:51 +0000

That’s a helluva canoe: That’s my cousin, Rob Bean. He’s standing next to a 23 foot, 35 pound (!) canoe that he’s planning to paddle some 250 miles in a charity event he’s calling the Big Moo Canoe. He’s hoping to raise $5,000 for Heifer International Heifer helps to fight hunger and poverty around the world.

Programming language warts: Newspeak

Fri, 09 May 2008 18:49:50 +0000

There’s a new language that is soon to be open sourced called Newspeak. Gilad Bracha and team are creating a new language to address what they see as the future of programming (online/offline operation, lots of service oriented design, more concurrency). They’re angling for a Smalltalk-like environment and, indeed, their current implementation is in Squeak. Ignoring that there’s at least one other language called Newspeak, it seems like Gilad Bracha’s Newspeak is built on reasonable premises.

I love my new Apple keyboard

Fri, 09 May 2008 11:58:49 +0000

“Apple Keyboard Kit” (Apple Computer) I’m fixing up my home office a bit, and I was using a dirt cheap eMachines keyboard with my MacBook Pro. That keyboard had a PS/2 connector which I ran to a KVM switch (I did have two computers hooked up at one point). So, the first problem was that that keyboard was contributing the my overall cabling mess because of the KVM switch.

Twitter Updates for 2008-05-07

Thu, 08 May 2008 03:59:59 +0000

@davewiner I think that’s wishful thinking. HRC has only slightly more lost now than she had yesterday # @davewiner if the final tally has her losing Indiana, I would not be surprised if she concedes… but that’s wishful thinking on my part # Powered by Twitter Tools.

Paver 0.7: Better than distutils, better docs and much more

Thu, 08 May 2008 02:55:29 +0000

I’m delighted to release Paver 0.7. If you missed my original announcement, the short story is that Paver is a new build, distribution and deployment scripting tool geared toward Python projects. My original announcement and the new foreword to the docs explain the motivation. Ben Bangert and others pointed out a giant documentation bug in 0.4: there was a fair bit of reference doc but no doc that said “here’s how you get started with Paver”.

Why Java remains the most popular language on the JVM

Mon, 05 May 2008 10:25:24 +0000

My latest blog post is up on the SitePen blog: Mark Ramm-Christensen posed some questions about using the JVM as a platform for dynamic languages. Many people do, in fact, use dynamic languages on the JVM (Groovy, Beanshell, Rhino, Jython, JRuby are some big onesâ€¦ and donâ€™t forget Scala, Nice and other â€œnon-dynamicâ€ languages that target the JVM). But Java the platform has not gotten widespread or serious attention until recently (witness the recent resurgence of Jython, the rise of JRuby and the coming of the Da Vinci Machine).

simplejson heading for the stdlib

Mon, 05 May 2008 02:06:34 +0000

Seeing this on Bob Ippolito’s blog might seem a little odd to many: Rewrote test suite with unittest and doctest (no more nosetest dependency) [From simplejson 1.9] Why on Earth would someone change from nose-style tests to unittest tests? How about so that the library can go into the Python Standard Library? simplejson will be a great addition. Thanks to Bob and the others who are working to get simplejson in!

Twitter Updates for 2008-05-02

Sat, 03 May 2008 03:59:59 +0000

back using Twhirl again. New version of Twhirl, new version of AIR. We’ll see if it’s better # Sorry for any tweets responses that I missed the past couple of weeks while not paying any attention at all to Twitter… # Robyn’s new (to the US at least) album is some awesome pop. # Powered by Twitter Tools.

links for 2008-05-02

Fri, 02 May 2008 09:35:28 +0000

How Dangerous Is the Internet for Children? – Pogueâ€™s Posts – Technology – New York Times Blog Short article with a levelheaded view on the dangers of the internet toward children. Also includes link to a PBS show on that subject. (tags: parenting internet dangers)

Twitter Updates for 2008-05-01

Fri, 02 May 2008 03:59:59 +0000

I’ll be talking about zc.buildout and Paver tonight at MichiPUG. # Powered by Twitter Tools.

Twitter Updates for 2008-04-30

Thu, 01 May 2008 03:59:59 +0000

The gas tax suspension is just one more example of why I’m for Obama. It’s about time someone stood up and said let’s stop with stupid fixes # neat. i just had a use for Python 3.0’s "keyword argument only" feature for functions. of course, i’m not using python 3.0 yet, but still… # Powered by Twitter Tools.

links for 2008-04-29

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 09:34:58 +0000

Coherent JavaScript data binding library based on concepts from Cocoa. I’m personally a fan of this model for making GUIs, and made a similar (never opened) package for Swing in 2004. (tags: databinding javascript library programming)

MichiPUG on Thursday: zc.buildout and Paver

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 15:49:08 +0000

The May Michigan Python Users Group (MichiPUG) meeting is coming up on Thursday, May 1. I’ll be leading discussion on zc.buildout and Paver. Any build/distribution/deployment tool talk is welcome, as well as our usual general talk about Python topics. I hope to see you there!

The Trash of Progress

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 11:22:04 +0000

This past weekend, Best Buy offered free electronic waste recycling. The amount of junk people brought out was amazing: Seeing all of that stuff there and knowing that this is just the Ann Arbor Best Buy really brings it home about just how much of this stuff we all collect and trash. The good thing, though, is that it all ended up here. It will be recycle or at least disposed of properly so that the mercury, lead, etc.

Twitter Updates for 2008-04-26

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 03:59:59 +0000

Bye Loud Twitter. Twitter Tools puts my blog in control of my tweets. Has more features, too. # Powered by Twitter Tools.

Twitter Updates for 2008-04-25

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 03:59:59 +0000

The first hard drive I owned had 5MB of space. SuperDuper says my laptop (which is smaller than that drive was) has 1.1M *files*. # Powered by Twitter Tools.

Free electronic waste recycling in Ann Arbor

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 12:48:09 +0000

For those people who read my blog and happen to live around Ann Arbor, there are two free electronic waste recycling opportunities coming up. Tomorrow (April 28, 2008) from 10am to 4pm at the Best Buy on Lohr Road Saturday May 10 from 9am to 2pm at Pioneer High School Keep that mercury, lead and other nasty stuff out of our landfills by taking your electronic junk to one of these places.

links for 2008-04-25

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 09:37:39 +0000

Available Parking Spots in Ann Arbor (tags: annarbor parking)

Yesterday’s tweets

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 09:05:23 +0000

12:54 SitePenners in Network World and Macworld: tinyurl.com/6eguvf # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

links for 2008-04-24

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 09:38:37 +0000

PHOTOGRAPHY BACKGROUNDS and PHOTO BACKDROPS by Owen’s Originals Many backdrops available for photo and video stuff. (tags: photography backdrops)

Yesterday’s tweets

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 09:04:05 +0000

11:50 Dear Microsoft: when you ask me if I want Silverlight and I say yes, don’t send Silverlight.exe to my Mac. Thanks. # 11:59 @crazybob Alas, if you’re looking for anyone without contradiction (snipers in Bosnia) you’ll need to move to another country. # 14:43 what’s with these people that follow tens of thousands of people on Twitter? # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

Leap (Mac software) is very cool

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 12:15:54 +0000

Based on having looked at and purchased previous MacUpdate and MacHeist bundles, it doesn’t seem like the current MacUpdate bundle is doing quite as well. Maybe it’s because they broke the magic price barrier (charging $64.99 rather than $49.99). It’s funny how prices work that way. It could also be that people aren’t as interested in the software that’s in the bundle. Things might take off once Parallels is unlocked, though.

links for 2008-04-23

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 09:38:59 +0000

Be Good Paul Graham on why starting a business that looks like a non-profit works. (tags: business management motivation) Google Transit launches AATA map service : All Things Ypsilanti â€” YpsiNews.com No real time info yet, but at least it’s a nice and fast UI for planning routes by bus. (tags: google transit annarbor) Free Conference Call, Phone Conferencing, Teleconferences – FreeConferenceCall.

Yesterday’s tweets

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 09:05:47 +0000

12:46 my new project, Paver, is out: www.blueskyonmars.com/projects/paver/ # 21:16 @davewiner CNN projecting Pennsylvania for Clinton now: www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/04/22/pa.primary/index.html # 21:36 My Paver project is already on the second page of search results for "paver" on Google. Not bad! # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

Paver and the building, distribution, deployment etc. of Python projects

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 16:45:48 +0000

This morning, I released a new open source “build tool” aimed at Python projects: Paver. The goal of Paver is to provide a smooth way to script up the management of your Python projects. You can read all about it on the Paver site, but I wanted to provide some background here. Look at all these tools! Python programmers have a great many tools at our disposal. We have tons of libraries that make it so that we don’t have to write lots of code to get our software built.

links for 2008-04-22

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 09:40:03 +0000

Steven Poole: Free your mind Good discussion on future business models for books. (tags: books business copyright drm free publishing money internet)

Doing a demo at Refresh Detroit

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 11:23:32 +0000

This Wednesday, I’ll be at the Refresh Detroit meeting for “demo night”. I’ll be showing off the Dojo and Python-powered user interface for SitePen’s Support service. Hope to see you there!

Yesterday’s tweets

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 09:04:49 +0000

19:18 smithee awards. Woot # 19:19 most ludicrous premise # 19:40 revenge of dr x # 19:40 oblivious # 19:50 wow. Really terrible movies again this year # 19:51 dr. Tarrs torture dungeon looks insane # 20:31 broke my iPhone case. Bummer # 21:36 "if you say we should split up, I’m going to bitchslap you.

links for 2008-04-19

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 09:35:40 +0000

Milliways: Infocom’s Unreleased Sequel to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Waxy.org Complete history with playable prototypes of Infocom’s Restaurant at the End of the Universe game. via daringfireball.net (tags: games history infocom)

links for 2008-04-18

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 09:33:52 +0000

Code Simplicity Â» Complexity and the Wrong Solution “If somebody comes up to you and says something like, â€œHow do I make this pony fly to the moon?â€, the question you need to ask is, â€œWhat problem are you trying to solve?â€ Youâ€™ll find out that they really need to collect gray rocks. Why they thou (tags: programming design)

Yesterday’s tweets

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 09:05:06 +0000

15:06 @837 beats: still hatin’ on timezones. # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

Yesterday’s tweets

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 09:09:02 +0000

09:06 New MacUpdate software bundle that will likely include Parallels! www.mupromo.com/?ref=4759 # 09:34 Me on candidates that lose ground: "They get bitter, they cling to lies or secondary figures or word definitions to deal with frustrations" # 14:13 I don’t like Twitterific popups, and Twhirl keeps appending %00 to URLs. So, now I’m trying Spaz. # 14:13 when there are so many choices, it’s easier to try a different program than file a bug report.

MacUpdate Parallels Bundle

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 13:17:19 +0000

Apparently, it’s Mac software bundle time again. MacHeist has “retail bundle” deal going that is entirely uninteresting to me. I first read about it a few days ago, and it’s since only sold 980 bundles… far less than has been typical for one of their deals. MacUpdate has just released a new bundle that is far more interesting. The Parallels Bundle. They’re being a bit sneaky calling it that, because Parallels is the last app that will be unlocked.

links for 2008-04-16

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 09:37:40 +0000

SitePen Blog Â» Unit Testing Custom Code with the Dojo Objective Harness Dustin talks about using DOH to test code, even code that doesn’t use Dojo. (tags: javascript test)

Yesterday’s tweets

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 09:04:16 +0000

10:28 Why does Twhirl (an AIR app) use Control-Arrow to move between words rather than Option-Arrow on a Mac? That’s just wrong. # 10:28 For anyone considering making AppDrop more viable: take a look at the ZODB. Seriously. It’s a much closer fit for datastore than an RDBMS. # 11:18 isn’t it a bit late to have an HR Block commercial ok the radio? # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

links for 2008-04-15

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 09:40:19 +0000

Random Defense – the game @ itch.com neat little game where you set up towers to defend some area from weird little random graphics. (tags: entertainment games) Photo Matt Â» SecurityFocus SQL Injection Bogus A bunch of great tips for running WordPress securely. (Main tip: stay up to date.) Spotted via daringfireball.net (tags: security wordpress) Download YouTube Videos as MP4 Files (tags: video youtube howto) Exclusive: Google App Engine ported to Amazon’s EC2 – Waxy.

Yesterday’s tweets

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 09:05:03 +0000

10:59 "refactoring" sounds entirely too serious. I’m doing some rejiggering of code right now. # 15:03 @crazybob Yes, Obama could do as he pleased, but the evidence at the time did not support the "rash" war tinyurl.com/2go7wz‘s_Ira … # 15:05 @crazybob sorry, bad link… tinyurl.com/ywvtcv # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

eWeek: SitePen: Passing the Open-Source Torch

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 15:46:02 +0000

eWeek has just posted an article about SitePen: SitePen: Passing the Open-Source Torch Open-source participation helps SitePen amass an all-star team of Web developers. SitePen is full of fantastic people, really. It’s a great example of a business built on the success of open source project leadership and contribution.

Dojo 1.1 is mighty slick

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:47:34 +0000

Alex Russell picked out a few great highlights from the new Dojo 1.1 release and has a nice little essay on open source to boot: I could go on for a long, long time about whatâ€™s great in Dojo 1.1â€¦but Iâ€™ll spare you most of that. James, Pete, Dylan, and the release notes can give you a strong sense of why Dojo 1.1 is the most polished, fastest, and easiest-to-use release of Dojo weâ€™ve ever done.

Amazon preannounces persistent storage for EC2

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 13:34:16 +0000

I don’t know if this preannouncement comes as a result of all of the Google App Engine publicity, but here it is: Amazon Web Services Blog: Storage Space, The Final Frontier. In a nutshell: AWS now lets you create a storage volume of 1GB to 1TB that can be mounted in one EC2 instance and will persist beyond the lifetime of an EC2 instance. As an added bonus, you can have automatic snapshots of your volume plunked into S3.

links for 2008-04-12

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 09:37:47 +0000

Google App Engine for developers The best high level overview (with some details thrown in) of App Engine that I’ve seen. (tags: google appengine) From Al Goreâ€™s Chief Speechwriter: Simple Tips for a Damn Good Presentation (Plus:Â Breakdancing) | The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss good tips on giving presentations. Covers the words and ideas of a talk. (tags: presentation tips writing)

links for 2008-04-11

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 09:40:50 +0000

Battle at Kruger Lions, buffalo and crocodile in an amazing amateur video. (tags: animals youtube video)

Yesterday’s tweets

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 09:05:54 +0000

07:54 @ianlandsman: AOL won’t force Yahoo to run Windows 🙂 # 09:35 just commented on using Vellum as a Capistrano (and Rake)-like tool in Python: tinyurl.com/642xkw # 09:39 @jakemarsh appears to be trying to test Twitter’s limits (he’s following 54,146 people, now including me!) # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

App Engine: I agree with Ian Bicking the Luddite

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 01:17:48 +0000

Isn’t quoting out of context great: I hate computers. [From Ian Bicking: App Engine: Commodity vs. Proprietary] More seriously, though, in saying “I hate computers”, Ian is actually talking about the opposite of being a Luddite. He’s dreaming of a world in which much of computing just works in the background, so that we can spend our time doing more important and interesting things in the foreground. I’m linking to Ian here because he’s said exactly what I have been thinking about App Engine: from a Python programming perspective the APIs are simple and clear.

Yesterday’s tweets

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 09:03:58 +0000

06:59 video I was working on is temporarily on hold. So, it’s off to the other pile of things to do. # 07:58 caught up on blog commenting. whew. time for some real work. # 10:14 Vellum is starting to look interesting. zedshaw.com/projects/vellum/index.html # 15:45 @sillyevar no TurboGears in Google App Engine yet. Lots of Python stdlib not available, so no Mako or Genshi yet. Not to mention minor t … # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

Google App Engine, not really an AWS competitor?

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 11:09:25 +0000

It occurred to me just now that Google App Engine and Amazon Web Services are only barely in competition right now. If you want an infinite storage system like AWS S3 in App Engine, you need to code it yourself (ignoring the preview limits App Engine currently has). If you want to deploy apps as easily as you can with App Engine in AWS, you need a bunch of infrastructure that AWS does not provide.

Google App Engine – big apps for Python folks

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 10:43:35 +0000

Google’s App Engine has been released. This is much cooler than just opening up BigTable for outside access (which is what TechCrunch reported over the weekend). One big difference between App Engine and Amazon Web Services is that the The Development Environment lets you build an app locally, including Google’s auth API and datastore. That’s very clever. You can build up an app completely and then deploy it when ready.

Yesterday’s tweets

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 09:04:49 +0000

13:46 done with meeting. time for some video work! # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

Dear Lazyweb: flipping screen image on Mac

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 01:23:35 +0000

It’s kind of a weird thing to want to do, but I’d like to be able to “flip” the screen image on one of my displays on my Mac, in real time. The Mac lets you rotate the image (in 90 degree increments), but there is no way to make it like an image seen in a mirror. Does anyone know of software that lets you do that?

Rumor: Google To Launch BigTable As Web Service

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 02:12:33 +0000

Interesting rumor, and totally plausible. Just as Amazon has thought “why not make some money off of all of this great infrastructure we’ve built”, it looks like Google is going to do the same thing: Source: Google To Launch BigTable As Web Service Google may be releasing BigTable, its internal database system, as a web service to compete with Amazon SimpleDB, according to a source with knowledge of the launch.

links for 2008-04-05

Sat, 05 Apr 2008 09:35:11 +0000

Brendan’s Roadmap Updates: Popularity Brendan Eich talks about where JavaScript came from. (tags: javascript history) TED | Talks | Larry Lessig: How creativity is being strangled by the law (video) (tags: copyright culture kids presentation ted)

InternetNews – Python Fans Take Aim at the Enterprise

Sat, 05 Apr 2008 01:28:11 +0000

David Goodger, Michael Foord and I talk about Python’s enterpriseyness in InternetNews Realtime IT News â€“ Python Fans Take Aim at the Enterprise After years in the shadows, the open source Python programming language is becoming increasingly mainstream. There are more users and more tools. Backers of Python now argue that Python is ready for the enterprise.

TurboGears Ultimate DVD now online, free at ShowMeDo

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 16:06:26 +0000

In June 2006, I shipped the TurboGears Ultimate DVD, featuring several hours of useful screencast material for TurboGears programmers. I produced the DVD with TurboGears 0.9a6 (or so) code, but much of what is talked about there applies to TurboGears 1.0x users. A big thanks to Ian Oszvald and Kyran Dale for putting the effort into getting 2GB of material transcoded and online: TurboGears Ultimate DVD (TG v1.0) – video tutorials to learn turbogears, web_development, web_framework, python, javascript, web_application, cheeseshop, generic_function, JSON, metaclass, widget, API, sqlalchemy, cherrypy, sqlobject, WSGI

Yesterday’s tweets

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 09:04:25 +0000

09:11 @Hiflyer congrats! just a shame I don’t drink coffee! # 09:18 Trying out Twhirl, so I’m not cross-posting to Pownce # 09:30 let’s try that again. I’m trying out Twhirl, so I’m *now* cross-posting to Pownce # 10:36 michipug tonight… doc tools and easyextend # 13:16 my longest blog post in quite a while: tinyurl.com/3xzn3g # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

Flash, Silverlight and the Open Web

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 17:18:49 +0000

Is an evolution of the Open Web in progress right now? Undoubtedly… I took a look at some of the players in Flash, Silverlight and the Open Web on the SitePen blog.

Yesterday’s tweets

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 09:04:54 +0000

06:59 time for some more blogging # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

links for 2008-04-02

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 09:38:34 +0000

COBOL ON COGS greenscreen in your browser, even (tags: geek humor programming funny) lift developers abandon Scala in favor of Cobol – new name: Heavy Lifting (tags: scala programming humor funny) Helvetica Serif Some things were never meant to be together. (tags: funny humor typography)

Yesterday’s tweets

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 09:04:50 +0000

07:24 finally got my idea from PyCon out the door. still need to get it in the cheeseshop # 12:25 lots o’bloggin’ today. just announced MichiPUG meeting for Thursday # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

MichiPUG meeting on Thursday, April 3

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 16:23:51 +0000

The Michigan Python Users Group (MichiPUG) monthly meeting is coming up on Thursday, April 3. We’ve got two exciting topics for this month’s meeting. The first part is Mark Ramm leading some discussion on documentation tools (including Sphinx). I roped Mark into this because I haven’t yet run Sphinx, but it looks great. He’ll also talk about Idiopidae which Zed Shaw and Mark were hacking on at PyCon. I’ll also lead some discussion and experimentation with EasyExtend, Kay Schluehr’s tool for monkeying with Python’s syntax.

April Fools 2008 on the Web

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 15:11:12 +0000

Gruber wants to be a spoil sport by linking to Your April Fools Day Joke Continues to Suck. While I admit that the old “I changed my stylesheet to someone else’s” joke isn’t that funny any more, I do enjoy the bit of weird stuff that shows up on April 1. Maybe it’s not laugh out loud funny, but it brings a smile to my face, and I’m sure it does the same for others.

Psychotic: optimizing Python compiler

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 11:08:50 +0000

An idea that I had at PyCon has finally come to fruition: introducing Psychotic, a pure Python optimizing compiler that achieves some pretty impressive results. For a new project, Psychotic has a good deal of documentation. There’s also the introductory screencast, which is “lightning talk sized” (under 5 minutes). There’s actually a fuller announcement over at the SitePen blog.

links for 2008-04-01

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 09:38:04 +0000

PC World – Ten Great (but Fake) Tech and Science Videos (tags: humor video) Review Board Nice looking code review tool open sourced by VMware (tags: coding programming review software tools development) Chip Collis: Top 10 Myths Keeping Hillary in the Race – Off The Bus on The Huffington Post (tags: politics obama)

Yesterday’s tweets

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 09:02:08 +0000

22:27 googlecode seems fairly borked right now. # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

Rich UI Webapps with TurboGears 2 and Dojo Screencast

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 17:23:08 +0000

I have recorded a screencast of my PyCon 2008 talk and put the code for the demo app online. Check it out on the SitePen Blog Â» Rich UI Webapps with TurboGears 2 and Dojo Screencast.

Yesterday’s tweets

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 09:06:33 +0000

20:48 fleshing out an idea I had at PyCon. Hope to release within a few days. Release early, release often! # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

Yesterday’s tweets

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 09:02:48 +0000

15:14 just finished recording what I think is a decent screencast of my pycon talk (with minor improvements). now to package up the code # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

Yesterday’s tweets

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 09:04:21 +0000

13:52 time to write a new sqlalchemy migration script. very happy that project is working again # 13:56 hey, even better… i don’t need to do a migration after all. # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

Why Apple is Investing in WebKit Performance

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 13:27:12 +0000

While I don’t have first hand knowledge of why Apple is doing it, I think I’ve got a pretty good idea of Why Apple is Investing in WebKit Performance.

links for 2008-03-25

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 09:24:17 +0000

Internet Radio, Citizen Broadcasting, Social Media Podcasts – Blog Talk Radio This service lets you create a live audio blog show and take up to 5 callers at a time to talk about a subject. It’s free (they get ad revenue, apparently). (tags: audio blogging blog marketing free mobile podcasting phone)

Yesterday’s tweets

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 09:07:54 +0000

21:28 @dpn sqlalchemy is the default with TG2. Mako can be used optionally # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

links for 2008-03-23

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 09:18:50 +0000

Overview â€” Sphinx Documentation Nice looking documentation tool that generates HTML and PDF. Used to generate the Python docs. Keep text in ReStructured Text. (tags: documentation OpenSource python software)

Yesterday’s tweets

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 09:02:54 +0000

21:02 @dpn hmm… database fine now (20 hours later). wonder what was up. # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

My PyCon 2008 report

Sat, 22 Mar 2008 03:28:24 +0000

Some initial thoughts on PyCon 2008 are now up on the SitePen blog.

links for 2008-03-21

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 09:24:17 +0000

KidZui – The Internet for Kids A browser based on whitellists rather than blacklists to provide a safe and clean browsing experience. (tags: browser kids software)

Yesterday’s tweets

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 09:03:50 +0000

12:28 @BryanForbes tinyurl.com/2wp73k is quite a lot of music – probably couldn’t get rights to Nirvana. Who needs a box? just buy songs # 13:28 trying out WingIDE for the first time in a long time. They’ve added cmd-T from TextMate, plus nosetests! # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

Providing support for open source projects

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 16:16:07 +0000

A few days ago I posted a brief blog entry about what Iâ€™ve been working on: SitePen Support (Dojo, DWR, Cometd) We finished the work for the initial launch of this service immediately before I left for PyCon, so I didn’t have a chance to properly blog about it. Getting SitePen Support going has been my primary task in the time since I joined SitePen, so I’m anxious to write about it now that it’s public.

TurboGears looking for Google SoC Students!

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 11:19:01 +0000

TurboGears has been accepted as a Google Summer of Code organization. Chris Arndt has put together a page at docs.turbogears.org to pull together all of the TG Summer of Code information. Congrats to Chris and the others for pulling together this year’s Summer of Code effort for TG! Next week is signup time for students (March 24-31), so if you’re interested in getting paid to work on TurboGears this summer, check out the TG SoC info page.

links for 2008-03-20

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 09:25:59 +0000

Taffy DB : Getting Started with your first bite of Taffy Little client-side “database”, basically a way to structure, update and get at data for your client-driven apps. (tags: javascript database programming)

Yesterday’s tweets

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 09:03:32 +0000

13:52 time for some blogging… first up, about the new Support service that I’ve been working on # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

links for 2008-03-19

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 09:22:53 +0000

Dropbox – Home – Secure backup, sync and sharing made easy. Wow. Awesome screencast showing off this service that lets you easily move files between computers (and have backups at the same time). (tags: backup collaboration mac productivity software storage sync windows)

Yesterday’s tweets

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 09:08:19 +0000

12:54 finally reached inbox zero # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

The Constitution is there to restrict the government

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 13:39:57 +0000

This is on CNN: Attorney: DNC violates Constitution: Steinberg argued that the 14th Amendment, which bars states from denying individuals equal protection under the law, should prohibit the DNC from creating rules that make the votes of the residents of those four states “paramount to the rights of the voters in Florida.” I am not a lawyer (Steinberg is), but this seems so obviously wrong. Steinberg must be a publicity-hunting Clinton supporter.

Yesterday’s tweets

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 09:03:12 +0000

17:24 @pycon I’m on the train to union station. Had a good time. See you all next year. # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

What I’ve been working on: SitePen Support (Dojo, DWR, Cometd)

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 17:34:42 +0000

I’m at PyCon right now and don’t have much time to blog (I really try to maximize my limited conference time). But, I can’t go without bringing attention to: SitePen Blog Â» Commercial Support Now Available from the Co-Creators and Contributors of the Dojo Toolkit, DWR, and Cometd, because this is what I’ve been working on lately. SitePen Support is the first “product” that I’ve worked on at SitePen (services can be products, too).

Yesterday’s tweets

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 09:03:15 +0000

18:54 haufe.eggserver sounds interesting for reliable and private deployment. Needs some kind of auth. # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

Yesterday’s tweets

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 09:05:59 +0000

07:50 that i’ve been using zc.buildout a lot, virtualenv just saved my system’s python from getting all messy # 13:16 on the train to pycon. Woo woo! # 15:31 still on train, still finishing presentation. Oh, is that tomorrow? 🙂 # 19:21 on the el train to the hotel. Finished my presentation on amtrak. Woot # 19:34 my talk has python, javascript, dojo, comet, turbogears and a brief look at the service we launched yesterday.

links for 2008-03-12

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 09:28:45 +0000

Scamming the Scammers: 5 Brilliant Reverse 419 Scams at OddOrama (tags: funny humor internet culture)

Yesterday’s tweets

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 09:02:01 +0000

21:22 busy time. new product launching and a talk coming up on Friday (see you at PyCon!) # 22:34 learning how to make a dojo widget using the django template language # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

links for 2008-03-09

Sun, 09 Mar 2008 09:18:31 +0000

Bloxes nifty blocks for building dividers, walls, etc (tags: cardboard cool furniture organization make)

links for 2008-03-08

Sat, 08 Mar 2008 09:23:42 +0000

Qpy Provides an HTML quoted string type that’s a subclass of Python’s unicode type. Nice solution to ensuring that you’re not leaving yourself open to XSS attacks. (tags: development python templates web)

Wait… who won in Texas?

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 14:03:31 +0000

Clinton has been widely touted as having won in Texas, Ohio and Rhode Island. But, they’re not done counting yet. Texas awards 126 delegates via the primary and another 67 via caucuses. It’s a weird system, and one can legitimately claim that Clinton won the primaries (65 delegates to 61). But, by the latest count, Obama is leading the caucuses by 56% percent. If that percentage holds, the final delegate count in Texas will be 98 for Obama and 95 for Clinton.

Yesterday’s tweets

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 10:03:34 +0000

15:28 iphone SDK sounds great. # 16:10 not surprised that Apple’s SDK site is entirely hosed. I briefly saw the page that mentions the options. # 16:32 Iphone sdk does not include beta firmware. So you can build cool apps that you can only play with in the emulator. # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

links for 2008-03-07

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 09:25:27 +0000

Punakea | nudge:nudge Free tool for tagging your files in OS X (the tags are Spotlight searchable) (tags: macosx organization productivity software free freeware tagging tags) Steripen portable water purifier 1 minute to kill off the baddies in a quart of water. Can be solar charged, too. (tags: camping equipment water)

Yesterday’s tweets

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 10:04:25 +0000

11:32 wow. IE8 sounds like a big improvement. even steals Safari’s web clips # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

links for 2008-03-06

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 09:22:58 +0000

Hillaryâ€™s Math Problem | Newsweek Politics: Campaign 2008 | Newsweek.com Obama’s pledged delegate lead is hard to overcome, and it’s unlikely that Hillary will. Will the superdelegates vote with the voters, or will they go their own way and vote for Hillary? (tags: politics obama) 1000 True Fans Kevin Kelly has written a great article about making a living in the long tail by going after 1000 true fans.

links for 2008-03-05

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 09:23:59 +0000

Dojo Campus Free online learning resource for Dojo. (tags: ajax dojo javascript web2.0)

Audiobooks without DRM

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 17:17:35 +0000

Surprise! â€œOur feeling is that D.R.M. is not actually doing anything to prevent piracy,â€ said Ms. McIntosh of Random House Audio. [From Publishers Phase Out Piracy Protection on Audio Books – New York Times] What’s funny about the music industry and now the publishing industry taking these steps away from DRM is that this has all been done before! You don’t need to look any further than what happened with copy protected software… and things that you really want to take with you (like music, audiobooks and now movies) are even more likely to suffer from the problems people disliked about copy protected software.

links for 2008-03-04

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 09:27:50 +0000

OAuth â€” An open protocol to allow secure API authentication in a simple and standard method from desktop and web applications. (tags: authentication oauth programming web)

MichiPUG meeting: Nose by Jason Pellerin

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 02:40:22 +0000

Jason Pellerin is going to be giving a talk about his Nose testing tool at the Michigan Python Users Group (MichiPUG). I’ve been a Nose users since the very beginning, so I’m happy that Jason himself is giving a talk on it. As usual, the meeting is on the first Thursday of the month (March 6th, in this case) at 7PM. Meetings are always free. And, as has been the case the past several months, SRT Solutions is going to be hosting the meeting at their perfect downtown Ann Arbor location.

links for 2008-02-29

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 09:26:34 +0000

Welcome to Google Sites JotSpot reborn. Looks cool. (tags: google collaboration web wiki)

links for 2008-02-28

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 09:29:01 +0000

Senator Clinton’s “Million Little Pieces” moment. – Here Comes Everybody “Senator Clinton’s campaign has launched one of the oddest bits of political propaganda in the history of modern politics”. A new website tries to convince super delegates that they should vote for Hillary despite the fact that many more people want Obama (tags: politics)

Refresh Detroit JavaScript Library Techniques meeting

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 02:08:17 +0000

I’m just back from attending this meeting: [ Refresh Detroit Â» February 27, 2008 Meeting: JavaScript Library Techniques, Tips and Tricks]1. Part of the abstract: The advent and popularity of JavaScript libraries has caused front-end programming paradigms to change drastically. Design patterns are emerging, object-oriented concepts are common place, and the line between client-side scripting and server-side scripting is beginning to blur. The talk was given by Brian Reindel of Niche Retail.

A Google Buying Opportunity?

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 13:17:24 +0000

The NYTimes is reporting that Google is losing altitude as their “clicks go flat”. Investors nailed the stock 4.6 percent yesterday on word that ComScore thinks that Google’s click throughs on ads were flat between January 2007 and January 2008. Two analysts are quoted in the article as saying that Google’s problems are self-inflicted (or at least half self-inflicted). From the article: Mr. Cleland said the most recent quarter, when Googleâ€™s revenue grew at 51 percent while profit rose only 17 percent, was the latest sign that the company was overspending.

Yesterday’s tweets

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 10:05:02 +0000

21:23 funny… trying to watch the debate live on msnbc.com. debate doesn’t work, but the commercials come up fine # 21:26 @hiflyer mentioned in the NYTimes, no less! # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

Adobe AIR out, who will use it?

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 15:47:37 +0000

Yesterday, Adobe shipped AIR 1.0, an open source toolkit and runtime for creating desktop apps using web technologies. For a time there, I really wondered why someone would want AIR, rather than just building a normal webapp that runs from the server. I can now think of four reasons: offline – This one is obvious. AIR is a Google Gears competitor as a way to take a webapp offline. performance – Rather than relying on the browsers’ caching behavior to make parts of your software load snappily, just ship the whole app to the user so that the whole thing is local as they navigate.

Snowy Morning

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 15:25:52 +0000

This time of year is when I start thinking that moving to Hawai’i would be nice. It’s often very cold and grey and it’s been going on for too long by now. That said, I do like these mornings when everything is covered in fresh snow. The view out of my home office window:

links for 2008-02-26

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 09:24:13 +0000

New screen cleaner (tags: humor video funny)

links for 2008-02-25

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 09:24:29 +0000

VTD-XML “The Future of XML Processing” Interesting approach to handling XML documents. Claims to be much faster and more memory efficient than DOM (with similar benefits) and even faster than SAX to boot. (tags: xml xpath WebServices)

links for 2008-02-23

Sat, 23 Feb 2008 09:27:40 +0000

Repair or replace your broken appliance? – Green Living Online Good tips on the repair/replace question that comes up as appliances get older. Our house turns 10 this year, so we’ll have to start thinking about these things soon enough. (tags: appliances energy efficiency repair)

Change Congress

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 17:11:18 +0000

When there’s a long tradition for something and a lot of money behind keeping that tradition alive, it becomes very easy to say “that’s just how it is” and continue on your merry way. Change is hard, but you’ve got to start somewhere. Larry Lessig wants to start some change. Specifically, he thinks that the current mode of operation in Congress is a little too beholden to business-backed lobbyists, and there’s evidence of that all over the place in the law books.

links for 2008-02-19

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 09:28:03 +0000

ies4osx Here’s a project that takes IE and bundles it up for running on the Mac with Wine. Wild. (tags: ie macosx mac programming testing)

links for 2008-02-18

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 09:22:48 +0000

Nutrition facts, calories in food, labels, nutritional information and analysis This site appears to have very detailed views of how nutritious any given food is on a variety of axes. (tags: food health statistics)

links for 2008-02-15

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 09:27:04 +0000

Running Multiple Firefoxes John Resig talks about a few Firefox 3 related things, but he also gives the command line (just run firefox -ProfileManager) for being able to sanely run multiple firefoxen. (tags: firefox) HEMA – online winkelen The coolest product display page you’re going to see this week. (tags: advertising animation marketing shop flash) The Bureau of Communication – Fill-in-the-blank Correspondence (tags: funny humor) 9 Practical Ways to Enhance your Web Development Using the Firefox Web Developer Extension | Six Revisions : Web Development and Design Blog (tags: design webdesign html javascript css development extension firefox) Vara Software : ScreenFlow New screencasting software for OS X Leopard.

Can Borders’ new concept store push toward a brick-and-mortar future?

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 20:38:58 +0000

I haven’t been there yet (it just opened today), but Borders has just opened their first new “concept” store right around the corner from my house. Eighteen months in development, this store is out to change Borders’ future prospects and help stop the losses. At this point, it’s unclear to me what bookstores will look like in 10 years. The Kindle, while certainly not perfect, is a glimpse of a more paperless future that I think will come to pass at some point.

links for 2008-02-13

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 09:29:46 +0000

Trent Reznor: Why won’t people pay $5? | Tech news blog – CNET News.com Big-name musicians are starting to seriously experiment with new business models now. Trent was disheartened by having only 20% of downloaders pay for the new music he’s put out there. (tags: music business) Unlike Trent Reznor, Saul Williams isn’t disheartened | Tech news blog – CNET News.com Saul Williams’ take on his album release with Trent.

links for 2008-02-09

Sat, 09 Feb 2008 09:43:13 +0000

Wil Shipley on Hype Delicious Monster had nothing if not hype. This is an 90 minute talk, so i’ll have to watch this later. (tags: marketing software video) Currency Exchange Rates via RSS (tags: finance money rss forex)

Cobra programming language

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 17:18:35 +0000

So, we’ve got Jython and IronPython as Python language reimplementations. There’s also Boo, which is clearly heavily inspired by Python but has some interesting extensions (static typing, for example). I just came across Cobra. Cobra, like Boo, is built on the .NET platform. The syntax is clearly inspired by Python, which I consider a good thing. In keeping line noise to a minimum, Cobra even ditches the “:” at the end of the line preceding a block of code.

Yesterday’s tweets

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 10:02:42 +0000

20:58 when was the last time you implemented binary search? # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

links for 2008-02-08

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 09:28:52 +0000

Metalua I’ve never used Lua, but the meta programming facility is pretty cool. (tags: lua programming)

Yesterday’s tweets

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 10:04:17 +0000

12:37 111111111 * 111111111 = 12345678987654321 # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

links for 2008-02-07

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 09:25:18 +0000

Growing algae in 3D (energy! oxygen!) This video is not 3D, but describes a way to grow algae in 3 dimensions. This allows you to remove more CO2 from the air and to generate oil, lots more than with corn or palm. (tags: energy globalwarming)

Yesterday’s tweets

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 10:04:30 +0000

17:14 McCain supporters back Huckabee in WV. Huckabee defeats Romney. Be kind of funny if that happened everywhere. # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

links for 2008-02-06

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 09:22:01 +0000

You Suck at Photoshop, Hilarious Tutorials by Donnie Hoyle | I gotta keep this in mind for my videos 🙂 (tags: funny graphics design howto photoshop tutorial screencast video humor) 20 minutes or so on why I am 4Barack (Lessig Blog) Lessig gives a nice presentation on Obama (a good view if you’re on the fence between Clinton and Obama). Also shows off good “lack of bullet points” style (tags: politics obama)

Yesterday’s tweets

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 10:05:37 +0000

09:43 interesting. The #2 song in the iTMS is “New Soul” by Yael Naim… the MacBook Air song. # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

links for 2008-02-05

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 09:28:45 +0000

Geonames web service Pass in a bounding box and get back a list of cities. Cool! (tags: WebServices programming) Cython: C-Extensions for Python A Pyrex spinoff that implements a bunch of features for intermingling C and Python, both for access to extension modules and for performance. (tags: python profiling programming extension pyrex cython) EE – Extension languages for Python a library for making external domain specific languages in Python.

links for 2008-02-04

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 09:30:54 +0000

Kevin Kelly — Better than Free An excellent article describing, at the highest level, how people can make money even in a world where digital copies are free. (tags: business marketing money publishing)

Obama for President

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 02:13:56 +0000

I couple of days ago, I added the spiffy Obama badge on the right hand side of my blog. If I were Dave Barry, I’d write about how “this blog” is endorsing Obama. But, I’m not Dave Barry. I’m endorsing Obama for President. He’s on the right side of technical issues, he’s got good ideas for a number of other issues and he comes across as one with real integrity, which is something our government can use at this point.

Yesterday’s tweets

Sat, 02 Feb 2008 10:02:01 +0000

07:08 @whiprush the bandwidth usage is a sign that AWS is worth AMZN investment. They get paid for bandwidth use! # 07:38 1Password can now fill in login forms on the iPhone! # 11:08 6-10 inches of snow seems to have turned into 3 tops # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

links for 2008-02-02

Sat, 02 Feb 2008 09:20:26 +0000

Valued Lessons: Monads in Python (with nice syntax!) (tags: python monads development programming) Of monads and spacesuits Tutorial showing the value of monads. (tags: monads programming development) Da Vinci Machine Project A project to make the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) more friendly to dynamic languages. Hear hear! (tags: development OpenSource programming jvm)

MSFT offers to buy YHOO, the geeks cringe

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 12:45:07 +0000

This morning, Microsoft offered $44 billion to buy Yahoo!. Years ago, Microsoft bought HotMail. At the time, HotMail’s servers were all running FreeBSD. Somewhere along the way, the transitioned all of HotMail’s servers over to Windows. What would it do to Yahoo!’s tech culture to make a complete shift to Windows? I can’t imagine it would be good.

1Password gets iPhone login support

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 12:39:04 +0000

Taking advantage of the fact that bookmarklets can be just about any length, the new version of 1Password can now fill in forms with your login information on your iPhone. This is in addition to 1Password’s previous mechanism for passing along your 1Password data in a secure bookmarklet. For the security minded out there, 1Password stores your passwords in encrypted form in the bookmarklet. The decryption code is written in JavaScript that runs on the phone and you have to type in an access code that you set up.

Yesterday’s tweets

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 10:04:30 +0000

21:51 Amazon Web Services customers use more bandwidth than Amazon.com. # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

links for 2008-02-01

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 09:29:39 +0000

8 Web Design Mistakes That Developers Make Good tips and links to help developers pay better attention to design. (tags: design webdesign tips)

links for 2008-01-30

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 09:29:14 +0000

What Our Top Spy Doesn’t Get: Security and Privacy Aren’t Opposites Schneier reframes the debate from security vs. privacy to control vs. liberty. This is another good article to point people to if they’re making the argument that we need to sacrifice our liberties for our security. (tags: politics privacy schneier security liberty control) Fluxx card game review Fluxx looks like an interesting game.

Yesterday’s tweets

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 10:07:13 +0000

07:12 @BryanForbes congrats! # 11:13 @sillyevar Rands would call you laptop larry 🙂 # 11:32 Nokia buys Trolltech for $153 million… that and MySQL make a pretty good couple of weeks for open source business. # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

links for 2008-01-29

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 09:30:29 +0000

Relax Like A Pro: 5 Steps to Hacking Your Sleep | The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss I don’t know about “ice baths”, but there are other interesting tips in Tim Ferriss’ post and the comments that follow about manipulating your sleep. (tags: lifehacks health sleep) iVideosongs: We’ll teach you how to play a complete song Looks like a nice site.

links for 2008-01-26

Sat, 26 Jan 2008 09:22:10 +0000

Trellis – The PEAK Developers’ Center I don’t think I had noticed how far this library of Philip Eby has come. Trellis lets you wire up the relationships between things (kind of like a spreadsheet knows the relationships between cells) and then have everything stay in sync automatically. (tags: python programming) Top 15 Amazing Coincidences – The List Universe Not sure if they’re all true (at least some are), but they’re all interesting!

Yesterday’s tweets

Fri, 25 Jan 2008 10:10:29 +0000

14:13 hey, lookie there… premature optimization is still the root of all evil! # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

links for 2008-01-25

Fri, 25 Jan 2008 09:24:42 +0000

The Dilbert Blog: The Hit Song You Wrote A few days back, Scott Adams talked about how many songs have complete nonsense for lyrics. He asked his loyal readers to toss forth some drivel for a song. Remarkably, the band Rivo Drei actually went and recorded it. You must check it out. (tags: funny music) YouTube – Richard Hammond presents Bloody Omaha (The Graphics) Amazing work recreating a battle with very few resources.

links for 2008-01-24

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 09:24:09 +0000

Last.fm â€“ the Blog Â· Free the Music Last.fm can now play any song and even full albums from all of the major labels. (tags: cool music free) Macworld | Creative Notes | Creative resources on the Web A useful collection of sites that help online creative work. (tags: design web) Rogue Amoeba – Under The Microscope last.

Aptana Jaxer bridges the client and server

Wed, 23 Jan 2008 12:03:47 +0000

I believe that we’re going to see some significant post-Rails server side web tools developments this year. TurboGears and Django were both never “Rails clones” because of their history and where they came from. But, all three promote a fairly similar idea of webapps are put together on the server. Last month, AppJet provided a look at something different. It combined transparent persistence and, importantly, a seamless ability to run code on both the client and server.

links for 2008-01-23

Wed, 23 Jan 2008 09:25:28 +0000

Roxer – The easiest way to make a web page Interesting Dojo-based UI that lets you move “boxes” of content around on the page. Very simple to use… I wish I could run this on my own server… (tags: web webdesign) Eloquent JavaScript Nice online book about JavaScript with an excellent UI for running examples. (tags: book ajax webdev free programming javascript)

MacHeist: even more stuff

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 14:05:42 +0000

MacHeist has caught some flak in the past for selling indie Mac developer wares at a price that’s too low (by some reckonings, see below). On the other hand, those developers are choosing to become part of the promotion and MacHeist raises money for charity. This go around, they’ve raised more than $320,000. I bought the heist primarily for PixelMator and 1password, though I’ve also found that I enjoy CoverSutra.

Yesterday’s tweets

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 10:04:05 +0000

14:12 talk about separation of concerns… no presentation at all on the server side. # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

links for 2008-01-22

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 09:24:55 +0000

Get Paid to Write Online: Mentoring For Freelance Writers Not that I’m likely to want to do these things, but it’s interesting nonetheless. (tags: blogging writing marketing) Michael Stelzner’s Writing White Papers (tags: blog marketing writing)

Yesterday’s tweets

Sat, 19 Jan 2008 10:02:34 +0000

13:40 creating a new web framework. you can never have too many. # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

links for 2008-01-19

Sat, 19 Jan 2008 09:19:08 +0000

Disqus Another hosted solution for adding comments to a site. Can be used in place of WordPress’ built-in comment system. Provides general forums (and comments are just an extension of that) (tags: blog blogging wordpress comments)

When something goes missing, you realize how much you use it

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 15:25:15 +0000

Like, say, the Python Cheeseshop. I’ve been using Python eggs extensively since mid-2005 and have grown used to how easy it is to easy_install “random package”. Lately, I’ve been using zc.buildout to get entire environments set up, and it’s Cheeseshop dependent in the same way that easy_install is. Thanks to everyone who’s been involved with coding and running the Cheeseshop. It’s a great resource! Now can we have it back, please?

Yesterday’s tweets

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 10:02:58 +0000

08:22 screencasting time. better turn off Twitterific # 10:10 note to self: it’s best to tell Snapz to record the microphone if I actually want sound # 12:40 working on secret new product # 15:52 i love how hg uses FileMerge on the mac # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

links for 2008-01-18

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 09:24:31 +0000

How To Set an Apple Touch Icon for Any Site â€” All in the head Includes a handy bookmarklet for setting a custom icon. (tags: apple iphone webclips)

More about concurrency and non-relational DBs

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 20:58:45 +0000

My first blog entry just went up over on the SitePen blog. I expanded on two topics from CodeMash: concurrency and non-relational databases. If you read my brain dump on here a couple days ago, you might want to check out the SitePen entry if those two topics interest you. codemash, concurrency, dbms

Yesterday’s tweets

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 10:01:40 +0000

08:16 writing my first blog post for the SitePen blog # 15:35 dijit.form.DropDownButton is almost magical in the way it handles its contents. So easy!\ # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

links for 2008-01-17

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 09:27:03 +0000

Sun Microsystems Announces Agreement to Acquire MySQL, Developer of the World’s Most Popular Open Source Database Interesting news. (tags: business mysql)

Is AppleTV accounted for as a subscription product?

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 01:35:54 +0000

Somewhere along the way, Apple mentioned that iPhone sales are accounted for on a subscription basis. Apparently, their lawyers believe that they have to charge for new features if something is not sold on a subscription basis. Besides, Apple reportedly makes $18 per month per iPhone (that’s up to $72 million per month… not a bad little revenue stream!) OK, so that explains why Apple continues and will continue to push out new features for the iPhone for free.

Yesterday’s tweets

Wed, 16 Jan 2008 10:04:18 +0000

12:52 does anyone else think it strange that aapl charges $20 to upgrade ipod touch to the apps it should’ve had originally? # 14:43 the iphone update server could not be contacted # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

links for 2008-01-16

Wed, 16 Jan 2008 09:27:34 +0000

XSTM – Object Replication for Java, .NET & GWT “Shared Objects” for Java, and also for web browsers via GWT. If an object is shared, its state is synchronized between the systems sharing the object. (tags: java library clustering memory ajax) Podbean – Free Podcast Hosting, Searching and Subscription, Audio Video Blog Hosting (tags: podcasting)

CodeMash 2008 brain dump (summary: you should come in 2009!)

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 19:04:19 +0000

I spoke at CodeMash for a second year in a row. I think this year’s conference was even better than last year’s, particularly for me because I was only able to attend for one day last year. It’s a shame that CodeMash has such regional attendance, because where else do you find a conference with talks on C#, LINQ, Silverlight, Python (3 talks!), Rails, Dojo, Concurrency in Java and more?

links for 2008-01-15

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 09:30:20 +0000

Welcome to Pig! Pig Latin language and code for easily specifying parallel jobs and running them with Hadoop. (tags: apache Analytics cluster database OpenSource parallel programming software)

Blogging with ecto

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 19:04:27 +0000

Blue Sky On Mars has been around for six and a half years now. For the first time in all of that time, I’ve started blogging with a desktop client (ecto). Ecto is not perfect, but so far this seems like a really nice way to work. I particularly like how easy it is to include images (with automatic resizing and everything). WordPress makes it fairly easy now, but you still need to have the file on disk which is one more step away from what I get with Ecto.

links for 2008-01-14

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 09:23:46 +0000

MetaDeveloper: 13.75 hours, CodeMash Positive review from David Seruyange for my CodeMash talks. Thanks, David, for attending and for the comments! (tags: codemash)

Does $1 hosting matter?

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 03:06:31 +0000

Back when I was in the thick of my involvement with TurboGears, I remember seeing an email from someone complaining that, unlike with PHP apps, TurboGears apps cuoldn’t be hosted on $1 per month hosting accounts. While I was always interested in seeing TG apps on inexpensive shared hosts, I had no expectation that people could host TG apps for $1 per month. And, frankly, I don’t think I care about that.

links for 2008-01-13

Sun, 13 Jan 2008 09:21:59 +0000

Practical Common Lisp Free book online (published by Apress) (tags: books programming lisp) toledoblade.com — Recruiters buzz software designers in Sandusky I got a small mention in this article in the Toledo Blade. (tags: codemash)

links for 2008-01-12

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 09:25:37 +0000

Macworld | Amazon MP3 to add Sony BMG music OK, so it looks like Sony BMG is not just distributing MP3 format songs via stupid cards you buy from Best Buy. That is indeed a good move on their part. (tags: amazon mp3 music)

links for 2008-01-11

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 09:27:34 +0000

Continuing Intermittent Incoherency Â» How IE Mangles The Design Of JavaScript Libraries Alex enumerates several places where IE makes JavaScript (and JavaScript toolkits) way harder than they should be. (tags: javascript programming ie)

Yesterday’s tweets

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 10:03:33 +0000

07:42 finishing up CodeMash talks. Gee, is that tomorrow? # 11:39 going offline a bit for lunch, etc. before heading to CodeMash # 19:47 codemash panel discussion # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

links for 2008-01-10

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 09:26:57 +0000

MySpace.com – Morning Society – Minneapolis, Minnesota – Progressive / Electronica / Rock – www.myspace.com/morningsociety My coworker Tom Trenka’s band. Tom can apparently play in all time signatures — at the same time 🙂 (tags: music) GForge Collaborative Development Environment CDE: Welcome project tracking system (like a private sourceforge) (tags: groupware subversion OpenSource management)

New MacHeist: PixelMator, Snapz Pro X

Wed, 09 Jan 2008 12:40:05 +0000

MacHeist is back with a new MacHeist Bundle. For people not familiar with MacHeist (or similar), they take a bunch of indie Mac developer apps and put ’em together for cheap ($49). I’ve been eyeing 1password for its iPhone support, which will undoubtedly be better when the iPhone SDK comes out. AppZapper sounds useful. The others, I’m less sure about… until you get to the ones that need unlocking. Snapz Pro X, which I don’t need because I already own and use it for screencasting, is a great tool.

Bill Gates’ Last Day

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 13:40:16 +0000

A video pre-enactment of billg’s last day at Microsoft (as seen at CES 2008): This is awfully funny with a good selection of cameos.

links for 2008-01-07

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 09:29:41 +0000

How to Afford Anything (tags: finance howto lifehacks management money)

links for 2008-01-06

Sun, 06 Jan 2008 09:27:16 +0000

53 CSS-Techniques You Couldnâ€™t Live Without | CSS | Smashing Magazine (tags: css design webdesign)

Yesterday’s tweets

Sat, 05 Jan 2008 10:01:51 +0000

06:54 interesting. LoudTwitter has magically started working again. # 06:54 actually, it’s not magic… i logged in a couple days ago and fixed the URL which was somehow missing. # 08:36 just took a quick look at Circus Ponies NoteBook. Nice looking app, but I’ll stick with DEVONThink # 15:26 My “Presentation Zen” just arrived. Likely the only presentation book you’d need. # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

links for 2008-01-05

Sat, 05 Jan 2008 09:26:44 +0000

United State of Pop mashup of the top 25 songs (according to Billboard) of 2007. How did DJ Earworm get all of the vocals without backing music? Or can you really strip out backing music that well today? (tags: mp3 mashup 2007 music djearworm mashups pop) Amazon.com: Audio Mashup Construction Kit: ExtremeTech: Books: Jordan “DJ Earworm” Roseman Well, *this* explains how DJ Earworm gets the vocals out from a track.

Just because we’re always changing doesn’t mean we shouldn’t

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 16:36:22 +0000

Bruce Eckel is recommending that the Java language should be declared “stable” and left as is, rather than grafting on features that don’t fit well (particularly in the face of maintaining backwards compatibility). See: Java: Evolutionary Dead End. I agree with Bruce. As long as a high-degree of backwards compatibility is required, adding language features to Java will be clumsy at best. ECMAScript has the same backwards compatibility with forward movement challenges, but the language is much more flexible at its base, so I think ES4 can be a more successful evolution than Java 5 was.

Stupid lawsuit of the day: alleging monopoly practices for the iPod

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 16:04:50 +0000

Macworld | Apple music monopoly lawsuit seeks class-action status It alleges that Apple has constricted the market by not enabling iPods to play content in the Windows Media Audio (WMA) format, Microsoft’s copy-protection technology. Further, Apple sells songs on the iTunes store with its own copy-protection technology, FairPlay, which is incompatible with music players other than the iPod. The suit contends iPod-owning consumers can only buy music from iTunes, an unlawful tie-in that violates U.

Yesterday’s tweets

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 10:02:52 +0000

20:10 at MichiPUG meeting, talking about Django # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

links for 2008-01-04

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 09:30:40 +0000

CouchDB to be Apache licensed CouchDB is now going to be available for commercial use, as its author Damien Katz is now being paid to work on it full-time by IBM. (tags: apache couchdb web programming) Ecmascript 4.0 â†’ Classic Javascript translator JavaScript code that runs in the browser that translates ECMAScript 4 (JavaScript 2) to something current browsers can understand.

Yesterday’s tweets

Thu, 03 Jan 2008 10:03:55 +0000

07:00 why can’t twitter post to my blog directly? # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

links for 2008-01-03

Thu, 03 Jan 2008 09:25:13 +0000

Fluid – Free Site Specific Browser for Mac OS X Leopard Turn any website into a little Mac app. What’s interesting is that I find that I don’t have sites that I keep open all the time. (tags: fluid singlesite web browser) JavaScript: It’s Just Not Validation! [JavaScript & AJAX Tutorials] Interesting. I wrote a proof of concept of serverclient validation in September.

Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull (2008)

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 14:03:25 +0000

Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull (2008) Originally uploaded by Rockyblizzard Regardless of whether the movie is good, May 22nd is going to produce some big box office for this one.

links for 2007-12-31

Mon, 31 Dec 2007 09:23:10 +0000

Seth Godin, Marketing Action Figure Now we’ve seen everything. (tags: marketing toys funny) Choosing a Distributed Version Control System – Dave Dribin’s Blog Nice little article talking about making a move to a DVCS and Git, Mercurial and Bazaar in particular. He barely gets into it, but I think Mercurial’s superior branching/merging is a big reason to move from svn. (tags: coding distributed dvcs hg subversion svn versioncontrol mercurial) Why I Chose Mercurial – Dave Dribin’s Blog Follow-up to Dave’s post about DVCSs, in which he explains why he chose Mercurial.

links for 2007-12-29

Sat, 29 Dec 2007 09:27:38 +0000

Er.js: Erlang-in-JavaScript Interesting approach to async operations in JS (tags: concurrency javascript library programming webdev development erlang) Gluon Enterprise Web Framework A fairly new entrant in the Python web scene, this has some interesting ideas for very concise programming. (tags: python web framework orm programming development database)

links for 2007-12-23

Sun, 23 Dec 2007 09:22:07 +0000

Mininova Launches Content Distribution Service | TorrentFreak Free content distribution via BitToreent (very easy with free seeding) (tags: business web2.0 bittorrent mininova)

links for 2007-12-22

Sat, 22 Dec 2007 09:22:23 +0000

Medical myths — Vreeman and Carroll 335 (7633): 1288 — BMJ Debunking 7 common medical myths. (tags: health urbanlegends myths)

Millions of lines of code

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 15:36:46 +0000

Steve Yegge attracts some attention with Code’s Worst Enemy, in which he uses many, many words to say that “big, bloated software sucks to maintain”. He talks about a 500,000 line Java-based game that he wrote that is unmanageable. Though he’s railing against code bloat in general, he does rant a bit about Java in particular. I’ll come back to Java… First off, I agree with the basic idea that having too much code to manage in a single conceptual unit (a program) makes life very difficult.

links for 2007-12-20

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 09:31:47 +0000

‘The Hobbit’ is a go with Peter Jackson | Movie Biz, The Hobbit | Hollywood Insider | EW.com New Line and Peter Jackson have made up, and now Peter Jackson is going to be making The Hobbit. That’s not too surprising, given his huge success with LOTR. Interesting added bonus: he’s making *two* movies of The Hobbit, including a new original story t (tags: lotr hobbit tolkien peterjackson movies entertainment)

links for 2007-12-19

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 09:23:04 +0000

Oracle Berkeley DB Java Edition I didn’t realize this, but Oracle liberalized the license for Berkeley DB after buying Sleepycat. BDB JE offers transparent persistence for Java objects, which is pretty cool (I wonder how well it works/can be made to work with Scala?) The license is BSD- (tags: database java persistence opensource berkeleydb)

The eBay “Just Sold” Scam

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 02:45:31 +0000

Today, I nearly fell prey to a phishing scam. I am totally not the kind of person who falls for phishers, but this was a wild one. I was selling my PowerBook G4 12″ on eBay and the auction ended today. As usual, the bidding intensified at the end, but a winner was declared at a price I was happy with. A short time later, I received an email from eBay saying that a payment has been made and giving me a link for the details.

links for 2007-12-18

Tue, 18 Dec 2007 09:27:22 +0000

Apydia – Python API Reference Documentation Generator (tags: python documentation)

More auctions: PowerBook 12″, iPod nano, Edirol UA-5, more…

Sun, 16 Dec 2007 01:06:59 +0000

I’m nearly done revamping my office/music studio in hopes that I will actually have some time to play/make music when I finish all of this. Ending tomorrow, I have an Edirol UA-5 USB audio interface, a 2GB iPod nano and a Yamaha QY-70 portable music making gizmo. The QY-70 is basically a little battery powered synth and sequencer. Ending later in the week: my PowerBook G4 12″, which is a great little laptop.

Climate deal in Bali?

Sat, 15 Dec 2007 17:25:33 +0000

More often than not, politics can be annoying… So, a bunch of people finished a big meeting in Bali about climate change and how to deal with it. How did they do? “This is a real breakthrough, a real opportunity for the international community to successfully fight climate change,” said Indonesian Environment Minister Rachmat Witoelar, who served as conference president, at the conclusion of the talks. Gee, that sounds swell.

links for 2007-12-15

Sat, 15 Dec 2007 09:23:33 +0000

Cool Stuff: 30 Years of LucasFilm Christmas Cards | /Film (tags: geek starwars) Reducing pylons app memory usage? – Graham Dumpleton runs through the ways to control the amount of memory your WSGI-based python webapp takes. (tags: pylons python memory webdev)

Google taking on Wikipedia?

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 12:42:11 +0000

Interesting announcement from Google: Official Google Blog: Encouraging people to contribute knowledge Google announces a tool (Knol) that’s not yet open to the public but appears to be taking on Wikipedia. The premise is different, but I think the goal is similar. They want encyclopedia like articles that are written by people in the community who know stuff about a topic. However, Google’s take appears to be to have articles that are authored by single people that will stake their own personal reputations on the articles.

links for 2007-12-14

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 09:29:48 +0000

Programming Scala book Version 1 of the book about the Scala language is now available for sale, including updates through the release version. Dead tree version ships in May. (tags: book programming scala) Evolutionary Programming and Gradual Typing in ECMAScript 4 Interesting look at some of the new ECMAScript 4 features, presented as a migration from ES3 to ES4. (tags: javascript ecmascript es4 tutorial programming) Coding In Paradise: Using Google Gears on a Weblog Brad Neuberg talks about caching resources in the Google Gears local space for speed.

links for 2007-12-13

Thu, 13 Dec 2007 09:31:58 +0000

AppJet: Instant Web Programming Interesting model where a whole webapp can be written in a single JavaScript file (both the client and server) and instantly deployed. (tags: javascript programming IDE server web webdev coding development) Ajaxian Â» AppJet: Develop, Preview, Deploy all on the Web Interesting interview about AppJet (tags: IDE appjet javascript) BitNami: Open Source. Simplified Interesting… a bunch of open source packages, some of which are generally painful to install on systems that don’t have a good package manager, that are allegedly easy to install on Windows, Mac and Linux.

links for 2007-12-12

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 09:36:02 +0000

Jash: JavaScript Shell very nice shell (IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera) for running code and editing CSS in the page you’re looking at. (tags: ajax bookmarklets css debugging javascript ie firefox webdev) Morethanseven Â» Insert Dojo and YUI bookmarklets A simple bookmarklet to insert Dojo into the page you’re viewing. Combine this with Jash and you have access to all kinds of debugging and manipulation power.

DWR joins the Dojo Foundation – Joe Walker joins SitePen

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 14:54:32 +0000

Intriguingly, Ajaxian seems to have the news first: Ajaxian Â» DWR joins the Dojo Foundation – Joe Walker joins SitePen. I haven’t used Java in 3 years, so I haven’t had a chance to use DWR, but it looks like a nicely designed API for doing Ajax and Comet in Java apps. Having Joe Walker join up at SitePen is great news indeed, and DWR is quite an addition to the Dojo Foundation.

Rich UI webapps with TurboGears 2 and Dojo

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 12:13:13 +0000

I’ve just received notice that my proposed talk for PyCon 2008 has been accepted! People who were at my PyCon 2006 “Effective Ajax with TurboGears” talk might remember that I talked about sprinkling Ajax throughout a webapp as appropriate. A lot has changed in the nearly two years since. We can now move a lot more presentation logic to the browser, and the server side becomes much more of a web services layer.

links for 2007-12-11

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 09:23:28 +0000

TED | Talks | Theo Jansen: The art of creating creatures (video) Nifty creatures created from tubes and lemonade bottles that occupy Holland’s beaches. (tags: ted science video)

Scala Blog and lift 0.3

Mon, 10 Dec 2007 12:19:28 +0000

There’s now a multi-author Scala Blog that provides info about this very cool language. It sounds like there is a draft of a Scala book about ready, and the lift web framework hits 0.3. Scala and lift are tools to watch, because there is a lot of interesting background going into them. Anyone who has been eyeing Erlang’s concurrency features should check out Scala, because it gives you the same concurrency features but on top of the JVM with access to Java libraries when you need them.

links for 2007-12-10

Mon, 10 Dec 2007 09:28:17 +0000

The Team That Put the Net in Orbit – New York Times Here’s an article about the NSFnet, which was created 20 years ago. The article talks about the early days of ANS, which is where I first worked after college. I was working in the ANS operations center at the time the NSFnet was turned off in 1995. (tags: nsfnet internet)

links for 2007-12-09

Sun, 09 Dec 2007 09:23:26 +0000

The â€œBlogâ€ of â€œUnnecessaryâ€ Quotation Marks (tags: funny blog)

links for 2007-12-08

Sat, 08 Dec 2007 09:21:09 +0000

Macworld: Creative Notes: Choosing the right loops for your composition suggestions for places to buy loops of various kinds. (tags: music loops mac audio)

links for 2007-12-07

Fri, 07 Dec 2007 09:32:33 +0000

Home Tips: Home Improvement, Home Repair and DIY (tags: house homeimprovement) MP3 to MIDI and WAVE to MIDI Converter: WIDISOFT Audio To MIDI Audio Unit for those times when i’d like to covert singing to notes. MacWorld reports that the software doesn’t do a great job with all sources and that trying out the demo first is a good idea. (tags: audio mac music plugin software)

links for 2007-12-06

Thu, 06 Dec 2007 09:28:03 +0000

xkcd – A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language – By Randall Munroe You know that it’s a comic for geeks when it talks about Python (the language)! We can always count on xkcd! (tags: python humor xkcd) Europe Relieved by Iran Finding – TIME “President George W. Bush urged America’s allies Tuesday to keep the pressure on Iran despite the U.

links for 2007-12-05

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 09:24:48 +0000

BBC NEWS | Programmes | 4×4 Reports | Cancer risk in microwaved food “chemists at Stockholm University have found heating any food containing potato in a microwave produces significant levels of acrylamide.”The BBC had two articles about acrylamide. Heating starchy foods at high temperatures appears to be dangerous, accord (tags: food health) Amazon Payments widgets Amazon now offers widgets for using their payments service, so it no longer requires web services programming to use their payment service.

Michael Foord’s Mock

Tue, 04 Dec 2007 13:22:42 +0000

I’ve started using Mock – Mocking and Test Utilities by Michael Foord (that’s fuzzyman to you :). Python’s dynamic nature (monkeypatching and whatnot) means that you don’t need to come up with some of the elaborate constructs for testing that Javafolk have had to. Mock gives you a few handy features to make stubbing out and verifying behavior easy and natural. Fuzzyman’s new release of Mock (0.3.1) includes a couple of features that I suggested to make it more nose-friendly and to eliminate the need for global variables when using the “patch” decorator.

Michigan Python Users Group December 2007 Meeting

Tue, 04 Dec 2007 02:58:28 +0000

The Michigan Python Users Group (MichiPUG) December meeting is coming up this Thursday, December 6th at 7PM. We’ll once again be meeting at the SRT Solutions office in downtown Ann Arbor. This month’s topic is distributed version control systems. I’ll be talking about/demoing Mercurial, and we’ll have just general discussion about version control systems and other Python topics. See you there!

Installable vs. Hosted

Mon, 03 Dec 2007 19:11:47 +0000

37signals doesn’t want to do installable software, Ask 37signals: Installable software?: If we built installable software weâ€™d have to spend a lot more of our time on technical support, write a lot more documentation, slow down our development process, and lose a fair bit of control over our customer experience. For some companies this wouldnâ€™t be a big deal, but for us it would be a real drag. Of course, I recommend you read all of Jason’s commentary before continuing.

links for 2007-12-03

Mon, 03 Dec 2007 09:26:08 +0000

Mono on OSX, Win32 – Miguel de Icaza Mono on OS X just crossed the “halfway point”. You can now run Windows.Forms and Gtk# applications *without X11*! Very cool. Of course, they don’t look like OS X apps. But, that’s okay by me for now. This opens up new apps and a whole new platform for dev (tags: mono .net macosx)

links for 2007-12-02

Sun, 02 Dec 2007 09:22:02 +0000

Nutrition Source, Harvard School of Public Health This looks like a very information rich site for reliable nutrition info. (tags: health science diet food)

links for 2007-12-01

Sat, 01 Dec 2007 09:27:52 +0000

Making the most of WebKit for iPhone Until February, the only way to make iPhone apps is for Safari. Here’s a nice collection of tips for making iPhone UIs. (tags: development iphone css) Distributed revision control with Mercurial I didn’t realize there was a book-in-progress for Mercurial. (tags: hg mercurial versioncontrol distributed)

links for 2007-11-30

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 09:26:06 +0000

Dynamic CSS via JavaScript Nice looking library for manipulating CSS via JavaScript. (tags: css javascript library mootools) Rope, a python refactoring library … Nice… a modern library for refactoring Python code. I’d love to see this integrated with TextMate. (tags: python programming refactoring development) templatemaker Adrian Holovaty’s project that takes multiple files (say web pages, for instance), finds out where they differ and uses that as a template for extracting future data.

links for 2007-11-29

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 09:27:10 +0000

DSL Book WIP Martin Fowler is working on a book about Domain Specific Languages. This site has his work-in-progress. (tags: programming book dsl)

links for 2007-11-27

Tue, 27 Nov 2007 09:26:35 +0000

The Blogger’s Guide to SEO – by Aaron & Giovanna Wall : SEO Book.com Haven’t read this yet, but it seems like an interesting read. (tags: blogging seo toread)

links for 2007-11-22

Thu, 22 Nov 2007 09:31:59 +0000

MonetDB and SQLAlchemy [panela.blog-city.com] I’ve never previously heard of MonetDB. It’s a column-oriented database (superfast for reads). Matt Harrison is putting together an SQLAlchemy interface for it. How cool is that? Use row-based DB for writing data, move the data to Monet later for reportin (tags: sqlalchemy python orm database monetdb)

links for 2007-11-19

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 09:28:58 +0000

The Omni Mouth Â» OmniFocus public beta/introductory pricing OmniFocus public beta starts. $80 for a todo list? Looks snazzy, but iGTD sure does an awful lot of this for free. (tags: gtd omnigroup omnifocus igtd)

links for 2007-11-18

Sun, 18 Nov 2007 09:24:58 +0000

Jonathan Ellis’s Programming Blog – Spyced: Reed-Solomon libraries Jonathan Ellis worked on an s3-like service while at Mozy. Here, he gives some pointers on how to manage disk failures in that giant environment. (tags: python storage)

Google, wireless and core competencies

Sun, 18 Nov 2007 00:03:41 +0000

Apparently, Google is readying a bid for wireless spectrum. They’ve got the cash to buy the spectrum, but the analysts say that they must get a carrier partner: “Wireless spectrum and network management are nowhere near Google’s core competency. Its competence is in one market, online advertising,” said Emma Mohr McClune, principal analyst with Current Analysis. To me, this is confusing Google’s revenue model with the things it is competent to do.

links for 2007-11-17

Sat, 17 Nov 2007 09:22:31 +0000

VisualHub: The Universal Video Converter for Mac. Handy looking program for video conversion. Looks like it does everything QuickTime Pro does and more. (tags: mac video software) How-to: Proper Gmail IMAP for iPhone & Apple Mail (tags: Gmail mac iphone mail.app)

Not fair! Apple releases Final Cut Express 4

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 03:43:21 +0000

On Tuesday, I ordered Final Cut Express 3.5 with overnight shipping because I had some screencast work to do. I got it yesterday and installed it. Today, Apple released Final Cut Express 4. They’ve lowered the list price to $199 from $299 (luckily, I paid about $230). I don’t so much care about that part… what I do care about is that I don’t want to have to pay $100 to upgrade to FCE4, when I just yesterday paid more than the new price for the product.

Dojo Offline + Google Gears talk at CodeMash

Tue, 13 Nov 2007 19:54:40 +0000

The complete CodeMash Conference Session List is up now, and it looks like both of my talk proposals were accepted! I mentioned earlier that I’ll be giving an overview of the Dojo JavaScript Toolkit there. It turns out that I’ll also be giving a talk on Dojo Offline + Google Gears for taking your web applications on the road.

Life without Quicksilver

Tue, 13 Nov 2007 13:09:05 +0000

With Tiger, I was a rabid Quicksilver fan. I tended to use it almost exclusively as an application launcher and to add todos to iGTD. Every now and then, I’d use it to delete a file or something, but it was almost always just launch or todo. I did also use it to look up contact information, which is something you can also do with Spotlight. With Leopard, Spotlight works a lot better, and is very quick as a program launcher.

Eye-fi

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 15:25:05 +0000

Working on cool stuff with great people is the ideal, right? Check it out. There’s this most unusual product called the Eye-Fi, which combines an SD card with built-in wifi. What this means is that you can shoot pictures with your digital camera and have them uploaded to your computer and Flickr (etc) wirelessly, without doing anything. Bam! They just beam over. How cool is that? Even cooler to know that my new company was involved in the Eye-Fi’s creation.

WordPress: How do people register even though registration is off?

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 13:23:04 +0000

A question for the lazyweb, as I didn’t find an answer immediately via Google… how is it that I’ve seen a couple of random people register new user accounts, doubtless for nefarious purposes, even though I have user registration turned off on my blog? Yesterday, I even renamed wp-register.php, figuring that people may have been posting directly to the script. Is that not the right script?

Mixer and Korg Wavestation EX for sale

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 13:18:01 +0000

OK, I promise that my blog is not going to just be filled with ads for random stuff that I’m selling. I actually have a programming-related article planned for sometime soon. In the meantime, though, hot on the heels of listing my desk on craigslist, I now have a DOD 1642 16-Channel Professional Sound Mixing Board and a Korg Wavestation EX keyboard for sale. Some people on eBay have started calling the Wavestation “vintage”.

Yesterday’s Tweets

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 12:00:56 +0000

11:53 @markramm sorry I missed the Happy Doughnuts. sounds good 🙂 # 11:54 Just made my first posting on craigslist. that’s a very frictionless UI. # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

Music or radio studio desk for sale

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 16:53:10 +0000

I’ve just put a listing up on craigslist (holy cow that was easy! no wonder people use craigslist) for: Music / broadcast studio desk with rack spaces $300 obo. Though I’m hoping to have a bit more time for music in the near future, I wanted to really downsize my space. That’s why I had a bunch of gear up for sale a couple weeks ago, and now I have my desk up for sale.

Yesterday’s Tweets

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 12:02:56 +0000

09:19 now coming to you live on my new MacBook Pro. Twitter was just too slow with a single core PPC. # 11:31 trying life without Quicksilver using just Spotlight in Leopard. # 13:36 oh my god. the corners of the menu bar in Leopard are square! that’s it. i’m switching to linux. jk # 14:08 @cleverdevil I know that the menu bar can be rounded again, but it doesn’t bother me that those few pixels in the corner are not black # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

links for 2007-11-10

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 09:17:15 +0000

SitePen Blog Â» Blog Archive Â» Kevin Dangoor joins SitePen Dylan has given me a nice welcome at SitePen. (tags: sitepen)

links for 2007-11-09

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 09:20:13 +0000

VectorMagic Convert bitmaps to vector images (tags: vector graphics) Glassbooth – Quiz to help you choose best 2008 presidential candidate (tags: politics)

links for 2007-11-07

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 09:17:23 +0000

Palimpsest: the guide to a (mostly) paperless life | 43 Folders Great rundown of a mac-based paperless office setup. (tags: 43folders scanner s3 productivity paperless)

Yesterday’s Tweets

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 12:01:28 +0000

07:08 reporting for duty! # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

Dojo 1.0 released

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 15:07:38 +0000

I’m an early riser, usually starting work around 7AM Eastern. Today is no exception, despite the fact that this is my first day at my new job. I was surprised to find Alex Russell online when I started up this morning, but this explains it all: Dojo 1.0 has been released. Dojo 1.0 is huge (and yet compact… 23K core!) and powerful. Congrats to everyone who worked on this release!

links for 2007-11-02

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 09:17:59 +0000

bbumâ€™s weblog-o-mat Â» Blog Archive Â» PyObjC 2.0 (PyObjC in Leopard) Python (and Ruby) support is greatly enhanced in Leopard. Cool! (tags: python macosx programming)

links for 2007-10-31

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 09:17:15 +0000

Web Application Security Joe Walker gave what looks like a great talk about web application security. (tags: ajax CSRF security webdev javascript)

Yesterday’s Tweets

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 11:27:10 +0000

10:35 on vacation and have a cold. bummer. # 10:50 wow. control-M lets me select menu items on the Mac using the keyboard. i can’t believe i never found that before. # 13:44 @sillyevar of course you can also use Quicksilver to find any item on any of the menus with minimum keystrokes # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

Yesterday’s Tweets

Sun, 28 Oct 2007 11:02:34 +0000

09:47 @benbangert heh. i didn’t have a pic handy. i plan to fix that this weekend… # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

Yesterday’s Tweets

Sat, 27 Oct 2007 11:03:30 +0000

20:53 @benbangert good to see you twittering # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

links for 2007-10-27

Sat, 27 Oct 2007 09:17:18 +0000

Repoze A project to open Zope technologies to folks using the WSGI stack in Python. (tags: python webdev wsgi)

Dojo toolkit overview at CodeMash

Sat, 27 Oct 2007 00:50:58 +0000

I’ll be speaking at CodeMash for the second year in a row. At CodeMash ’07, I did an introduction to TurboGears. At CodeMash ’08, I’ll be doing an overview of the Dojo JavaScript toolkit. Dojo is a comprehensive and powerful package, so I’m going to do what I can to highlight nifty things the package can do. I’m going to work under the assumption that people who attend this talk understand JavaScript, but that’s really the only pre-req.

Going to work for SitePen!

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 17:56:44 +0000

I’m excited to announce that starting November 5th, I’ll be working for SitePen. Never heard of SitePen? That’s not surprising. But, if you’re involved in web development, you’ve likely heard of the Dojo JavaScript Toolkit. Alex Russell, Director of R&D at SitePen, is the leader of the Dojo Core project and SitePen’s CEO, Dylan Schiemann is also a JavaScript fiend who has been involved with Dojo for a long time.

A few words about Arbor Networks

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 17:56:24 +0000

As I’ve announced in a separate posting, I’m going to go work for SitePen. I wanted to say a few things about Arbor Networks, the company that I’m now leaving. There are many plusses to working at Arbor Networks. There are a lot of smart people at Arbor, and Arbor does a good job of ensuring that the new folks coming in are also people you’d want to work with. Pretty early on in one’s career, you learn just how important it is to have good people to work with, and Arbor has lots of them.

links for 2007-10-26

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 09:18:23 +0000

about:cmlenz – CouchDB “Joins” Chris Lenz provides a quick look at how you solve a common problem that is well-understood in RDBMS but not so well understood in CouchDB (blog posting with associated comments) (tags: couchdb)

Yesterday’s Tweets

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 11:02:01 +0000

09:00 TGWebServices has a new home (code.google.com/p/tgws) and Florent Aide is a new committer there. # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

links for 2007-10-24

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 09:17:20 +0000

Payoneer uses MasterCard prepaid cards to enable payouts from websites Interesting payment solution for websites who need to pay cash to affiliates or content producers. They provide a debit card that can be used anywhere in the world. (tags: money payments)

TurboGears Web Services gets new maintainer, home

Tue, 23 Oct 2007 14:17:21 +0000

TGWebServices is a package that I created earlier this year to provide a simple and powerful multi-protocol web services layer for TurboGears users. TGWebServices now has a new home at code.google.com, which will be easier to maintain. Clearly, that site needs some work and a new release needs to be made to point there, but that will happen all in good time. TGWebServices now also has its own mailing list for the first time.

links for 2007-10-20

Sat, 20 Oct 2007 09:19:39 +0000

SQLAlchemy 0.4.0 Released Congrats to Mike and everyone who worked on SQLAlchemy 0.4. It’s quite a release for an already great package! (tags: python sql sqlalchemy) Macworld: Feature: I will keep my Mac safe from other users some good tips on running a secure Mac. (tags: apple security mac) Macworld: Creative Notes: Adding drums with EZdrummer Review of a nice sounding drum sounds-n-midi virtual instrument package (tags: music mac ezdrummer) Charts And Graphs: Modern Solutions | Developer’s Toolbox | Smashing Magazine A big collection of tools (with nice screenshots to give you an idea of each) that generate charts.

Yesterday’s Tweets

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 11:09:29 +0000

09:32 is it just me, or does twitter need a more explicit way to reply that links/includes the original tweet? # 10:02 of course, with only 140 characters you don’t want to ‘quote’ a tweet in the traditional sense # 22:36 why oh why did my WordPress plugins deactivate? without Akismet, bam! tons of spam. # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

links for 2007-10-19

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 09:18:19 +0000

My DebugBar | CompanionJS / HomePage Firebug Lite-like javascript debugging tool for IE. Might not be free (it expires… so it’s unclear where it’s being taken). It does look more useful than Firebug Lite, though, and IE needs all the help it can get. (tags: debugging ie javascript) VentureBeat Â» Google Analytics updates: Tracking for Ajax, Javascript, Flash and more Google Analytics has added Ajax event tracking.

Music gear for sale (effects processors, sampler, midi interface)

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 18:41:27 +0000

I’ve been a hobbyist musician for a while now. I’ve decided that it’s time to redo things in my studio a bit, and so I’ve got some gear up for sale on eBay. The auctions end next week, so there’s plenty of time to get in cheap. Lexicon Vortex effects processor Music Quest 8PortSE MIDI interface with Windows XP drivers E-mu ESI-4000 Turbo sampler (with Zip drive, CD-ROM drive and a collection of CD-ROMs).

Yesterday’s Tweets

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 11:01:09 +0000

07:59 good coverage of Leopard features on AppleInsider. I’m looking forward to this upgrade! # 09:36 @cleverdevil spotlight in Leopard is supposed to be fast for app launching and even can calculate… but it can’t add to iGTD! # 10:51 @cleverdevil iGTD+quicksilver is very cool, fi you’ve never tried it. (the new Mail does todos now, so maybe iGTD won’t be as useful) # 13:05 Apple iPhone SDK: a good move, as long as Apple makes it frictionless for developers # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

links for 2007-10-18

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 09:17:59 +0000

Alex Russell: On Licensing Alex goes into some of the intricacies of open source licensing and how to protect yourself and your project. I’ve talked about this in the past, too, but Alex has definitely taken things farther than I have by helping to set up the Dojo Foundation and ha (tags: OpenSource software licensing) Catalog Choice – How It Works Free service to help eliminate unwanted catalog waste.

New anti-spam measure installed

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 11:13:42 +0000

Over the past day, I’ve had hundreds of spam comments and trackbacks sent to my site. About 1⁄4 of these made it through to the site, but I’ve been pretty quick to delete them using WordPress’ “Mass Edit Mode”. Still, it’s annoying to have to do that at all. This morning I installed JSSpamBlock, which uses a clever technique to make it so that normal web-browsing humans don’t need to do anything different to post a comment.

Yesterday’s Tweets

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 11:03:14 +0000

07:54 back online after an extended absence # 14:34 I’ve submitted two talk proposals for CodeMash ’08 # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

links for 2007-10-13

Sat, 13 Oct 2007 09:18:28 +0000

ReMate turns off auto updating of textmate projects (great when a project is remote) (tags: textmate network) [TxMt] New Remote Project bundle another approach to the remote directories: a project that is considered “remote” (tags: remote textmate)

Yesterday’s Tweets

Fri, 05 Oct 2007 11:07:02 +0000

14:17 issue 1 of Python Magazine is now available (free) # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

links for 2007-10-05

Fri, 05 Oct 2007 09:18:10 +0000

Amazon’s Dynamo – All Things Distributed Dynamo appears to be the underlying storage layer of S3. Here’s a paper about how it’s designed. (tags: amazon aws grid storage scalability)

Yesterday’s Tweets

Thu, 04 Oct 2007 11:05:27 +0000

07:33 just signed up for the Ann Arbor slashdot party # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

links for 2007-10-03

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 09:17:21 +0000

Radiohead lets buyer decide the price This is newsworthy: the group Radiohead is allowing the music buying public to choose what they want to pay for their new album. For now, Radiohead is working without a record contract. (tags: music business) Interview with Allan Odgaard, creator of TextMate at JJB Blog A bunch of talk about TextMate 2 and some of the infrastructure there… no talk about when we’ll see TM2, though.

Yesterday’s Tweets

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 11:01:32 +0000

15:02 oug McIlroy can handle SIGKILL # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

links for 2007-10-02

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 09:18:13 +0000

AnnualCreditReport The place to go to get your truly free annual credit report from the major credit reporting companies. (tags: finance money creditreport) On McIlroy Doug McIlroy (creator of pipes, diff and more) Facts (tags: geek humor)

Yesterday’s Tweets

Sat, 29 Sep 2007 11:02:02 +0000

16:34 argh. Nose is attempting to import modules that have nothing to do with tests and aren’t even imported in the code being tested. # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

Apple iBrick for sale at mobilebee.com

Fri, 28 Sep 2007 15:00:25 +0000

For just $510 with a T-Mobile contract, you can “Buy a Apple iPhone”. Of course, once you get it and set it up, you’re likely to update to the latest iPhone software. At which point, you’ll be the proud owner of an iBrick. I can’t believe that anyone would actually try to sell an iPhone with T-Mobile service. Sure, I can understand someone trying to use it that way, but selling such a blatantly unsupported configuration is just asking for unhappy customers.

Yesterday’s Tweets

Fri, 28 Sep 2007 11:04:49 +0000

09:58 just signed up for Grand Central. looks neat, but will explore later # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

Amazon launches MP3 service. Record labels are still dumb.

Wed, 26 Sep 2007 13:41:30 +0000

Amazon.com has launched their awaited MP3 Download service. I don’t know if eMusic has such a thing, but one important feature that Amazon has is their song downloader tool. This tool automatically adds the new song to iTunes, which makes the experience of buying from Amazon as close to the seamless iTunes experience as possible. Amazon wins points in my book for shipping DRM-free MP3 tracks. A couple of the major labels signed on with Amazon, but some of them held out on the foolish belief that DRM was actually doing something useful for their businesses.

links for 2007-09-26

Wed, 26 Sep 2007 09:18:03 +0000

A List Apart: Articles: If I Told You You Had a Beautiful Figure… Introduces FigureHandler which applies consistent (and smart) formatting to figures. (tags: css design javascript prototype webdesign layout images) macosxhints.com – Keyboard Maestro – App switcher, macros, and more Keyboard Maestro sounds neat. shame their site is down. (tags: mac software)

Michigan Python Users Group October Meeting: Boo!

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 12:01:17 +0000

The October meeting of the Michigan Python Users Group is coming up next week. Thursday, October 4 at 7PM, once again at SRT Solutions’ office in downtown Ann Arbor. This month, Jay Wren is going to be giving a talk about Boo, a very heavily Python-inspired language for .NET/mono. Though it’s not Python, I asked Jay to give this talk because Boo looks a lot like Python, but it’s statically typed (!

Yesterday’s Tweets

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 11:04:40 +0000

09:26 On Writing Well is… written well. # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

links for 2007-09-25

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 09:17:51 +0000

Quicksilver in Real Life on Vimeo (tags: funny quicksilver mac geek)

Yesterday’s Tweets

Sat, 22 Sep 2007 11:08:26 +0000

13:24 terracotta.org annoys me, because it doesn’t list any downsides. # 22:08 @sillyevar check out CamStudio camstudio.org/ # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

links for 2007-09-22

Sat, 22 Sep 2007 09:24:41 +0000

TuneCore This site publishes music to the major online music stores. You pay them a fee and keep all of the royalties. (tags: music marketing) Quercus: PHP in Java Interesting… an implementation of PHP in Java (apparently sophisticated enough to run Drupal). (tags: java php programming OpenSource software)

Yesterday’s Tweets

Fri, 21 Sep 2007 11:05:30 +0000

10:24 @sillyevar while i agree about the ‘who cares’ part, jottit is more of a wiki than just a pastebin. the cool part is the “lazy signup” ui # 16:15 beautiful weather for picnic on the diag # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

links for 2007-09-21

Fri, 21 Sep 2007 09:20:26 +0000

Pretend to be a Time Traveler Day: 12-8-7 These are great! (tags: funny geek humor)

Yesterday’s Tweets

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 11:03:57 +0000

09:25 Just heard this morning that Shakey Jake died. He was always entertaining to see while working downtown. # 15:47 @sillyevar that’s a neat graph. for some reason, i’d want to call that a ‘pieburst’ # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

Yesterday’s Tweets

Wed, 19 Sep 2007 11:05:35 +0000

07:09 methinks that Google’s new presentations tool is not likely to lead to better presentations. # 08:07 Selenium is great and all, but OSAF’s Windmill sounds like it’s making a big step forward. # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

links for 2007-09-19

Wed, 19 Sep 2007 09:17:38 +0000

Official Google Blog: Our feature presentation Presentations come to Google Docs (tags: collaboration powerpoint presentation software) Windmill automated Web application UI testing framework Looks like OSAF is trying to take Selenium to the next level. (tags: ajax javascript debugging testing OpenSource webdev) Humanized Weblog: Undo Made Easy with Ajax (Part 1) Aza Raskin talks about adding undo to a web app using a very simple “event queue” technique to show just how easy undo can be.

Happy 2nd Birthday, TurboGears!

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 17:41:54 +0000

Though it was publicly displayed a couple of days before, I announced the release of TurboGears on September 17, 2005: Blue Sky On Mars Â» Blog Archive Â» Announcing TurboGears web megaframework (Python). Thanks again to everyone who has made TurboGears a successful and fun open source project!

Yesterday’s Tweets

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 11:04:24 +0000

11:31 interesting. the bacon chocolate bar is available at Zingermans # 14:31 growl now seems to use growl to tell you about new versions. I hadn’t noticed this before, but it makes sense. # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

links for 2007-09-18

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 09:21:48 +0000

Brian Kerr | ArbCamp talking cattle, linkdump Some info about ArbCamp – Oct 27 in Ann Arbor. (tags: michigan annarbor) 86 Mac Plus Vs. 07 AMD DualCore. You Won’t Believe Who Wins Heh. 1986 Mac Plus vs. 2007 AMD Dual Core running XP or Vista (tags: funny comparison) Jottit While not everyone will get into Markdown (*I* like it, though), Jottit is undoubtedly the easiest way to get a new website going.

links for 2007-09-16

Sun, 16 Sep 2007 09:17:34 +0000

New iPods reengineered to block synching with Linux – Boing Boing Between Apple’s “ringtone racket” (see Daring Fireball) and this, it lookslike Apple is truly starting to move away from being customer driven. If they head down that slippery slope, everything they’ve built over the past decade is gone. (tags: apple ipod itunes drm) 13 Clever and Hilarious Billboard Advertisements | The Best Article Every day These are some great billboards.

Yesterday’s Tweets

Sat, 15 Sep 2007 11:04:44 +0000

09:36 nice little Firebug upgrade: fireclipse.xucia.com/#Downloads, but will it become the real 1.1? # 10:14 Gran Paradiso (Firefox 3) crashed on the first page I tried to go to # 13:17 Too bad Loud Twitter doesn’t put the date in the blog post title # 14:28 tinyurl.com/yuzsf2 is a 3D printer. looks like it makes small gargoyles. or bumpy prototype parts. # 14:28 ok. that’s just cool. i posted a link and it was automatically tinyURLed.

Yesterday’s Tweets

Fri, 14 Sep 2007 11:05:42 +0000

22:23 just blogged about twitter (and then this tweet will show up on my blog tomorrow. seems a bit recursive, eh?) # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

links for 2007-09-14

Fri, 14 Sep 2007 09:23:46 +0000

sprintf for JavaScript – String substitution YAHOO.tools.printf at the bottom of this post is a useful and straightforward little function. (tags: javascript templates)

Twitter and del.icio.us sitting on Mars

Fri, 14 Sep 2007 02:22:25 +0000

I’ve had this blog since May 2001, which makes it the logical place for me to put something if I want to remember it publicly. When del.icio.us came along, I thought it looked cool, but I really wanted to keep track of links I found interesting here, on Blue Sky On Mars. I would end up either with short blog posts that basically contain one link, or I would opt to not save the link at all.

Yesterday’s Tweets

Thu, 13 Sep 2007 11:04:26 +0000

17:20 Starting to figure out how twitter, del.icio.us and my blog all interrelate # 21:35 IM didn’t seem to work for me. Let’s try Twitterific. # 22:08 checking out javascript unit testing tools # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

links for 2007-09-12

Wed, 12 Sep 2007 09:18:40 +0000

Digital rights, digital wrongs | Technology | Guardian Unlimited Cory Doctorow’s series on DRM. Cory is one of the best anti-DRM writers that I’ve seen, with clear, easily understable arguments. (tags: copyright drm)

links for 2007-09-11

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 09:17:59 +0000

iPhone Central: iPhone Hacking Kit, the next generation wow. look at this to see how far iphone hacking has come over the past few weeks. (tags: apple iphone) Flying Meat: Acorn New Mac image editor that aims to be small, lightweight and easy for the common tasks. Includes Python scriptability! (tags: mac graphics software) JonDesign’s (Javascript) SmoothGallery 2.0: Improved Mootools Mojo for Images | What is it ?

links for 2007-09-08

Sat, 08 Sep 2007 09:17:00 +0000

Protoscript JQuery and YUI-based prototyping tool that uses JSON to store behaviors. It is fairly concise for things that you’d commonly want to do. The author intends for there to be a Firefox extension for adding the behaviors, so that this can be a very easy tool (tags: design javascript programming prototype yui)

links for 2007-09-07

Fri, 07 Sep 2007 09:17:09 +0000

ActiveState – The ActiveState Blog: ActiveState Announced Open Komodo Project: Open Source, Open Web, and Open Dev Tools (tags: IDE webdev activestate komodo firefox)

links for 2007-09-06

Thu, 06 Sep 2007 09:19:55 +0000

jsonpath A small JS library that provides functionality similar to XPath for JSON-style objects. (There’s also a PHP version.) (tags: javascript json OpenSource library programming)

MichiPUG September Meeting: Python 3.0

Sat, 01 Sep 2007 14:58:04 +0000

As Guido announced on his blog yesterday: Python 3000 alpha 1 has been released! On that note, I’ll lead an informal run through of what’s new in Python 3.0 at the next Michigan Python Users Group (MichiPUG) meeting. The meeting is coming up on Thursday, September 6 at 7PM. Dianne Marsh has offered SRT Solution’s new office space to host this month’s meeting. It’s just a block south of the Arbor Networks office that we’ve been meeting at (it’s at the corner of Fifth and Washington in downtown Ann Arbor).

Last weekend for the TurboGears Ultimate DVD, etc.

Fri, 31 Aug 2007 10:38:24 +0000

About a month ago, I mentioned that the TurboGears Ultimate DVD and my other TG merchandise (MarbleGears and the toolboxes) were on clearance. I’ve reduced the prices a little more and set Monday as the last day for sales of the goods. Now is your last chance! The stuff is cheap, and I’d be happy if my fulfillment company has less stuff to send back to me 🙂

links for 2007-08-30

Thu, 30 Aug 2007 09:20:25 +0000

Speakers – Conference 2007 – D Programming Language (tags: d programming) YouTube – John Cleese – How to Irritate People – Airplane Sketch (tags: funny video montypython)

links for 2007-08-23

Thu, 23 Aug 2007 09:20:11 +0000

OpenDNS | Providing A Safer And Faster DNS free DNS server that claims to be faster than your typical ISP’s (tags: dns) Brandon Aaron Â» Blog Archive Â» New Plugin: Live Query Neat JQuery plugin that runs code against nodes automatically as they match or don’t match a given JQuery selector. Even works with new nodes added via Ajax or removed by JavaScript. (tags: javascript jquery webdev)

links for 2007-08-22

Wed, 22 Aug 2007 09:19:09 +0000

Dijit 0.9 What’s New Dijit is the Dojo toolkit widgets spinoff, and there’s a nice collection of features in 0.9. (tags: javascript dojo dijit) Ajaxian Â» Dojo 0.9 Final Version Released (tags: dojo javascript) jQuery for JavaScript programmers Simon Willison provides a great overview of JQuery and the features that make it cool and interesting. (tags: javascript jquery) techspot.

Flash gets H.264 support

Tue, 21 Aug 2007 12:02:11 +0000

Interesting news: Mac Rumors: Adobe Annouces H.264 Support in Flash The reason I find this interesting is that most of the popular video sites have settled on Flash-based players as their standard user interface. From my experimentation, H.264 provides the best size/quality ratio that I’ve seen for screencasting, at least among codecs that are broadly supported. So, the addition of H.264 to Flash means that the Flash player can now be a good platform for lossy-encoded screencasts.

links for 2007-08-21

Tue, 21 Aug 2007 09:19:44 +0000

The Hand of FuManChu – Storm, SQLAlchemy, and Geniusql Bob Brewer compares the performance of a few operations in three current Python ORMs. Good detail, and a good exposure of some places where performance can be improved. (tags: orm python sqlalchemy programming dejavu geniusql storm)

links for 2007-08-18

Sat, 18 Aug 2007 09:19:08 +0000

A JavaScript Module Pattern Â» Yahoo! User Interface Blog A reasonable approach for module-like things (including private variables) in JavaScript (tags: javascript)

links for 2007-08-15

Wed, 15 Aug 2007 09:20:16 +0000

Management Methods | Management Models | Management Theories A very compact (albeit with some integrated ads) and concise list of models and theories that can be used as a jumping off point for further learning. (tags: business management mba) Dinosaurs with Jetpacks. at Shots Ring Out Universal is starting to sell DRM-free songs on an “experimental” basis, but they won’t do it through iTunes.

links for 2007-08-14

Tue, 14 Aug 2007 09:19:37 +0000

The Personal MBA Manifesto: Mastering Business Through Self-Education (Recommended Business Books) (tags: business books management mba)

links for 2007-08-12

Sun, 12 Aug 2007 09:18:26 +0000

Urbanape : software/Thumbscrew_1_0_Final.html Thumbscrew is a Mac app for creating attractive, rotated thumbnails. (tags: mac freeware graphics software)

links for 2007-08-11

Sat, 11 Aug 2007 09:19:33 +0000

About JSPON A version of JSON with extensions for managing persistent data. (tags: json ajax development jspon persistence javascript programming)

links for 2007-08-09

Thu, 09 Aug 2007 09:19:38 +0000

SproutCore A JavaScript app framework that is getting some notice because Apple’s new .Mac Web Galleries use it. (tags: javascript framework web programming)

links for 2007-08-08

Wed, 08 Aug 2007 09:18:44 +0000

E-junkie Shopping Cart for selling downloads & tangible goods Hosted shopping cart that looks pretty good, reasonably full-featured and reasonably priced. (tags: ecommerce shopping cart) Blogs as Stores: A Comprehensive Overview of Ecommerce Solutions for Bloggers: TypePad Hacks quick reviews of many blogging ecommerce tools. interesting to see the variety that’s out there. (tags: blogging ecommerce)

links for 2007-08-06

Mon, 06 Aug 2007 09:19:26 +0000

Blueprint: A CSS Framework pre-built CSS for grids (tags: css design webdesign) Amazon.com: Amazon FPS, Amazon Flexible Payment Service: Amazon Web Services Amazon’s new payment service. Looks very flexible and reasonably priced. (tags: amazon WebServices aws payments paypal) CreateSpace – DVD on Demand, CD on Demand, DVD Duplication, DVD Replication On demand book printing (plus DVDs and CDs) at better prices than I remember Lulu having.

links for 2007-08-03

Fri, 03 Aug 2007 09:18:48 +0000

Sophie multimedia authoring tool Open source tool for creating multimedia documents. (tags: Multimedia software sophie publishing)

links for 2007-08-02

Thu, 02 Aug 2007 09:20:06 +0000

SIMILE | Exhibit Nifty little project for publishing small databases of data in JSON format without an actual database or, in fact, actual code. Nice way to publish a small collection of things. (tags: javascript ajax json visualization semanticweb simile)

links for 2007-08-01

Wed, 01 Aug 2007 09:19:46 +0000

XRAY :: for web developers This bookmarklet helps you inspect elements of your web pages (somewhat like Firebug). When it works under IE, this could be a big help. For Firefox, I just use Firebug. (tags: development css bookmarklets webdev design)

links for 2007-07-31

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 09:19:10 +0000

Finished â€˜Potterâ€™? Rowling tells what happens next The Deathly Hallows epilogue was not particularly exciting to me (though I enjoyed the rest of the book). But, in this interview (for folks who have read the book already), JK Rowling gives a few more bits about where the characters end up. (tags: harrypotter books spoilers potter)

MichiPUG/AACS Meeting at Google on Thursday

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 19:12:06 +0000

As I mentioned previously, the August meeting of the Michigan Python Users Group is a joint meeting with the Ann Arbor Computer Society at the Google office in Ann Arbor. I have just found out what our meeting topic is… Russell Whitaker, a Google software engineer, will be talking about Test Driven Development in Python. I was test infected a long time ago and I’ll certainly be interested to see if Russell has some tricks I haven’t seen yet 🙂

Review of Arbor Networks Peakflow X 3.7

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 14:12:53 +0000

For those who might be curious what I’ve been working on for the past year, check this out: ITPro: Reviews: EXCLUSIVE: Arbor Networks Peakflow X 3.7. 5 stars out of 6. Six star reviews seem a little strange, but I’m happy to see Peakflow X getting more additional positive press. If you saw my release of TGWebServices in February, that work was done for the 3.7 release of Peakflow X.

links for 2007-07-28

Sat, 28 Jul 2007 09:18:39 +0000

Script Software – Essential Mac Automation for Everyone with iKey keyboard shortcuts and automation (tags: mac software productivity)

links for 2007-07-27

Fri, 27 Jul 2007 09:18:43 +0000

Walk Score – How walkable is your house? Gives a score to how walkable your house is based on how close by other things are. Not surprisingly, and unfortunately, my house scores pretty low. (tags: googlemaps mashup walking) Brendan’s Roadmap Updates: New Projects (IronMonkey and more) Mozilla has started a project to bring IronPython and IronRuby to Tamarin. It will be very interesting to see how IronPython does performance-wise against CPython in the Tamarin environment.

links for 2007-07-26

Thu, 26 Jul 2007 09:20:38 +0000

VirtualBox Open source virtualization that is currently in beta on the Mac. (tags: virtualization Software OpenSource free) Mindquarry for Collaboration, Teamwork, Productivity | Mindquarry, the Open Source Collaborative Software Java-based open source collaboration tool (interestingly uses subversion for version control) (tags: collaboration opensource groupware ProjectManagement)

links for 2007-07-25

Wed, 25 Jul 2007 09:20:04 +0000

Â» Mail Your Child to Sri Lanka or Hire Indian Pimps: Extreme Personal Outsourcing Tim Ferriss includes some other outsourcing links and tells some crazy outsourcing stories. (tags: lifestyledesign lifehacks) KeyCastr: Easy Keystroke Visualizer useful for displaying keystrokes while doing a screencast (tags: screencast presentation tool mac)

Clearance deals on TurboGears DVD, MarbleGears, etc.

Wed, 25 Jul 2007 02:11:39 +0000

It’s time to clear out my warehouse space for some projects that I am starting up. I have slashed the prices on the TurboGears Ultimate DVD and the nifty TurboGears merchandise (the MarbleGears marble maze, the tin toolbox and the squishy, stress-reliever toolboxes). The DVD, with more than 5 hours of material, is now under $10 while supplies last.

links for 2007-07-19

Thu, 19 Jul 2007 09:21:58 +0000

Strands uses coroutines to provide a more synchronous style of async programming in javascript (tags: javascript ajax)

TurboGears 1.0.3 released!

Thu, 19 Jul 2007 03:15:54 +0000

Florent Aide has just released TurboGears 1.0.3. Congrats to Florent on a release with a whole bunch of good things! (See the changelog). Florent and Mark Ramm have been pushing things forward at a great clip for TurboGears 1 and 2. Stay tuned (or even better, get involved!) for the coming 1.1 and 2.0a releases.

Google Tech Talk for the next MichiPUG meeting

Thu, 19 Jul 2007 01:03:16 +0000

The August MichiPUG meeting will be held at the Google Ann Arbor office. We’re having a joint meeting with the Ann Arbor Computer Society: Google Ann Arbor Tech Talk Event. The meeting is at the normal MichiPUG time (presentation starts at 7PM on Thursday, August 2nd). However, there’s going to be food, drinks and chatting with area tech folks and Google folks starting at 6PM. We’re looking forward to an excellent gathering.

TechSmith (Camtasia maker) goes Mac!

Wed, 18 Jul 2007 15:02:22 +0000

One of my most enduringly popular blog entries is the one in which I call out for a Mac version of Camtasia, TechSmith’s exceedingly cool screencasting tool. If you search Google for “camtasia mac”, that posting is the top link. Troy Stein, Camtasia’s product manager, has been active in the conversation in the comments on that entry, and today clued me in to Jing Project: Visual conversation starts here. Mac or Windows.

links for 2007-07-18

Wed, 18 Jul 2007 09:23:08 +0000

Lingon by Peter Borg launchd configuration manager (tags: mac launchd osx Software tools)

Bye bye, CareerSite

Sun, 15 Jul 2007 02:07:20 +0000

A few days ago, a bunch of present and former CareerSite employees got together in a farewell gathering for the company. The Ann Arbor News has a brief story: CareerSite moving out of state. I was the application development manager at CareerSite from late 2001 through Feb 2003. That was an, um, interesting time.

links for 2007-07-14

Sat, 14 Jul 2007 09:21:05 +0000

RobotReplay – The Next Generation of Web Analytics (tags: usability web design)

links for 2007-07-12

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 09:22:34 +0000

WebORB for PHP | Flex RPC and Flash Remoting for PHP | AMF0 and AMF3 (tags: php flex remoting development) Introduction to Abject-Oriented Programming â€” Typical Programmer amusing… via Ned Batchelder (tags: programming humor funny development) CodeInvestigator – Debugging without breakpoints records a run of a python script… not sure if there’s a useful way to use this with larger, web app types of things, but it’s an interesting thing to keep an eye on.

links for 2007-07-09

Mon, 09 Jul 2007 09:18:57 +0000

telekinesis iphone remote stream itunes music on the iphone, among other remote control options (tags: iphone mac remote control itunes)

links for 2007-07-08

Sun, 08 Jul 2007 09:21:40 +0000

Yaakov Nemoy: Turbogears and Seam TurboGears and Seam are definitely two different breeds of products. (tags: turbogears java seam)

Lots of motion in TurboGears now

Sat, 07 Jul 2007 12:20:18 +0000

Alberto Valverde, TurboGears’ current fearless leader, made an announcement a few days back about some changes that have quickened TG’s pace of development: Update on the status of TG. Open source projects can take a considerable amount of time and energy that can be hard to sustain, depending on what is going on in your life. I certainly saw that with various contributors to TurboGears. People would come and go as they needed to.

links for 2007-07-06

Fri, 06 Jul 2007 09:24:53 +0000

MadTV Nails Apple and Bush in One Skit (tags: apple bush funny humor politics video) NetWorkSpaces for Python A tuplespace-like system for handling concurrency. server is in Python, but the clients can be in assorted languages. (tags: python programming concurrency distributed cluster parallel network)

links for 2007-07-05

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 09:23:14 +0000

DreamHost iTunes backup dreamhost has a new deal that gives a year of free service to back up your iTunes (Mac only) (tags: dreamhost itunes backup)

links for 2007-07-04

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 09:23:49 +0000

Richard K Miller dot coooooooooom / WordPress plugin: What Would Seth Godin Do Adds a First Time Here part of the page for new visitors. (tags: wordpress plugin blogging) Franklin, “Way to Wealth” Benjamin Franklin’s the Way to Wealth, as recommended by 37s. (tags: finance money) Brave (or stupid?) Cat cat vs. eagle – two go in, one comes out (tags: funny humor photos animals cats)

links for 2007-07-03

Tue, 03 Jul 2007 09:23:36 +0000

Ext JS Blog – Â» Building a desktop application with Ext, AIR, Aptana and Red Bull Jack Slocum makes an AIR and Google Gears-based todo list with online/offline operation (tags: air ajax javascript aptana ext gears) Unicycle.com :: Products :: Ultimate Wheel wow. this unicycle is just a wheel with pedals. (tags: unicycle)

July MichiPUG meeting – TurboGears 2

Mon, 02 Jul 2007 16:01:35 +0000

The July Michigan Python Users Group meeting is coming up this Thursday, July 5th at 7PM at the Arbor Networks office in downtown Ann Arbor. Our main topic for this meeting is TurboGears 2, which Mark Ramm will be talking about. Hope to see you there!

Google Calendar’s Fatal Flaw

Thu, 28 Jun 2007 15:29:28 +0000

I want to use Google Calendar, because it has a nice UI and I can access it from everywhere. There is one small thing that keeps me from switching from iCal: “sticky” notifications. Â It’s not a complicated feature. When I reach the reminder time for an appointment, iCal will pop up a window that stays there until I dismiss it (either by closing it or by telling it to remind me again later).

TurboGears 2: a reinvention and back to its roots

Wed, 27 Jun 2007 13:08:57 +0000

Mark Ramm has just posted a glimpse of The Future of TurboGears. I wanted to post a little of my perspective and a historical view. This past weekend, Jonathan LaCour, Mark Ramm, Rick Copeland, Noah Gift, and Mike Schinkel sprinted on TurboGears 2 (along with a bit of coding-from-starbucks-while-on-vacationby Alberto). TurboGears 2 is at once a reinvention of TurboGears and a return to TG’s roots. My original TurboGears 0.5 release was just a few hundred lines of Python code that built upon thousands of lines of other libraries.

links for 2007-06-26

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 09:18:11 +0000

Python web development and frameworks in 2007 (jp’s domain) Interesting bit of a look at some Python web frameworks including TurboGears. Not wholly accurate or inaccurate. (tags: python framework web comparison programming opensource turbogears)

links for 2007-06-22

Fri, 22 Jun 2007 09:21:09 +0000

Babel internationalization project for Python that leverages gettext and the Common Locale Data Repository (tags: python i18n programming turbogears gettext cldr) Objectpark Software – Picnic file sharing software that will synchronize a shared folder between computers (uses Bonjour to find the shared folders) (tags: mac software bonjour osx)

links for 2007-06-19

Tue, 19 Jun 2007 09:20:50 +0000

RapidoWrite a typing accelerator that expands abbreviations that you give it (tags: mac osx software freeware)

links for 2007-06-15

Fri, 15 Jun 2007 09:24:27 +0000

Mac OS X Troubleshooting Book (PDF) – Help Guide KnockOutDock lets you make the dock effectively go away without getting rid of some of its useful features (expose and whatnot). Good for Quicksilver users like myself who never use the dock. (tags: mac troubleshooting osx software freeware)

links for 2007-06-14

Thu, 14 Jun 2007 09:18:34 +0000

O’Reilly Radar State of the Computer Book Market, Part Four – Programming Languages Q1 07 (tags: programming books statistics)

links for 2007-06-13

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 09:18:29 +0000

ZK – #1 Ajax project on SourceForge.net Java-based server-side Ajax system (tags: ajax framework java opensource programming development)

Python dictionaries are not the same as instances

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 00:29:50 +0000

Yes, yes, I know that Python dictionaries are instances of the dict class. Something that I have noticed through the years and in a variety of bits of code is that many people will use a dictionary where they should really be using an instance. Many of the people that do this likely came from PHP4, Perl or even C where classes are either non-existent or are a little uncomfortable to use.

links for 2007-06-12

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 09:21:35 +0000

XPath Checker – Brian Slesinsky firefox extension to veify xpaths (tags: firefox extension xpath testing) Aptana: The Web IDE nice looking eclipse-based IDE (tags: javascript IDE ajax css html programming) Orbit Event Daemon Event-driven (libevent + pyevent) Comet server in Python (tags: python comet)

links for 2007-06-09

Sat, 09 Jun 2007 09:20:06 +0000

BlogStorm, a website dedicated to tracking links, buzz and popularity in the blogosphere. (tags: blog analytics statistics) Language Log: The Dan Brown code The DaVinci Code works as an interesting thriller, but apparently not as a piece of literature. (tags: writing books davincicode funny)

links for 2007-06-08

Fri, 08 Jun 2007 09:20:27 +0000

Ted On Flex: Flex 3 – Thursday: Dramatically Smaller Flex SWF Files This is a logical and very good move: Flex 2 applications produce fairly large SWF files because they carry the baggage of the Flex framework and components. In Flex 3, the SWF need only contain your own code and the framework is cached. Good job! (tags: adobe flex) Announcing lift 0.2.0 – CircleShare Blog David Pollack announces the new version of lift.

links for 2007-06-07

Thu, 07 Jun 2007 09:28:00 +0000

After thought Â» More Spreadsheets in TextMate! hmm… a spreadsheet in a text editor. weird, but it works. may also be helpful in formatting tables for restructured text. (tags: textmate spreadsheet bundle) Ted On Flex: Flex 3 – Wednesday: Components and SDK Enhancements nice looking new Advanced DataGrid in Flex 3, along with “Deep Linking” (more bookmarkable URLs) and better localization. (tags: flex adobe components)

June MichiPUG meeting tomorrow!

Wed, 06 Jun 2007 17:23:27 +0000

The June meeting of the Michigan Python Users Group is coming up tomorrow. We’re back to the usual time and place, 7PM at Arbor Networks in downtown Ann Arbor. The main topic on deck: the Python DB-API. Carsten Haese will be giving a newbie friendly talk on the topic, which is a nice contrast with last months rather more intensive PyPy/Stackless discussions (thanks Stephan, for that meeting!)

links for 2007-06-01

Fri, 01 Jun 2007 09:20:40 +0000

Mac Rumors: Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Interviewed at All Things Digital [Video] (tags: apple microsoft jobs gates) Home | Mindquarry, the Open Source Collaborative Software (tags: business collaboration opensource groupware software projectmanagement)

Google Gears offline apps and Apollo to ship with SQLite

Thu, 31 May 2007 10:55:43 +0000

Google has just open sourced a new project; Google Gears. (Hmm… sounds like a good companion to another open source project…) Google Gears lets you design webapps that can be taken offline and provides an SQLite-based data store. The data store even includes the full text search engine that Google helped fund. They also add a worker thread pool for performing background tasks (notably, their threads do not share state… so it’s more like multiprocess programming than multithreaded programming).

A day late and $1.20 short

Wed, 30 May 2007 13:43:06 +0000

I predicted that Apple would announce their premium, DRM-free tracks yesterday, since they tend to do music announcement on Tuesdays. I was off by a day: Apple Launches iTunes Plus I logged into my iTunes account to check it out, and only four of my purchased songs are on participating labels (3 of which were by Coldplay). So, upgrading my library at this point was $1.20. Today is the start of real competition in the online music and music player space.

links for 2007-05-30

Wed, 30 May 2007 09:22:05 +0000

How to Write a Spelling Corrector Peter Norvig’s 21-line Python implementation of a spell checker (tags: programming python)

Contact

Mon, 28 May 2007 02:22:31 +0000

links for 2007-05-27

Sun, 27 May 2007 16:19:36 +0000

20 WordPress Themes That Don’t Disappoint – share.clarklab.net (tags: wordpress themes design)

Kevin’s Articles

Sun, 27 May 2007 09:38:51 +0000

###articles###

Seth Godin’s The Dip

Sun, 27 May 2007 08:39:20 +0000

This past Tuesday, I had the pleasure of attending Seth Godin’s The Dip talk at the Michigan Theater. Here’s a photo from Seth’s blog: It’s been a busy week, so I haven’t had a chance to write about this until now. The first thing I want to say is this: if you’re still doing presentations with bullet points, you need to see someone like Seth Godin speak. It will give you a whole new appreciation for how best to present material.

links for 2007-05-26

Sat, 26 May 2007 16:20:18 +0000

fValidator – An open source (free) unobtrusive javascript tool for easy handling form validation (tags: javascript html opensource)

DRM-free iTunes songs coming on Tuesday

Fri, 25 May 2007 23:13:43 +0000

You heard it here first. (This isn’t a rumor by the way… just going on the fact that Apple said that the “premium” tracks were coming in May, and they tend to release new music-related stuff on Tuesdays. I figured I’d blog this as a record of my powers of prediction 🙂

links for 2007-05-24

Thu, 24 May 2007 16:21:39 +0000

Shimo – Mac VPN client A replacement Cisco VPN client with nice features like Keychain use for storing passwords and Growl notifications (tags: vpn osx security free cisco mac freeware)

links for 2007-05-23

Wed, 23 May 2007 16:22:00 +0000

Neatorama Â» Blog Archive Â» The Strangest Disaster of the 20th Century. (tags: science weird disaster) Techdirt: Arguing For Infinite Copyright… Using Copied Ideas And A Near Total Misunderstanding Of Property succinct explanation of how copyright and “intellectual property” are different from tangible property, for anyone who’s making the argument that copyright should be unlimited. (tags: copyright) plain text wiki a wiki built as a textmate bundle.

Michigan Python Users Group June Meeting

Mon, 21 May 2007 05:51:23 +0000

This past week’s MichiPUG meeting was fun and interesting (thanks, Stephan!), but the topic was not entirely Python newbie friendly. PyPy and Stackless are cool, but they are not mainstream. For the June meeting (June 7 at 7PM, back at Arbor Networks), Carsten Haese will be giving a talk on a topic that is definitely mainstream: Python’s DBAPI. The DBAPI is like Java’s JDBC. It’s a database independent way to connect to databases and run queries.

links for 2007-05-20

Sun, 20 May 2007 16:20:14 +0000

YouLicense – The Online Music Licensing Marketplace – YouLicense – Buy, Sell, and License (tags: music licensing)

links for 2007-05-19

Sat, 19 May 2007 16:20:15 +0000

Schneier on Security: Rare Risk and Overreactions another good one from Schneier about tendency to overreact to things that are statistically improbable. Includes the cool quote: “the plural of anecdote isn’t data”. (tags: security culture politics schneier liberty) Amazon.com: Whitney Design 01812 6-Shelf Canvas Sweater Organizer: Kitchen & Housewares this looks handy… if you have a closet and need some quick shelves for lightweight items, this gets you there right away, (tags: storage organization)

links for 2007-05-18

Fri, 18 May 2007 16:19:58 +0000

deconcept â€º SWFObject: Javascript Flash Player detection and embed script (tags: swfobject flex flash)

A sign that Google has come to Ann Arbor

Thu, 17 May 2007 01:54:45 +0000

When Google announced that they were going to employ 1,000 people in Ann Arbor within a few years, the local newspaper was all over it. It actually got to be a bit much. Still, from the perspective of someone working in tech here, it’s good to see a marquee name come to town. I snapped the picture above soon after the sign was put up on the still-under-renovation McKinley Towne Center, where Google Ann Arbor is currently housed.

links for 2007-05-14

Mon, 14 May 2007 16:23:00 +0000

glumbert.com – High Power Job video of man who fixes high voltage power lines (tags: video electricity cool) Jonathan Coulton – MySpace – YouTube – Rock Music – New York Times Good NYTimes Magazine piece about the new kind of “B-list” music artist that is growing up today (and the kind of living you can make being in that role). Good coverage of Jonathan Coulton.

All Others Pay Cash: now you can see it!

Sat, 12 May 2007 09:25:13 +0000

Last summer, I reported on Mickey Hadick’s All Others Pay Cash, a comedy short that is likely the only one you’ll see that includes talk about Python web frameworks. Check out Mick’s new website which includes the entire AOPC video!

links for 2007-05-11

Fri, 11 May 2007 16:20:24 +0000

How To Use Timeboxes for Scheduling Software Delivery | Tyner Blain (tags: projectmanagement timebox management)

links for 2007-05-10

Thu, 10 May 2007 16:21:56 +0000

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Product Managers : The Product Management View (tags: productmanagement product management)

links for 2007-05-04

Fri, 04 May 2007 16:22:04 +0000

Stellarium open source planetarium (tags: astronomy software learning science education) CSS Design Templates – Free Website Templates & WordPress Themes (tags: css templates free design)

Skittr: Twittr clone in Scala with Lift

Fri, 04 May 2007 09:08:51 +0000

David Pollack quotes Sandra Boynton in the title of this more-interesting-for-grownups post: Prance with the Horses, Skittr with the Mice. David has provided a more complete example of his lift web framework for Scala. This example shows why I’m paying attention to what’s going on with Scala and lift. The generally accepted way to do scaling in the LAMP world is to go for “shared nothing” as much as possible and throw more boxes at the problem.

links for 2007-05-03

Thu, 03 May 2007 16:21:57 +0000

33 Rules to Boost Your Productivity Steve Pavlina’s set of rules (tags: productivity) Freeverse : Lineform An inexpensive native Cocoa vector drawing program. (tags: software osx vector illustration design graphics)

TurboGears 1.0.2 released!

Thu, 03 May 2007 03:43:45 +0000

Congrats to the TurboGears team for the new 1.0.2.2 release (see the full changelog). Though this release is a minor version number bump, it comes with a couple of nice, new features: Python 2.5 support and localizable errors messages in FormEncode. Special thanks for the Pyrex folks and Phillip Eby (author of RuleDispatch, among many other things) for making the Python 2.5 support possible. There are, of course, a number of other changes and fixes from quite a few people (and the project has gained some new committers in the past few weeks).

May MichiPUG meeting moved to the 16th

Thu, 03 May 2007 00:16:17 +0000

The Michigan Python Users Group usually meets on the first Thursday of the month. This month, we’ve got a change in plans. Stephan Diehl will be visiting from Berlin and has offered to give a talk about PyPy and Stackless. To fit with his schedule, we’ve moved the MichiPUG meeting to Wednesday, May 16th at 7PM. And, to really mix things up, we’ll be holding the meeting at the Ann Arbor IT Zone.

links for 2007-05-02

Wed, 02 May 2007 16:20:28 +0000

Perian – The swiss-army knife of QuickTimeÂ® components supports 3vix, divX, flash video, Sorenson H.263, Truemotion VP6 and Xvid (in AVI and FLV containers), plus AAC, H.264, etc. in AVI container. (tags: quicktime video mac osx codec) Jim Hugunin’s Thinking Dynamic : A Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) IronPython creator Jim Hugunin talks about Microsoft’s new open source DLR. He describes the code as “early”, but it’s a promising idea: build a layer on top of the CLR for dynamic languages.

Silverlight: Microsoft’s multi-language Flash alternative

Tue, 01 May 2007 18:40:21 +0000

Nik Cubrilovic at TechCrunch has one of the best writeups I’ve seen about Microsoft’s Silverlight (formerly WPF/E): Silverlight: The Web Just Got Richer. Silverlight is gunning for Flash/Flex. Flash and Flex have some huge advantages: they’re fast, tiny and installed. The “installed” part is actually not that important, as far as end-user installation goes. Installing a plugin, especially on IE on Windows, is pretty easy. “Installed” is important, though, because there are many developers who are used to the Flash/Flex systems.

links for 2007-04-29

Sun, 29 Apr 2007 16:19:49 +0000

Boing Boing: Coachella: BjÃ¶rk’s wild sound machines, and report from the turf Xeni Jardin reports on some really cool looking musical devices that Bjork and band used at Coachella (tags: music) Kitchen Soap Â» Blog Archive Â» Slides from â€˜Capacity Planning for LAMPâ€™ talk at MySQL Conf 2007 How Flickr does capacity planning. links to a number of tools that help. (found via Ned Batchelder) (tags: flickr scalability mysql lamp opensource scaling)

links for 2007-04-28

Sat, 28 Apr 2007 16:21:39 +0000

Neuros Technology Neuros OSD – it’s like an open source Apple TV (no hard drive included – add your own USB) (tags: video pvr opensource linux gadgets) Trixie Tracker: Baby Tracking Software if you keep track of everything your baby does, this software will make pretty charts for you. (tags: baby tracking parenting statistics)

Seth Godin in Ann Arbor Michigan – May 22nd

Sat, 28 Apr 2007 08:19:31 +0000

Check it out: Seth Godin in Ann Arbor Michigan – May 22nd. This is what I like about Ann Arbor. It’s a relatively small city, but it is disproportionately active for its size. There are a lot of interesting technology, business and arts things that go on here. If you’re interested in marketing and not familiar with Seth’s work, you should really check out his blog.

links for 2007-04-27

Fri, 27 Apr 2007 16:21:54 +0000

Batman Defenders of the Night (tags: video batman funny towatch comedy)

Ajaxian Â» Adobe announces that it will be opening Flex under Mozilla License

Thu, 26 Apr 2007 19:03:10 +0000

Ajaxian Â» Adobe announces that it will be opening Flex under Mozilla License. This is a big move on Adobe’s part, and it will be interesting to see how this shakes out against OpenLaszlo which previously could cite its open source nature as a benefit over Flex. Adobe still catches a lot of flak because the Flash player is closed source. Given their recent open source moves, I would be surprised if they aren’t seriously considering it.

links for 2007-04-26

Thu, 26 Apr 2007 16:21:12 +0000

Griddle Noise: Python’s Make Rake and Bake, another and again Jeff Shell proposes a simpler replacement for setup.py/zc.buildout/make that combines declarative/procedural tasks as in make but does it all in python. (tags: make programming python rake) ChartDirector Chart Component and Control Library for ASP/COM/VB/.NET/Java/JSP/PHP/Perl/Python/Ruby/ColdFusion/C++ (tags: charts programming python web graphics library)

links for 2007-04-24

Tue, 24 Apr 2007 16:19:15 +0000

Some handy Mail.app Smart Mailboxes | 43 Folders (tags: mac mail tips osx mail.app 43folders)

links for 2007-04-23

Mon, 23 Apr 2007 16:21:07 +0000

MacFusion | The GUI for MacFUSE (tags: macfuse fuse gui mac osx)

links for 2007-04-21

Sat, 21 Apr 2007 16:22:21 +0000

ldopa.net Â» archive Â» glterminal green screen style terminal for the mac (tags: mac software osx geek terminal)

links for 2007-04-19

Thu, 19 Apr 2007 16:23:19 +0000

Life Support: Let the children go on foot and on bike (tags: children health parenting statistics security politics)

links for 2007-04-12

Thu, 12 Apr 2007 16:24:34 +0000

Pearls Before Breakfast – washingtonpost.com interesting piece about what happens when you put a virtuoso violinist with a $3.5m violin in a subway station to play. (tags: culture music performance) Mac OS X S3 Browser (tags: s3 amazon mac software)

links for 2007-04-11

Wed, 11 Apr 2007 16:23:41 +0000

How to Change the World: LinkedIn and the Art of Avoiding an Asshole Boss (tags: LinkedIn management)

links for 2007-04-09

Mon, 09 Apr 2007 16:21:16 +0000

bartek:bargiel : iGTD a new GTD-based todo list that looks more featureful than Actiontastic. (tags: gtd productivity software tools free macosx mac)

links for 2007-04-08

Sun, 08 Apr 2007 16:23:07 +0000

Google Voice Local Search 800-GOOG-411 to get information for free. (tags: google mobile tools 411 free phone) Some more Rails to lift code examples – CircleShare Blog David Pollak provides a nice bit of sample code that shows off a common operation done in Rails and then done in his Scala-based /lift/ framework. (tags: scala lift rails java) Welcome to Dirvish a multiple copy disk backup system (tags: backup free mac OpenSource osx software storage tools)

links for 2007-04-07

Sat, 07 Apr 2007 16:22:10 +0000

Aardvark Firefox Extension lets you quickly remove parts of a page or change colors. can help make a page much more printable (tags: firefox extension css web) Scientists’ stark warning on reality of warmer world | Climate change | Guardian Unlimited Environment (tags: politics globalwarming climate)

links for 2007-04-05

Thu, 05 Apr 2007 16:23:02 +0000

Edward Tufte: Data Analysis for Politics and Policy: Contents/Preface (tags: statistics book tufte) Ext JS – JavaScript Library (tags: ext javascript library ajax) The Great Flickr Tools Collection (tags: flickr photos Tools)

MichiPUG on Thursday: The Other Standard Library

Tue, 03 Apr 2007 08:34:52 +0000

Our topic for Thursday, April 5th of the Michigan Python Users Group is “the other standard library”. We’re going to talk about Python libraries that people can’t live without. 7pm at Arbor Networks in downtown Ann Arbor. Hope to see you there![ ]1

The Beginning of the End of DRM

Mon, 02 Apr 2007 22:36:10 +0000

Apple and EMI have jointly announced new “premium” DRM-free tracks at iTunes: Mac Rumors: Apple/EMI Press Conference Coverage [Event Over] Anyone who worked with software in the late 80s and early 90s would remember how common and annoying copy protection was in those days. The people paying the bills hated it, and it went away. It’s much the same with music today. People are trying to move their music around as they please and the DRM gets in the way of reasonable, lawful use.

April Fools Day Roundup

Sun, 01 Apr 2007 19:58:52 +0000

April Fools Day on the web is a time for celebration of new products and new news. Here’s a roundup (that I’ll update from time to time) of the ones I like from today: Google’s TiSP gives you free internet access via fiber optic cable that is run through your sewage lines. Google’s Gmail service now offers Gmail Paper, where you can have your mail printed out and delivered to you.

links for 2007-03-25

Sun, 25 Mar 2007 16:20:36 +0000

Singapore Scotts Tower, Orchard RoadOffice for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) crazy building with floating towers (tags: design architecture) Video Colbert Dares Democrats to Impeach Bush – Colbert, demovrats, impeach, Bush – Dailymotion Share Your Videos (tags: politics colbert humor)

Joyent Slingshot: a smart product idea

Sat, 24 Mar 2007 10:47:32 +0000

Joyent Slingshot uses Ruby on Rails to create webapps that you run on your desktop that can sync up with the server side. It’s designed to provide an easily installable program for Windows and Mac. This is a good idea and it’s good timing for this product, because it’s coming out head-to-head against Adobe’s Apollo. Apollo could be huge, but it’s just getting going. For those who have been following my blog, TurboGears was actually extracted from a desktop webapp.

links for 2007-03-22

Thu, 22 Mar 2007 16:24:33 +0000

Join the community – Nabaztag neat little wifi rabbit looking thing that gets data from the net (tags: cool gadgets)

links for 2007-03-21

Wed, 21 Mar 2007 16:23:58 +0000

TurboGrid, presented by TurboAjax Group (tags: ajax javascript grid widget dojo)

The security of online password managers

Tue, 20 Mar 2007 22:42:18 +0000

Today, I learned about PassPack – Free Online Password Manager. PassPack appears to do everything right. The encryption/decryption happens in your browser, which means that the data simply cannot be decrypted by the people at PassPack or someone that gets ahold of PassPack’s data.Â They also offer a reasonable technique for dealing with phishers. Fundamentally, though, there is still a risk with a service like this. If someone manages to get into PassPack’s servers, they can modify the software that gets sent to your browser so that it passes along your encryption key, which they can then use to decrypt your passwords at their leisure.

links for 2007-03-20

Tue, 20 Mar 2007 16:20:15 +0000

DoIt todo list – integrates with QuickSilver (tags: mac software productivity osx todo gtd freeware)

Adobe Apollo is in alpha

Mon, 19 Mar 2007 18:55:40 +0000

Though there are some people who are concerned about handing over a monopoly to Adobe (which is a fair concern), Adobe Apollo is now out in alpha and is certainly technology to watch. It’s a system for creating cross-platform desktop apps using webesque technologies (HTML/JavaScript/CSS/Flash). Unfortunately, cross-platform at this time only means Windows and Mac, though Apollo could undoubtedly be brought to Linux if the demand is there. I heard a rumor at one point that Adobe is considering bundling in sqlite, which I think would be killer.

links for 2007-03-17

Sat, 17 Mar 2007 16:24:05 +0000

Instacalc Online Calculator | Instant Results (tags: calculator tools web2.0 excel finance productivity) Coding Horror: The “Works on My Machine” Certification Program (tags: funny programming)

links for 2007-03-16

Fri, 16 Mar 2007 16:21:12 +0000

STANFORD Magazine: March/April 2007 Features Mind-set Research Article about Carol Dweck (a psychologist) and her research into motivation and success. Haven’t read it yet (Guy Kawasaki recommended) but it sounds intriguing and useful at first glance. (tags: business kids lifehacks productivity motivation psychology toread education)

links for 2007-03-15

Thu, 15 Mar 2007 16:23:20 +0000

Max from sbooth.org (tags: freeware mp3 music audio encoder mac software) Core JavaScript 1.5 Guide:Working with Objects woah. javascript has getters and setters. I never knew that! (tags: javascript programming) CSRF Attacks or How to avoid exposing your GMail contacts – Joe Walker’s Blog If you’re using cookie authentication, you should be aware of what that can mean for you.

links for 2007-03-14

Wed, 14 Mar 2007 16:21:55 +0000

FormFaces.com open source (BSD, now!) JavaScript library that interprets XForms into normal HTML controls (tags: xforms javascript ajax web)

links for 2007-03-11

Sun, 11 Mar 2007 16:22:01 +0000

Apple Unveils New Product-Unveiling Product | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source (tags: apple funny humor mac marketing)

links for 2007-03-08

Thu, 08 Mar 2007 16:21:44 +0000

E – TextEditor | The power of TextMate on Windows (tags: textmate editor windows) The Hand of FuManChu – PyCon 2007 and CherryPy (tags: pycon pycon2007 cherrypy python) PyCon: Day 3 (Jeremy Jones) (tags: pycon2007 pycon python) S3 Firefox Organizer (tags: s3 firefox amazon storage backup)

links for 2007-03-07

Wed, 07 Mar 2007 16:28:21 +0000

Barenaked Ladies’s Music Store Amie Street picks up BNL (and other Nettwerk artists, Sarah McLachlan, perhaps?) Very cool model. the songs started out free, but they’re already as high as 92 cents. Who cares, though! They’re DRM-free! Go BNL and Nettwerk! (tags: download drm Music bnl) Parallel Python Python library for moving jobs between python processes on the same or multiple machines (tags: python concurrency smp cluster) lily javascript data flow system (tags: programming ajax)

TGWebServices 1.1 – now with complex input

Wed, 07 Mar 2007 02:11:23 +0000

TGWebServices has now been updated to allow for “complex input”. In other words, you can create a class in Python and have instances of that class as input to your web service methods. (This works via SOAP or plain HTTP POST with XML or JSON documents.)

links for 2007-03-06

Tue, 06 Mar 2007 16:25:43 +0000

cosign: web single sign-on (tags: SSO authentication OpenSource security software)

Merging TurboGears and Pylons?

Tue, 06 Mar 2007 00:16:29 +0000

Mark Ramm goes into a bit of detail over the recent speculation of Merging TurboGears and Pylons? I had a comment about this on the Pylons mailing list as well. Those of us using Python to develop webapps have a great variety of tools to work with. It’s worth noting that I (and many others) like the style/feel of TurboGears apps (which is to say CherryPy-style dispatch by default and Genshi templates).

links for 2007-03-05

Mon, 05 Mar 2007 16:21:47 +0000

Scaling Python for High-Load Web Sites (tags: python performance optimization scaling web)

links for 2007-03-04

Sun, 04 Mar 2007 16:21:23 +0000

paranoia.jpg Paranoia: if it’s not an American flag, it’s probably a bomb. (tags: humor security ATHF Politics boston) msgbus – Google Code (tags: HTTP libevent publish/subscribe bus)

links for 2007-03-03

Sat, 03 Mar 2007 16:25:13 +0000

Creating Passionate Users: The best user manuals EVER Kathy Sierra uses horse training books as an example of how we should be thinking about software documentation. nifty. (tags: documentation writing learning) Welcome to pyglet gaming / multimedia library that is pure Python (using ctypes to talk to native services). mac, windows, linux (tags: python gui graphics programming) Ian Landsmanâ€™s Weblog v2.

links for 2007-03-02

Fri, 02 Mar 2007 16:22:21 +0000

Recycle Ann Arbor the reuse center takes old computer equipment, among other things (tags: annarbor) JJinuxLand: PyCon: The Wonderful World of Widgets for the Web jj behren’s notes about my PyCon talk (tags: pycon python turbogears)

links for 2007-03-01

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 16:27:01 +0000

PyCon 2007 Notes by William McVey good notes from quite a few presentations at PyCon (tags: python pycon)

PyCon on Engadget

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 00:30:02 +0000

Check out the picture in this Engadget article: OLPC BTest-2 XO beta machine sequel arrives. That picture was clearly taken at PyCon this past weekend. In fact, it even looks like that PyCon badge visible in the back is Ian Bicking’s. Gadget news is not what we normally expect from PyCon 🙂

links for 2007-02-28

Wed, 28 Feb 2007 16:21:35 +0000

Announcing the lift web framework version 0.1.0 – David Pollak’s Blog A web framework in a statically typed language doesn’t need to suck. Check this out. (tags: scala web development java lift)

MichiPUG meeting Thursday, March 1

Tue, 27 Feb 2007 23:34:41 +0000

The Michigan Python Users Group will be meeting next on Thursday, March 1. Currently on the agenda is a PyCon recap from those of us who were at PyCon. As usual, the meeting will be at the Arbor Networks in downtown Ann Arbor. Feel free to bring along any other Python topics you might have.

links for 2007-02-27

Tue, 27 Feb 2007 16:27:35 +0000

macosxhints.com – Install an iSync plugin for K800 support (tags: isync mac k800i mobile AddressBook)

links for 2007-02-23

Fri, 23 Feb 2007 16:22:48 +0000

RightContext Provides context sensitive right click menus (tags: javascript contextmenu)

links for 2007-02-22

Thu, 22 Feb 2007 16:21:53 +0000

James Ward: How I Overcame My Fear of Flash (tags: flex flash)

TGWebServices 1.0.2 released

Thu, 22 Feb 2007 00:41:35 +0000

Initial reaction to TGWebServices has been positive, and people have downloaded it… I haven’t had any direct feedback from users yet, but I’m certainly a user of the project. I’ve just released a new bugfix release. See the changes here: [TGWebServices changes for 1.0.2. ]2

Bum rush the charts

Thu, 22 Feb 2007 00:09:12 +0000

links for 2007-02-20

Tue, 20 Feb 2007 16:23:01 +0000

Seven steps to remarkable customer service – Joel on Software Fog Creek’s approach to customer service. (tags: business customer service support software)

links for 2007-02-16

Fri, 16 Feb 2007 16:21:24 +0000

Neil Blakey-Milner on TGWebServices, soaplib, Elixir and Breve (tags: python turbogears soap tgwebservices) :: cleverdevil ::: Making a Statement with Elixir (tags: sqlalchemy elixir python orm)

links for 2007-02-15

Thu, 15 Feb 2007 16:23:08 +0000

Daily Life in an Ivory Basement : /feb-07/pycon-web-panel-2 More thoughts from Titus on the coming web panel. (tags: python web development)

links for 2007-02-14

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 16:21:13 +0000

Optio’s soaplib soaplib is similar (yet different 🙂 to my TGWebServices package released last Friday. (tags: soap python webservices) Griddle Noise: An update on Python SOAP toolkits Jeff Shel talks briefly about the two new SOAP libraries in python/ (tags: python soap webservices) Tech Salary Negotiations – IT jobs | Negotiation Institute (tags: career salary negotiation)

links for 2007-02-13

Tue, 13 Feb 2007 16:24:28 +0000

pycon-web-panel Titus Brown gives some info and links relevant to the Python Web Frameworks panel that I’ll be on at PyCon 2007. (tags: python web pycon) Elixir Declarative “active record” pattern layer on top of SQLAlchemy (tags: sqlalchemy python) InfoQ: Introduction to OpenTerracotta (tags: java opensource Terracotta clustering cluster tutorial) Osama Team Hunger Force “we will disrupt their workday with a mildly offensive middle finger!

links for 2007-02-12

Mon, 12 Feb 2007 16:25:21 +0000

WSGI Middleware Considered Harmful (dirtSimple.org) (tags: python wsgi) WSGI Framework Components and other thoughts on WSGI (tags: python wsgi)

Announcing TGWebServices 1.0

Sat, 10 Feb 2007 04:14:08 +0000

I’m pleased to announce the first release of TGWebServices, a multiprotocol web services toolkit for TurboGears. TGWebServices hooks up straightforward Python methods in an easily consumed API supporting SOAP, HTTP+XML and HTTP+JSON. “Easily consumed” means that it works well even with statically typed languages. Thanks to Arbor Networks for letting me release this work. (p.s. we’re hiring!). Thanks also to WebFaction for hosting the TGWebServices project.

links for 2007-02-09

Fri, 09 Feb 2007 16:25:39 +0000

Pipes: Rewire the web (tags: yahoo mashup web2.0 rss feeds programming ajax) Making a Flickr Killer With TurboGears – Part 1: Introduction To TurboGears Â· Nadav Samet’s Blog (tags: turbogears) Zooglobble: Review: A Curious Glimpse of Michigan – Hipp, Kammeraad, and Friends (tags: kids music michigan) MyOwnDB Blog Â» Blog Archive Â» Understanding javascriptâ€™s prototype member (tags: javascript prototype tutorial) Cliff Wells on using nginx with TurboGears useful stuff from Cliff (tags: nginx turbogears) nginx fast and small HTTP server with the Bob Ippolito seal of approval (tags: nginx webserver HTTP) YouTube – 24: Aqua Teen Hunger Force (tags: humor funny 24 ATHF video)

links for 2007-02-08

Thu, 08 Feb 2007 16:26:57 +0000

Blaze New Media Â» Portfolio Â» Durable WordPress Theme (tags: wordpress themes blogging) Picnik – edit photos the easy way, online in your browser (tags: photo editor photography tools) TurboGears and Pylons (a technical comparison) (tags: turbogears pylons web framework python)

links for 2007-02-07

Wed, 07 Feb 2007 16:24:26 +0000

Apple – Thoughts on Music Amazing. Jobs says that they’d drop DRM if they can, which would break their near-monopoly. Good for Apple! (tags: apple drm music) Sticker Guy! (tags: advertising stickers custom) Hacking Skype: 25 Tips to Improve Your Skype Experience (tags: hack tips skype)

links for 2007-02-06

Tue, 06 Feb 2007 16:22:10 +0000

Spanning Sync (tags: ical google calendar Mac sync)

links for 2007-02-03

Sat, 03 Feb 2007 16:22:58 +0000

Prototype 1.5 PDF: The Complete Documentation (Global Moxie) (tags: prototype javascript documentation)

links for 2007-02-01

Thu, 01 Feb 2007 16:22:20 +0000

Yolk tool for viewing the eggs.you have installed and activated and querying the cheeseshop. add a little more functionality, and this would be the ‘nest’ command that Phillip’s been meaning to write. (tags: python egg tools) Hybridizing Java wherein Bruce Eckel puts forth Flex as the best choice for developing rich internet apps. I concur! (tags: flex programming javascript flash)

links for 2007-01-31

Wed, 31 Jan 2007 16:24:38 +0000

Official Google Mac Blog: Google Notifier tips and tidbits (tags: google Gmail notifier osx tips) Ajaxian Â» Joe Hewitt Firebug power user demo (tags: firebug screencast tutorial firefox debugging javascript)

LouderVoice: reviews on your blog

Wed, 31 Jan 2007 10:34:32 +0000

LouderVoice seems interesting. The goal is to allow you to post reviews on your blog, but have them aggregated back in a meaningful way on the LouderVoice website. It sounds like a neat idea, and I’ll be interested to see how it feels. By the way, they’re hiring and the site is based on TurboGears.

Michigan Python Users Group meeting on Thursday

Wed, 31 Jan 2007 00:31:45 +0000

The Michigan Python Users Group will be meeting on Thursday, February 1, 2007 at Arbor Networks’ office in downtown Ann Arbor. Our topic this time around is template engines, so come with comments and questions about your favorite or least favorite template engines. (Other Python topics are welcome as well…)

links for 2007-01-30

Tue, 30 Jan 2007 16:25:59 +0000

Don Norman’s jnd.org / in praise of good design A number of examples of well-designed products, including a new stapler design and a way to attach your kid to your suitcase. (tags: design usability)

links for 2007-01-28

Sun, 28 Jan 2007 16:22:24 +0000

creativepro.com – Bit by Bit: Forget Cue Cards, Make a Teleprompter! (tags: teleprompter video howto)

links for 2007-01-27

Sat, 27 Jan 2007 16:23:48 +0000

‘There is no war on terror’ | Special Reports | Guardian Unlimited Politics But he said: “It is critical that we understand that this new form of terrorism carries another more subtle, perhaps equally pernicious, risk. Because it might encourage a fear-driven and inappropriate response. By that I mean it can tempt us to abandon o (tags: politics terrorism security) perl.com: Quick Start Guide with SOAP Part Two (tags: Perl SOAP programming) Presentation Prompter (tags: presentation teleprompter software) instructables : Full-screen scrolling teleprompter how to build a teleprompter on the cheap (tags: video teleprompter)

links for 2007-01-26

Fri, 26 Jan 2007 16:23:02 +0000

Introducing Scala, Step 2 – David Pollak’s Blog good intro including Actors, an important concept. (tags: programming scala java) Refwell Blog Â» Blog Archive Â» Full-Duplex Ajax module for Lighttpd (tags: ajax comet lighttpd fdajax javascript)

Fighting back against astroturfing

Fri, 26 Jan 2007 10:03:10 +0000

Apparently, the folks at aquafresh’s ad agency are astroturfers. My friend’s solution? change all of the posts to say Crest instead: anyone try teeth whitening?

Schneier on Security: In Praise of Security Theater

Thu, 25 Jan 2007 19:49:01 +0000

Bruce Schneier has often spoken out against “security theater” (if you don’t know that term, it’s worth reading his new article). In Schneier on Security: In Praise of Security Theater, Schneier actually talks about the real pros and cons of security theater and instances in which it even makes sense. I don’t read tons of security-related material, but this is the best accessible, high-level description I’ve seen for “how to think intelligently about security”.

links for 2007-01-25

Thu, 25 Jan 2007 16:27:07 +0000

Svnmerge.py – SubversionWiki svnmerge is a tool that fixes subversion’s less-than-desirable merging behavior (notably, you don’t have to keep track of versions that you’ve already merged from trunk to your branch) (tags: subversion svn)

macfuse just keeps getting cooler

Tue, 23 Jan 2007 19:35:03 +0000

macfuse brings the goodness of the FUSE project to the Mac, and the project just keeps getting better. I’m just about to install the newest version, which apparently features a small GUI to help you mount volumes. Additionally, the project has released a new SpotlightFS that is like the Finder’s SmartFolders, but these work from the command line! Way cool.

I figured out the server problem.

Tue, 23 Jan 2007 10:25:30 +0000

Or, at least, I think I did. On the old server “top” never really showed me much, even when the load was 18+. On the new box, top showed me a pretty even split between MySQL and PHP. The new box was somewhat responsive even under the high load, so I poked around at a mysqladmin processlist and the www_access log file a little bit. It quickly became clear that I was under attack by comment spammers.

Blue Sky On Mars has moved

Mon, 22 Jan 2007 18:37:29 +0000

At long last, I have moved Blue Sky On Mars to a new machine with a couple of config changes along the way. The new BSOM is on a CentOS machine at Zogmo, sitting behind lighttpd instead of Apache. I also changed over a couple of tables from myisam to InnoDB. Hopefully, all of this will improve server uptime, because the old server was still seeing very high load even with BSOM as the highest traffic site on the box.

links for 2007-01-21

Sun, 21 Jan 2007 08:53:03 +0000

The Hand of FuManChu – help(CherryPy 3.0) Bob is definitely someone who cares about ease-of-programming (tags: python turbogears cherrypy)

Mako templates in Python

Fri, 19 Jan 2007 20:09:18 +0000

I didn’t realize it had been publicly released, but it has indeed: Mako! The prolific Mike Bayer has released a new open source template language. It’s a blazingly fast, plaintext-based, complies-to-Python template language with a pleasing syntax and useful features. Genshi remains my favorite HTML/XML template language, but Mako is a good choice when you’re going for speed (or if you dislike attribute-based template languages). Mako works with TurboGears and also the newly released ToscaWidgets.

links for 2007-01-19

Fri, 19 Jan 2007 09:11:01 +0000

Python Cheese Shop : multishove 0.1 (tags: python sql)

Introducing the DisplayShelf widget

Fri, 19 Jan 2007 01:47:46 +0000

This afternoon, at CodeMash, James Ward and I took over an open spaces table, got some extra displays set up and hacked up a TurboGears widget wrapper for Ely Greenfield’s Display Shelf Flex component. The Display Shelf gives you the effect that Apple created in iTunes 7 with the cover art view. Now, in TurboGears, you can display your own photos the same way trivially. Just call the widget with a Python list of image URLs, and you’ve got your shelf!

Great job, CodeMash organizers!

Fri, 19 Jan 2007 01:35:27 +0000

This year was the first CodeMash conference, and I hope it’s not the last. Unfortunately, I could only stay for one of the two conference days. What makes CodeMash great is that it’s a software developer conference that covers all the bases. There were lots of Python talks. There were .NET people all about. Lots of Ruby love. Many Java folks. (There were many well known folks there as well.) It was a great theme for a conference and it was really nice to have it in the midwest.

Bruce Eckel’s CodeMash keynote on a dynamic world

Thu, 18 Jan 2007 18:52:58 +0000

Bruce Eckel is no longer a fan of “eyes forward” talks, where you sit and listen to someone give a talk. He points out that we can do that on the web. When we get together at a conference, we should do the things that we can’t do when we’re separate. That’s why Bruce is a fan of open spaces discussions. He makes a very good point, and I know that I’ve gained a lot through hallway talk at every conference I’ve been to.

Neal Ford on DSLs at CodeMash

Thu, 18 Jan 2007 17:50:13 +0000

Neal Ford, from Thoughtworks, did the opening keynote session at CodeMash. His talk was about language oriented programming and domain specific languages as the next evolutionary step for programming. (LOP and DSL were both terms coined by Martin Fowler, also of Thoughtworks). Neal traced through the history of programming languages to determine how we got to the languages we have today. Then he started in on DSLs and had some compelling examples of DSLs in the real world (Starbucks, Waffle House hash browns, etc.

links for 2007-01-18

Thu, 18 Jan 2007 08:53:08 +0000

Presentation Zen: Film explores the omnipresent PowerPoint culture in search of its philosophical potential (tags: powerpoint presentations)

Programming languges panel at CodeMash

Thu, 18 Jan 2007 01:10:21 +0000

This was an interesting panel cover a range of programming topics. It was a relaxed, informal way to get into the conference. These notes are very sketchy and miss quite a bit of the discussion… No one really seemed to be a fan of Java. Ted Neward wasn’t able to make it, and I’m sure that he would have been a better defender. The panel was definitely into the dynamic languages.

links for 2007-01-16

Tue, 16 Jan 2007 08:49:10 +0000

Slashdot | Alan Cox Files Patent For DRM Alan Cox, who works for Red Hat, has filed for a patent on DRM. Red Hat apparently won’t license the patent to anyone, if the application is granted. This is unlikely to work, but a very cool attempt anyhow. (tags: legal politics drm)

links for 2007-01-14

Sun, 14 Jan 2007 08:43:57 +0000

Windows 386 Promo Video – Google Video “Boring until the 7 minute mark when the production is taken over by crack-smoking monkeys.” (tags: weird video microsoft)

TG Book sample chapter: The TurboGears Toolbox and Other Tools

Sat, 13 Jan 2007 01:42:39 +0000

InformIT has a sample chapter from Rapid Web Applications with TurboGears: The TurboGears Toolbox and Other Tools > 19.1 Toolbox Overview.

Creating a Flex application using TurboGears

Fri, 12 Jan 2007 17:07:27 +0000

Adobe Flex, for folks not aware of it, is a toolkit for creating attractive, functional GUIs easily. It deploys via Flash, so it works just about everywhere (and looks the same in every browser!). Oh yeah, and Flex is free (though Adobe sells an IDE and additional server side tools that do some extra cool things). Bruce Eckel, host of this weekend’s TurboGears Jam, and James Ward from Adobe (who will also be at the Jam) did a joint screencast where they show off how to create a Flex application with TurboGears.

Disappointing MacWorld keynote

Wed, 10 Jan 2007 02:00:01 +0000

Yes, the iPhone is cool. Way cool, even. Apple TV looks like a nice product as well. But, this is “Mac” World Expo, right? I’m a Mac user and I was more interested in the things that weren’t announced today: a new 12″ MacBook Pro, iLife ’07 and iWork ’07. We all know they’re coming… My guess is that iLife and iWork have been put on hold to coincide with the release of Leopard, and will possibly require Leopard.

links for 2007-01-09

Tue, 09 Jan 2007 08:48:51 +0000

VirtueMart: Your free e-commerce solution. shopping cart based on Joomla. no support for Google Checkout included yet. (tags: ecommerce joomla php shop cart)

links for 2007-01-06

Sat, 06 Jan 2007 08:45:41 +0000

How to Change the World: Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn (tags: LinkedIn career business howto) LinkSys WRT54G as repeater/Extender? – Wireless and Wifi Forums (tags: wireless networking)

links for 2007-01-05

Fri, 05 Jan 2007 08:45:43 +0000

Endo python documentation tool supports Restructured Text, docstrings and comments before variable assignments. I don’t know if it imports the module or not (it must read source to extract comments, though). (tags: python documentation tools)

links for 2007-01-04

Thu, 04 Jan 2007 09:02:36 +0000

SitePen Blog Â» Blog Archive Â» The Dojo Offline Toolkit I’ve looked previously at using proxies for offline web app usage, but the coupling of a proxy and dojo.storage really makes a powerful combo. (tags: dojo offline javascript programming)

TurboGears 1.0 released!

Thu, 04 Jan 2007 02:42:32 +0000

On IRC today, I told a tale of version number mayhem. TurboGears 0.5 came out in September 2005. 0.8 came out in October 2005. In November 2005, I wrote an article right here about how open source projects shouldn’t be shy about releasing their 1.0 versions. The 0.9 alphas started just before PyCon in February 2006. Between 0.8 and 0.9, TurboGears grew a lot of code and features. We needed to assimilate all of that.

TurboGears has a new leader

Thu, 04 Jan 2007 02:41:38 +0000

Since around April, people following TurboGears have undoubtedly noticed that my “public participation” in the project has been sporadic. I say “public”, because I’ve often had things going on behind the scenes for the project. But the fact is, that I’ve been busy. The DVD, the book, the presentations, the new job. With the exception of the job, which is a fairly predictable chunk of time, the other things were one time events.

TurboGears.org moves to WebFaction

Thu, 04 Jan 2007 02:38:20 +0000

The server that runs turbogears.org has sporadically had a problem where the Apache process completely bogs down (and the load average gets up around 20). I haven’t had the time to really chase it down and it happened randomly enough that I didn’t worry too much about it. Over the past few days, however, the site has been down more than it’s been up! So, on New Years Day, I finally took Remi Delon up on his offer of free hosting for turbogears.

links for 2007-01-02

Tue, 02 Jan 2007 08:43:09 +0000

The 10 most outrageous civil liberties violations of 2006. – By Dahlia Lithwick – Slate Magazine (tags: bush law politics)

Special TurboGears IRC chat event on January 3rd

Thu, 28 Dec 2006 01:25:40 +0000

I’ll be hosting a chat on #turbogears on irc.freenode.net at 12PM Eastern/5PM GMT on Wednesday, January 3rd. There’ll be an announcement or two, a special guest and talk of TG 2.0. Feel free to bring your questions along! See you then!

links for 2006-12-24

Sun, 24 Dec 2006 08:47:25 +0000

The Hand of FuManChu – CherryPy 3 has fastest WSGI server yet Bob Brewer has been tuning and benchmarking the CherryPy 3 WSGI server. It is *quite* zippy, and CP3 is hugely faster than CP2.2. Great job! (tags: wsgi python performance cherrypy)

Happy Holidays!

Sat, 23 Dec 2006 20:39:55 +0000

Hey there! Happy holidays to you all! Thanks for quite an eventful 2006. My blog has been in an unfortunate extended quiet period recently. I expect the dry spell to be ending soon, with new things that go beyond the “all TurboGears all the time” focus that’s been here of late.

links for 2006-12-23

Sat, 23 Dec 2006 08:44:26 +0000

Institut fÃ¼r Robotik & Prozessinformatik (tags: 3D software 3dscanner scanner) Table Sorting, Filtering, Etc from JavascriptToolbox.com free for commercial use as well. (tags: javascript table library)

links for 2006-12-22

Fri, 22 Dec 2006 08:45:09 +0000

Tornado Pictures (tags: tornado weather photos) Vitamin Features Â» Create cross browser vector graphics an intro to dojo.gfx (tags: javascript graphics dojo svg)

links for 2006-12-21

Thu, 21 Dec 2006 08:44:00 +0000

YouTube – “Weird Al”‘s interview with Kevin Federline (tags: funny)

links for 2006-12-20

Wed, 20 Dec 2006 08:43:50 +0000

The Simple Dollar Â» 25 Gadgets That Actually Save Money (tags: lifehacks gadgets money tools)

links for 2006-12-16

Sat, 16 Dec 2006 08:44:04 +0000

5 Things a Java developer needs to know about Scala – David Pollak’s Blog (tags: scala java programming)

links for 2006-12-14

Thu, 14 Dec 2006 08:45:40 +0000

Violent Acres Â» Archives Â» Two Phrases That Destroyed American Culture “The customer is always right” is wrong morally (as this great rant points out) and even is often bad business because it rewards our worst customers. (tags: culture rant)

CodeMash early registration ending on the 18th

Wed, 13 Dec 2006 02:54:28 +0000

If you can be in Sandusky, Ohio next month, check out CodeMash – January 18 & 19, 2007. It’s a software development conference for people using just about any toolset to develop software. Early registration (ending on the 18th!) is $99, and the event is at an indoor waterpark. Java, .NET, Python, Ruby, PHP and more are all represented, and there’s a good lineup of speakers.

links for 2006-12-08

Fri, 08 Dec 2006 08:43:26 +0000

NPR : Children’s Tunes Revive Spirit of Punk Rock (tags: children music) Make Create: Google Backdoor change your user agent to mimic the googlebot to get into sites without registering (tags: google hack) Technical Revenue: The Architecture of Mailinator (tags: java email)

links for 2006-12-07

Thu, 07 Dec 2006 08:39:49 +0000

profilehooks.py a simple decorator that makes it easy to profile a single function call (tags: python profiling programming)

MichiPUG Meeting on Thursday (12/7)

Wed, 06 Dec 2006 02:58:37 +0000

The December Michigan Python Users Group meeting is coming up on Thursday, December 7th. As usual, it will be a 7PM at Arbor Networks (go to the michipug.org website for more info). On the agenda for this meeting is a talk about Pyblosxom from Jim McDonald. Beyond that, the discussion is open and Mark had suggested that we could talk about Python 2.5 features a bit more. I hope to see you there!

Web Widgets for everyone at PyCon 2007!

Tue, 05 Dec 2006 13:21:15 +0000

The talks and tutorials for PyCon 2007 were recently announced. I’ll be talking about ToscaWidgets, Alberto Valverde’s web component system. Make no mistake about it: my talk is not TurboGears-specific (though I’ll likely demo with TurboGears). Last December, I put up a rough version of how I thought Python-based web components should work. I wanted them to encapsulate: Display of form elements Display of potentially complex non-form elements Inclusion of JavaScript and CSS as needed (without additional Python or template code) Validation to convert to and from the web Automatic error handling (as much as is possible) In other words, I wanted to remove the boilerplate code from working with forms.

links for 2006-12-05

Tue, 05 Dec 2006 08:41:30 +0000

Fatadam.com Â» Top 10 Viewed Youtube Videos Of All Time (tags: youtube video)

TurboGears 1.0b2 released!

Mon, 04 Dec 2006 22:20:43 +0000

TurboGears 1.0b2, a bugfix release over 1.0b1, has been released! You can download TurboGears using the new tgsetup.py script (which provides better error reporting and saner defaults, plus it will grow to help with testing of new TG versions).

links for 2006-12-04

Mon, 04 Dec 2006 08:40:23 +0000

Wrapping the pre tag (tags: HTML webdesign css)

TurboGears in .NET ROCKS!

Sat, 25 Nov 2006 23:05:54 +0000

Dianne Marsh of SRT Solutions talks a bit about TurboGears in the latest .NET ROCKS! podcast. Not surprisingly, .NET ROCKS! usually talks about, um, .NET. In this one, they’re talking a bit about other technologies. Dianne has had an opportunity to work with a broader array of technologies than most, so this is a good topic for her. (note to those reading this: I haven’t yet listened to the podcast, but I wanted to spread the word because I’m sure it’ll be an interesting one just knowing the folks involved.

links for 2006-11-21

Tue, 21 Nov 2006 08:42:19 +0000

Which style of WSDL should I use? (tags: WebServices soap web development wsdl) Linux Knowledge Base and Tutorial – Reviews | Open Source | Rapid Web Applications with TurboGears: Using Python to Create Ajax-Powered Sites (tags: books python web turbogears programming)

links for 2006-11-20

Mon, 20 Nov 2006 08:40:37 +0000

splee.blog :: SimpleBlog Part 4 – Widgets (tags: web programming turbogears python)

links for 2006-11-19

Sun, 19 Nov 2006 08:38:37 +0000

Wesabe hmm… will people trust this site with all of their personal financial data? (tags: finance money)

links for 2006-11-18

Sat, 18 Nov 2006 08:38:18 +0000

woot-off checker watches the stuff that goes by on woot when there’s a woot-off (tags: woot) Pete Laceyâ€™s Weblog :: The S stands for Simple yeah, this is what SOAP is like. (tags: soap rest webservices)

links for 2006-11-16

Thu, 16 Nov 2006 08:46:36 +0000

Corunet. El blog Â» The definitive heatmap a tool that lets you gather a heatmap for your site/app (tags: javascript usability webdesign heatmap)

#20 tech book on Amazon.com

Wed, 15 Nov 2006 21:13:38 +0000

Rapid Web Applications With TurboGears is now shipping from Amazon, and I just looked and found it at #20 on Amazon.com’s Computers/Internet Bestsellers. Groovy! Thanks to everyone who’s buying it! Update: Since this was a transient event, I wanted to get a screenshot (which I didn’t have time to do earlier when I first posted this). We were 21 when I first posted this but, as you can see above, we landed at #20.

links for 2006-11-15

Wed, 15 Nov 2006 08:41:36 +0000

10 Best WordPress Plugins for Google Adsense (tags: Adsense wordpress google)

TurboGears book is out, photographic evidence here!

Tue, 14 Nov 2006 22:48:44 +0000

Amazon may not show it as in stock, but Rapid Web Applications With TurboGears is most certainly out and in print!

links for 2006-11-14

Tue, 14 Nov 2006 08:44:18 +0000

Building Web Services with Java: SOAP SOAP Data Encoding good information about data encoding and data types in soap. (tags: soap webservices programming)

Schneier on Security: Voting Technology and Security

Mon, 13 Nov 2006 16:28:19 +0000

This is the best summary of why electronic voting machines are a problem. I’ve certainly been aware (and scared) of the issues for some time, but there are a lot of people that aren’t. This is a good one to forward around to people you know who aren’t aware of the issues. This is a really important issue to fix before the next election, and only some people in the government are aware and care about this issue.

links for 2006-11-11

Sat, 11 Nov 2006 08:41:55 +0000

Jellyfish.com (tags: shopping)

links for 2006-11-10

Fri, 10 Nov 2006 08:40:22 +0000

Boing Boing: Pelosi: I’M IN UR HOUSE / IMPEACHIN UR DOODZ (tags: humor politics funny)

links for 2006-11-09

Thu, 09 Nov 2006 08:40:26 +0000

SkyMaul: The Catalog Parody from Kasper Hauser (tags: funny humor parody)

MochiKit.Animator: fancy new animations for MochiKit

Wed, 08 Nov 2006 02:36:28 +0000

So, we’ve got this book coming out this week, and it features 80+ pages on MochiKit 1.4, including the powerful Scriptaculous effects port. Karl Guertin’s new MochiKit.Animator makes the Scriptaculous port a much harder sell. I always appreciate beauty in an API, and this is a very attractive API indeed. It’s based on Bernard Sumption’s work, and this really looks like a solid choice if you’re using MochiKit.

Genshi – beautiful and fast?

Wed, 08 Nov 2006 02:28:02 +0000

While I’m a big fan of his programming (and a certain other of his projects, I’m not of a fan of Mike Bayer’s Myghty template language. The original language itself was invented in Perl-land and Mike adapted and extended it in Python. I just don’t enjoy the syntax. Admittedly, though, Myghty and other Python template languages are faster than my favorite, Genshi. So , you can imagine my delight to read that Mike is working on speeding up Genshi!

links for 2006-11-04

Sat, 04 Nov 2006 08:36:42 +0000

Avoid creation of those pesky ._ and .ds_store files (tags: mac) Welcome to Mr. McGroovy’s box rivets for building things out of cardboard boxes (tags: cardboard toys make fasteners)

Vote for sanity. Vote for gridlock.

Fri, 03 Nov 2006 17:30:00 +0000

British believe Bush more dangerous than Kim Jong-il | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited America is now seen as a threat to world peace by its closest neighbours and allies, according to an international survey of public opinion published today that reveals just how far the country’s reputation has fallen among former supporters since the invasion of Iraq. Bush is not acting alone. He’s acting in concert with an almost completely docile Congress.

links for 2006-11-02

Thu, 02 Nov 2006 08:43:42 +0000

Optimizing Page Load Time – die.net (tags: web optimization performance)

MichiPUG Meeting: Thursday, November 2

Wed, 01 Nov 2006 16:43:50 +0000

The November meeting of MichiPUG will be tomorrow, Thursday, November 2nd at 7PM at the Arbor Networks office. Last month’s meeting had a filled schedule with talks on wxPython and Twill. This month, we’ve got our most open schedule we’ve had for a few months. The one topic we’ve decided on is that we’re going to talk about editors and people will be free to show off some of the cool Python editing related features of their favorite editor/IDE.

links for 2006-10-31

Tue, 31 Oct 2006 08:39:09 +0000

XML-RPC in TurboGears (tags: turbogears python web webservices xmlrpc) Danielâ€™s Weblog Â» Blog Archive Â» Announcing TurboEntity (tags: python turbogears sqlalchemy)

CodeMash – January 18 & 19, 2007

Mon, 30 Oct 2006 22:26:03 +0000

New, groovy-sounding non-denominational conference coming in Sandusky, Ohio: CodeMash – January 18 & 19, 2007

links for 2006-10-30

Mon, 30 Oct 2006 08:41:43 +0000

Motivator: Create your own custom poster — Inspire! Motivate! Mock! (tags: funny tools photos)

links for 2006-10-29

Sun, 29 Oct 2006 08:38:10 +0000

SimpleBlog Part 3 – many-to-many relationships at splee.blog (tags: turbogears programming python sqlalchemy)

links for 2006-10-26

Thu, 26 Oct 2006 08:38:47 +0000

Guy Kawasaki: Defensibility (tags: business)

links for 2006-10-23

Mon, 23 Oct 2006 08:37:43 +0000

The scandal sheet – Salon 34 scandals of the last four years, for anyone who still thinks that we currently have an honest set of folks in Washington. (tags: politics bush scandal)

links for 2006-10-21

Sat, 21 Oct 2006 08:36:53 +0000

SimpleBlog – Part 2 at splee.blog (tags: turbogears sqlalchemy python howto) Schneier on Security: The Death of Ephemeral Conversation (tags: security privacy law)

Stickum – A TurboGears based Pastebin

Sat, 21 Oct 2006 01:22:42 +0000

Lee McFadden announces Stickum – A TurboGears based Pastebin. There’s nothing quite like the joy of simple but useful apps.

links for 2006-10-19

Thu, 19 Oct 2006 08:39:54 +0000

WebDeveloper.com – IE bug with overflow:scroll and position:relative If elements look fixed on the whole page when they shoudl be scrolling (in IE), this is probably the reason. (tags: web development ie) Fixing position:fixed for Windows Internet Explorer fixed position simulation for ie. (tags: IE html web development css) Python Web Development Frameworks at About.com The About.com editor like TurboGears 🙂 (tags: turbogears python web development) splee.

links for 2006-10-18

Wed, 18 Oct 2006 08:42:04 +0000

No Silver Bullet Revisted American Programmer Journal another take on Brooks’ No Silver Bullet (tags: programming)

links for 2006-10-14

Sat, 14 Oct 2006 08:37:51 +0000

http://shadowdane.shackspace.com/cats.htm they’re everywhere. (tags: cats humor funny) DOM Helper somewhat live CSS editor for IE, plus DOM explorer. (tags: ie css editor DOM development web tools)

links for 2006-10-13

Fri, 13 Oct 2006 08:39:56 +0000

Access Matters Â» Blog Archive Â» Todayâ€™s AJAX and DHTML Best Practices (tags: accessibility AJAX javascript webdesign) SQLite gains fulltext search! Lots of other interesting tidbits in Michael Cleverly’s notes from a talk given by D. Richard Hipp. (tags: database sqlite text) No Silver Bullet: Fred Brooks’ 1986 paper (tags: development programming brooks)

The TurboGears Jam Hosted by Bruce Eckel

Wed, 11 Oct 2006 20:56:43 +0000

Big event announcement: The TurboGears Jam Hosted by Bruce Eckel. I’m really excited about this, because I’ve heard some great things about how Bruce runs a conference like this. This is akin to the Web Frameworks Jam that Bruce hosted this past July. They had such a good time with TG that they wanted to do more, thus The TurboGears Jam was born. I’m thankful that Bruce decided to hold this in Ann Arbor.

links for 2006-10-11

Wed, 11 Oct 2006 08:37:34 +0000

Pika – really really freaking cute if you ask me! The real life pikachu! – Google Video (tags: video cute)

links for 2006-10-10

Tue, 10 Oct 2006 08:36:43 +0000

BBC NEWS | Google buys YouTube for $1.65bn YouTube launched in Feb ’05. Not a bad deal selling your business after less than two years for 1.65 billion. (tags: news web business google)

Ian Landsmanâ€™s Mini Site Marketing Experiment

Sun, 08 Oct 2006 01:51:40 +0000

Ian Landsmanâ€™s Mini Site Marketing Experiment is one of the best marketing ideas (and implementations thereof) that I’ve seen in quite a while. Check out the Open Source Help Desk List site that he created. This is a genuinely useful roundup of open source help desk software, though the alphabetical listing is not as useful as listings by platform or by relative maturity/usability would be. The site is not so subtly trying to get people to consider Ian’s HelpSpot product as an alternative.

links for 2006-10-06

Fri, 06 Oct 2006 08:38:00 +0000

Apache Flood “profile based” HTTP load testing (tags: testing apache performance loadtesting)

First half of TG book available electronically

Thu, 05 Oct 2006 12:11:06 +0000

At long last, the first half of Rapid Web Applications with TurboGears is now available electronically as part of “Rough Cuts”. You can buy it electronically now and keep getting updates all the way through the final copy of the book. The book is entirely in the editing phase right now and we’re working hard to wrap it all up quickly. We’re expecting the entire book to be on Safari by the end of the month, and it should be available in print next month.

links for 2006-10-05

Thu, 05 Oct 2006 09:45:49 +0000

Introduction: Testing Python Web applications using twill and wsgi_intercept in-process testing – no web server required! (tags: python testing web twill wsgi development) Hairy Spider Blog – DOMHelper Addins you say, how do I write one of those? (tags: ie css) Natural Docs (tags: documentation javascript)

links for 2006-10-03

Tue, 03 Oct 2006 09:45:09 +0000

Rolling Stone : Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — Will The Next Election Be Hacked? (tags: politics voting)

links for 2006-10-01

Sun, 01 Oct 2006 09:49:29 +0000

Junkfunnel Labs (tags: funny security) Photoshop converts a Photo to a Pencil Sketch (tags: webdesign photos tools) How to Run a Meeting Like Google (tags: business google management)

links for 2006-09-30

Sat, 30 Sep 2006 09:47:54 +0000

Process Impact — Goodies for Software Peer Reviews and Software Inspections (tags: software tools inspections review Development) Codestriker: Homepage (tags: review Software development tools) Stevey’s Blog Rants: Good Agile, Bad Agile While Stevey misses the point that most businesses can’t operate the same way Google does, this is still full of great insights about just what it is that Google does.

MichiPUG meeting on Tuesday, October 3

Fri, 29 Sep 2006 22:41:13 +0000

MICHIPUG (the Michigan Python Users Group) will be meeting on a special day for October: Tuesday, October 3rd. The meeting will be at 7PM as usual, at the Arbor Networks office in downtown Ann Arbor, as the September meeting was. We changed the day so that Titus Brown, author of Twill, could come and talk about testing topics with us. We’re hoping that Jason Pellerin, author of Nose, will also be there.

TurboGears issue of o3 is up!

Fri, 29 Sep 2006 22:35:02 +0000

o3: The Open Source Enterprise Data Networking Magazine, a free, polished online magazine available in PDF form now has issue 5 up. Issue 5 has two articles about TurboGears: an introduction that I wrote, and an article about scaling by the guys at FrozenBear (creators of diggdot.us). Check it out! (And pay attention to the ads, if you’ve been thinking about the TurboGears Ultimate DVD.)

links for 2006-09-29

Fri, 29 Sep 2006 09:49:22 +0000

InfoQ: Testing Ajax Applications with Selenium (tags: Ajax Selenium Testing javascript web tdd development tools)

Spliced Networks’ TurboGears AppStack

Thu, 28 Sep 2006 16:12:51 +0000

Tucked away in this the press release about their participation in Ohio LinuxFest, you’ll find this mention of the new TurboGears AppStack from Spliced Networks: TurboGears is one of many open source projects that Spliced Networks has packaged into a new solution called AppStacks. Designed to work with any Linux operating system, and Apple’s MacOS X Server, AppStacks are highly secure and optimized server appliance solutions. Preconfigured, secure server environments seems like a great thing to sell, because there are a lot of components required to get these things right.

TurboGears in Print

Mon, 25 Sep 2006 13:07:38 +0000

Nope, the book’s not out yet (though the writing is complete and we’re going through edits now). However, you can find good stuff about TurboGears in print in two places. I’m tardy reporting on the first one. This is from Japan and I’m not sure if you’d call it a book or a magazine. It doesn’t have ads, but it’s also not as long as a typical book. Whatever you call it, it’s very interesting:

links for 2006-09-24

Sun, 24 Sep 2006 09:45:48 +0000

PR Leap – Free Press Release Distribution to Major Search Engines – Beta (tags: marketing business)

links for 2006-09-23

Sat, 23 Sep 2006 09:45:42 +0000

Trading Hours For Dollars Â« John Chow dot Com (tags: business money career entrepreneurship)

links for 2006-09-22

Fri, 22 Sep 2006 09:46:51 +0000

Pyd: Connecting D and Python D is an interesting looking language. It looks a bit like the Java you’d like to have (type inference, native associative array syntax), but it’s native compiled and runs nearly as fast as C with much less overhead than Java. It’s made all the more inter (tags: python d programming) Mercurial binary packages Windows and Mac premade Mercurial packages with extra fixes beyond the current release.

Genshi: the best template language in Python right now

Wed, 20 Sep 2006 13:35:18 +0000

Christopher Lenz announced a new version of Genshi a couple of days ago. Genshi is the template language that was formerly known as Markup. A good way to think about it is that it’s Kid 2.0. The latest version includes a feature I was wishing for in Kid: plaintext templating. Take a look at the doctest for it: >>> tmpl = TextTemplate('''Dear $name, ... ... We have the following items for you: .

links for 2006-09-20

Wed, 20 Sep 2006 09:45:21 +0000

Using digg and Netscape to get traffic (tags: marketing digg) YouTube – White & Nerdy (tags: funny music video)

TurboGears 1.0b1 released!

Fri, 08 Sep 2006 12:25:33 +0000

TurboGears got its first public display at the first Michigan Python Users Group meeting in September 2005. Last night, at the end of the latest michipug meeting, I flipped the switch to release TurboGears 1.0b1. Here is the announcement email that went out: I am pleased to announce TurboGears 1.0b1, which now supersedes the 0.8.9 release as the preferred TurboGears release. Many people have been using the TurboGears 0.9x releases for several months now and have been very happy with the results.

New TurboGears-related screencasts and requests

Wed, 06 Sep 2006 16:17:25 +0000

If you haven’t already seen it, you should check out the screencast for the online marking tool that Greg Wilson’s group made. Very slick stuff, and I wish the graders had a tool like that when I was in school. Oprius has posted three new screencasts of their slick Foundations package. Finally, the good folks of ShowMeDo have pointed me to a page to request TurboGears screencasts. Put in a call for your topic of choice.

Algorithms book

Wed, 06 Sep 2006 16:06:51 +0000

Free Algorithms textbook – because you never know when you’ll need a different algorithm.

RPath’s RAA – building custom Linuxes with a TG app

Wed, 06 Sep 2006 13:03:09 +0000

Another TurboGears-based product showed up on Digg a few days ago (I’m a bit tardy in blogging this one, sorry!) RPath makes a great-sounding tool for building custom Linux distributions for appliances. Linux is a great embedded platform for medium to large devices, depending on your requirements, and RAA lets you get your Linux in shape easily so that you can focus on your application (might I suggest that TurboGears is a good way to make the UI for your app?

BitRocket – Mac OS X BitTorrent Client

Wed, 06 Sep 2006 02:37:43 +0000

BitRocket – Mac OS X BitTorrent Client

What’s new in CherryPy 3.0

Tue, 05 Sep 2006 19:24:49 +0000

WhatsNewIn30 – CherryPy excellent stuff on the way. Bob Brewer has cleaned things up a lot. (Elvelind Grandin is already looking at ways we can simplify the TurboGears core using these new features.)

Parallels rocks

Tue, 05 Sep 2006 18:58:49 +0000

Parallels Desktop for Mac lets you run Windows (and other OSes) on your Intel Mac. I’ve had it for a few days, but one of my coworkers showed me the “Parallels Tools” today. Wow. Make sure you install the tools when you use Parallels with Windows. It’s so cool. The mouse seamlessly moves between Mac OS and Windows as the cursor goes over the Windows window. And, full screen mode looks right now (before I had black bars on both sides of my MacBook Pro’s widescreen display).

Google Revealed: The IT Strategy That Makes It Work

Fri, 01 Sep 2006 17:33:26 +0000

Some very interesting tidbits about how Google runs its IT. Google Revealed: The IT Strategy That Makes It Work – Management News by InformationWeek

Schneier on fighting terror with anti-terror

Thu, 31 Aug 2006 02:10:50 +0000

Probably one of the best articles you’ll see with a succinct message about how we’re doing all of the wrong things in the face of a terrorist threat: Schneier on Security: What the Terrorists Want Another thought experiment: Imagine for a moment that the British government arrested the 23 suspects without fanfare. Imagine that the TSA and its European counterparts didn’t engage in pointless airline-security measures like banning liquids. And imagine that the press didn’t write about it endlessly, and that the politicians didn’t use the event to remind us all how scared we should be.

Guido’s clarification on the pronouncement

Wed, 30 Aug 2006 16:54:44 +0000

Django: Python on a Plane “I don’t do a lot of Web programming, and the Web programming that I do isn’t very complex, so I’m not sure that my vote should count very strongly,” [Guido] added. “But people keep asking me to pick one, and I like Django because I like the way its authors run their project: They really ‘get’ open-source development.”

In praise of the Django people

Wed, 30 Aug 2006 16:51:40 +0000

As open source projects, TurboGears and Django have their differences. We compete for many of the same users (though there are some things that may be easier in one or the other).Â That said, I must say that the Python-web people that I’ve interacted with have been great. Jacob Kaplan-Moss posted his own take on Guido’s Pronouncement, even linking to my post on the subject. Thanks, Jacob! Between PyCon and EuroPython, I got to spend time with a whole bunch of Python-web people (some of whom I saw in both places: Simon Willison, Jim Fulton, Philip von Weitershausen).

Seth’s Blog: Marketing Morality

Wed, 30 Aug 2006 16:12:57 +0000

Seth Godin talks about Marketing Morality. Just as marketers need to take responsibility for the things we sell, so do we all…

Sherb’s Blog :: Clever Advertising

Sun, 27 Aug 2006 13:21:39 +0000

Sherb’s Blog :: Clever Advertising Another great set of pics for this morning. Ads that work with real-life environments…

Hummingbird Hawkmoth

Sun, 27 Aug 2006 13:07:10 +0000

I just saw this on Boing Boing and it demanded blogging. This creature is just too unusual and nifty to pass up: It sure looks like a hummingbird… except for those antennas!

GetBundle Bundle for TextMate

Wed, 23 Aug 2006 14:26:29 +0000

GetBundle for TextMate makes it super easy to install one of the 3.4 billion TextMate bundles that are available.

Summer of Code Goodies Arriving

Mon, 21 Aug 2006 12:43:51 +0000

Though we still have more than a month of good weather to look forward to here in Michigan, the thought of summer ending and heading into another long winter isn’t pleasant. On the plus side, the end of summer brings the results of Google’s Summer of Code. The one that I’ve been most looking forward to is Migrate, assistance for SQLAlchemy database schema migration. I just spotted Evan’s 0.2.0 release on the Cheeseshop.

There can’t be only one.

Sat, 19 Aug 2006 13:30:42 +0000

I guess I’d better give up now. Guido announced at SciPy that Django is the “standard” web framework for Python. How’s that for a first two sentences of a blog post? Of course, only one of those two sentences is accurate. According to the blog post I linked to above, Guido “hopes that Django and TurboGears will converge”. Sigh. Someone please tell me that Guido hasn’t fallen for the “Python is losing to Ruby because Ruby only has one web framework” argument.

TurboGears at the Great Lakes Software Excellence Conference

Sat, 19 Aug 2006 02:00:50 +0000

I will be presenting TurboGears at the Great Lakes Software Excellence Conference, which is October 25th and 26th in Grand Rapids, Michigan. If you’re in the midwest, I hope to meet up with you there!

TurboGears 0.9a9 released (something different)

Sat, 19 Aug 2006 01:21:48 +0000

Today, TurboGears 0.9a9 was released. This is a bug fix release with a couple of minor enhancements. The big difference with this release was that it was completely handled by Elvelind Grandin. Elvelind was, if memory serves, the first person (after me) with svn commit access to TurboGears and he has been helping out all along. Now he’s helping out as the TG release manager with the mechanics of issuing new releases.

The company I work for is cooler than yours

Tue, 15 Aug 2006 14:02:28 +0000

The release notes for Arbor Peakflow SP mention “Zombie army detection”. I’m sure that was written with a straight face. Still, not many companies can list that as a feature of their product. Imagine a car: the new Chevy Impaler with Zombie Army Detection and BrainChaff (courtesy of Brains4Zombies) protects you and your family from the zombie armies that are just waiting to attack. The botnet and zombie army detection features of Peakflow SP are actually quite useful, but it is still a fun thing to see in print.

Python Web Frameworks on the Small Screen

Mon, 14 Aug 2006 19:13:58 +0000

In the madness before EuroPython, Mickey Hadick sent me a copy of his first episode of “All Others Pay Cash”. You can check out a trailer for it on Mickey’s videos page. I finally got around to watching the video this weekend. This episode, “Death By Chocolate”, is funny and worth a watch… for those of us doing Python web stuff, it’s notable for being, by my guess, the only sitcom to mention half a dozen Python web frameworks and even slide in a plug for Fuzzyman.

TextMate wins an Apple Design Award

Thu, 10 Aug 2006 01:46:53 +0000

Like many Mac+Unix users, I’m a big fan of TextMate. Congrats to Allan on winning an Apple Design Award! It’s well-deserved. TextMate takes good advantage of the Mac’s graceful UI and Unix innards. Thanks to Jeff Shell for the pointer.

Oprius Foundations is a free to use contacts, calendar and todo app

Wed, 09 Aug 2006 03:10:44 +0000

Oprius has just updated their website and opened up signups. Their first offering is Oprius Foundations, which is a free, integrated contacts, calendar and todo management app. It’s very slick, Ajaxy goodness can be seen in their screencast. This is a stepping stone to their actual bread-and-butter product: Oprius Independent. Independent is software to help people who are independent direct sales and network sales business people. It’s also worth noting that Oprius is hiring.

Guy Kawasaki and Seth Godin: Together At Last

Tue, 08 Aug 2006 01:17:22 +0000

One a-list business blogger interviewing another: Signum sine tinnitu–by Guy Kawasaki: Ten Questions with Seth Godin I like reading Seth’s thoughts, even if he does keep beating the same drum (hey! he actually believes in what he writes!). I did enjoy Seth’s answer about what makes him successful: If we define success as the ability to make a living doing what I do, Iâ€™d say the following: No ulterior motive.

ShowMeDo has your TurboGears videos for you!

Sat, 05 Aug 2006 04:08:15 +0000

The good folks over at ShowMeDo have put together a convenient, all-in-one-place index of TurboGears videos. Check them out! (And, of course, you can get hours more on the DVD.) Thanks, Ian and Kyran!

Fast Track Needs You!

Tue, 01 Aug 2006 02:35:20 +0000

Jonathan LaCour has sent up the call: Fast Track Needs You! And it does! A chance to help out with a new name, logo and look. It’s a great and useful project, and these are fun areas to help in. (Oh, and I’m certain Jonathan would be happy to accept patches if you want to help out in that way 🙂

Things to comment on

Fri, 28 Jul 2006 14:04:25 +0000

In addition to starting my new job at Arbor Networks (which is going quite well, by the way), I’ve been working hard on the TurboGears book ever since returning from EuroPython. This has left me with little time to blog, and I didn’t have my work machine set up for blog posting (which is to say that I forgot my password because I never have to type it), so I couldn’t even link to interesting things.

“New” Monopoly

Tue, 25 Jul 2006 10:38:14 +0000

Remember “New Coke”? Monopoly ditches cash, goes plastic – Engadget

YouTube – jon stewart on net neutrality

Mon, 24 Jul 2006 11:00:03 +0000

YouTube – jon stewart on net neutrality

YouTube – Knights of the Round Table – Star Trek TOS

Wed, 19 Jul 2006 03:08:55 +0000

YouTube – Knights of the Round Table – Star Trek TOS

Unintentionally bad company URLs

Sun, 16 Jul 2006 04:25:26 +0000

In principio erat Verbum – Î•Î½ Î±Ï?Ï‡Î· Î·Î½ Î¿ Î›Î¿Î³Î¿Ï‚: Î™Î¿Ï?Î»Î¹Î¿Ï‚ 2006

Python Web frameworks, Part 2: Web development with TurboGears and Python

Wed, 12 Jul 2006 02:50:44 +0000

Ian Maurer’s Python Web frameworks, Part 2: Web development with TurboGears and Python is up on IBM DeveloperWorks now. I haven’t read his final copy yet, but I did get a chance to read a draft. With today’s featureful frameworks, there’s a lot more to write about than can fit into a single introductory article. I’ve been trying to see slightly different things covered in different places to give people a variety of views into TurboGears.

Super quick EuroPython wrapup…

Wed, 12 Jul 2006 02:45:11 +0000

I’m very tardy in writing anything on my blog, particular given how much I’ve had going on. I certainly would like to write more. I had a great time in Geneva, heard a number of interesting talks there, saw cool things at CERN and in town, and met many interesting and talented Python folks. I also got to speak quite a bit and took part in a fun web framework shootout.

Urban Fairies fairy doors Locations

Wed, 28 Jun 2006 11:32:57 +0000

Urban Fairies fairy doors Locations which, oddly enough, are located in the town in which I live. I’ll have to check that out when I’m downtown next.

Python Web Developer Appliance

Wed, 28 Jun 2006 02:16:58 +0000

Jim McDonald of our local Python Users Group (MichiPUG) created the Python Web Developer Appliance, which is a VMWare Player appliance for trying out almost everything you could want related to Python web development. It’s all configured and ready to run. It’s a slick piece of work if you’re looking to tinker.

TurboZSI SOAP web services for TurboGears

Wed, 28 Jun 2006 01:08:46 +0000

Charlie Moad announced TurboZSI today, which is a package that wraps up the ZSI library to provide SOAP-based web services for TurboGears. It looks good, but it also reminds me about why I like standard HTTP with JSON return values for web APIs.

The JavaScript Library World Cup

Tue, 27 Jun 2006 14:28:11 +0000

The JavaScript Library World Cup: Dan Webb writes an excellent article providing a high-level view of 4 different JavaScript libraries (Dojo, Prototype/Scriptaculous, MochiKit and Yahoo! UI).

Sounddogs Sound Effects, Production Music, Royalty Free Music, MP3 AIF WAV Sound Effects

Sun, 25 Jun 2006 16:58:49 +0000

SoundDogs.com, because you never know when you’ll need Sound Effects, Production Music, Royalty Free Music, MP3 AIF WAV Sound Effects

Free! Icons for your website or application at MaxPower

Sun, 25 Jun 2006 03:36:16 +0000

Free! Icons for your website or application at MaxPower

PlotKit with EasyPlot in TurboGears

Sat, 24 Jun 2006 13:47:12 +0000

PlotKit with EasyPlot in TurboGears nice and easy client-side graphing.

TG Site: MeCommerce 50% revenue split for bloggers

Fri, 23 Jun 2006 21:25:28 +0000

TechCrunch has the story today: GoodStorm to offer e-commerce widget with 50% revenue split for bloggers, talking about a new service called MeCommerce. There’s a whole bunch going on in this one that makes me take notice. 1) MeCommerce was put together by FrozenBear and runs TurboGears under the hood. 2) 50% of retail markup (not revenue, as TechCrunch states) is a sweet deal. 3) People can buy things without leaving your site… not necessary, but cool.

WebFaction gives 50% of profits to TurboGears

Fri, 23 Jun 2006 16:29:03 +0000

WebFaction, in addition to having the easiest TurboGears hosting, is now good for the project in another way: they are paying 50% of their profits from TurboGears hosting back to the project. That is money that I use to get services that benefit TurboGears itself. Not sure who WebFaction is? WebFaction was formerly Python-Hosting.com. These guys know how to host TurboGears apps. After all, two of the principal folks from CherryPy are there!

iBox javascript

Wed, 21 Jun 2006 18:08:49 +0000

iBox is like Lightbox but can handle separate pages, inline divs and images. It’s also small (11K).

How easy is it to host a TG app?

Wed, 21 Jun 2006 15:08:20 +0000

When I put (in my sidebar) that WebFaction has the easiest TurboGears hosting, I meant it. Check out their Control panel demo and see for yourself. Nicely done!

Preorder Rapid Web Applications with TurboGears

Wed, 21 Jun 2006 11:40:43 +0000

Psst… hey you. Yeah, you! I’ve got a deal for you… I hear Amazon.com has Rapid Web Applications With TurboGears available for preorder at 37% off of list price! Yeah, I know the page doesn’t have much of a description right now, but this will be the book to have if you want more information on TurboGears (or SQLObject or Kid or MochiKit!). There’s even a bonus bit about SQLAlchemy! The book doesn’t ship until October 27th (according to Amazon, what would I know about such things?

Changing the color attribute on a physical product

Fri, 16 Jun 2006 14:47:31 +0000

Remarkably, all of the timings fell into place for me to begin shipping the TurboGears Ultimate DVD (and the assorted other fun stuff I’ve got) today as planned. Producing the DVD was a painful experience that was fraught with peril (but mostly fraught with an extraordinary variety of technical complications). It was a good feeling to get it off to manufacturing. The DVDs arrived on schedule at the warehouse on Wednesday, and I received a few yesterday.

PythonDoc Wiki Macro for Trac

Fri, 16 Jun 2006 11:29:21 +0000

PythonDoc Wiki Macro for Trac – just add links to Trac’s source browser, and this looks like a winner.

JavaScriptSearch News: TurboGears: A Python-based Framework for Ajax Web Development

Thu, 15 Jun 2006 14:36:51 +0000

JavaScriptSearch News: TurboGears: A Python-based Framework for Ajax Web Development

The Lyrebird

Wed, 14 Jun 2006 17:32:41 +0000

The Lyrebird does an amazing job of reproducing the sounds it hears.

A Blog Around The Clock: all about sleep

Tue, 13 Jun 2006 14:29:20 +0000

A Blog Around The Clock has all kinds of interesting things about sleep.

Got my Toolboxes and MarbleGears

Mon, 12 Jun 2006 19:53:16 +0000

It’ll likely be a week before I get my hands on a physical copy of the TurboGears Ultimate DVD, but I did receive my tin Toolboxes and MarbleGears today. The fulfillment service did a great job packaging it up and shipping it along. (The owner of the company has a great attitude: he insists on not making “boxing stuff up and sending it out” any more complex than it really is.

Automatic Python imports with autoimp, lazy ones with Importing

Mon, 12 Jun 2006 15:48:51 +0000

Connelly Blog: Automatic Python imports with autoimp tries to make all modules/packages available without loading everything up. Interesting idea. Something that may also be interesting is using its recursive lazy loader in TG to not import the features you’re not using. The license is unknown, however. (Update: it’s public domain). Update: odd to get two import-related packages in the same day. I’m uncertain about the automatic import thing, but Phillip Eby just released Importing which provides dynamic module loading (it also provides “load object Y from module X specified in python dotted notation string” utility functions, which could eliminate a utility we have in tg.

Bruce Eckel’s Some Kind of Event

Mon, 12 Jun 2006 13:55:13 +0000

Bruce Eckel is proposing Some Kind of Event in place of his Thinking in Java event. He’s considering doing something in TurboGears (possibly a Rails/TurboGears comparison, or developing a TG app, or porting one from Python to Java). This would be a great event! I really wish I could attend, but my schedule’s just not open at that point. Please pester Bruce if you’d like to see TurboGears highlighted at his event.

Socialtext Partners with Dan Bricklin on wikiCalc

Fri, 09 Jun 2006 17:21:36 +0000

Socialtext Partners with Dan Bricklin on wikiCalc is an interesting follow up to the Google Spreadsheet news. I made the prediction that Google’s going to (someday) sell a box that you can drop onto your company network that lets you do collaborative spreadsheets and document editing. Socialtext, it would appear, can do that for you now, and using open source software if you want to manage it yourself! Or, you can get hosted services or buy their hardware/software combo (just like the GOB I was talking about).

Rapid Web Applications with TurboGears book cover

Fri, 09 Jun 2006 15:09:38 +0000

If you’ve been wondering what a TurboGears book might look like, you need wonder no more: More word on how and when you’ll be able to get ahold of the book is coming soon. Update: So, I sometimes forget that not everyone has been working on this book for the past few months. The origin of this cover certainly warrants a little explanation. Prentice Hall (Pearson) is a very large publisher with many brands and each brand has their own different collections of books.

You’re pitiful

Fri, 09 Jun 2006 02:52:02 +0000

“Weird Al” Yankovic has released what is probably the only song you’re likely to hear this year that mentions the game Halo.

DVD is off to manufacturing!

Thu, 08 Jun 2006 15:29:53 +0000

I’ve shipped off The TurboGears Ultimate DVD for manufacturing! Woohoo! The final running time of all of the videos on the disc is more than 5.5 hours. There’s four hours of video that’s not available online. Putting together that DVD was a grueling experience, due primarily to technical issues. A computer that locks up sometimes… Premiere Pro’s odd habit of producing files an order of magnitude larger than QuickTime Pro does using “the same codec”… and QuickTime Pro (on Windows) gets the occasional buffer overrun (after spending a few hours encoding).

A Brand New Job!

Thu, 08 Jun 2006 15:18:40 +0000

After quite a bit of deliberation, I’m pleased to announce that I’m going to work for Arbor Networks, starting on July 11th after my Month of Insanity is over. Arbor will be a great place to work and they made a terrific offer. I’ve previously worked with half a dozen people there. Had Arbor not been so attractive, my decision would’ve been easier. I had to really think about what’s best for TurboGears and myself.

The business behind Google Spreadsheet

Thu, 08 Jun 2006 01:40:27 +0000

So, Google introduced a spreadsheet. It’s got cool collaboration features, and runs neatly within your browser. Of course, people are starting to be wary of Google potentially holding all of their information, which makes Google Spreadsheet a less likely holding spot for very sensitive information (and quite a few people put sensitive information in spreadsheets). That somewhat limits the number of people that will use the product. Google currently makes almost all of their money from ads.

Google Spreadsheets

Wed, 07 Jun 2006 03:19:47 +0000

Like probably everyone else in the world, I’ve worked in a company that was hampered by inefficient spreadsheet mailing. I’m sure that many geeks other than myself have tried to come up with solutions to this problem. The Google Spreadsheet announcement is not a big surprise, and I think it makes a lot of sense. It’s hard to get people to change, and people are used to making spreadsheets, even when they’re not the “right” tool for the job.

Europython 2006 Schedule

Tue, 06 Jun 2006 15:37:00 +0000

The Europython 2006 schedule is up and has what is, to me, an overwhelming amount of me. I’m very much looking forward to going there and meeting everyone, but it appears that I have an hour and forty minutes to prepare for! It wouldn’t be a big deal if I didn’t also need to work on a book this month and to earn a little money in between. Seriously, if you’re a TurboGears user, heading to EuroPython and interested in taking on a TG segment, email me please.

UIZE JavaScript API

Sat, 03 Jun 2006 18:15:43 +0000

UIZE JavaScript API fancy effects, nice table widget

Rolling Stone : Was the 2004 Election Stolen?

Fri, 02 Jun 2006 13:31:30 +0000

Rolling Stone : Was the 2004 Election Stolen?

raze library of utilities for Python

Thu, 01 Jun 2006 02:47:16 +0000

raze has what appears to be a number of the things you’d normally grab from the Cookbook, all packaged together.

irrepressible.info TurboGears site slashdotted

Wed, 31 May 2006 19:09:34 +0000

This week, Amnesty International’s irrepressible.info campaign website (developed by the folks at Soda) was simultaneously Slashdotted and Observed (the Observer being a popular UK paper) and lived to tell the tale. The irrepressible.info campaign is all about human rights and freedom on the net. Also, some news that I forgot to blog a couple weeks ago. Diggdot.us recently appeared in MacWorld as one of the go-to sites for geeks. It’s great to see these successful sites with TurboGears under the hood.

Free Image Hosting at AllYouCanUpload.com

Tue, 30 May 2006 16:25:37 +0000

Easy resizing, no registration, no size/bandwidth limits: Free Image Hosting at AllYouCanUpload.com

200,000 eggs served

Tue, 30 May 2006 15:55:15 +0000

Let the cholesterol jokes begin! TurboGears.org has served more than 200,000 eggs. (Do Python Eggs even have cholesterol?)

Using JavaScript Widgets with TurboGears

Tue, 30 May 2006 14:25:37 +0000

I’ve just put up a new screencast showing how easy it is to use JavaScript libraries that have been packaged as TurboGears widgets: Using JavaScript with TurboGears. This screencast actually shows off a few things: Using a widget (obviously) How widgets include the necessary JavaScript The widget browser in the TurboGears Toolbox How cool setuptools/Python Eggs are (I start from not even having the widget package installed). This shows off setuptools, because I used the Lightbox widget, which in turn requires the Scriptaculous widget.

Coders aren’t the only contributors to open source

Mon, 29 May 2006 20:23:18 +0000

The TurboGears project has been fortunate to have a number of great contributors. We have had a number of excellent code contributions and contributors, but we’ve also had people give us support on the mailing lists, documentation and visuals. I’m very thankful to have Richard Standbrook, Ronald Jaramillo, Karl Guertin and others helping keep TurboGears visuals on track. Richard has even helped out with my TurboGears Ultimate DVD by providing a DVD slip case design:

SQLAlchemy gets a new release and a new site

Mon, 29 May 2006 02:54:51 +0000

Mike Bayer and others have been involved in a pretty significant rejiggering (that’s the technical term) of SQLAlchemy. Much of the common user API is unchanged, but some of the pieces have become considerably more flexible. Additionally, Mike has rolled out a new site: SQLAlchemy – The Database Toolkit for Python SQLAlchemy has a strong community, which provides patches and updates on a regular basis. Included with SQLAlchemy are several user-supplied extensions, including ActiveMapper, SqlSoup and SelectResults.

PyCells and peak.events

Sat, 27 May 2006 11:25:44 +0000

When Phillip Eby works on something that has “head-exploding” properties, it’s worth paying attention to see why he’s putting forth the effort: PyCells and peak.events. Sometimes these things look academic and not useful in reality, and I’ve seen responses along these lines to TurboGears’ use of Rule Dispatch. Really, though, this looks quite valuable for certain kinds of problems in certain kinds of systems.

Off to a fine start

Fri, 26 May 2006 17:35:19 +0000

Word is just starting to spread about the TurboGears Ultimate DVD (and the tin and squishy Toolboxes and the MarbleGears), so I’m quite happy with the response I’m seeing so far. A couple interesting bits so far: Sales outside the US outnumber sales in the US. Ronald Jaramillo, who is personally responsible for the general coolness of the TurboGears Toolbox (the software one), placed the first order. Denmark, Thailand, Taiwan, Japan, Switzerland and the UK at least have all put in appearances.

Example TurboGears apps in Portuguese

Fri, 26 May 2006 16:37:45 +0000

I don’t know Portuguese, but apparently Claudio Torcato has made a couple of TurboGears example apps (I saw the mention of widgets in there, as well). The cool thing is that I spotted these in the Cheeseshop. It’s nice seeing people registering their work!

Announcing the TurboGears Ultimate DVD

Fri, 26 May 2006 13:32:26 +0000

I am taking preorders for the TurboGears Ultimate DVD, with more than 2 hours of new screencasts. Rather than copying the whole description here, or writing some new, less-useful description, I’ll just say “head on over and check it out”. I’ve also got to comment on the new TurboGears merchandise. The tin TurboGears Toolbox is going to be quite the desk accessory: But, I’m really looking forward to getting my hands on the new MarbleGears:

TurboGears site design updated

Thu, 25 May 2006 21:07:03 +0000

Richard Standbrook’s excellent looking site design that we’ve been previewing at TurboGears.org for a while has finally taken center stage: TurboGears: Front-to-Back Web Development. It seems like lots of things that have been brewing are bubbling to the surface now. Stay tuned!

IKEA | DREAM KITCHENS FOR EVERYONE

Thu, 25 May 2006 14:10:31 +0000

IKEA | DREAM KITCHENS FOR EVERYONE is possibly the coolest, entirely upper case ad on the net. Amazing rotating picture effect.

FireBug 0.4

Thu, 25 May 2006 02:40:59 +0000

While there are folks routing around JavaScript to implement in their native languages, there are folks like Joe Hewitt turning JavaScript development (at least with Firefox) into a more pleasant experience. Firebug 0.4 debugger (breakpoints and all!)

Web Montag TurboGears talk

Wed, 24 May 2006 11:05:52 +0000

Andreas Zwinkau will be giving a TurboGears talk this coming Monday at [Web Montag]. If you live near Karlsruhe, Germany, stop by and check it out!

Shoes on Apple’s site

Tue, 23 May 2006 18:15:53 +0000

Ten years ago, when Apple was busy flushing itself down the toilet, who would have predicted shoes for sale via Apple’s site? Nike+iPod

Placeopedia.com – mashing Wikipedia with Google Maps

Tue, 23 May 2006 15:32:39 +0000

I had a cool idea for a mashup and the web answered: Placeopedia.com – Connecting Wikipedia articles with their locations. Fun stuff!

Oprius Foundations: very cool PIM in TurboGears

Mon, 22 May 2006 13:48:07 +0000

Oprius Software has just put up some screencasts showing off their in-development software. Oprius Foundations is a hosted, fabulously ajaxy personal information manager (contacts, calendar and todo right now). They make heavy use of TurboGears widgets and have created a beautiful interface. It’s cool stuff, and I’d link to them even if they weren’t using me as example data in the contacts screencast 🙂

Rob Gonsalves artwork

Sun, 21 May 2006 16:57:34 +0000

Rob Gonsalves makes paintings like Escher’s metamorphosis on steroids. Most excellent.

Why are people still afraid of JavaScript?

Fri, 19 May 2006 14:27:21 +0000

The recent introduction of the Google Web Toolkit, which allows you to write your JavaScript in Java put a thought back into my conciousness: why are people going so far out of their way to avoid writing JavaScript today? To their credit, the Google Web Toolkit provides some distinct reasons to choose it over hand-coded JavaScript: static typign (for those who like that kind of thing) and the ability to use the IDE you know and love.

Ajaxian Â» Javascript Associative Arrays considered harmful

Fri, 19 May 2006 14:13:12 +0000

In talking about Javascript Associative Arrays considered harmful, Ajaxian mentions that the Prototype library no longer extends Object.prototype as of 1.5. Welcome to the world of compatible JavaScript! (They do extend Array.prototype, but that cause far fewer headaches, if any.)

iShowU: a competitor for Snapz Pro X

Thu, 18 May 2006 17:28:03 +0000

Abhik pointed me to iShowU. This looks like a viable competitor to Snapz (though I haven’t tried it yet to be sure). The features list makes it sound like their recorder is highly optimized. If this works as well as it sounds and carries a price tag lower than Snapz’ $70, this could indeed be a solid screen recorder for the Mac.

20 Minute Wiki updated

Wed, 17 May 2006 15:39:55 +0000

After more than 68,000 views of the original screencast, I have just put up a more svelte 20 Minute Wiki Tutorial for TurboGears. This screencast was much more elaborately produced, but it’s still the same at the heart of it. I’ll be linking it up from the front page of TurboGears.org sometime soon.

Blazing Things LLC and Appropriate Solutions, Inc. to Co-Develop Zesty News, the On-Line News and Information Aggregator

Tue, 16 May 2006 10:53:44 +0000

The press release I posted here is up on PRWire: Blazing Things LLC and Appropriate Solutions, Inc. to Co-Develop Zesty News, the On-Line News and Information Aggregator

Scan This Book! Copyright and libraries in 2006

Mon, 15 May 2006 18:11:28 +0000

Scan This Book! by Kevin Kelly is likely the best summary you’re going to find of the state of a massive “holds everything” library and some of the copyright issues around that.

The danger of statistics: Django (the pool player) will overtake Zope

Mon, 15 May 2006 11:01:51 +0000

I would’ve just posted on his blog, but the anti-spam Turing test didn’t work for me. (I’m not a bot! I swear!) Django will overtake Zope shows a graph from the recently released Google Trends that would make it appear that Django (the web framework) was about to pass Zope in Google searches people run. Of course, Zope (and TurboGears for that matter) are both unique names in the search space.

Mal’s e-commerce

Sat, 13 May 2006 03:15:56 +0000

Mal’s e-commerce, a free, hosted shopping cart.

Best codec for Screen capture content

Fri, 12 May 2006 03:06:29 +0000

I was in codec hell today, a place that is commonly occupied by folks doing various kinds of video. This write-up: Best codec for Screen capture content is pretty consistent with what I’ve seen. H.264 is a mighty fine codec.

Comparison of Dojo and Prototype

Thu, 11 May 2006 18:06:58 +0000

A very on target comparison of Dojo and Prototype (javascript toolkits). As I said in the comments there, MochiKit hits the same kind of easy-to-use sweet spot that Prototype does, but it also plays nicely with Dojo. And has great docs.

Appropriate Solutions Zesty News Press Release

Wed, 10 May 2006 12:56:54 +0000

Press Release For Immediate Release: May 10, 2006 Blazing Things LLC and Appropriate Solutions, Inc. to co-develop Zesty News PETERBOROUGH, NH May 10, 2006 Blazing Things LLC (BT) and Appropriate Solutions, Inc. (ASI) have entered into a partnership to further develop Zesty News — Blazing Things’ on-line news and information aggregator. Under the new, multi-year arrangement, ASI will pick up development of Zesty News from the basis created by BT. ASI will also provide documentation and technical support services for the product.

TurboGears 0.9a6 released!

Wed, 10 May 2006 11:33:42 +0000

I’m pleased to announce the release of TurboGears 0.9a6. I hadn’t planned for another alpha release, but there were some important fixes to get out. The Widget Browser in the Toolbox is significantly more interesting now. For one thing, all of the core widgets now have “WidgetDescriptions” so that they show up in the browser. The other change is that the browser now shows the source of the description (which makes for a handy usage example) and the source of the widget’s template (so you can override it if you want complete control over appearance).

Decorative borders and the Canvas

Mon, 08 May 2006 14:43:09 +0000

Decorative borders and the Canvas should theoretically work in Safari, Opera 9, FF 1.5 and IE with Google’s implementation of the canvas tag

Stephen Colbert at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner

Mon, 08 May 2006 11:05:16 +0000

Wikipedia has a great article about Stephen Colbert at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. The reaction to Colbert’s routine from the media is interesting, because Colbert was definitely roasting the media in addition to the President. But, this is the age of the net. Even if the mainstream media decides not to talk about Colbert’s speech or show actual funny clips, millions have already caught the video online.

The World’s Shortest Marketing Plan

Thu, 04 May 2006 15:44:16 +0000

Stripping out nonessentials, The Worlds Shortest marketing Plan maxes out at 24 pages, whereas some templates start at 30 pages. The grid is a great distillation of everything you needs to cover.

TurboGears and the Summer Of Code

Thu, 04 May 2006 14:32:30 +0000

If you’re a student and want to hack on open source for fun and profit this summer, Google’s Summer of Code is a great program to get into. The time to pitch a project and run with it is now. TurboGears has mentors on board and our SummerOfCode wiki page gives some info about the kinds of projects we’re thinking of (feel free to pitch whatever great idea comes into your head!

A step-by-step SQLAlchemy tutorial

Thu, 04 May 2006 11:35:53 +0000

Robin Munn’s new step-by-step SQLAlchemy tutorial is a nice intro.

selector – WSGI Delegation

Tue, 02 May 2006 10:42:15 +0000

Luke Arno’s selector – WSGI Delegation looks look a similar idea to Routes, but it’s more direct since it takes a WSGI callable as its parameters rather than a string that is looked up. (Whether direct is a good thing or not depends on the app).

dojo.storage: offline storage for your Ajax data

Mon, 01 May 2006 19:05:55 +0000

This is some most excellent stuff: Brad Neuberg: Offline Access and Permanent, Client-Side Storage, Thanks to Dojo.Storage. Here’s a packaged up way to store megabytes (if you need to) permanently on the user’s computer, as long as they’re using one of the browsers used by 95%+ of the population. This is not the kind of capability that everyone needs, but when it’s right for your app you didn’t really have a way until now.

TurboGears 0.9a5 released!

Sat, 29 Apr 2006 12:04:00 +0000

Just in time for today’s documentation sprint, and packed with more goodies than originally planned, TurboGears 0.9a5 (“incredible”) is out! This release unifies logging under the Python standard library logging module and makes it conveniently configurable. We’ve also added a new cron-like scheduler (based on Irmen de Jong’s Kronos). And, what I’m sure is going to be a big relief to our Python 2.3 users, Simon Belak has incorporated Phillip Eby’s convenient, 2.

Mark Ramm at the AAJUG

Fri, 28 Apr 2006 21:18:01 +0000

Mark Ramm is going to be introducing TurboGears to the Ann Arbor Java Users Group on Tuesday, May 2nd. Mark has some experience with Struts, so I’m sure he’ll have no trouble demonstrating the fun that is using a dynamic language like Python and a framework like TurboGears.

I want a Freeware Utility to … 450+ common problems solved : eConsultant

Wed, 26 Apr 2006 16:36:29 +0000

[I want a Freeware Utility to … 450+ common problems solved ]1

Zesty News Development Resuming!

Wed, 26 Apr 2006 14:17:46 +0000

I am very happy to report that development of Zesty News is now restarting. After quite a bit of discussion with different people, followed by a bit of contract hammering, I’ve just signed a contract with Appropriate Solutions, Inc. (ASI) to continue the development of Zesty News. I will continue wearing the product manager, marketing and sales hats. I’ve really enjoyed talking with Ray Cote of ASI these past couple of months, and think they’ll be a great partner on this.

What is a “release candidate”?

Wed, 26 Apr 2006 13:28:40 +0000

There are some software version numbering conventions that people rely on a little bit. 1.1 is newer than 1.0. alpha is less solid than beta. The exact definitions of a move to 1.1 or from alpha to beta are variable from project to project. People do whatever works for their project, and that’s cool. As long as users can figure out what they’re downloading and have reasonable expectations, it really doesn’t matter.

tunelog: music metadata extravaganza

Tue, 25 Apr 2006 14:24:08 +0000

The good folks of Frozen Bear bring us tunelog which gives you all kinds of social web 2.0 music metadata madness. It’s got a complete, documented API and can keep track of what you listen to in iTunes on Windows or Pandora, if you wish. They’re making good use of TurboGears, as the API supports both XML and JSON output.

Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th

Thu, 20 Apr 2006 20:00:11 +0000

A conservative magazine (Human Events) enlisted some folks to name the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries Not surprisingly, The Communist Manifesto topped the list by a wide margin. The amusing part, and I wouldn’t be posting this if there wasn’t one, is #10 General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by Keynes. Here’s part of the Human Events summary: The book is a recipe for ever-expanding government.

Star Wars vs. Star Trek

Thu, 20 Apr 2006 02:55:13 +0000

Sign one that I’m a geek: I saw this on Fark. Sign two: some of these are just way too funny. “Star Wars” vs. “Star Trek”

TurboGears Documentation Sprint!

Wed, 19 Apr 2006 16:19:43 +0000

Mark beat me to posting about this: TurboGears Documentation Sprint! That’s right, a documentation sprint! Saturday, April 29th at the Humantech office and on the #turbogears channel at freenode. Documentation for all of the cool new stuff is the biggest bug TurboGears has right now, so we want to get that fixed in a big way. There’s a lot that can be done, even for folks who don’t know enough about all of the new features to write about them.

TurboGears @ Penguicon 4.0

Wed, 19 Apr 2006 02:33:39 +0000

I’m remiss in not mentioning that Mark Ramm will be talking TurboGears at Penguicon 4.0 this weekend! There are quite a few interesting topics on the agenda. If you’re in the Detroit area, check it out and say howdy to Mark.

Angry/negative people can be bad for your brain

Tue, 18 Apr 2006 15:55:09 +0000

I’m certain that this will be the most interesting thing I read today: Angry/negative people can be bad for your brain

Excellent customer service at GoDaddy

Tue, 18 Apr 2006 15:34:32 +0000

I just canceled my dedicated server at GoDaddy, because they were stuck at Fedora Core 2, which makes any package upgrades and new installations a pain. Even though I canceled the hosting service, I’ve just got to say that they have excellent customer support. I’ve called them a few times over the past few months, and they’ve responded quickly and courteously, never gave me any kind of hassle when I wanted a refund for something, and have just been generally knowledgeable and ready to handle my requests.

Configuring Apache and CherryPy to handle a Digg effect

Tue, 18 Apr 2006 12:28:06 +0000

One of Amir’s CherryPy apps got digged yesterday, and he was kind enough to put together some tips for configuring Apache and CherryPy to handle a Digg effect.

Hear about TurboGears at 7Âº FÃ³rum Internacional Software Livre

Fri, 14 Apr 2006 10:43:27 +0000

If you’re going to be near Porto Alegre, RS, Brasil next week, you can hear Humberto DiÃ³genes speak about TurboGears at 7Âº FÃ³rum Internacional Software Livre.

How To Be A Successful Evil Overlord

Wed, 12 Apr 2006 20:28:37 +0000

How To Be A Successful Evil Overlord

Stupid Command Prompt Tricks

Wed, 12 Apr 2006 12:56:33 +0000

These Stupid (Windows) Command Prompt Tricks actually look rather useful.

Wish-A-Mile 300 Bicycle Tour

Tue, 11 Apr 2006 19:35:52 +0000

A friend of mine (hi, Dave!) is riding in the Wish-A-Mile 300 Bicycle Tour for the Make-A-Wish Foundation which tries to grant wishes to children with life-threatening disesases. The “300” is the number of miles he’s got to ride in three days. In years past, Dave and I have done bike tours together, but those tours maxed out at about 65 miles in a day. 100 miles three days in a row is a lot.

Fredrik’s syntax highlighting for PythonDoc

Tue, 11 Apr 2006 14:33:56 +0000

Fredrik Lundh has an experimental bit of code for doing Python syntax coloring and links to specific lines/features from PythonDoc output. /stuff/sandbox/pythondoc/effbot

Guido experimenting with generic functions, TG using them

Mon, 10 Apr 2006 19:59:05 +0000

Guido has blogged about a generic function implementation (he uses the term Dynamic Function Overloading) that he has checked into the Python sandbox. It is good news to see work on this going into the core of Python. TurboGears 0.9 makes heavy use of Phillip Eby’s RuleDispatch package and it gives a lot of power in choosing an error handler, choosing an output format and even determining if a user is authorized for a resource, if you use a new package created by Alberto.

DesignEducation.ca – Thousands of Design Resources

Mon, 10 Apr 2006 12:39:52 +0000

DesignEducation.ca – Thousands of Design Resources the name and title say it all…

Web track keynote at EuroPython

Sat, 08 Apr 2006 12:42:03 +0000

With a great deal of support from Paul Everitt (of Zea Partners, formerly Zope Europe) and the EuroPython organizers, I’m pleased to report that I’ll be giving the keynote talk for the web track at EuroPython this year. There’s a whole lot to talk about when it comes to the what’s going on in Python and web tools, and I excited and honored to be given the chance to talk about it at EuroPython.

TurboGears 0.9a3 released!

Tue, 04 Apr 2006 21:22:03 +0000

I’m pleased to announce the release of TurboGears 0.9a3. This release fixes the long standing issue of master template reloading and also brings in CherryPy 2.2 final, which was just been released. Check out the complete changelog. Download or upgrade today!

Don’t write off “traditional publishers”

Tue, 04 Apr 2006 20:59:34 +0000

Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier-Hansson spoke out against “traditional” publishers in Shaking up tech publishing. The comments were at least as interesting as the main course. Check out Tim O’Reilly’s comment as a response from an established publisher. Tim puts the whole thing into perspective and makes a good point about the way royalties are paid out for the purposes of apples-to-apples comparisons. Mark and I chose a traditional publisher, Prentice Hall, for our TurboGears book.

Announcing TurboBOB – best of breed tool for TurboGears

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 05:57:15 +0000

TurboBOB TurboBOB, the “best-of-breed” extension to TurboGears, provides a powerful, robust new feature for TurboGears that targets a need of 80% of enterprise web applications. TurboBOB brings Web 2.0 to that need and ushers in a whole new era of flexibility. Be sure to check out the 4 minute introductory screencast.

Docudo screencast

Fri, 31 Mar 2006 13:11:47 +0000

Ronald Jaramillo is introducing Docudo with a new screencast. The project is still in its early stages. Join in while there’s still neat stuff to do!

Merquery – packaging up indexing for the masses

Fri, 31 Mar 2006 13:09:27 +0000

Brian Beck is starting work on a project named Merquery, with the goal of making full text indexing (aka “a search engine”) trivial for users of rapid development frameworks like TurboGears. Reading the post that I’m linking to, it doesn’t sound like Brian is reinventing the search engine wheel. Making a high-quality engine is hard work and has been done by a number of projects already. Brian is talking about providing a drop dead simple API for getting the engine running with your database.

freeform: natural interpretation of loosely structured user phrases

Wed, 29 Mar 2006 16:56:58 +0000

freeform: natural interpretation of loosely structured user phrases is one of those things that I don’t need right now, but seems useful enough for the future. It’s designed to handle free form text input and make sense of what the user has entered.

stubble

Tue, 28 Mar 2006 18:39:01 +0000

stubble: create stubs for your unit tests (also includes support for making stand-ins for Eggs!)

The adventures of scaling, Stage 1

Tue, 28 Mar 2006 16:03:31 +0000

Simon Belak on the TurboGears list points to The adventures of scaling, Stage 1, an article about scaling a database-intensive reasonably high traffic (~1M page views a day) site based on Ruby on Rails. The author hits upon many of the common topics in scaling LAMP architecture sites. One thing I didn’t see mentioned, probably because it wasn’t particularly relevant for his application, is data partitioning. Any opportunity to break up your database into multiple chunks that can potentially be deployed separately can be a big win in terms of scalability.

TurboGears 0.9a2 released!

Mon, 27 Mar 2006 23:04:51 +0000

I’m happy to report that TurboGears 0.9a2 has been released! We’ve had a whole raftload of feedback and contributions since the release of 0.9a1. 0.9 is becoming considerably more solid, but I’m not going to upgrade it to “beta” until there are more docs. Be sure to read the upgrade instructions, because you’ll need to make some changes to come from 0.9a1 or 0.8 to this release. TurboGears Changelog Backwards Incompatibilities

TurboGears googlegroup passes 1,500 members

Mon, 27 Mar 2006 12:55:02 +0000

The main TurboGears mailing list has just passed 1,500 members. Even with the 0.9 release in an underdocumented alpha state, we’ve still got new people showing up every day. The list broke 1,000 back in January. Another interesting milestone on the mailing list: it looks like Jorge Godoy is going to beat me out for top poster this month! And Jorge and I are both running well behind Michele Cella for top poster on the TurboGears Trunk mailing list.

Setting up supervisor (on a single machine)

Mon, 27 Mar 2006 12:02:26 +0000

Titus has written a nice introduction to Supervisor in: Setting up supervisor (on a single machine)

Fast Track – open source project status in TurboGears

Sat, 25 Mar 2006 22:45:00 +0000

The good folks at Optio, with much urging from Jonathan LaCour, have open sourced Fast Track. I had a chance to see an earlier version of Fast Track when I visited Optio in December. It’s a nicely done “project status” tool. Many companies rely on awful, emailed status reports to keep people up to date (using which project managers often have the unpleasant responsibility of updating Gantt charts and whatnot). Fast Track is a very simple way for people to communicate up or down the chain of command about the status of a project.

pytemplates mailing list

Thu, 23 Mar 2006 23:10:15 +0000

TurboGears has an interface for template engines that now supports quite a few template tools and CherryPy and Pylons as hosts for those templates. It’s quite simple to work with, but there are still a couple of things that need to be done to it. Since there are a few people involved on both sides (template plugins and plugin users), I thought it practical to set up a mailing list to finish hashing out interface changes and get them out there.

Studio adds a line to a movie for the fans

Thu, 23 Mar 2006 19:13:12 +0000

In shooting additional footage for “Snakes on a Plane”. New Line has added in a line that was demanded by fans. Strangely, they were shooting additional footage to ensure that the movie goes from PG-13 to R. Though it’s not the kind of movie I’m generally inclined to see, I gotta say that sticking with the “Snakes on a Plane” title was a great move. You just know exactly what you’re going to get.

A Greasemonkey Christmas

Wed, 22 Mar 2006 17:08:00 +0000

How did I miss this? A Greasemonkey Christmas provides all kinds of great goodies for the heavy Gmail user. Gmail is great, but just yesterday I was thinking “man, I wish I had a keyboard shutcut for ‘trash this message’”. Now I do! I found this from Lifehacker’s Become a Gmail master.

Installing Subversion (svn) on Linux (Debian Stable)

Tue, 21 Mar 2006 20:21:40 +0000

Andrew Beacock’s Blog: Installing Subversion (svn) on Linux (Debian Stable)

The Hosting Shuffle

Tue, 21 Mar 2006 17:05:36 +0000

Yep, it’s that time again. I’m doing the hosting shuffle, which I last did back when TurboGears was first released. I have a couple of reasons for this particular shuffle: I want a bit more control over the things that are running as part of turbogears.org, and my dedicated server at GoDaddy is frozen at Fedora Core 2. It is apparently possible to upgrade Fedora “in place” using yum. Unfortunately, it appears that it’s also possible to completely hose your box such that it won’t boot any more.

Compound Thinking Â» â€œLeanâ€? Book Publication

Tue, 21 Mar 2006 16:03:49 +0000

Mark Ramm writes about the approach we’re taking to our TurboGears book in â€œLeanâ€? Book Publication. Mark set up all of the tools and classes, so he deserves all the credit here. It’s a good setup that I think will ultimately result in a stronger book.

Overloaded vehicles

Sat, 18 Mar 2006 19:04:20 +0000

From the always relevant Boing Boing, comes this link to a gallery of Overloaded vehicles! This is not mild overload. This is the kind of serious overload the arrest you for here in the States.

Great meeting at TechSmith (Camtasia)

Fri, 17 Mar 2006 04:17:31 +0000

Yesterday, I had an excellent time meeting with folks at TechSmith. You may remember that a few weeks ago, I urged people to pester TechSmith about a Mac version of their wonderful Camtasia product. A few emails with Troy Stein, the Camtasia product manager, later and I was off to meet with them to discuss a wide variety of things going on at TechSmith. TechSmith is one of those software companies that makes great products and really cares about their users.

Recur – module for recurring tasks in Python

Thu, 16 Mar 2006 13:35:26 +0000

Robert Brewer has a nice module, Recur, which can be used for “cron-like” activities within a running Python program.

Ian’s Shoelace Site – Shoelace Knots – How To Tie Your Shoes

Tue, 14 Mar 2006 20:21:31 +0000

Want to re-learn something you’ve been doing suboptimally for years? Ian’s Shoelace Site – Shoelace Knots – How To Tie Your Shoes

The CherryPy Documentation Project

Tue, 14 Mar 2006 16:58:51 +0000

Remi and Sylvain have created The CherryPy Documentation Project, which uses a new blog-like program to maintain their docs. Docs for open source projects often lag behind the project by quite a bit, and it’s good to see that they’re going after that problem head-on.

Julian Beever’s pavement drawings

Fri, 10 Mar 2006 20:58:37 +0000

I think I’ve blogged about these before, but there are some that I don’t remember seeing previously. These things are just too cool to ignore: Julian Beever’s pavement drawings.

New TurboGears mailing lists

Thu, 09 Mar 2006 22:17:03 +0000

At long last, the primary TurboGears mailing list has split. This list has 1,400 members and a lot of traffic. Given that 0.9 is now out in alpha, I thought it important to separate the discussion of current and minor release topics from the stuff that’s a little ways out. The TurboGears Trunk mailing list is the one for this purpose. I opted for “trunk” rather than “devel” because everyone who uses TurboGears is a developer and I’ve seen many cases of people posting to the wrong list because the dividing line is hard to spot sometimes.

CherryPy and WSGI

Thu, 09 Mar 2006 16:51:15 +0000

Christian Wyglendowski posts a great summary of where CherryPy 2.2 stands with regards to WSGI. If you’ve followed the discussion on the various mailing lists and thought CherryPy only minimally handled WSGI, this post does a great job of setting the record straight. CP2.2’s WSGI support is not 100% ideal, but it’s way better than 2.1 and you can do an awful lot with it. Big kudos to Christian, Robert Brewer, Ian Bicking and Phillip Eby for hashing it out and coming up with an implementation that meets CherryPy’s backwards compatibility needs and takes a big step forward.

A better command line for Windows?

Tue, 07 Mar 2006 18:37:33 +0000

cmd.exe on Windows sucks. Cygwin and MinGW aren’t really Windows (though they are certainly better and cygwin is what I use). So, I ask the lazyweb: is there a better command line for Windows? It looks like the company that made 4DOS (JPSoft) is still around and makes better command lines. They’re not entirely cheap though. Are there any free choices? Seems like this would be a good Python project, given the tools for making Python command prompts and the excellent Windows integration that’s available.

PyCon 2006

Mon, 06 Mar 2006 19:40:21 +0000

Despite being a Python user on and off for a decade, this year’s PyCon in Dallas was my first. I doubt it will be my last! I had a great time. There were quite a few interesting talks. Hearing about Python 2.5 in detail from the source was good. As someone heavily involved in Python web development, the Plone, Zope and Django talks were interesting and educational. To see some of what you missed, check out the PyCon 2006 photos at Flickr.

Over GPLed

Fri, 03 Mar 2006 22:03:40 +0000

Last week, it was a Python template engine. This week, it’s JavaScript tabs library. It seems to be a fairly common occurrence that people release developer-oriented open source packages that come with a GPL license. Unless you intend to create a business selling your software with a different license to business (the Sleepycat model), this just seems like a way to severely restrict use of your library. The only people likely to use libraries like those that are licensed under the GPL license are people that are writing open source (GPL) applications.

YouTube – microsoft ipod packaging parody

Wed, 01 Mar 2006 06:01:01 +0000

This is entirely too funny. And sadly, too realistic. microsoft ipod packaging parody

Effective Ajax with TurboGears talk online

Tue, 28 Feb 2006 15:15:23 +0000

My PyCon talk, Effective Ajax with TurboGears, is now available online. The visuals for the presentation were done in TurboGears (bah! who needs PowerPoint!). The tarball for that project, plus a screencast of the presentation (recorded before PyCon) and a written version of the talk all appear on the 0.9 preview site.

TurboGears 0.9a1 released!

Thu, 23 Feb 2006 20:04:58 +0000

I’m pleased to announce the first alpha release of TurboGears 0.9. This release has been long in coming, but there’s a lot that’s new. This release includes “widgets” for working with forms easily, the Toolbox (including the CatWalk database model browser) set of browser-based development tools, internationalization, revamped and hugely improved error handling, and an identity framework for out-of-the-box authentication/authorization. There are many improvements to TurboGears in this release. Take a look at the changelog.

gethuman cheats

Wed, 15 Feb 2006 19:51:39 +0000

gethuman cheats – the secret codes that let you talk to a human rather than an endless loop of menus.

Boing Boing: Photos: awesomely mangled English on bootlegged crap in China

Tue, 14 Feb 2006 22:21:04 +0000

Boing Boing: Photos: awesomely mangled English on bootlegged crap in China. It’s not all bootlegged, but a lot of it is very entertaining.

SQLAlchemy has a release (and a declarative layer)

Tue, 14 Feb 2006 14:52:43 +0000

SQLAlchemy, which was announced a couple months back and has been busy in svn, has now had its first release. Congrats to Mike Bayer on that! SQLAlchemy is an object-relational database mapper that uses the data mapper pattern. This is in contrast to SQLObject and ActiveRecord which use the active record pattern. Also interesting for SQLAlchemy, is that Jonathan LaCour’s declarative layer effectively gives you active record-style mapping. The data mapper pattern works well for more complicated databases or bigger databases because it lets you be more explicit about what you want to pull from the database and how you want it to show up in your objects.

Yahoo! Design Pattern Library and UI controls

Tue, 14 Feb 2006 12:17:01 +0000

Yahoo! has just released a Design Pattern Library which provides some very good guidelines for using fancy web controls, and they’ve also released their own JavaScript library: Yahoo! UI Library. The Yahoo! UI Library has a number of the same sorts of features that you’d get from MochiKit or Dojo. It’s also well-documented, which is a bonus. It doesn’t have the “pythonic” set of functions that MochiKit offers or the overwhelming completeness of Dojo, but it looks like a respectable entrant in the JavaScript library space.

TurboGears Highlights Feb 13, 2006

Mon, 13 Feb 2006 22:01:53 +0000

Ronald Jaramillo has put together his first “TurboGears Highlights” to bring to light some of the interesting stuff going on for those who haven’t been following the heavy duty traffic flow of the TurboGears list (1,269 members at present. More than 2,500 messages last month.) FooManChu summarized in a detailed post how the Teach Dreamweaver and Windows to properly recognize KID files tinyurl.com/aawu5 Jeff Marshall and Greg had put together a TurboGears-based image server/service

Thanks, PSF!

Mon, 13 Feb 2006 16:10:10 +0000

amk talks about how the Python Software Foundation is funding PyCon travellers. Since he has opened the door for me to do so, I’d like to say a big “thanks!” to the PSF for helping out with my PyCon travel. Between the conference and the looking-to-be-lively TurboGears Sprint, I’m spending a whole week in Addison, Texas. And, that’s completely on my dime, which is not a very easy thing when you’re still working on getting a business going.

Let the Good Times Roll–by Guy Kawasaki: The Art of Rainmaking

Fri, 10 Feb 2006 17:16:48 +0000

Guy Kawasaki’s blog is fantasic. Really great reading (and only a month old!) One recent entry: The Art of Rainmaking stresses some great points about selling your product. His writing here is focused on selling some goods and getting some cash, but many of his points are applicable to selling anything: ideas, open source tools, etc.

Crazy busy

Thu, 09 Feb 2006 17:00:33 +0000

My blog posting these past few weeks hasn’t been up to my usual standard. I’ve been in an entirely new brand of busy for me. If the level of busy-ness was measured in caffeine, I’ve had some jobs that were closer to Root Beer, most jobs along the way were like a Coke or Pepsi. Right now, I’m definitely in Jolt-land. (I’m not caffeinated myself, but it seems like an appropriate metaphor).

Chat in Gmail

Thu, 09 Feb 2006 16:47:23 +0000

For many people, including me as of last night, Gmail now includes chat via Google Talk. And I must say that it’s very cool and nicely implemented. I tried a chat this morning (I was using Gmail’s web interface, he was using gaim) and it worked great. The amazing thing was that the chat transcript in my gmail account was updated live as we were talking. I did a search for a piece of mail and that chat showed up while we were still going.

Cocoa, JSON & TurboGears

Wed, 08 Feb 2006 12:49:49 +0000

Cocoa, JSON & TurboGears: three great tastes that go great together!

February MichiPUG wrapup

Fri, 03 Feb 2006 18:37:20 +0000

Last night was the February meeting of the Michigan Python Users Group. As usual, it was a good, lively meeting. We had a presentation from Jim MacDonald on setuptools/Easy Install/Python Eggs, which led to an inevitable discussion about packaging tools and systems. Everyone seemed pleased at what setuptools brings to the picture (and I’ve been a big fan for several months). We had another presentation from Steve Kryskalla which covered a very interesting project: converting a Chinese teaching web site to Python.

Camtasia for the Mac

Mon, 30 Jan 2006 13:38:50 +0000

Camtasia Studio is the ultimate screencasting tool. For those of us using a Mac, we’re stuck with Snapz Pro X. Snapz is a fine screen capture tool, to be sure… but take a look at the features you get from Camtasia, and you’ll see that there’s really no comparison. Camtasia’s number one problem is that it’s Windows-only. I’ve seen quite a few people out there using Macs to produce screencasts. TechSmith has had a hard time justifying the effort to make a Mac version of Camtasia.

Metadata Hootenanny > Home + FAQ

Tue, 24 Jan 2006 06:15:17 +0000

Metadata Hootenanny is used to edit metadata (like chapters) in a QuickTime movie.

FireBug – JoeHewitt.com

Mon, 23 Jan 2006 17:36:09 +0000

FireBug is a Firefox extension that provides an interactive logging/debugging tool for webapps.

defective yeti: Xyzzy

Fri, 20 Jan 2006 03:51:35 +0000

Xyzzy Iraqi Invasion: A Text Misadventure is the funniest thing I’ve seen online in a while.

Music Sales Are Booming on Internet – Yahoo! News

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 15:55:12 +0000

Music Sales Are Booming on Internet The IFPI added that the legitimate music business was gradually gaining ground on digital piracy. It said research showed that in Europe’s two biggest digital markets â€” Britain and Germany â€” more music fans are now legally downloading music than illegally file-swapping. This kind of thing drives me batty. iTMS finally presented a music service that was reasonable to use (or, more accurately, super simple to use with restrictions that are not entirely heinous).

Multiple applications and Paste support

Tue, 17 Jan 2006 18:43:05 +0000

Here’s a decent summary of a #cherrypy meeting (deFuze.org) we had yesterday in which we discussed the ability to run multiple CherryPy “apps” in the same server process and running CherryPy apps behind Paste. The short of it is that TurboGears 0.9 won’t run multiple apps in process, but somewhere between 0.9 and 1.0 we’ll either go with Ian Bicking’s CherryPaste or with CherryPy 2.2’s new tree.mount feature to allow multiple TurboGears apps to run in process.

Announcing The Develix TurboGears Bug Bounty

Tue, 17 Jan 2006 15:54:35 +0000

Thanks to a generous offer from Cliff Wells, I’m pleased to announce the Develix TurboGears Bug Bounty. Develix will provide a year of free hosting for the people who help close these TurboGears tickets to get 0.9 out the door quicker. We’ve had many great contributions so far, and it’s nice that Develix wants to help those who are helping the project.

Favorite songs of 2005

Thu, 12 Jan 2006 15:44:35 +0000

I didn’t want it to get too far into 2006 before I put my latest annual favorite songs list up. This is my third annual list. The first list had 9 songs, the second had 19 and this one has 24. I have no idea what that means. Is the music getting better? Are my standards going down? Who cares? I just know that these 24 songs provided primo enjoyment for my ears this past year.

iWeb highlights the dangers of being an ISV

Wed, 11 Jan 2006 14:32:00 +0000

Yesterday, Apple introduce iLife ’06, which includes the new major component iWeb. From the pretty pictures on the Apple site, iWeb looks like a nice product. It’s nicely integrated with the other parts of iLife, making it easy to publish all of the “stuff” that you collect up digitally. As an independent software developer, though, I can really feel for the guys at Karelia. Their Sandvox website tool was set to enter beta soon.

Presentation tonight at the Michigan!/usr/group

Tue, 10 Jan 2006 20:08:06 +0000

I’ll be presenting TurboGears tonight at the MUG meeting in Farmington Hills, Michigan. My plan is to do the live version of the “20 Minute Wiki”, newly modified for TurboGears 0.9. The 0.9 “20 Minute Wiki” is functionally equivalent to the 0.8 version, but the code is nicer. Sorry for the late notice!

TurboGears 0.8.8 security fix release

Tue, 10 Jan 2006 18:21:26 +0000

I have just released TurboGears 0.8.8. The only change from 0.8.7 is the requirement of CherryPy 2.1.1. The staticfilter of CherryPy 2.1.0 has a serious security flaw that would allow people to retrieve files from “..”. You should update as soon as possible: You can run “easy_install CherryPy>=2.1.1” as the simplest update path You can also use the standard TurboGears upgrade instructions: http://www.turbogears.org/download/upgrade.html Thanks to Remi Delon and the others on the CherryPy team for a fast fix and release on this issue!

TextMate 1.5 released

Fri, 06 Jan 2006 20:43:26 +0000

I’ve been using the beta version of TextMate (a great Mac text editor) so long, I had forgotten about the possibility of an actual release. Well, version 1.5 is out! I’m guessing that everyone using TextMate has been using beta versions, so it’s just a tiny rev over what we’ve been running. But, for anyone who isn’t using TextMate this may be a chance to check it out again. There’s now an official screencast (one of my screencasts also appears on that page!

Template plugins for everyone!

Fri, 06 Jan 2006 18:26:52 +0000

A few days ago, I mentioned that TurboGears 0.9 (currently in svn only) now supports template plugins with four available (Cheetah, Stan, ZPT, plus Kid which was built in to TurboGears). Meanwhile, Buffet (a template rendering filter for CherryPy) supports Cheetah, CherryTemplate, Kid, Myghty, Python String Templates and XSLT. Not only that, Buffet used a very similar pattern for choosing a template and sending data to it. So, I emailed Christian Wyglendowski about it… and we settled on an interface for our template plugins.

The Great Python Framework/Application Debate

Fri, 06 Jan 2006 12:57:58 +0000

Jeremy Jones comments on my attitude toward winning in The Great Python Framework/Application Debate

CherryPy supports multiple apps

Thu, 05 Jan 2006 19:25:27 +0000

As of a couple days back, CherryPy can now [handle multiple applications. ]1

TurboGears class in Ann Arbor, LinuxForum in Copenhagen

Thu, 05 Jan 2006 18:25:53 +0000

Starting January 21st, Mark Ramm will be offering a TurboGears class for 20 people meeting every other Saturday in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Follow that link to read Mark’s thoughts about getting a learning experience built around TurboGears. These classes will also help Mark hone the content for the TurboGears book we’re working on. CatWalk/ModelDesigner creator and all around good guy Ronald Jaramillo will be presenting TurboGears at LinuxForum in Copenhagen, Denmark.

TurboGears 0.8.7 released!

Thu, 05 Jan 2006 18:00:15 +0000

TurboGears 0.8.7 is out and available for download. 0.8.7 (January 4, 2006) This update primarily solves installation issues and is not required otherwise. quickstart corrected to properly produce egg-info directories (previously, directories could be created with “-” when it should have a “_”). Note that setuptools 0.6a9 will warn you if you have a – in your egg-info directory name. Just rename the directory, and you’ll be fine. Installation issues that people may have had earlier are resolved in this setuptools update.

Frameworks matter, too

Thu, 05 Jan 2006 15:36:40 +0000

Peter Hunt puts the focus on successful web applications in How Python wins on the Web. He cites the success of Plone, MoinMoin, Trac, Mailman PyBloxsom and the non-web-based BitTorrent. He cedes the web application framework “market” to Rails and suggests that Python will “win” by having the best apps out there. I think he’s half correct. Ultimately, it’s the apps that people use and having the best apps will increase Python’s user base.

1,000 members!

Thu, 05 Jan 2006 14:19:41 +0000

Today, the TurboGears googlegroup passed the 1,000 members mark! I don’t know if it’s the whole 10 fingers, 10 toes thing, but there’s something fun about these powers of 10 numbers. With 1,000 members, the group is roughly among the top 1% of all googlegroups in membership. Even better, it’s one of only 33 big groups that have “high” traffic. My estimate is that google delivered 1 million email messages for the group last month!

How to Become an Early Riser

Wed, 04 Jan 2006 16:07:01 +0000

Steve Pavlina’s sensible tips on How to Become an Early Riser.

PyCon 2006 Schedule

Wed, 04 Jan 2006 15:08:36 +0000

The PyCon 2006 Schedule is up! (It was presented as being “close to final”, so keep that in mind.) Mark Ramm’s TurboGears Tutorial is on the first day, and my Effective AJAX in TurboGears is on the last. If you’re into TurboGears, see if you can stay a day or two after for the Sprint! See you there!

Looking for a Zesty News partner

Wed, 04 Jan 2006 14:56:42 +0000

As those who have been following my blog for a while know, I’ve been working on a product called Zesty News. Zesty News is an RSS/Atom feed reader… that means, it brings the news to you. No need to manually track dozens of sites on your own. Not only will Zesty News bring the news to you, it tries to figure out which stories are the most interesting to you, and puts those at the top.

Self-referential sign

Wed, 04 Jan 2006 05:03:01 +0000

It’s been on Boing Boing, so everyone’s probably already seen this. Doesn’t matter, I still think it’s funny to see a sign that is apparently warning you not to hit your head on it.

â€œLet the Good Times Rollâ€? by Guy Kawasaki

Wed, 04 Jan 2006 04:52:23 +0000

[Guy Kawasaki has a blog. ]1

Mochi Media looking for a TurboGears developer

Wed, 04 Jan 2006 04:20:59 +0000

Another sighting of a TurboGears job: Bob Ippolito’s company, Mochi Media, is looking for a Job: Content portal developer.

Recommended Business Books

Wed, 04 Jan 2006 03:08:16 +0000

Over the years, I’ve done a variety of reviews. I’ve also consumed a lot more books, music, movies and websites than I’ve managed to review or mention here. I’ve decided that I’d really like to highlight some of the great things that I’ve found along the way.

I’m starting to aggregate some of the best things that I’ve come across in books, music, movies and online. Though many people come to Blue Sky On Mars via search engine hits (more than 1,500 posts over 4 years results in a fair number of random hits), many others are here because they share common interests. I hope that you’ll find something interesting and new in these lists. All of the lists appear in my Recommended category.

TurboGears now supports Cheetah and Stan

Sun, 01 Jan 2006 15:28:10 +0000

The other day, I talked about what TurboGears is not, specifically mentioning template systems. TurboGears has one documented, supported and included way for generating pages: Kid. But, with the latest code in Subversion, TurboGears now also supports other template engines via plugins that provide fairly seamless support for other systems. Which other systems? There are already two plugins, and writing plugins is easy (and documented). TurboCheetah provides support for, you guessed it!

Now running WordPress 2.0

Sun, 01 Jan 2006 05:34:44 +0000

There’s nothing quite like an upgrade which is easy, seamless and gives a whole bunch of new features. The WordPress 2.0 upgrade was like that. Nice. I’ve also switched from the WordPress default theme (which I used for an embarrassingly long time), to the nice and modern K2. I would certainly like to use a TurboGears-based blog, but I tend to be more practical than that. WordPress gives me a lot of great blogging features with a giant community supporting it.

Happy New Year!

Sun, 01 Jan 2006 05:29:13 +0000

2005 was a very interesting year for me, and it feels like it’s really just a warm up for an exceedingly interesting 2006.

Fear destroys what bin Laden could not

Tue, 27 Dec 2005 19:06:53 +0000

Robert Steinback’s op-ed in the Miami Herald, Fear destroys what bin Laden could not is a very nicely written piece that makes an important point about one of the things that makes America great (individual liberty) and why we should be trying to defend that.

Practical software entrepreneur

Tue, 27 Dec 2005 18:54:51 +0000

Ian Landsman is right on in 4 Rules for the Practical Entrepreneur. This is a must-read for anyone considering making the jump to being a software product freelancer. Falling into Ian’s “visionary” category is fine as long as you know what you’re getting into. With Zesty News, I broke one of Ian’s rules: it’s a consumer product. Kinda. It appeals to both business and consumer users, so the question then becomes one of marketing and how you draw the business users in.

What is TurboGears not?

Tue, 20 Dec 2005 14:38:53 +0000

In product management, the things you choose not to do are at least as important as the things you choose to do. Though it might seem like adding features is always a good thing, there are actually tradeoffs being made with each feature added. Consider my cell phone (a Nokia Series 60): this thing can do many different things. It keeps my contacts, has games, takes pictures and can wake me up via its alarm clock.

Python and the One Web Framework

Tue, 20 Dec 2005 14:37:38 +0000

Ruby’s rise seems to have some people in the world of Python nervous. Without question, Ruby’s increase in popularity can be largely attributed to Ruby on Rails. Though I could be wrong, it seems like many Python people look at the fine bits of code that exist for Python and think “Python can do that! The only reason Ruby is getting users is because there’s only one web framework to use”.

TurboGears book from Prentice Hall

Mon, 19 Dec 2005 21:18:26 +0000

It’s official! After a month of discussions with two different publishers (both of which sounded quite excited about the project), Mark Ramm and I have agreed to write a TurboGears book for Prentice Hall. Prentice Hall is the largest technical publisher in the world and will provide excellent marketing and distribution support for the book. The worldwide reach is important, as TurboGears has many users outside of the US. We’re working with Mark Taub, who has experience publishing books for

Tasty – a REST tagging engine built on TurboGears

Tue, 13 Dec 2005 14:49:50 +0000

Anders Pearson just announced Tasty, a REST tagging engine designed to be integrated with other apps. Anders developed Tasty with TurboGears.

Congrats Jeff!

Thu, 08 Dec 2005 02:42:33 +0000

Who would’ve thought: open source projects have real people with real lives behind them. TurboGears contributor Jeff Watkins (responsible for the identity package) is now a father! Congrats to Jeff and his wife and best wishes!

TurboGears Latest (December 7th, 2005)

Wed, 07 Dec 2005 18:22:48 +0000

TurboGears Latest (December 7, 2005) Work on TurboGears 0.9 is progressing well. The new features are largely defined (and many are well-baked). Next up: go through the open tickets and get the release out: http://trac.turbogears.org/turbogears/roadmap TurboGears 0.8a5 was released to include upgrades of the included projects (including MochiKit 1.1 and Kid 0.8). Kid 0.8 is a must-have upgrade. http://www.turbogears.org/download/ Ronald Jaramillo introduced another new feature of TG 0.

admi18n: Painless localization for TurboGears

Wed, 07 Dec 2005 17:41:05 +0000

Ronald Jaramillo doesn’t tell me anything. He certainly didn’t tell me that he was going to build a GUI for TurboGears i18n: admi18n: Painless localization in 10 steps. Dan Jacob has been hard at work getting core i18n support for TurboGears (and that’s looking pretty nicely baked at this point). Ronald’s admi18n is a TurboGears 0.9 Toolbox GUI for simplifying the process of extracting strings and creating message files and translations for your app.

The Atlanta Python December Meetup

Wed, 07 Dec 2005 14:59:21 +0000

I’m planning to go to tomorrow’s Atlanta Python December Meetup. I’m surprised that only 3 people are RSVPed as yes. The Michigan Python Users Group has gotten 8 people or more for its meetings. If you’re in Atlanta, stop in and say ‘hi’! I’d like to meet some more folks while I’m down here.

Different styles but equivalent functionality

Tue, 06 Dec 2005 16:13:52 +0000

When I first released TurboGears, I got a lot of questions about why I chose package X instead of package Y. When you’re talking about any sufficiently mature set of packages, trying to answer a question like that is an invitation to an endless discussion. I refer to that as the “emacs vs. vi” debate, since that’s the example that’s been with us for a long time. I’m all ears when one solution is demonstrably better for a task than another, but more often than not it’s a six-of-one, half-dozen-of-another sort of deal.

Q-Unit – Greatest Hits

Mon, 05 Dec 2005 16:34:09 +0000

Do you like Queen? No? How about 50 Cent? No? Well, then you might want to ignore Q-Unit – Greatest Hits, a nifty mashup of Queen and 50 Cent with such “Greatest Hits” as “We Will Rock You In Da Club”.

Swaroop at foss.in

Sat, 03 Dec 2005 21:16:21 +0000

Here’s a picture of Swaroop talking about TurboGears at foss.in. You can also see his notes about this particular day at the conference and his slides.

TurboGears 0.8a5 released!

Fri, 02 Dec 2005 18:21:47 +0000

This update brings in some of the updated projects that are included in TurboGears. The Kid update fixes a few inconvenient bugs, thanks to David Stanek. Download TurboGears Project Updates Kid updated to 0.8.0 MochiKit updated to 1.1 FormEncode updated to 0.4 setuptools updated to 0.6a8

Oprius Software – new TurboGears job

Wed, 30 Nov 2005 16:14:26 +0000

Oprius Software has the distinction of posting the second TurboGears job.

A Byte of Python has TurboGears under the hood

Wed, 30 Nov 2005 16:12:02 +0000

Swaroop C H wrote this morning (at least, it’s morning here!) to tell me that A Byte of Python now has TurboGears under the hood.

TextDrive has been acquired by Joyent

Mon, 28 Nov 2005 18:47:11 +0000

This has probably been all over the blogs already, but congrats to the folks of TextDrive who are now part of Joyent. Joyent has some really cool looking offerings and TextDrive expands what they can do in some interesting dimensions. Check out the press release.

TurboGears ModelDesigner

Mon, 28 Nov 2005 15:58:51 +0000

Yesterday, the ever-resourceful Ronald Jaramillo introduced ModelDesigner for TurboGears, which he introduced with a nice, quick screencast. ModelDesigner lets you create TurboGears (SQLObject) model classes via some easy web forms. ModelDesigner is part of the TurboGears Toolbox coming in 0.9. Ronald hasn’t checked it in to svn yet, but he promises to do so sometime soon.

PyCon 2006 – see you there!

Sat, 26 Nov 2005 03:58:53 +0000

The list of talks for PyCon 2006 is up. There are lots of good topics planned, including two TurboGears sessions. Mark Ramm, who I’m helping out on a forthcoming TurboGears book, will be doing a tutorial session on TurboGears. I’ll be doing a talk on “effective AJAX”, which is all about making a usable AJAXified web app (samples, of course, will be in TurboGears). Though I’ve used Python for many years, this will be my first PyCon, so I’m really looking forward to it.

Back online after protracted offlineness

Sat, 26 Nov 2005 03:53:44 +0000

Since Wednesday of last week, I’ve had really spotty access to the internet. The timing was quite unfortunate with all of the activity going on in building TurboGears 0.9. Finally, today, I am back online and should be for a good stretch.

Diggdot.us online aggregation for geeks

Tue, 22 Nov 2005 00:45:26 +0000

Ineresting sighting of TurboGears in the wild: Diggdot.us aggregates content from Slashdot, Digg and del.icio.us to give aggregator-less geeks a well-rounded, de-duped view of current goings on.

TurboGears 0.9 irc chat

Wed, 16 Nov 2005 15:54:12 +0000

Yesterday, a whole bunch of people showed up for a meeting to discuss TurboGears 0.9. Not only did they show up, they stuck around for 3 hours. We had a lot to discuss and there are quite a few people contributing code. The activity level is great and I can’t wait to have a fully-baked 0.9 out the door.

MichiPUG third meeting wrapup

Wed, 16 Nov 2005 14:56:50 +0000

The Michigan Python Users Group had its third meeting on Monday. There were 8 of us in attendance at the Humantech office, which has been a fairly consistent number. Roger Espinosa gave a good talk introducing ElementTree and lxml. And, as always, the unstructured part of the meeting was interesting and useful, covering a wide-range of topics. There was some interesting talk about Ubuntu (interesting for me, at least, since I haven’t run Ubuntu as yet).

Kinkless GTD now even smoother with Quicksilver

Wed, 09 Nov 2005 19:57:03 +0000

I’ve been a Quicksilver fan for a while now, and I’m a recent convert to Kinkless GTD which uses OmniOutliner to implement the Getting Things Done style of, well, getting things done. This morning, I updated to the latest version and learned about a new feature: you can add new items to your KGTD inbox via Quicksilver! If you’ve never used Quicksilver, it’s hard to imagine how speedy it can make things.

MacDevCenter.com: What Is TurboGears (Hint: Python-Based Framework for Rapid Web Development)

Wed, 09 Nov 2005 00:44:28 +0000

Matthew Russell has just posted an article at O’Reilly’s MacDevCenter What Is TurboGears (Hint: Python-Based Framework for Rapid Web Development). He and I spoke a few days ago, and he wrote quite an article around the interview. Thanks, Matthew!

600 members and nearly 30,000 screencast views

Tue, 08 Nov 2005 17:09:13 +0000

I’ve been really busy these past few days, working on features for TurboGears 0.9 and creating a new screencast. This morning a took a quick look at the stats. The TurboGears google group has passed 600 members and the “20 Minute Wiki” is likely to pass 30,000 views this week. It’s also likely that TurboGears.org will serve its 40,000th Python Egg this week!

TurboTunes tutorial and screencast

Tue, 08 Nov 2005 17:03:23 +0000

Haven’t had a chance to check out Ronald Jaramillo’s great CatWalk tool for TurboGears? Take a look at the new TurboTunes tutorial and screencast to see how easy it is to populate your development databases using the CatWalk model browser. This is the first preview of TurboGears 0.9, which is coming soon.

The 30,000 calorie sandwich

Fri, 04 Nov 2005 02:30:15 +0000

Anyone complaining about BK’s behemoth breakfast sandwich should take a look at the $47 30,000-ish calorie sandwich that’s making the rounds.

Oracle releases a free database

Wed, 02 Nov 2005 18:18:57 +0000

Oracle has introduced a free version of their database called Oracle 10g Express Edition (XE). One interesting thing about this release is that Oracle has explicitly stated that people can redistribute this database. The database has built in limitations designed to keep it targeted at only lowish-end apps, so it shouldn’t cannibalize the sales of their full-blown system. Contrast this with Java, which is free but annoys everyone to no end because you can’t distribute it.

TurboGears at FOSS.in 2005

Tue, 01 Nov 2005 14:54:20 +0000

If you’re going to be in Bangalore at the end of November, be sure to check out Swaroop’s TurboGears talk at FOSS.IN/2005: India’s Premier FOSS Event.

Deploying TurboGears apps with SCGI

Tue, 01 Nov 2005 04:21:10 +0000

Jonathan LaCour has written a nice (and concise!) howto on running TurboGears behind lighthttpd with SCGI. Very handy stuff!

Planet Turbogears

Mon, 31 Oct 2005 13:48:26 +0000

I neglected to mention a useful resource for people following TurboGears somewhat more loosely than our busy mailing list: Planet Turbogears was set up last week by Lee McFadden. That gives you one handy place to go to follow bloggers that talk about TurboGears.

URL-rewriting in CherryPy 2.1 and TurboGears

Thu, 27 Oct 2005 13:15:33 +0000

Robert “FuManChu” Brewer goes in-depth on URL-rewriting in CherryPy 2.1. This is some documentation I wish I had a couple weeks ago. Robert sums up which aspects of mounting apps at arbitrary points are broken: Generating URL’s to spit back out in HTML. Broken. I now have to manually provide prefix to my HTML templates, or take on the nightmare of making every generated URL into a URL which is relative (e.

I’m in Die Welt!

Wed, 26 Oct 2005 14:57:41 +0000

No, Die Welt is not doing an expose on the seamy underbelly of TurboGears. (TurboGears doesn’t actually have an underbelly, let alone a seamy one). Martin Dowideit wrote an article about the US Postal Service for Die Welt and found my blog posting about the delivery of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince from earlier in the year. It looks like I’m the “human interest” portion of the article which is a general overview of where the USPS stands and the challenges it faces.

TurboGears 0.8a4 released

Tue, 25 Oct 2005 19:29:56 +0000

This is a minor update to TurboGears, including 3 project upgrades and a fix. The use of setuptools 0.6a6 means that it should now be much easier to do a non-root installation of TurboGears on Unix-like systems. Here’s the changelog entry: 0.8a4 (October 25, 2005) Project Updates setuptools 0.6a6 CherryPy 2.1 final MochiKit 1.0 Fixes On some servers, TurboGears can take a minute to start answering

MochiKit 1.0 released

Tue, 25 Oct 2005 13:57:59 +0000

Bob Ippolito has just released MochiKit 1.0! Congrats, Bob! As he says on his blog, MochiKit was 1.0 quality from the first release, and there’s been a lot of great work on the project since then. MochiKit 1.0 will be included in TurboGears 0.9 0.8a4.

A Micro ISV goes 1.0!

Mon, 24 Oct 2005 18:48:29 +0000

A hearty congratulations to Ian Landsman for shipping HelpSpot 1.0. I feel a kinship with Ian because he started UserScape about the same time that I started Blazing Things. He and I have been exchanging email periodically all year, and he’s a great guy who knows his stuff. Shipping a beta is exciting, but shipping 1.0 is the ultimate!

Answering questions about TurboGears

Sat, 22 Oct 2005 17:59:29 +0000

Today marked an interesting milestone. TurboGears’ Google Group now has 453 members (up about 100 in the past week), which gives it more members than cherrypy-users! Google has upped the traffic category to “medium”, so another 141 people have wisely chosen to sign up for the announcements list. Given the fast growth and the size of the list, I find myself answering a lot of questions about TurboGears. According to Google, so do bonono, Elvelind, Ian Bicking, Jeff Watkins, Bob Ippolito and Phillip Eby.

CherryPy 2.1 and CatWalk 0.9 released!

Sat, 22 Oct 2005 03:03:50 +0000

It doesn’t yet show up on the front page, but if you look at the CherryPy downloads, you see that CherryPy 2.1 is out! Congrats to the CP team! I’ve changed the svn version of TurboGears to use CherryPy 2.1 final, so TurboGears users will automatically get the update with 0.9. Also of note, Ronald Jaramillo has released CatWalk 0.9 and has produced a spiffy survey application tutorial. Good work, Ronald!

Kinkless GTD

Wed, 19 Oct 2005 12:49:42 +0000

Because I’m behind on my reading, I hadn’t heard about the Kinkless GTD system for OmniOutliner. I had already been organizing myself via OmniOutliner, but Kinkless looks much slicker than the route I was taking. If you’re into GTD and OmniOutliner, this is something you should really see!

TurboGears bringing new people to Python

Mon, 17 Oct 2005 01:41:03 +0000

I don’t have any statistics to share on this, but something that has just occurred to me is that there have been several instances over the past couple of weeks where people have mentioned that they’re new to Python while they’re asking questions about TurboGears. Python has been my language of choice for a decade, and I’m happy to be contributing in some way to growing Python’s usage.

Ben on Python Web Framework Niches

Mon, 17 Oct 2005 01:20:23 +0000

Ben Bangert talks about Python Web Framework Niches, specifically detailing TurboGears and Django. I think he’s on the mark that each framework defines its niche based on what it’s asked to do. The best APIs are ones that solve real problems for applications, and not ones that are just created because something sounds neat or potentially useful. The part that Ben leaves out is the matter of taste (which I touch upon in a comment).

TurboGears 0.8 Released!

Fri, 14 Oct 2005 19:14:46 +0000

TurboGears 0.8a1 is available now! What’s New This is a brief summary. The complete information about what’s new can be found here: http://www.turbogears.org/about/changelog.html API improvements based on feedback and patches from the first public release. Seven people contributed patches to TurboGears directly, and there’s been quite a bit going on in the other projects. Easier production of XML output from controller methods Static file directories are set up in new quickstarted projects

TurboGears going like gangbusters

Fri, 14 Oct 2005 19:13:39 +0000

After the slashdotting, Ian Landsman wondered what the extended effect of the slashdotting would be. Certainly, after serving more than 13,000 views of the screencast on Monday, things have tapered off. The 20 Minute Wiki is still getting 1,000 views a day! (That’s 80GB per day, for those watching their waistline bandwidth usage). I haven’t had a chance to do a total tally, but I’m guessing that the screencast is up to 25,000 views.

Too many choices can be bad

Thu, 13 Oct 2005 03:22:37 +0000

Every time a prospective customer needs to make a choice, you open up the possibility that the choice will be to head somewhere else. A couple months ago, Apple offered: the iPod Shuffle, iPod mini, iPod and iPod Photo. I’m not going to count the U2 iPod, because that’s more of a niche gimmick sort of thing. Since then, Apple has introduced two new models, but reduced the number of choices: iPod Shuffle, iPod nano and iPod.

The HelpSpot Tour

Thu, 13 Oct 2005 02:45:49 +0000

Ian Landsman has posted a new tour of HelpSpot, and I’ve got to say that Ian has produced a beautiful looking product. I’m going to fire it up to get a first hand look after I move everything over to my new server at GoDaddy, but from the tour this is a great looking product for help desks of all sizes (including 1, as Ian has mentioned).

TurboGears is not a Rails clone

Wed, 12 Oct 2005 12:21:20 +0000

Uchi Ogbuji spotted a Slashdot comment by Ian Bicking explaining why TurboGears is not a Rails clone. I don’t think I’ve come out and said it, but what Ian said sums things up quite well. TurboGears is every bit as compelling as Rails, but it’s not a clone. It’s built as an integration of preexisting components, to give you the full front-to-back development stack. We have lots of good tools and ideas to choose from and Rails is not the only idea well from which we’ll be drinking.

CatWalk model browser for TurboGears

Wed, 12 Oct 2005 01:35:02 +0000

Ronald Jaramillo has put together CatWalk, a simple model browser for TurboGears. I haven’t tried it yet, but from the screenshots it looks like it could be the start of something quite nice.

What’s a slashdotting like?

Tue, 11 Oct 2005 03:06:39 +0000

A Slashdotting can be very interesting if the thing most slashdotters are looking at is an 80MB file. I have no idea how many people (if any) were served up by the Coral cache. I don’t know how many people downloaded the file via BitTorrent. I can see a thing or two by looking at my access log, and speaking with Jason I got some other fun facts. About twice as many people viewed the 20 Minute Wiki screencast today as they did in the previous 23 days.

TurboGears on slashdot! And a TurboGears job!

Mon, 10 Oct 2005 13:53:03 +0000

This is the kind of morning I like to wake up to. A very interesting one. The first thing I noticed was email saying my blog was down. (That’s due to a problem with my MySQL start up script… I guess the server rebooted but MySQL didn’t come back.) Then I saw the mention that TurboGears has been slashdottted! Thanks to Guillem Cantallops Ramis for getting us on the front page!

TurboGears October 2005 Mad Dash (Sprint)

Sun, 09 Oct 2005 03:38:37 +0000

Today, we had the first TurboGears Mad Dash. I figured that calling it a “sprint” is probably not accurate, given that most sprints last several times the length of today’s mad dash. Including myself, we had 10 participants. Given that I had announced my desire to hold a sprint just a few days after TurboGears’ public release, the turnout was very good. Most of the people there were members of michipug (including two that I hadn’t met before), and we also had two hearty travelers from Cleveland.

Top browser at TurboGears.org

Fri, 07 Oct 2005 13:00:44 +0000

Here’s an interesting bit of trivia. Sawmill reports that the top browser at turbogears.org is… Python urllib 2.4! 6,500 eggs served. (Of course, the 600MB used for serving up all of those eggs is nothing compared to the 400GB used for serving up the quicktime…)

The magical, mystical “1.0”

Tue, 04 Oct 2005 15:22:03 +0000

It seems that many open source projects don’t want to put themselves at the magical “1.0” number until the software is “done”. In my opinion, software is “done” when it reaches its end of life and is being put out to pasture. That’s one of the great things about software: it’s malleable! Software is much more malleable that many other “products”. One could start a project by declaring “SuperMegaWidget will be called 1.

Newsgator buying who? NetNewsWire?

Tue, 04 Oct 2005 14:26:25 +0000

There’s a rumor that Newsgator is going to buy NetNewsWire. I completely believe this rumor, and I’d imagine that this has been in the works for a while. When Newsgator bought FeedDemon (and Nick Bradbury), it seemed like NetNewsWire would be an obvious choice for them to build out Mac support. Since I fully believe this rumor, I’ll just say congrats to Brent Simmons now.

Running a code sprint

Tue, 04 Oct 2005 13:53:19 +0000

The first time I heard the term “sprint” for software, it was in the context of Zope. A ZopeMag article also credits Tres Seaver at Zope with this and talks about how Zope Sprints are run. I decided to write up how I’m planning to handle this Saturday’s TurboGears “Dilly” Sprint in Ann Arbor in hopes that I’d get some useful commentary. This will also provide tips for the people who are coming.

Controllers for MVC web frameworks roundup

Sat, 01 Oct 2005 00:44:47 +0000

If you’re curious what some of the different styles of controlers in the various web frameworks look like, check out Ben Bangert’s Best of breed Controllers for MVC web frameworks. Understandably, he didn’t take a very in depth look at each framework and he missed some, but still interesting nonetheless.

What I want in a Wiki for software development

Tue, 27 Sep 2005 19:32:03 +0000

There are lots of wiki programs out there. I mean lots. It seems like everyone has written one, in just about every language there is. Wikis are used a lot for software project documentation, because they’re just so easy. The barriers to jumping into a wiki and adding a page where one seems needed are so low that people dive right in with gusto. You’d think that my issue with wikis is that you end up with a huge mass of disorganized pages.

Web Services Infrastructure: Kid Templating

Tue, 27 Sep 2005 11:27:45 +0000

Ryan Tomayko put up an article describing the genesis of Kid as an answer for generating responses for web services. Right now, TurboGears produces HTML and JSON as part of the out-of-the-box experience. I definitely expect that we’re going to see the ability to specify a Kid template for XML output. I think that toward the end of my time in Javaland, an increasing number of the blogs I read seemed to be doubting WS-*.

Google result counts

Tue, 27 Sep 2005 11:13:19 +0000

There has been plenty of speculation on the web over the years about the result counts listed from Google searches. I have my own bit of interesting Google search result trivia. Before TurboGears’ release, searching for the word turbogears would yield a few dozen automotive-related hits, which makes sense because it wasn’t really a word or a brand name before now. This morning, a search for turbogears yields 210,000 results. That number is so large that I find it hard to believe that even counting automatically-generated archives of things will yield anywhere near that number of pages.

Weekly TurboGears URL

Sun, 25 Sep 2005 02:44:39 +0000

Weekly TurboGears URL (Sep 24, 2005) I’ve found the Dr. Dobb’s Python-URL! mailing to be a concise way to keep up with what’s going on in Python without actually following comp.lang.python directly. I’m going to do something similar here, for those who are just following the blog or the announcements list. This first issue will go to the main TurboGears list, but I’m not sure if that makes sense to do in the future.

A brief history of TurboGears

Sat, 24 Sep 2005 04:30:14 +0000

An email from Jimmie Houchin has convinced me to take a few minutes out and explain where TurboGears came from and why it has emerged on the scene now. One note about how I’m writing this: there are many good tools for Python that solve a variety of needs. Since I’m not out to disparage other people’s work here, I’m not going to mention tools that I had been using or tools that I decided not to use.

TurboGears moves to TextDrive

Thu, 22 Sep 2005 17:13:37 +0000

TurboGears.org is now running at TextDrive! By all accounts that I’ve ever seen, the people at TextDrive are among the most clued-in you’re going to find in the web hosting business. They know how to run servers, and they understand today’s “agile” development tools. When I described my hosting problems, Michael Koziarski, who works for TextDrive, was among those who offered assistance. The assistance offered: free hosting for TurboGears at TextDrive.

TurboGears on day 4 and some Jeremy Jones commentary

Wed, 21 Sep 2005 15:26:57 +0000

TurboGears certainly got going with a bang this past Saturday. We’re almost at the 4 day mark now, and the “20 Minute Wiki” screencast has been viewed more than 2,800 times. (Consuming 225GB of bandwidth!). turbogears.org has served up more than 2,600 eggs. The discussion mailing list has 89 members. Before Saturday, doing a Google search for TurboGears yielded a few dozen results. Now, Google says there are 23,400 results.

Putting a hosting company to the test

Tue, 20 Sep 2005 02:54:57 +0000

Pricing is an interesting thing. As a general rule, unless you’re in a completely commodity business, price is not related to the cost of something. Price is based on the value of something and what people will pay. What this means is that the cost structure of a product or service is not necessarily in line with the price. What does that have to do with hosting? Well, hosting companies typically charge for packages based on how much data you transfer in a month.

A day after TurboGears’ release

Mon, 19 Sep 2005 03:47:27 +0000

TurboGears had a quiet launch on Wednesday, when I presented the “20 Minute Wiki” live at the first MichiPUG meeting. It was listed as just “CherryPy+SQLObject” on the agenda, since TurboGears hadn’t been announced in any form at that point. Yesterday, I made the more public announcement here on Blue Sky On Mars and on python-announce. From previous experience, it seemed like things tended to be a bit quieter on the weekends.

Annoucing TestGears 0.2 unittest extension

Sat, 17 Sep 2005 17:42:49 +0000

Last month, I introuced Testido, a unittest extension that removes the need to write TestSuites by hand and simplifies some testing. To be in line with TurboGears, for which Testido was originally created, the package has been renamed TestGears. Here are the changes between Testido 0.1 and TestGears 0.2: unittest.TestCase instances are collected regardless of whether their names begin with “test”. (Thanks to Robert Brewer for the report.) Now calls setup_module(module) and teardown_module(module) as in py.

Announcing TurboGears web megaframework (Python)

Sat, 17 Sep 2005 16:53:50 +0000

TurboGears brings together four major pieces to create an easy to install, easy to use web megaframework. It covers everything from front end (MochiKit JavaScript for the browser, Kid for templates in Python) to the controllers (CherryPy) to the back end (SQLObject). The TurboGears project is focused on providing documentation and integration with these tools without losing touch with the communities that already exist around those tools. TurboGears is easy to use for a wide range of web applications.

MichiPUG first meeting wrapup

Fri, 16 Sep 2005 02:30:58 +0000

I thought it would be worthwhile to post a note about the first meeting of the Michigan Python Users Group, which was last night. Including myself, we had 11 in attendance, which I thought was quite good! The mailing list is up to 26 members, so all in all we’re off to a good start membership-wise. The members that were present last night have varying levels of Python experience and have used different combinations of tools.

eBay to Acquire Skype for $2.6 billion

Tue, 13 Sep 2005 18:13:41 +0000

Skype had 2004 revenue of $7 million, and projects 2005 revenue of $60 million. Not earnings, but revenue… this makes the $2.6 billion that eBay is paying to acquire Skype quite remarkable. Skype does have powerful network effects going, though, and they will not prove easy to dethrone. Just like eBay. I’m sure that’s where the attraction is, but the purchase amount just boggles the mind. One thing I forgot to mention initially when I put this post up: eBay is paying $1.

HelpSpot beta released

Mon, 12 Sep 2005 18:48:09 +0000

Congrats to Ian Landsman, a felllow micro ISV, who has just released the beta of HelpSpot, his help desk software. Woot! There’s nothing like the feeling of shipping software.

Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 is out, but you might want to wait

Sat, 10 Sep 2005 11:31:12 +0000

I recommended Deer Park a few weeks ago, and now the official Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 is out! A word of warning, however: the Web Developer extension has not yet been updated for 1.5. And, for me, after I ran 1.5 on my Mac, my Deer Park alpha no longer sees extensions. So, I’m basically left without Web Developer until it’s updated. I’m sure that will be soon, but this is something to keep in mind if you’re a heavy user of Web Developer.

Fake entries for copyright protection

Fri, 09 Sep 2005 17:40:39 +0000

Apparently, encyclopedias and dictionaries will sometimes include fake entries to allow them to identify works that are copying their own. The New Yorker talks about one such case in the New Oxford American Dictionary. The word, as of 9/9/2005, is up over 800 hits on Google. The article is interesting… not only does it reveal the word, but it also talks about the pain involved in tracking it down. Luckily, the publishers were kind enough to confirm the word after presented with the results of the investigation.

Knock Knock and Call To Action double book review

Thu, 08 Sep 2005 16:51:53 +0000

I’ve been meaning to write up a review of Call To Action by Bryan Eisenberg and Jeffrey Eisenberg for some time. Meanwhile, in between the time that I read Call To Action and today, Seth Godin has released his KnockKnock ebook for free. I decided to review the two at the same time, because there is a lot of overlap. I discovered Call To Action through Seth Godin’s blog, and wrote an early opinion of it back in June.

Michigan Python Users Group first meeting: 9/14

Tue, 06 Sep 2005 11:54:02 +0000

Michigan Python Users Group First meeting! Wednesday, September 14, 2005 7PM At the Humantech office in Ann Arbor. Agenda: Introductions and discussion about how people are using Python currently Steve Kryskalla will talk about creation of random and dynamic images in CGI scripts Kevin Dangoor will talk about developing webapps with CherryPy and SQLObject If you’re interested and can make it, please [sign up for the michipug

Blog comment spam

Tue, 06 Sep 2005 11:50:29 +0000

Thanks for Spam Karma 2 and WordPress’ built in anti-spam features, I don’t have much of a problem with comment spam these days. It looks like Blogger must still be dealing with it, though. As far as I know, they’ve always required you to sign in to post a comment. Apparently, that’s not enough, though. Now you have to log in and respond to a CAPTCHA. Gadzooks. I’ll stop posting comments on Blogger sites when they require a blood sample for verification.

Storing data on the browser

Tue, 06 Sep 2005 02:17:03 +0000

Cookies have some pretty severe limitations in terms of the amount of data you can store. Besides, they get transmitted to the server on every request, so you don’t necessarily want to store a ton of data in there anyway. On the other hand, using sessions on the server to store data for the current user is also a bad idea unless you have a small or very predictable user base.

Getting testimonials for your product

Tue, 06 Sep 2005 01:59:33 +0000

John Jantsch has a great tip for getting quality testimonials for your product. The key is rather than asking for a testimonial directly, have a prospective customer ask a current customer for an opinion. You’ll end up with a better-written testimonial than if you had asked for one directly. I’ve never tried this myself, but I do believe this would work wonders.

Perspective: Being Poor

Tue, 06 Sep 2005 01:56:59 +0000

John Scalzi provides an excellent perspective piece on Whatever: Being Poor. Something to consider, though: this is being poor in America. If you’re talking about poor in India, China, Africa or almost anywhere else in the third world, you can downgrade just about every one of these even further. Seriously, if you think “Being Poor” sounds depressing as written (and it likely does, for those of us reading and writing blogs), just transplant your brain to Africa as you read.

The EFF breaks down DRM so you don’t have to

Sun, 04 Sep 2005 02:02:44 +0000

I’ve been following DRM in music files for a long time now. The EFF does a good job of deconstructing exactly what you’re paying for when you buy songs from the most popular online music services: The Customer Is Always Wrong: A User’s Guide to DRM in Online Music. The EFF does provide a list of services that sell their music in unrestricted MP3 files. Unfortunately, that Kelly Clarkson song that just got stuck in your head is not going to be found on any of those services.

Seth Godin’s Knock Knock online marketing book now available

Fri, 02 Sep 2005 15:34:16 +0000

As promised when he released it, Seth Godin’s ebook KnockKnock is now available for free. It’s a short take on how to use the new online marketing tools to make any website work more effectively. I haven’t read it yet, but I’ve enjoyed Seth’s work in the past. All of his books have at least one powerful idea that makes the read worthwhile.

Allan’s latest TextMate tips

Thu, 01 Sep 2005 13:00:48 +0000

I hadn’t been paying attention to the TextMate blog, because the editor itself always notifies me when new releases come out and tells me what’s in them. I’ve been missing out, though! Here’s a Tips and Tricks posting that provides a couple of solutions for Python triple quoting and TextMate’s smart quotes (along with a few other tips, like a convenient diff against current saved file command). Even more recently, Allan wrote about the Power of Snippets, which is a hugely powerful feature of TM.

Need an idea? How about 50 ways to get one?

Thu, 01 Sep 2005 10:35:36 +0000

The definitive collection of idea generation methods is Martin Leith’s large collection of techniques that people use to generate ideas. The idea may be cheap when compared to the execution, but you’ve still gotta have one.

Fool.com: Behind the Bubble Babble

Wed, 31 Aug 2005 18:50:32 +0000

Do you remember all of the analysts talking about the wide open skies for internet stocks and the “new economy”? The Fool is trashing the folks who claim there’s no housing bubble in the enjoyably titled Behind the Bubble Babble: The very people most vehement about denying a housing bubble are precisely the people who have the most to gain from seeing one continue: mortgage sellers and realtors. It always pays to look at where a quote or story is coming from.

Seth on Urgent vs. Important

Wed, 31 Aug 2005 16:30:46 +0000

For anyone who’s never pondered whether something is “important” or just “urgent”, Seth Godin’s Hurry! is a good introduction to the topic.

An unexpected confirmation of the value of the Bill of Rights

Wed, 31 Aug 2005 15:56:48 +0000

The Bill of Rights was created to protect people from the corruption that comes from a government with absolute power (absolute power corrupts absolutely, as they say). I don’t think the founding fathers anticipated that the Bill of Rights would be needed to protect against the “entertainment industry”. The story is that in Delhi, India, the international arm of the Motion Picture Association has been granted a general warrants that “[permit] police to search any premises suspected of containing pirated products, and permits officers to open locked premises without delay.

Announcing Testido automatic unittest TestSuite generator

Sat, 27 Aug 2005 14:47:16 +0000

For a project I’m working on, I didn’t want to introduce a dependency on py.test. I also didn’t want to manually write test suites myself. So, here’s Testido: a simple unittest extension that easily hooks in to however you’re testing now and eliminates the need to manually write suites. Through the wonder of setuptools, Testido can be installed trivially with easy_install. The simplest usage looks like this: from setuptools import setup setup(name='foo', version='1.

O’Reilly Connection: jobs social networking site

Fri, 26 Aug 2005 13:05:21 +0000

Ian Bicking pointed to O’Reilly Connection, which is actually a pretty interesting looking site. It’s a combination of social networking software and a jobs board for software developers and people who want to hire them. Given how many jobs are found via people you know, this is a logical step, and the implementation looks good. Of course, it looks like it’s just getting started (192 people with the “python” tag, 320 with the “java” tag).

Engadget 1985 – best nostalgia of the year

Thu, 25 Aug 2005 11:28:08 +0000

From the BBS opener to the great review of technology-as-it-stood in 1985, Engadget 1985 is the best bit of nostalgia we geeks are likely to get this year.

A clear sign that manufacturers are counting on not paying rebates

Wed, 24 Aug 2005 17:04:19 +0000

This is the most egregious example of why manufacturers use rebates that I’ve ever seen. Outpost has a 120GB hard drive for the insanely low price of $20. Even the regular price of $80 is pretty good, but $20 is just nuts. Even if Outpost runs on super skimpy margins, you’ve got to assume that their gross margin on this will be at least $10 of the $80 price. So, counting the rebates, Western Digital would be getting $10 for this hard drive.

Return of the CueCat

Wed, 24 Aug 2005 15:50:23 +0000

A few years ago, some insane people gave $100 million to a company called Digital Convergence. The idea? Give away bar code scanners so that people could just scan a code in a magazine ad to jump straight to the advertiser’s website. Oh, and track what all the user scans through a unique ID to build up interesting profiles of people. There were so many things wrong with the idea and implementation it’s a sign of the times that were that they managed to get the thing off the ground and distribute millions of dollars worth of the CutCat cat-shaped bar code readers.

Customers of new UK ISP get to share all Sony music on P2P

Wed, 24 Aug 2005 13:00:30 +0000

I’ve been following the sales of music online for years now. I’ve been fairly okay with iTunes Music Service, because the restrictions on the files have not yet caused me grief and I’m certain they are breakable, should I ever find that the restrictions are causing me grief. I have also used AllOfMP3.com from time to time. Here’s an exciting scoop from Boing Boing: Customers of new UK ISP get to share all Sony music on P2P

My new backup strategy

Tue, 23 Aug 2005 18:42:22 +0000

A friend of mine had a hard drive failure yesterday. This, and Ian’s hard drive failure last month have jostled me into changing my backup strategy. For years, I’ve been using a central Linux server and rsync to back up. I wrote a small script with all of the rsync options, and I’d run that script to get data files and documents up-to-date on the server. This is generally fine, and I’m not likely to lose important data with a hard drive failure.

OmniOutliner is a great organizational tool

Sun, 21 Aug 2005 03:05:21 +0000

I’ve been reading 43 Folders for a while, and I really dig the whole GTD thing. Until today, I was keeping my next action lists in TextMate. But then I read Keith Robinson’s How I learned to stop worrying and love my schedule and it’s companion How I Schedule Actions and Tasks. Spreadsheets are a great generic tool for keeping track of lists of things, adding stuff up and the like.

End of Presentation Tips

Sun, 21 Aug 2005 02:43:51 +0000

Bert Decker has written 6 Don’ts for the End of Your Presentation. For those of us who only make the occasional presentation, these kinds of tips are a great thing. Little touches can make a big difference.

News Flash! Flying Spaghetti Madness!

Sat, 20 Aug 2005 02:54:27 +0000

Since I started using the convenient L10 Hit Counter in June, I’ve been able to very easily see what people are reading here whenever I want. Mysteriously, the #3 URL here, just behind the BSOM front page, since mid-June is my posting about the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Apparently, the Pastafarians are a larger more dedicated lot than I originally expected. The original FSM site has grown quite a bit. 10 million hits (now up to 750k per day), and startling bits of work like Touched By His Noodly Appendage.

What is Zesty News?

Fri, 19 Aug 2005 17:27:39 +0000

After I first announced Zesty News, I mentioned that it was an RSS reader, and I talked a bit about making it browser-based and cross-platform, while still including reasonable support for things expected on Macs and PCs. I hadn’t talked about what makes Zesty News special, and that’s just as well since I ended up delaying things a bit. Now that the alpha is out and available to testers, I have put more information about Zesty News up on the Blazing Things site.

A funny thing happened on the way to release…

Thu, 18 Aug 2005 12:21:38 +0000

Last week, Ian Landsman wrote about leaving features out in order to get a product out the door, and I promised to write about delaying a product to make it stronger. One thing about writing a blog is that, as long as you’re honest, you give yourself an automatic history. Something you can look back and reflect on. For example, on May 10th, I wrote that the Zesty News alpha was feature complete, and that there was only bug fixing and interface cleanup to go.

Joel doesn’t “get” XP

Thu, 18 Aug 2005 11:54:41 +0000

Understand up front that I’m not saying that Joel is wrong about how he develops software. Joel’s comment in The Project Aardvark Spec about extreme programming doesn’t seem to fully appreciate what goes on (or is supposed to go on) in an XP project. As I worked through the screens that would be needed to allow either party to initiate the process, I realized that Aardvark would be just as useful, and radically simpler, if the helper was required to start the whole process.

CamStudio free screen capture for Windows

Thu, 18 Aug 2005 02:50:29 +0000

Since Jon Udell’s been all over “screencasts” lately, it’s good to know what screen capture tools are available. I’ve just updated my original blog post about screen capture tools from January to include CamStudio. Unlike Wink, CamStudio does audio and video right now. Well worth a look.

New! Michigan Python Users Group

Tue, 16 Aug 2005 02:10:02 +0000

It didn’t take long to hear back from eight people in southeast lower Michigan (with a disproportionate percentage in Ann Arbor), so I have gone ahead and started the Michigan Python Users Group (michipug) mailing list. People have different agendas for their user groups. Jim Holmes appeared to be seeking World Domination with his .NET user group in Dayton, Ohio. I’m going to toss out an opening volley in what I’d like to see in a user group:

Python users in the Detroit/Ann Arbor area?

Sun, 14 Aug 2005 19:58:53 +0000

Since Google searches don’t turn up much of value here, I’m curious if there are any folks out there reading this that work with Python and are in the Ann Arbor or Detroit area. I don’t see signs of an established PUG around here. Update: There are Pythonistas in this area. Rather than replying to this posting, you can now sign up for michipug.

Christopher Walken 2008

Sun, 14 Aug 2005 18:10:25 +0000

2008 is the first year in which I am eligible to run for President, so naturally I had planned to throw my hat into the ring. But, now that Christopher Walken is running, I know that there’s no point 🙂 Still, it seems a little funny to think of Zorin as our President. Or Colonel Angus, for that matter. Walken’s speeches would be great to listen to and watch, however.

PasswordMaker, a very clever password system

Sun, 14 Aug 2005 03:38:17 +0000

I’ve tried a couple of different password managers over the years. They all have their shortcomings… these days, since I’m cross platform, my choices are even more limited. Recently, I’ve started using the Java-based Password Manager by Ramesh N. It’s not entirely pleasant, but it does the job fine and is cross-platform. Lifehacker mentioned a few password managers, including the intriguing PasswordMaker. One Password To Rule Them All.â„¢. PasswordMaker is neat because it’s totally cross-platform (and even has a JavaScript version that you can run in whatever browser you’re using at the time).

How not to go out of business

Sat, 13 Aug 2005 18:01:14 +0000

“Burning bridges” is an expression used when someone leaves a job, situation or some people behind and does so in a way that there is no turning back. I don’t know how long Paul Purdue’s iFulfill blog will remain up, but it’s a living, recent example of bridges being burnt. It’s a fact that many business go under for many reasons. Lining up all of the variables required to make a business succeed is very difficult.

Calling Lufthansa

Thu, 11 Aug 2005 15:44:37 +0000

I needed to call Lufthansa, and they don’t make it very easy to get their phone number. A couple screens in on Lufthansa’s USA site, you’ll get the (800) 645-3880 phone number. Here’s the interesting bit: I called that number and got through to your typical “press 1 if you would like to hold for 5 minutes”, “press 2 if you would like to hold for 7 minutes” sort of menu.

Ian Landsman on Leaving Features Out

Tue, 09 Aug 2005 16:15:51 +0000

In Leaving Features Out, Ian Landsman describes the thought process he used to drop a big feature from HelpSpot 1.0. I think he made the right decision for the right reasons (go look for yourself to see what he dropped and why). Getting the right mix of features is way more art than science. Sometime over the next week, I’ll be posting a story covering the flip side of this: choosing to delay in order to add something in.

Ironic release of a documentation tool

Sat, 06 Aug 2005 15:38:29 +0000

pigeon 0.1.0 just showed up in the Cheese Shop. Here’s the short description: Generates HTML documentation from python source The long description includes this warning: Warning: This is an alpha release for those who are interested in checking progress. No documentation and not for production use. I realize it’s an alpha release, but still… you’d think even the very first release of a automatic documentation tool would have some documentation?

Finding a user’s Documents folder on Windows and Mac

Fri, 05 Aug 2005 14:27:23 +0000

Update: I revised this to include the Mac way of finding the user’s documents directory. Perhaps the Python standard library should include a way to get at the best path for storing documents. For Windows Yuck. Coming within 10 feet of win32 programming, you can really appreciate the need for .NET and a sane API. For anyone needing to find the user’s “My Documents” folder on Windows with Python, here is one way that I’ve found to work based on this MSDN article.

Turning web docs into printable docs

Wed, 03 Aug 2005 13:02:17 +0000

Quite a bit of documentation is written in HTML these days, since quite a bit of it is designed to be on the web. HTML doesn’t always work out well for the printed page, primarily because you need to be able to properly refer to page numbers in a large document. You need that capability for tables of contents, indices and references to illustrations. Print is also better if you have at least a little control over where a pagebreak occurs.

Beginning Mac development

Tue, 02 Aug 2005 16:37:28 +0000

TUAW links to Beginning Mac Development and Mac OS X Tiger for Developers, two articles by Justin Williams that look (on the surface) like nicely-written intros. I have not yet read them, so I can’t say how they are beyond the surface, but I wanted to keep track for later reading. (This kind of thing is also of value to PyObjC developers and even those who want to use Java with native Mac features.

Sneaky eBay phishing

Tue, 02 Aug 2005 02:06:46 +0000

I’ve seen lots of phishing scams, but this one is particularly clever and has a lesson for us folks developing web apps. The email was formatted better than many phishing scams, but had the common fingerprint of “you need to update your account information”. Out of curiousity, I took a look at the link they were directing me to: —–://signin.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?SignIn&UsingSSL=1&pUserId=&ru=http://servlet.ebay.com/ForumController?dest=—-://217.159.171.237/.aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll/ebay/login.html (I’ve yanked the https from the beginning so that no one accidentally gets caught from this site.

PyObjC and Quicksilver

Mon, 01 Aug 2005 03:02:32 +0000

Woah… you can write Quicksilver plugins in Python. I guess it makes sense, given how all-encompassing PyObjC is, but I’ll definitely have to start thinking of applications for this. I’ve been hooked on Quicksilver for a while now (and I’m still waiting for someone to make it for Windows!)

Upgrading a remote server to FC4

Sat, 30 Jul 2005 12:58:03 +0000

My server for Blue Sky On Mars is running on Fedora Core 3. I’m not in a rush to upgrade to FC4, but I know that such an upgrade is inevitable. Since the server is remote, thousands of miles away from me, I’m interested in doing the upgrade via yum. Apparently, it can be done, but there are potential gotchas. Thankfully, those gotchas have been enumerated here: YumUpgradeFaq.

The Long Emergency, Peak Oil and Doom Mongering

Sat, 30 Jul 2005 12:47:09 +0000

I get all my political news from Rolling Stone. (Yeah, right.) In reality, though, The Long Emergency over at RollingStone.com is a book excerpt about the coming crisis brought on by “peak oil”. Peak oil is the term used for reaching the maximum possible oil production. It’s all downhill from there. I was aware of peak oil’s coming, but I wasn’t aware that some are predicting that 2005 is the year we reach it.

Microsoft “Genuine Advantage”

Thu, 28 Jul 2005 19:12:07 +0000

In Microsoft’s ongoing hunt to find more money after saturating the market, they’ve decided to harass existing users rather than coming up with useful new product. Since they’re going to all the trouble to harass their users, you’d think they could’ve at least made a more thorough attempt than this: window.g_sDisableWGACheck=’all’.

MochiKit makes JavaScript suck less

Thu, 28 Jul 2005 17:31:01 +0000

That’s the tagline for MochiKit â€“ A lightweight Javascript library, and it is accurate. There are a bunch of useful, well-documented and tested bits of JavaScript in there. It’s worth a look, particularly if you’re targeting modern browsers.

Konfabulator is free!

Tue, 26 Jul 2005 16:39:30 +0000

Wow. I’ve been out of the loop a bit for a few days. I just discovered that Yahoo! has bought Konfabulator and released it for free as Yahoo! Widgets. For those not familiar, Konfabulator is basically the same as Dashboard on Mac OS X Tiger. The biggest difference is that Dashboard uses Expose to zoom on and off screen, and Konfabulator widgets sit around on your desktop all the time.

MochiKit JavaScript library

Thu, 21 Jul 2005 15:15:15 +0000

You get spoiled by a lot fo the niceties of a high-level language like Python. JavaScript has *some* high-level features, but MochiKit adds a bunch more. I’ve been playing with MochiKit for a couple of weeks, and it has a very nice, solid design that does things in a way that is both JavaScripty and Pythonic. Bob Ippolito is doing a great job with it. Take a look!

CSS3 Multicolumn in JavaScript

Tue, 19 Jul 2005 13:27:34 +0000

Some enterprising (read: “crazy”) folks have gone and implemented CSS3 multicolumn support *in JavaScript*. Very nifty. As I noted a few days ago, though, multiple columns is not so great for reading on-screen. A printed view that uses multiple columns would be beautiful, however, and it’s quite cool that people using browsers other than Firefox 1.1 can get in on the action.

A few Harry Potter from Amazon observations

Mon, 18 Jul 2005 02:43:51 +0000

I’ve read only a little bit of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, so this is not really about the book. This is actually about *receiving* the book. For some reason, I remember that Order of the Phoenix was shipped with special FedEx Saturday delivery. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was FedEx’s busiest Saturday ever. What made Amazon’s logistics for this book interesting is that UPS carried the book most of the way, and then *delivered it to a post office*.

Deer Park rocks!

Sat, 16 Jul 2005 17:44:40 +0000

I’ve been using the Deer Park alpha (Firefox 1.1 alpha) for a few days now. So far, it’s been very stable and very fast. It also includes a couple of regular annoyances with Firefox 1.0… those things that don’t really stop you from doing what you want, but annoy you every time you hit it (which is frequently). When you open a link from an external program (like Mail), it now opens in a new tab rather than replacing the contents of your topmost browser window.

Harry Potter – the weekend’s biggest entertainment

Sat, 16 Jul 2005 12:28:02 +0000

Two years ago, I wrote about how Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix’s $90 million haul was bigger than that of Hollywood’s biggest movie of the week. With reports of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince selling through more than 10 million copies *today*, this book is debuting bigger than any movie has ever debuted. If Amazon’s $17 price is at all representative, that means that Half-Blood Prince will have a $170 million day.

Shortcut to Stronger Writing

Sat, 16 Jul 2005 12:19:53 +0000

Sci-Fi author C.J. Cherryh offers tips on improving your writing. With so many people writing so many blogs, good writing tips are a welcome thing. Many blogs use “conversational” writing… but, if you’re interested in the tips, here they are: Writerisms and other Sins: A Writer’s Shortcut to Stronger Writing.

Personal offshoring

Sat, 16 Jul 2005 12:11:32 +0000

For a large software development project, the risks of offshoring development can potentially be huge. For small, specific parts of a project, farming that piece out to someone else can be fairly low risk. This can also apply to very small project, like one you might want done yourself. Ben Hammersley gives a tiny taste of personal offshoring. The internet really does change things.

Configuration management for non-Java apps

Fri, 15 Jul 2005 18:40:57 +0000

Patrick Peak seemed to have misinterpreted no deployment means for a Rails app. I’m certain that we’re talking about “no deployment” during development. Compared to *some* Java environments, it is a big win to be able to just try something and refresh the page. However, especially for folks doing test-driven development, I think this is definitely not the biggest win from Rails. In Java, it is pretty well standardized that folks bundle up a war file, which they then toss onto their production app server at the right time.

Schmozilla!

Fri, 15 Jul 2005 18:16:02 +0000

A short time ago, this site (and my other sites) were all unavailable. And, of course, I couldn’t get on the box to figure out what was going on. When I finally got on there, everything *looked* pretty normal… except for the fact that the load average had climbed to more than 100! Sadly, my server doesn’t have 100 processors and so it was completely hosed until the problem stopped.

Ruby on Rails and scaling

Wed, 13 Jul 2005 19:38:35 +0000

David Heinemeier Hansson has written a rebuttal to the “it doesn’t scale” argument in defense of Ruby on Rails. It’s a good, concise article that applies equally well to all of the variants of LAMP. If someone is giving you grief about scaling something in Python/Ruby/PHP/Perl or Java without EJB, David’s article and Ryan Tomayko’s earlier article provide good counters so you don’t have to write your own.

A Sparklines web service in Python

Wed, 13 Jul 2005 19:07:16 +0000

Here’s a handy article that takes you through designing a convenient web service *and* provides a nice introduction to sparklines, if you’ve never seen them before. XML.com: A Bright, Shiny Service: Sparklines

CSS3 Columns

Wed, 13 Jul 2005 17:26:54 +0000

Since I’m running Deer Park, I thought I’d see what CSS3 columns actually look like. Being too lazy to type a few lines into a text file, I googled and found this: Well, I’m Back: Gecko 1.8 For Web Developers: Columns. Lo and behold, that very blog entry uses two columns. Multiple columns are nice, because you can use the full width of your media without your lines being obnoxiously long and painful to read.

Attention to detail in Help Spot

Wed, 13 Jul 2005 16:14:56 +0000

I’ve been following Ian Landsman’s development of HelpSpot since the beginning, and it is very interesting to observe his attention to detail. Check out his latest preview. I worked in a network operations center some years back (and developed tools for them as well), so I have an idea about “trouble ticket” systems. Ian is building software that is “subtly innovative”. If you’re entering an established market and produce something that is wildly different from everything else out there, you’ll have an uphill battle getting people to use it.

Trying out Firefox 1.1 (Deer Park)

Wed, 13 Jul 2005 16:01:05 +0000

Since I’m primarily a Mac user these days, I was interested to learn that Firefox 1.1 has improved the user experience for Macs. Things like middle-clicking to open a link in a tab and making the preferences work more like Mac preferences do. So far, after a short time using it, Deer Park seems mighty fast. It also supports interesting things like CSS3 columns. Of course, you can’t use them because no one else in the world is running a browser that supports it, but it’s nice to see the standards support growing.

CIA Leak Quotes

Wed, 13 Jul 2005 10:54:32 +0000

The Associated Press gathered up White House spokesman Scott McClellan’s statements about the CIA leak. “On the record” can be a beautiful thing sometimes. As I understand it, government press conferences are public domain, so I’m including the quotes here: Sept. 29, 2003 Q: You said this morning, quote, “The president knows that Karl Rove wasn’t involved.” How does he know that? A: Well, I’ve made it very clear that it was a ridiculous suggestion in the first place.

A CMS that can store in Subversion

Tue, 12 Jul 2005 02:19:40 +0000

There are plenty of CMS choices today (a great many of which are free). For many types of projects, a Wiki acts as a great CMS, because anyone can edit. Wikis are nice, too, because many of them keep a revision history. Lots of open source projects use Wikis with the idea that users of the project can contribute documentation. The trouble with a wiki, though, is that even though a revision history is maintained there’s no way to sync up the wiki with the versions of the software people are using.

Muslim bloggers react to the terrorism in London

Sat, 09 Jul 2005 17:19:13 +0000

Dave Winer points to Rebecca McKinnon’s roundup of reactions from Muslim bloggers to Thursday’s bombings in London. The reactions are what you’d expect (and hope for): sadness for those lost and anger at the terrorists. I’m curious about the reaction from “normal” Muslims around the world. Given the state of infrastructure, the standard of living, and government censorship in the Middle East and elsewhere, looking at reactions from bloggers will only give you the view of the well-educated and well-off.

FeedDemon by Subscription?

Thu, 07 Jul 2005 15:59:44 +0000

If you’ve ever been curious what people think about paying for a “subscription” to a desktop application, look no further than Nick Bradbury’s announcement that FeedDemon will move to a subscription model. I’ve thought about this a bit myself, and one of the early commenters summarized my feelings on the subject well: something like internet-based synchronization (which NewsGator offers) is a *service* and charging that by subscription makes sense. Something like FeedDemon is a software *product* and you expect to be able to use that version of the product forever.

How much code in the browser is too much?

Thu, 07 Jul 2005 12:26:11 +0000

With the ascent of AJAX, many people are writing or considering writing more code to run in browser than they had in years. JavaScript, once left for dead as being too incompatible and impossible to debug, is now being viewed as something usable. Firefox/Mozilla has certainly helped the renaissance. With an honest-to-goodness debugger, plus a super-handy web developer toolbar, you can really get a view into once going on. Selenium provides a mechanism to run tests in-browser, so that you can get all of the benefits of an automated test suite making sure your code works in different browsers.

The Ridiculously Thorough Guide to Making Your Own Pizza

Wed, 06 Jul 2005 02:19:09 +0000

Not that I have time to do so these days, but when the time arises, Billy Reisinger’s The Ridiculously Thorough Guide to Making Your Own Pizza will be there to help me make a dandy pizza. I’m looking forward to his deep dish installment.

Zesty News update

Tue, 05 Jul 2005 13:07:40 +0000

I’ve been very quiet about Zesty News the past few weeks. The reason for this is simple: I don’t like pitching vaporware. When I announced Zesty News at the end of April, I had a specific distinct bug list that I was going to tackle before release of the alpha, so I felt fine in announcing it. I don’t regret having done so, because I also wanted to put the name out there.

PHP security update

Tue, 05 Jul 2005 11:25:54 +0000

For anyone out there that doesn’t read Slashdot: Netcraft: PHP Blogging Apps Vulnerable to XML-RPC Exploits. This includes WordPress and Drupal, both of which I am using at present. Time to go update!

Exponential growth

Mon, 04 Jul 2005 14:09:28 +0000

I’ve been running the Google ads for three weeks now. Each week, my revenue from the ads has doubled over the previous week. Given that, in just a few weeks, my Google ad revenue will be larger than Google’s current revenue. Early next year, I’ll be able to buy the whole U.S. Ahh, the joys of exponents. Last week, 50% of my traffic came from one article that got some wide circulation in the Python community.

ArtRage free painting program

Sat, 02 Jul 2005 20:01:25 +0000

The folks behind the swell Kai’s Power Tools graphics filters have a Windows and Mac painting program called ArtRage. And it’s free! ArtRage is a painting package designed to provide a realistic and fun simulation of using paint on a canvas, along with pens, pencils, crayons, and other tools. Sounds reminiscent of Fractal Design Painter, which is probably beefier, but is definitely not free.

My-Cast: nice, personalized weather site

Fri, 01 Jul 2005 19:44:30 +0000

Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools just had a link to My-Cast. I’ve generally been a fan of The Weather Underground, but I will say that My-Cast has a nice radar view and offers convenient emailed forecasts and alerts, all for free. (My favorite wunderground feature is the unadulterated text of the warnings that come from the National Weather Service. I’m not sure if My-Cast has that, because there are no warnings or watches at the moment.

The GPL is still useful

Fri, 01 Jul 2005 16:34:32 +0000

Apparently, ESR thinks the GPL is not needed anymore. (For those who don’t follow this type of thing, ESR is Eric Raymond, founder of the Open Source Initiative.) He cites Linux as an example of a project that he thinks would have grown even without the GPL. He’s probably right about Linux. Linux could have become a big success even without the GPL. However, paricularly as the number of devices using Linux increases, the fact that Linux is licensed under the GPL helps in getting more code out in the open.

Tortured headline

Fri, 01 Jul 2005 13:33:57 +0000

On Yahoo! News this morning: “Israeli opinion moves against Gaza pullout foes”. Though that headline is an accurate portrayal of what’s in the story, the negatives (against, pullout and foes) make my head spin. “Israelis favor Gaza pullout” is more succinct, but doesn’t capture the fact that there has been literally violent opposition to the pullout. It could be worse: “Foes of Israeli opinion argue against not staying in the vicinity of the pullout”

ActiveGrid – where’s the business?

Wed, 29 Jun 2005 18:07:04 +0000

ActiveGrid sounds interesting. They’re creating a LAMP+java application server/application builder for making typical business apps. The key that they’re going after, and you can get this straight from their name, is easy deployment on grids of commodity hardware. Their tools support (or will support) several databases and PHP/Perl/Python or Java for development. Everything is XML-based, so much of the system is language-neutral. It all sounds very interesting, but I’m left wondering what the business model is when I see a site like this.

Petition filed to build a hotel on Justice Souter’s property

Wed, 29 Jun 2005 02:17:48 +0000

Apparently, a real request has been filed to build Hotel Lost Liberty on the current site of Supreme Court Justice Souter’s house. That is a very appropriate way to protest the eminent domain ruling, and I’m quite certain that Hotel Lost Liberty and the Just Desserts Cafe will definitely provide better revenues to the city. Via Boing Boing.

How to move a feed

Tue, 28 Jun 2005 14:31:35 +0000

So, I just happened to notice that the Google Blog has moved. I hadn’t been paying very close attention, because I think it moved a while ago. In doing the move of their blog, Google did the right thing by putting an HTTP response of 301 – “permanent redirect”. That’s swell. However, they appear to have done a blanket redirect of the whole blog to the front page of the new blog.

iTunes adds podcasts

Tue, 28 Jun 2005 13:06:23 +0000

As rumored, iTunes 4.9 dropped today, with podcasts in tow. I’m not a podcast person (yet), because I just haven’t had the time to devote to listening. The integrated podcast support in iTunes is very easy. They’ve added a whole section to the music store for finding podcasts, and you can also subscribe to any podcast you know the URL for. In the Podcasts part of iTunes, you see one podcast per line.

Weblog spam

Tue, 28 Jun 2005 12:08:12 +0000

Slashdot has a posting about the growing problem of weblog spam. They’re not talking about comments or trackback spam. They’re talking about whole weblogs that are nothing but spam for the search engines. This is a problem for the search engines that are using RSS, and it will be critical for those search engines to come up with a filtering technique that eliminates the chaff from the wheat. Luckily, though, this is not a general problem for RSS.

Grokster commentary

Tue, 28 Jun 2005 02:49:15 +0000

Personally, I’ve never used Grokster and would probably have no familiarity with Grokster if it weren’t for the fact that their name is attached to a case that made it to the Supreme Court. Boing Boing, not surprisingly, has some good coverage of today’s decision in the case. Here’s the roundup of Boing Boing’s coverage: [Cory Doctorow of the EFF has a PopSci editorial](http://www.boingboing.net/2005/06/27/corys_grokster_edito.html) Grokster had a press conference that [you can listen to](http://www.

Matisse – the new NetBeans GUI Builder

Tue, 28 Jun 2005 02:30:35 +0000

Matisse – the new NetBeans GUI Builder looks quite nice from the demo screencast. Though it’s been several months since I was looking at the Eclipse GUI building tools, this is far ahead of those tools in ease-of-use. Very nice work! I did see one comment that compared this with Apple’s Interface Builder. Something I didn’t see in Matisse (maybe it’s there, but it wasn’t in the screencast), is the data binding aspect of IB.

I am the King of Self-Proclamation!

Mon, 27 Jun 2005 03:38:11 +0000

Amazingly enough, at this moment in time, Google has declared that I am the King of Self-Proclamation. I even beat out Michael Jackson, who was apparently previously declared the King of Self-Proclamation (oddly, by someone other than himself).

del.icio.us direc.tor: Delivering A High-Performance AJAX Web Service Broker :: Johnvey

Sat, 25 Jun 2005 11:49:47 +0000

After the recent appearance of Google’s AJAXSLT, it’s interesting to read about del.icio.us direc.tor (page subtitle: Delivering A High-Performance AJAX Web Service Broker). As I commented yesterday, I don’t like the XSL-T syntax. However, when I look at the XSL used by this project, I will freely admit that this XSL is not bad. It is more verbose than a Velocity-like template language, but there just wasn’t a lot of template code necessary for direct.

RSS in Longhorn

Sat, 25 Jun 2005 02:15:43 +0000

Microsoft’s Simple List Extensions Specification is, in fact, simple. I do think there is value in where they’re headed with this, because this provides some more machine-readable data that is presently user-configured in tools like Zesty News. It is great to see something that looks different from the “embrace and extend” Microsoft of old: this spec uses XML namespaces, making it pretty transparent to existing tools. And, the spec is published under a Creative Commons license with a royalty-free grant to use any Microsoft patents that may cover this particular spec.

Google AJAXSLT

Fri, 24 Jun 2005 16:45:11 +0000

The new Google AJAXSLT provides a JavaScript XSL-T and XPath implementation that you can use when providing AJAX goodness in your apps. It’s licensed under a BSD-style license, so you can use it for whatever you want. As you can see from the readme, Google had to really work to smooth out differences between browsers, many of which have no exposed XSL or XPath functionality at all. As you can guess, it’s probably not going to be whizzy fast if your browser doesn’t have built-in XSL.

OneShare.com – when you’re not looking to invest

Fri, 24 Jun 2005 01:44:34 +0000

Right now, Apple (AAPL) is trading for about $39 per share. If you want to get a gift for someone, you can get them one framed share of Apple for just $122. Or you could get them three shares of stock instead. Which one would you choose? That says something about you… a practical person would buy three shares of stock: that’s three times the dividends (if Apple pays dividends), three times the appreciation and three times the value when sold.

Building the Firebird Database on Mac OSX Tiger

Thu, 23 Jun 2005 19:57:29 +0000

The folks who make the Firebird database only package up the “classic” server for the Mac. This is a process-based server and is more resource intensive than the multithreaded SuperServer. David Pugh has written up instructions for building a Firebird SuperServer on Mac OS X. I have a couple of additions for people using Tiger. First, you’ll need to gcc_select 3.3, because Firebird does not appear to be gcc 4.0 compatible at this point.

script.aculo.us JavaScript library

Thu, 23 Jun 2005 19:44:47 +0000

Building on the Prototype JavaScript library, we now see the script.aculo.us library which provides easy to use effects and drag-and-drop features. And, it’s nicely documented to boot!

Ordering in RSS feeds

Thu, 23 Jun 2005 19:14:47 +0000

CNET reports that Microsoft wants to extend RSS to include ordering information for things like best seller lists. The funny thing about this is that XML (and RSS is XML) already has an implied ordering. It’s then up to a human to decide whether or not they care about that ordering. All you would really need added to RSS is a flag that says “ordering in this feed is important”.

LevelTen Hit Counter – free web analytics

Thu, 23 Jun 2005 14:03:36 +0000

Many free web log analysis tools give you the basics, but stop short of providing the type of information that will really tell you where your potential customers are dropping off. The LevelTen Hit Counter is not a weblog analyzer; it keeps its own logs in your database. It uses cookie and IP tracking (which I should note is also available in standard weblogs, if you enable cookie logging) to try to provide a better view of what people are doing.

Warnings and Promises: an eloquent statement of music biz problems

Thu, 23 Jun 2005 02:41:58 +0000

Glenn McDonald explains in Warnings and Promises why he (someone who buys in excess of 100 CDs per year) has finally given in and “stolen” music online. Someone who buys more than 100 CDs a year is what is known in most industries as a “great customer”. His article is a clear story on how the music industry is failing. (Via 43 Folders)

Flying Spaghetti Monster!

Thu, 23 Jun 2005 01:44:56 +0000

I must remind you that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is just a theory, not a fact. As with any theory, it is good to consider other points of view.

The Commiseration Tag

Mon, 20 Jun 2005 23:28:43 +0000

Not sure if anyone else out there has a similar tag, but my “One of those weeks” post included the “commiseration” tag. Seems like a good tag if you’re in the mood to share in other people’s misery 🙂 On Technorati and del.icio.us.

Gas prices too high? Just steal the oil!

Mon, 20 Jun 2005 17:09:45 +0000

I’d just like to draw some added attention to the commenter on this post who is seriously that we just take the oil from Iraq to reduce our gas prices. I thought it was a troll, but apparently that’s not the case. Check it out! (Curiously, the commenter in question, Kyle, appears to be from a “blue state” based on his domain name.)

Google and online payments?

Sat, 18 Jun 2005 18:10:52 +0000

If this story about Google’s plan to take on PayPal has any truth to it, this may indeed be a fine time to invest in GOOG despite the $70 billion valuation. Why? Because my guess is that if they enter that market they have original spin on online payments. I can’t imagine that they would just offer up a clone of PayPal. Everything else they’ve done to date has had a significant technological edge to it.

ZODB vs. pysqlite with SQLObject

Sat, 18 Jun 2005 14:15:51 +0000

I have found only two good options for an embedded, transactional database that can be conveniently used in a non-free Python application: the ZODB and sqlite. I started out with sqlite and then recently started doing some heavy duty tinkering with the ZODB. Concurrency For many desktop applications, sqlite is great. The data is all conveniently stored in one file and current versions of sqlite even eliminate the need for “vacuuming” up deleted data.

Apple WebObjects is now free

Fri, 17 Jun 2005 16:06:01 +0000

When I read about XCode 2.1, this kind of bubbled just under my conciousness. Slashdot brought it fully to my attention, though. Apple has made WebObjects free with Tiger. (Not open source, though…) I read a bit about WebObjects in 2003 while doing some research for a new project. Though I have seen some folks complain that Apple has let the software languish, I’ve seen some of these same folks say it’s the best way to build a webapp.

Picture It Postage

Thu, 16 Jun 2005 16:56:50 +0000

File this under “pricey but cool”: Picture It Postage lets you get real postage stamps with a picture straight from your iPhoto library. They charge approximately $0.50 extra per stamp ($16.95 for 20 $0.37 stamps), but it is reallly spiffy for a special occasion. I gather that there are other services like this, but this is the first I’ve heard of it.

Self-proclamation

Thu, 16 Jun 2005 16:47:43 +0000

I’ve seen Michael Jackson referred to as the “self-proclaimed King of Pop”. I’m not entirely certain about whether the King of Pop moniker was actually self-proclaimed to begin with (and I’m too lazy to even do a Google search to find out, given that it’s not my main point). My point is that Richard MacManus has declared himself the self-proclaimed Father of Web 2.0. (Note my link text.) I think it would be cool to see Richard MacManus take over “self-proclaimed”, in addition to “Father of Web 2.

43 Folders: More Quicksilver Power Tips

Wed, 15 Jun 2005 19:10:47 +0000

If you use a Mac, I’m assuming you’re already using [Quicksilver](http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/). If not, get it now! Merlin Mann has just posted a few more Quicksilver Power Tips. Handy!

11 Client Types to Fire

Wed, 15 Jun 2005 12:54:23 +0000

Christopher Hawkins has written a great piece about 11 types of software project clients that you should fire. I think everyone who has been doing software for a while has worked with some suboptimal clients. I worked on one project where the customer was very nitpicky and detail-oriented, and yet they couldn’t make up their mind about the details! Couple that with problems on our side from a codebase that wasn’t aging gracefully, and that was an unhappy project that I worked on for more than a year.

Google cares about their business

Tue, 14 Jun 2005 21:40:23 +0000

In the rush to capitalize on internet efficiencies, many businesses use their websites 100% in lieu of person-to-person communication. As a small business owner, I can understand this to an extent. However, there are certain kinds of communication that are really vital to their business. Google makes more than 90% of their revenue from advertising. I don’t know what portion of this is AdSense (ads that appear on other sites like this one), but I’m sure it amounts to many millions a year.

EFF’s Legal Guide for Bloggers

Tue, 14 Jun 2005 16:12:12 +0000

In February, I posted a Legal Guide For Bloggers that is currently the #1 match on Google for the phrase “legal guide for bloggers” (update a few hours later: that link has already fallen to last on the page of search results! Google works fast!). That’s not likely to continue to be the case now that the EFF has published: EFF: Legal Guide for Bloggers In my posting, I had collected up a bunch of links to good resources if you find yourself at the wrong end of a Cease and Desist (is there a right end?

Are types worth this?

Tue, 14 Jun 2005 16:04:06 +0000

Tim Bray, who has spoken out previously on the goodness of “scripting languages”, laments the pain caused by the combination of Java Generics, Arrays, and Comparables. Given Java’s strongly-typed nature, I think generics are a good thing, because they extend the typing protection. (If you’re going to buy in to static typing, you might as well go all the way!) If you are trying to compare arrays of objects in Java, you’d do well to look at Tim’s post and save yourself some time.

Sick

Tue, 14 Jun 2005 14:06:10 +0000

Being sick when you’ve got your own business and you’re really looking forward to shipping is a drag. As a general rule, I don’t code when I’m sick… so, though I have code that I really, really want to write today, I’m going to wait ’til tomorrow. Since English does not have to be as presize 🙂 as code, I’m going to catch up on some blogging today.

First Time Here?

Tue, 14 Jun 2005 13:59:30 +0000

Hi, I’m Kevin Dangoor and this is my blog. I started Blue Sky On Mars (originally “We Write Online”, thank goodness for the name change!) in June, 2001 and have been posting almost continuously ever since. The name is a reference to the fine Total Recall movie, and I rather like the idea of people running around on Mars throwing frisbees and whatnot. I’ve been in the technology business for quite a while now, doing many different things.

Outlines for everyone?

Tue, 14 Jun 2005 12:07:09 +0000

I’ve been reading Scripting News for at least 6 years. I agree that Dave Winer is most interesting to read when he’s working on shipping some software, as he is now. His exuberance is impressive sometimes. He and John Robb predict a BusinessWeek cover for his new Instant Outliner. Here’s what I find interesting about this: Dave Winer has been doing outliners *for twenty years*. You have to figure that when you do something for twenty years, it’s going to reshape how your brain works.

Firefox a hog on Mac OS X?

Mon, 13 Jun 2005 19:53:55 +0000

Is it just me, or is Firefox a bit of a hog compared to Safari on Mac OS X? I’ve got a G4 PowerBook, and it runs just fine with Firefox or Safari. But my “hog-o-meter” goes off whenever Firefox is running. What is my “hog-o-meter”? The fan… When I’m using Safari, the PowerBook is entirely silent. When I’m doing my browsing in Firefox, the fan is almost always running and making some noise.

Trying out Google AdSense

Mon, 13 Jun 2005 19:40:42 +0000

This blog has always been for my personal use. I’ve been free to write what I please here and link to whatever I think is interesting and that I want to remember. I’ve decided to try out Google’s AdSense ads here because: I don’t feel that the ads will change my freedom to write what I wish here. Nothing I’ve written over the past 4 years violates the Terms of Service, so I have no reason to expect I’ll start now.

Multiple blogs or multiple feeds?

Sun, 12 Jun 2005 03:14:21 +0000

Since I started it, this blog has always been my “personal blog” and has never had an explicit focus. I’ve had around 575 technology- and software-related postings, so this is general a geek blog. But, I’ve had more than 400 “Random” things (these are usually entertaining bits found elsewhere, or some news about my site) and more than 100 postings in each of Music and Politics. This made me curious: is it better to have multiple blogs or simply have multiple feeds on the same blog?

More stock photo places

Sat, 11 Jun 2005 18:00:15 +0000

Marshall Brain’s WebKEW talks about free photos for your web site. He mentions [stock.xchng](http://www.sxc.hu/), which I linked to in [Art Tips for Programmers](http://www.blueskyonmars.com/2004/11/22/art-tips-for-programmers/). The comments at WebKEW bring up a couple other links to sites that I hadn’t heard of: [Yotophoto](http://yotophoto.com/) and [MorgueFile](http://morguefile.com/).

Dinosaurs and the Great Flood

Sat, 11 Jun 2005 15:22:19 +0000

I love the net. Someone who goes by the name “The Ferrett” talks about The Weirdest Book I Ever Got. The book in question is a comic book by Jim Pinkoski called “A Creationist’s View of DINOSAURS and the Theory Of Evolution”. Take a look at The Ferrett’s scans from it! Apparently, the dinosaurs were destroyed by the Great Flood after they tried to attack Noah’s Ark. You learn something new every day.

How to make a million dollars (on the web)

Sat, 11 Jun 2005 13:35:04 +0000

Marshall Brain, creator of the most excellent How Stuff Works has posted a presentation he gave in which he talks about how to make a million dollars. The presentation is a nice, light read and is generally of the “motivational” sort, by which i mean that it’s main purpose appears to be to get you off your butt and start something. Which is a very worthy goal, to be sure.

“Some of our unsubscribe data was deleted”

Fri, 10 Jun 2005 19:17:00 +0000

This seems like a good tactic for a spammer. Here’s a message I just got from Chevrolet: Dear Kevin, Thanks for your interest in Chevrolet. Recently some of our unsubscribe data was deleted. Please help us update our records to ensure that we have captured your preferences correctly. I can imagine some spammers accidentally forgetting to fix their weekly cron job that deletes unsubscribe data. In this particular case, I’m sure someone at Chevrolet is getting mildly flogged.

Two great intellectual property rights stories

Thu, 09 Jun 2005 14:30:03 +0000

I’m completely in favor of copyright holders (even the big conglomerate sorts) making money from their labors. However, I’m not in favor of copyright holders decimating the public domain (which is effectively a Constitution-granted right) and restricting what I can do for my own personal use with the items I buy (which is just stupid and bad business). Thanks to Boing Boing (and the EFF’s Cory Doctorow) for continuing to highlight the arguments against infinite copyright and DRM.

Doing contract work as a microISV

Wed, 08 Jun 2005 14:14:17 +0000

Ian Landsman says not to be afraid of contract work when you’re starting your microISV. He makes some great points. The key point, I think, is cashflow. In order for the business to survive, at some point cash needs to come in. Having ready access to more cash, like consulting gigs, is a good way to keep things going. I’ve made some choices recently that are delaying Zesty News a bit, but will result in a stronger product in the end.

G8 leading scientists urge greenhouse gas action

Wed, 08 Jun 2005 13:00:44 +0000

Scientists from each of the Group of Eight leading nations are urging action to curb CO2 emissions and avoid potentially catastrophic climate change. Mr Bush has consistently stressed the uncertainties of climate science. This is starting to sound a little like the “uncertainties of evolution science”. There are many things we don’t know, but quite a few scientists are now staking their reputations on a bet that humans are really having an effect on the climate.

Supreme Court ruling hides away dangerous precedent

Wed, 08 Jun 2005 03:11:34 +0000

In another example of how important blogs are to modern day journalism, take a look at CNN’s coverage of a Supreme Court ruling regarding medical marijuana and then look at Boing Boing’s coverage. Looking at the surface view, which is the CNN reporting, you might think “yeah, okay… so marijuana is something the federal government deals with”. But, the argument you see at Boing Boing shows why this is an important case.

A great defense of LAMP

Tue, 07 Jun 2005 15:06:53 +0000

Actually, this is a defense not only of LAMP, but of people out in the trenches doing Java with Spring and Hibernate as well. IBM poop heads say LAMP users need to “grow up” No. The LAMP stack is a properly constructed piece of software. Features are added when an actual person has an actual need that arises in the actual field, not when some group of highly qualified architecture astronauts and marketing

ZCatalog for standalone ZODB

Tue, 07 Jun 2005 13:03:22 +0000

I have just packaged up ZCatalog from Zope 3.1 for use with the standalone ZODB. I’m surprised that no one had released this previously, because all but the most trivial of ZODB apps will need some way to do non-primary key sorts of searches. Previously available solutions that I spotted are: [IndexedCatalog](http://www.async.com.br/projects/IndexedCatalog/) and [these instructions for getting Zope 2.6’s ZCatalog working](http://slarty.polito.it:8069/~sciasbat/wiki/moin.cgi/StandaloneZodbHowto). The major feature that ZCatalog has over IndexedCatalog is a full-text search index.

Seth Godin on being small

Tue, 07 Jun 2005 10:59:47 +0000

Seth Godin has just written a couple of articles on being small. It’s great food for thought for anyone considering breaking away and going uncorporate. One of the implications of the Long Tail is that you don’t know what’s going to work. That it’s easy to launch stuff, hard to figure out where it’s going to land. If you don’t have to bet the farm on every launch, you’re way more likely to launch more, and more randomly, which vastly increases your odds.

Apple switching to Intel

Mon, 06 Jun 2005 18:08:03 +0000

According to cnet: CEO Steve Jobs officially announced on Monday that Apple would gradually shift its Mac line to Intel-based chips over the next two years. The move confirms a timetable first reported by CNET News.com. My take on Apple for a long time now has been that they fundamentally view themselves as a hardware company. They’re very good at software (since the NeXT acquisition), but the software is really used to drive hardware sales.

NiceXSL: XSL without the screwy syntax

Mon, 06 Jun 2005 17:42:38 +0000

Ned Batchelder clued me (and his hordes of other readers) in to NiceXSL. I’ve always found XSL to be annoying, not because it’s declarative but because it has a nasty syntax. NiceXSL has a far more natural (for a programmer) syntax that is translated directly into XSL. It looks like the current implemention is in Java.

Liebermann’s ultimate BS

Sun, 05 Jun 2005 16:48:26 +0000

This extensive PDF of Liebermann Inc.’s tale of accomplishments is the most impressive bit of BS I’ve seen in some time. “Unbelievable” is exactly the right word. Mildly entertaining applies, too… but another watch of Stunt City is probably a better use of time.

Force use of launchd in Tiger

Sat, 04 Jun 2005 02:25:19 +0000

Here’s a useful tip: upgraded Tiger installs don’t use launchd. Even better, that link tells you how to make Tiger use launchd. Why would you want to? Because launchd breaks the bottleneck that caused earlier Mac OS Xs and still causes Linux to boot slowly. It allows daemons to more easily launch in parallel.

Stunt City: the funniest deodorant commercial of all time

Sat, 04 Jun 2005 02:04:46 +0000

I don’t remember what brand of deodorant it was for, but man this is a great commercial.

US gov’t rejects Amnesty Int’l claims about human rights

Wed, 01 Jun 2005 17:18:06 +0000

Amnesty International wasn’t pleased with the US’ human rights track record this past year. The US response? “The United States is leading the way when it comes to protecting human rights and promoting human dignity. We have liberated 50 million people in Iraq and Afghanistan, we have worked to advance freedom and democracy in the world,” said Scott McClellan. OK, sure. The US is trying to advance freedom, democracy [and US oil interests] in the world.

Making the switch

Mon, 30 May 2005 19:43:45 +0000

In two days, I’ll mark four years as a blogger Seems like a good time to do something I’ve been meaning to do for a few months now: switch to WordPress. There are a few little things that have been irritating me about MT. Those were quite possibly fixed by MT 3.1, but I wanted to head over to where a lot of the action was. I’ve decided to go ahead and put things in place so that the WP blog is now in control.

Thoughts on Podcasting

Thu, 26 May 2005 05:03:19 +0000

Podcasting has received a lot of attention. I don’t think I’ve written a single word about it to date, despite being a longtime reader of Dave Winer and a creator of a news aggregator. The reason I haven’t written anything to date is that it’s not something I’m really jumping up and down about. There are many other things going on in internet audio that are more compelling: the move to subscription services, heinous DRM — and when consumers will finally revolt against it, the ongoing availability of AllOfMP3.

Zesty News alpha delayed

Wed, 25 May 2005 19:13:34 +0000

I had, until very recently, been aiming for releasing the first alpha release of Zesty News Lite on May 31st. I do believe in “release early, release often” as a way to make great progress on a project, even a closed-source one. However, I also believe in not wasting the time of the people testing my product. That means balancing the desire to get features out there with a bit of stability.

Performance improvements in unreleased products

Fri, 20 May 2005 15:56:55 +0000

There’s the old question “if a tree falls and no one hears it, did it make a noise?” Just as goofy: “if you improve the performance of an unreleased application, did it actually get faster?” I’m definitely in the “premature optimization is the root of all evil” camp, but the time has come for some performance work on Zesty News. I currently have well over 1,000 unread items, and it takes a few seconds to bring up the main view.

Outlook vs. the River of News

Fri, 20 May 2005 15:33:32 +0000

Dare Obasanjo and Dave Winer are both talking about the problem with Outlook-style (3-pane) aggregators. I believe that Dave is generally right about the River of News: clicking on each feed and then clicking on each item is a drag. Thankfully, most aggregators seem to have moved past this. Even the built-in aggregator in Safari lets you view all of your feeds together. And yet, even though the aggregators offer other views that are more River of News-like, that’s not the default view.

Obligatory Star Wars Revenge of the Sith review

Fri, 20 May 2005 05:46:19 +0000

Today, the boss let me sneak out and see Star Wars, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. I saw a 1:30PM show and it was busy, but certainly not crazy. There were a couple people with lightsabers and robes, but that was about as nuts as it gets on a Thursday afternoon in Michigan. Short form review: I thought the movie was excellent. Yes, Lucas is not a good writer and, yes, the acting can be a bit stiff at times.

Now running Tiger

Tue, 17 May 2005 15:38:48 +0000

I finally got everything set up yesterday and installed Tiger. I used Carbon Copy Cloner to move my 10.3 installation to an external drive, so that I can continue to use that to make Panther builds of Zesty News. CCC is very easy and did the job with just a couple of clicks. The only trouble I had with it was that a bunch of my folders were owned by root in the clone.

I don’t want your cat to interrupt my work

Tue, 17 May 2005 15:16:55 +0000

I love cats as much as the next guy, but a new cat picture posted on a blog is not a good reason to interrupt my current train of thought. Right now, I’m writing this little article. If a box popped up saying “3 new blog postings” or “SomeSite: Here’s my cat”, that would derail this sentence as I’m writing it and take a few seconds to shift back and forth between the trains of thought.

Looking at sources for safe returns

Mon, 16 May 2005 06:47:14 +0000

It’s getting to be time to rebalance the finances. Much of my thinking of the current state of the economy and the stock market echoes what you see in John Mauldin’s excellent Bull’s Eye Investing. (Do be sure to check out John’s free newsletter, as he dispenses useful and timely thoughts every week). The short of it: Stocks are richly priced and are not going to provide decent returns for the next few years.

The power of words

Mon, 16 May 2005 05:53:56 +0000

Some bloggers regularly reach many thousands of people. There is a lot of power in broad reach combined with credibility, as you can see from a CNN article regarding a Newsweek screwup. Newsweek, with broad reach and credibility, published an article alleging Quran desecration at Gitmo that created a huge wave of unrest in the Middle East. Fifteen people are dead as a result. That’s a sobering thought on the power of words.

TiddlyWiki can save!

Sat, 14 May 2005 15:23:12 +0000

A completely browser-based client side wiki is cool enough, but the recent versions of TiddlyWiki can even save your changes! That only works in Firefox and IE right now (I’m using Safari at the moment), but that is quite the achievement. Even the upgrade process is impressively easy. For folks into Getting Things Done, Nathan Bowers has put together GTD TiddlyWiki, a repackaging of TiddlyWiki that is designed to keep all of your next actions together.

The $80 router/PBX

Sat, 14 May 2005 05:34:36 +0000

Though I have yet to install anything unusual on my Linksys WRT54G, I got that particular model specifically because I knew you could install other stuff if you wanted to. Some folks have figured out how to turn this little router (I think I only paid $50 for mine) into a PBX! Yes, you can have your very own configurable telephone system for very little cash.

US press picks up on British memo

Fri, 13 May 2005 16:55:06 +0000

A high-level British memo claiming that “intelligence and facts were being fixed” to support the Iraq war in mid-2002 has reached the mainstream US press. CNN has the story. Of course, as pointed out in CNN’s article, this had been claimed before. Do people still actually believe that the charges of an Iraqi threat were anything other than lies?

SIFR: Great looking typography on the web

Fri, 13 May 2005 05:36:55 +0000

Wow. No, I mean wow. SIFR, an LGPLed combination of JavaScript, CSS and Flash, let’s you easily use any font for text on your pages, regardless of whether the user has the font. It leaves your pages fully accessible and searchable, and it drops and and removes very easily. Look at the example page to see the kind of coolness I’m talking about. (Link via Ian Landsman.)

Photoshop color shifting when saving for the web

Thu, 12 May 2005 15:03:05 +0000

Yesterday, I was working in Photoshop and got a simple image looking the way I wanted it to. I had eyedroppered the color from a different file. Whenever I tried to edit in Image Ready or save for the web, the image became distinctly lighter. It would seem that this interestingly formatted page has the reason: Save For Web Color Shift ImageReady. As of now, I’m still seeing the color change when I move from Photoshop to ImageReady, so the tips presented there have not yet borne fruit for me.

Susan Senator’s site

Thu, 12 May 2005 14:36:04 +0000

Ned Batchelder has a great software blog that I’ve been reading for a few months now. His wife, Susan Senator has a new book about dealing with autism coming out later in the year. Check them out!

Mouseover DOM inspector

Thu, 12 May 2005 14:27:35 +0000

Do you have a spiffy new AJAX page that you’re trying to troubleshoot under IE? Check out the Mouseover DOM Inspector for a way to analyze what objects are sitting on your page at that moment. (Via Ned Batchelder.)

Joel explains Hungarian notation

Wed, 11 May 2005 20:30:44 +0000

Joel Spolsky, as always, is entertaining and takes a bit of exposition to get to the point in his latest article: Making Wrong Code Look Wrong. In the article, he makes a differentiation between “Apps Hungarian” notation and “Systems Hungarian” notation, and now it makes sense to me. Whenever I saw people talking about Hungarian Notation, I always saw the Systems version which seemed completely nonsensical: why would someone have a variable name that just duplicates information that you’ve already got?

Luxury Chair.com: use caution

Wed, 11 May 2005 18:01:45 +0000

If you do work that requires a lot of sitting, you donâ€™t want to skimp on your chair. The cost of a good chair is small compared to the cost that bad ergonomics can extract from your body. Of course, not everyone will agree on what the perfect chair is. Iâ€™ve spent about 3 years working at companies where my chair was an Aeron. Itâ€™s a shame that the Aeron was one of the symbols of dot com excess.

The tale of making Zesty News cross-platform

Wed, 11 May 2005 17:00:29 +0000

As I mentioned earlier, Zesty News has a browser-based interface. But, Zesty News is not a web-based program: it’s a desktop application. You install it on your computer and access the program through your web browser. So, I get to deal with the intracacies of cross-browser compatibility and the deployment aspects of a desktop application. Joy! But, it goes beyond that. While I can imagine telling a geek friend, “yeah, you just point your browser at http://localhost:xxxx and there you go!

Zesty News 1.0 alpha is feature complete

Tue, 10 May 2005 18:24:47 +0000

Calling an “alpha” feature complete is kind of funny. In my book, an “alpha” release is one that is missing some features that are planned for the final release. A “beta” release has all of the planned features, but is not fully tested. At this point, I have put together all of the features planned for Zesty News 1.0 alpha. So, the alpha is feature complete… but Zesty News 1.0 final is not.

Hillary Rosen doesn’t like lying in the bed she made

Tue, 10 May 2005 15:03:11 +0000

It sounds like Hillary Rosen is not happy with the world she’s created. Most agree [the iPod] is the best quality player on the market even if the cheapest one costs a few hundred dollars [except the Shuffle, which is $99 – kevin]. The problem is that the iPod only works with either songs that you buy from the on-line Apple iTunes store or songs that you rip from your own CD’s.

Dovecot auth process failed too early

Tue, 10 May 2005 06:06:30 +0000

For some reason (I don’t know what the reason is yet), my server rebooted twice a couple hours ago. Generally speaking, reboots aren’t that big a deal… journaling databases, journaling filesystems. Logs get processed and bam, everything is up. Tonight, everything except for dovecot, the imap/pop servier, started up. The wonderfully descriptive error message that maillog provided me was that the “auth process died too early”. I’m not sure why having the auth process die later is a good thing, and I really wish there was some more detail in the log, but there wasn’t.

Hitchcock remakes

Fri, 06 May 2005 18:40:26 +0000

CNN is talking about a planned remake of “The Birds” and also mentions a number of Hitchcock remakes that have appeared in recent memory. They left out more blatant exploitation like North On NorthWest, Dial T For T-Mobile, and Strangers on Amtrak.

Feed reading belongs in the browser

Fri, 06 May 2005 14:59:36 +0000

There will certainly be folks that disagree with me on this one, but I think that feed reading belongs in the browser. Most of the feed readers that I’ve seen have a Windows or Mac user interface and include a web browser in a portion of the window. A few, including Zesty News, have the primary user interface show up directly in the user’s web browser. At least at this point, feed reading is largely about resources that are on the web.

Google Web Accelerator speeds up browsing

Thu, 05 May 2005 04:51:18 +0000

There have been lots of programs along the way that claim to speed up browsing. However, not many people can offer a 100,000 computer network with tons of bandwidth to speed up your surfing. That’s where Google comes in with their web accelerator. The basic idea is that Google is already caching copies of web pages, so they’ll take those cached copies and send them to you more quickly than the original servers could.

The 15 pound burger

Wed, 04 May 2005 22:56:59 +0000

After the defeat of the 6 pound burger in January, a Pennsylvania bar has introduced the 15 pound burger. The current challenge is for two people to eat that burger in 3 hours. That still makes it 7.5 pounds per person, a 25% elevation over the old burger. At $30, it’s not such a bad deal if you go in on it with 10 of your closest friends.

Traffic conditions via RSS

Wed, 04 May 2005 20:54:19 +0000

Yahoo is now offering traffic conditions via an RSS feed. It would be a handy link if I didn’t work from home… Worth keeping a link here for future reference, though.

HelpSpot help desk software first look

Wed, 04 May 2005 15:13:28 +0000

Ian is starting on the path toward beta of HelpSpot and has given a first look at HelpSpot’s request view. Many help desk systems are way too complicated for many people who just need to effectively track customer requests. This looks like a good balance and a good way to make sure things don’t get dropped.

Brief movie review: Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Tue, 03 May 2005 22:52:35 +0000

I’ve read the Hitchhiker’s Guide books at least a couple of times. Consequently, I didn’t like some of the script choices that they made when they moved the story to film. They excised a number of the funniest bits in exchange for some added visual bits that were not particularly entertaining or important to the story. I did like the visuals, and I think the movie may have played better to people who weren’t as familiar with the Guide.

No need to subscribe here and at Blazing Things

Tue, 03 May 2005 16:45:35 +0000

FYI for anyone who is already subscribed to my RSS feed here: there is no need for you to subscribe at Blazing Things. My posts to Blazing Things will also be posted here. The Blazing Things site will have the “official” word of Blazing Things, whereas Blue Sky On Mars will continue to be my place for personal commentary and technical discussion.

What’s with the Zesty News name?

Tue, 03 May 2005 16:42:41 +0000

I figured that I’d start my articles about Zesty News off with a light, uncontroversial topic: where did the name come from? The Zesty News name actually came to mind when the original idea did in mid-2003. I liked the sound of it, and it even has a nice, although generally food-related, definition: “marked by spirited enjoyment”. That’s the way keeping up with the goings on in the world should be.

Happy 50th, Dave Winer

Mon, 02 May 2005 20:26:48 +0000

Today is Dave Winer’s 50th birthday. Happy Birthday, Dave!. Love him or hate him, the guy speaks his mind and has definitely had an impact on the software business. I’ve been reading Scripting News for at least 6 years, and reading Scripting News is without a doubt what led me to implement RSS on my own site back in ’99.

Will Canada cave?

Mon, 02 May 2005 19:14:25 +0000

In an annual report regarding intellectual property, the US has put Canada on watch for not implementing stupid laws like the DMCA. This represents the first shot across the Canadian bow. If history is any indicator, the copyright reform plan is going to face an onslaught of U.S.-backed lobbying for stronger protections in the months ahead. So, if Canada does not go along with laws that do not work, will the US start levying import duties on Canadian IP?

Great sandstorm photos

Sat, 30 Apr 2005 20:32:52 +0000

This didn’t seem like the kind of thing that people would make up, but the photos are pretty incredible. Snopes reports that these sandstorm photos are likely genuine, and I’m sure it would be unnerving to be the one standing there taking those shots! Particularly if you’re from a non-sandstorm place like Michigan.

Cobb County to distribute iBooks (evolution sticker not included)

Sat, 30 Apr 2005 20:16:11 +0000

Cobb County, Georgia is getting set to start distributing Apple iBook laptops to their teachers and students, possibly going to 63,000 computers. To me, it seems a little ironic that a school board that doesn’t understand science would approve $70 million in funding for computers.

Why another RSS reader?

Fri, 29 Apr 2005 17:33:56 +0000

Over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to write an article or two about design choices that I’ve made in Zesty News. The ideas for Zesty News started forming in late-2002, and were fairly concrete by mid-2003. I remember talking to Nigel, my boss at the time, about some of the ideas. At that point, with a baby coming in July, I was not in a good position to make a run for it.

Announcing Zesty News

Fri, 29 Apr 2005 16:34:09 +0000

People everywhere are discovering new ways to gather and use the information available on the internet. Zesty News will provide a new new way to gather up and read the information on the net. The focus of Zesty News is simple: keep you informed about everything that matters to you, and use up as little of your time in the process as possible. Zesty News runs on Windows PCs or Macs and works within the browser you’re already familiar with: Internet Explorer on the PC, Firefox on the PC or Mac and Safari on the Mac.

Tiger Direct sues Apple to halt Tiger

Fri, 29 Apr 2005 05:10:34 +0000

Tiger Direct appears to be shameless. One day before the slated release of Mac OS X Tiger, they have decided that Apple is infringing on their trademark. The claim does indeed have merit, but the timing certainly doesn’t. The Mac OS X Tiger name was announced a long time ago, and I’m sure that Tiger Direct had heard of it before this week. They’re just hoping for a cushy settlement, given Apple’s billions in cash.

Beware of Java string memory allocation

Wed, 27 Apr 2005 19:57:27 +0000

Charles Miller and other Atlassian folks were digging into a memory issue and found out that memory allocation and garbage collection for Strings and StringBuffers may not be what you’re expecting. The main thrust of it is that there are some optimizations to speed the common cases that can result in considerable memory waste if you’re not aware of the implementation. (For example, if you have a StringBuffer with a 32K capacity and do a toString on it, that new String will take up 32K of memory even if you only had 1 byte in the StringBuffer.

Yahoo kicks it up a notch with My Web

Wed, 27 Apr 2005 19:12:32 +0000

Furl has always been a neat idea: if you see something you on the web that you like, toss it into your own personal filing cabinet for later retrieval. Yahoo has launched My Web which lets you do much the same thing, but it’s integrated directly with Yahoo! search and Yahoo’s toolbar. It also allows you to pick things up via RSS and they’re experimenting with attention.xml. Very cool stuff going on there.

Magic voodoo for MySQL 4.1 upgrade on Fedora Core 3

Tue, 26 Apr 2005 21:54:26 +0000

I should’ve blogged this the other day. I did a yum update, and BAM! mysql disappeared. So, I guess these instructions for upgrading MySQL on FC3 are not entirely flawless. However, they did do the job of getting MySQL 4.1 running. It just didn’t survive an update. If you’re looking to get it running for yourself, these steps will do the trick.

JavaScript Shell

Tue, 26 Apr 2005 17:43:00 +0000

The JavaScript Shell lets you interactively run JavaScript commands, even against a particular window. This allows you to easily test out DOM manipulations you’re considering or, as the authors suggest, GreaseMonkey scripts. Very nice, but it does not appear to be Safari compatible at all. Just goes to show that Firefox is far and away the best browser for development. I have found that Firefox’s tools are the easiest for getting things working, and then I deal with making things cross-browser.

Ten years since the end of the NSFNET

Mon, 25 Apr 2005 20:19:15 +0000

Someone on the mailing list of former ANS employees points out that ten years ago this week, the NSFNETt was turned off. I was working in the ANS network operations center at the time, so I saw the decomissioning firsthand, though I wasn’t personally flipping any switches. During the days of the NSFNET, commercial exploitation of the Internet was frowned upon, and AOL connecting to the Internet promised to dumb things down.

Acid Search: free plugin to expand searches in Safari

Sat, 23 Apr 2005 17:08:08 +0000

Probably the #1 reason that I’ve been using Firefox instead of Safari has been the lack of “type ahead find” aka “find as you type” aka “that thing where you start typing and it searches the page without having to pop up a window, so it’s like really convenient and you can just press enter to follow a link so it’s good for navigation too”. Acid Search brings that feature to Safari and adds the ability to really expand Safari’s search box.

Ian Bicking on Ruby On rails

Sat, 23 Apr 2005 16:39:47 +0000

Ian Bicking has posted more thoughts on Ruby on Rails. For those of you not familiar with Ian, he’s had his hands in object-relational mapping, web frameworks and even template tools. Ian’s perspective in this latest article is from short experimentation with Rails, but I agree with the things that he has said that he likes and dislikes. Ian has described Paste in terms that make it sound like a piece of middleware for web framework developers to use in sharing code.

Why specs matter

Sat, 23 Apr 2005 14:51:28 +0000

Being an XP type, I don’t go in for specs for everything. Where interoperability counts, specs are key… and Mark Pilgrim nails the personalities in Why specs matter. “Angels” read specs closely, write code, and then thoroughly test it against the accompanying test suite before shipping their product. Angels do not actually exist, but they are a useful fiction to make spec writers to feel better about themselves.

HTTP abuse and painful frameworks

Sat, 23 Apr 2005 06:02:48 +0000

Ryan Tomayko had commented on my post from yesterday regarding using HTTP correctly (not abusing HTTP GET, etc.). My posting was following the pragmatic perspective of getting things done without worrying about absolute correctness. I agree with Ryan’s new posting “On HTTP Abuse”. Favoring “getting things done” doesn’t also mean that I don’t want to do things correctly. His post is correct that the frameworks that we use to get real work done just don’t lend themselves to using HTTP fully and correctly.

So that’s where Doug FM came from!

Thu, 21 Apr 2005 19:55:43 +0000

A couple weeks ago, one of the Detroit pop stations mysteriously switched formats and started calling itself “Doug FM”. They described their new format, if I recall correctly, as being like you “dropped your iPod in a can of paint”. What it boils down to is that they don’t have a 25 song playlist of current music in some format. They play a variety of things from the 70s, 80s and early 90s (I haven’t heard more recent than that on there).

GET, POST, PUT and DELETE in REST

Thu, 21 Apr 2005 19:41:08 +0000

No, I’m not yelling in the title. I’m just following up on Dare Obasanjo’s post about misunderstanding REST: A look at the Bloglines, del.icio.us and Flickr APIs. Dare’s complaint is that these services all have URLs that have side effects via HTTP GET. This is an interesting distinction to make. I just set up a new Drupal installation, and I’m reminded of Drupal’s cron.php. cron.php runs whatever periodic maintenance tasks are needed.

F-Script Anywhere (and Mac OS X) are very cool

Thu, 21 Apr 2005 14:29:00 +0000

F-Script is a Smalltalk dialect for Mac OS X. Clearly, many in the Mac community are already aware of F-Script, since it won an Innovators Award in 2003. I’d imagine many are always aware of F-Script Anywhere, which allows you to attach F-Script to any Mac OS X program. I wasn’t aware of this until yesterday, so I just had to say “wow! that’s cool!”. Using F-Script Anywhere, you’ve got an object browser that you can use to poke around at the various objects in a running program, sending messages and getting responses back.

MusicBrainz: acoustic fingerprint-based metadata

Tue, 19 Apr 2005 18:30:28 +0000

I’m not exactly sure how it is that I’ve never heard of this before. Maybe I have, but it didn’t make enough impression on me back then. MusicBrainz provides audio file metadata (somewhat like the CDDB), but it does it based on an acoustic fingerprint. The artist/song name/album name tags on my music tend to be of good quality already, but it wouldn’t hurt to do a run-through and cleanup. For the Mac, there’s IEatBrainz to clean up your iTunes library.

So much for a small Flash download

Mon, 18 Apr 2005 15:51:45 +0000

Adobe Acquires Macromedia hopefully won’t mean that you need Adobe Reader to view Flash in the future.

Simple trackback spam solution

Mon, 18 Apr 2005 05:17:11 +0000

This has got to exist already. Today, I was battling trackback spammers. I have MT-Blacklist installed, so they’re mostly just a nuisance, because I have to delete and rebuild all of those entries that they hit. Then it occurred to me: all of the trackback spam that I have seen has been repeated multiple times on the blog. They never hit just one post, and they’ll often hit dozens or maybe even hundreds.

How to fix your next actions

Mon, 18 Apr 2005 04:49:24 +0000

Merlin Mann asks the question Does this next action belong someplace else? and then proceeds to answer the question with a great breakdown of the likely problems with your next actions and how to fix them. (If you’re wondering what a “next action” is, I guess you haven’t drunk the Getting Things Done kool aid yet. Google “GTD” to learn more.)

Blue Sky On Mars has moved!

Mon, 18 Apr 2005 04:45:00 +0000

BSOM is now running on its new server at Hostik. A big thanks to Sitelutions for two years of great, low-priced service! The reason for the move to Hostik is that I am uncomfortable with a shared server for Blazing Things. So, I’m moving everything over to a new dedicated server at Hostik. So far, the Hostik folks have been great and responsive. I’m running Fedora Core 3 and find myself needing to get up to speed with SELinux quickly.

Tufte boiled down to bulletpoints

Sat, 16 Apr 2005 15:23:05 +0000

A link showed up on Blogdex for Graphics and Web Design Based on Edward Tufte’s Principles. For those not familiar with Tufte, he is the author of three very fine books: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information and Visual Explanations. These books, which Tufte beautifully self-published, are filled with great examples (and counter-examples) of good ways to communicate information. Tufte also wrote a paper on the woes of PowerPoint presentations.

Traction for SQLite

Fri, 15 Apr 2005 22:11:13 +0000

I just noticed the note on the SQLite home page: The new ADD COLUMN capability is made possible by AOL developers supporting and embracing great open-source software. Thanks, AOL! (No snickering that they’ve only just now added ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMN… remember that we’re talking about a 250K database). The interesting thing here is that AOL developers helped to enable this. Couple this with Apple using SQLite in the new CoreData feature of Mac OS X Tiger and it would seem that this little database is getting some hefty attention.

India’s statement on IP at WIPO

Fri, 15 Apr 2005 19:19:36 +0000

Boing Boing: India’s amazing statement on IP and international development actually sounds a lot like our Constitution: The legal monopoly granted to IP owners is an exceptional departure from the general principle of competitive markets as the best guarantee for securing the interest of society. The rationale for the exception is not that extraction of monopoly profits by the innovator is, of and in itself, good for society and so needs to be promoted.

Buy Apple stock?

Fri, 15 Apr 2005 05:08:39 +0000

TUAW makes the statement: buy Apple stock! Here’s my response: Something you see a lot on the Fool regularly is that you really need to by stocks by value. And, not just value relative to other stocks, but real value of the business. According to Yahoo, Apple is worth about $30.5 billion right now, even after the 9% drop. http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=aapl Apple earned about $300 million this past quarter. That would work out to $1.

Direct manipulation using JavaScript and CSS

Thu, 14 Apr 2005 18:53:00 +0000

The Ajaxian Blog had a link to Direct Manipulation Using JavaScript and CSS, a bunch of fabulous examples of drag and drop and in-place editing, all in the web browser. I was using Firefox, not IE, and there are warnings about IE problems. Who needs IE support, anyway? It’s only about 90% of the browser population, after all. These are very nice examples, and something to consider striving for as you’re building an app.

Comic Life: make comics from your photos

Thu, 14 Apr 2005 15:13:25 +0000

Comic Life is exactly the kind of app that comes out for the Mac but would seem out of place on a Windows box. It lets you take your photos and arrange them comic book style, adding in baloon text and whatnot. Looks nicely done.

Hilarious CS paper generator

Thu, 14 Apr 2005 14:26:00 +0000

As seen on /. and Boing Boing, SCIgen – An Automatic CS Paper Generator managed to get a paper accepted as “non-reviewed” at a conference. The paper is really entertaining. Along these same lines, to accomplish this mission, we concentrate our efforts on showing that the famous ubiquitous algorithm for the exploration of robots by Sato et al. runs in Ω((n + logn)) time [22]. In the end, we conclude.

Scariest article of the week

Wed, 13 Apr 2005 13:40:37 +0000

I hope that And the Verdict on Justice Kennedy Is: Guilty (washingtonpost.com) is really talking about an extreme right-wing minority and not the 50% that voted for Bush. Check out this choice gem: “The Constitution is not what the Supreme Court says it is,” Schlafly asserted. Wow. There’s someone that wasn’t paying attention in government class, or at least hasn’t read the Constitution. This article talks a lot about impeachment of Supreme Court Justice Kennedy.

Tiger shipping on April 29th

Tue, 12 Apr 2005 18:26:20 +0000

Apple has given the full-blown Tiger treatment to their website. Mac OS 10.4 ships on April 29th, but can be preordered now from Amazon, or the Apple Store. TUAW is running a poll to see which Tiger feature people are most looking forward to. Dashboard sounds great, but I think Spotlight is the one that really does it for me. Fast, full-text search baked right into the file system. Gotta love that!

FreeDMG: make Mac disk images with drag and drop

Tue, 12 Apr 2005 05:56:02 +0000

…and do it for free! Seems like FreeDMG really has an appropriate name.

How to make your own Google Maps

Tue, 12 Apr 2005 05:49:24 +0000

A handy article with handy links: HOW-TO: Make your own annotated multimedia Google map. Very groovy post from Engadget!

AOL and XM in joint online radio venture

Mon, 11 Apr 2005 19:46:02 +0000

Much as it seemed that online radio had been killed by the huge license fees that were set up, I guess the final nail has not been put in that coffin. Apparently, AOL and XM have joined forces to create a new online radio site offering 150 channels to anyone for free (including 20 XM channels). $5/month gets you 70 more XM channels. Cool! Something new to listen to when I’m working.

Bloglines package tracking and newspaper RSS readers

Mon, 11 Apr 2005 15:00:03 +0000

There’s a couple of bits of interesting news in RSS land. First, Bloglines has added package tracking to the list of feeds you can get. That’s a handy feature, and something I can guarantee I’ll have more to say about later. The other bit is that some newspapers are creating their own RSS readers. I learned a lot about newspapers when I was at CareerSite, because CareerSite’s customers were newspapers. Some newspapers are painfully old-guard and might start thinking about that internet thing in a few years, because it’s probably just a fad.

Tiger Direct: beware of spam

Fri, 08 Apr 2005 15:45:09 +0000

I bought some RAM from Tiger Direct a while ago. I don’t remember anything being wrong with the purchase itself… but, since then I’ve been getting periodic emails with their “Ultra Product Updates”. I’ve followed the unsubscribe option more than once, and I also went through their front door customer service email. Customer service said that they had removed me from the list. Apparently they haven’t because I got another message today.

Media shifting

Wed, 06 Apr 2005 20:49:15 +0000

Jon Udell is talking about media shifting to listen to just the audio portion of video programs while doing other things. I’ve been looking to do this for a few weeks now. Specifically, I want to be able to pull the video of off my ReplayTV (DVArchive does that for me) and then rip the audio stream out and convert it to MP3 or AAC to listen on the iPod. So far, I have been able to find a nice Mac tool to do this.

Best listing of free photos

Wed, 06 Apr 2005 17:35:42 +0000

Robin Good offers the best listnig of free photos that I’ve seen. I noticed that Flickr was listed as well, and I don’t think that all of the photos on Flickr are available for free use. It always pays to review usage terms before grabbing a graphic from a site. Via Ian Landsman

Nicolas Lehuen’s ternary search tree

Tue, 05 Apr 2005 16:48:28 +0000

I’m keeping a bookmark of Nicolas Lehuen’s pytst ternary search tree library. I don’t need one right this second, but TST’s are very useful (look at Nicolas’ description to see why). It’s LGPL open source, written in C++. If I do find myself needing a TST, I’m likely to also need to use it with Unicode, which this one does not currently support. I’d have to figure that out when I get there…

Best Buy ending rebates

Sun, 03 Apr 2005 00:18:27 +0000

Engadget and Slashdot are reporting that Best Buy is going to stop their rebate programs within two years. Though Best Buy does not use TCA, as far as I know, this is probably a good move for them. CompUSA, who does use TCA, should pay attention, given that one of my most popular posts over time has been about problems with getting rebates fulfilled. Hopefully, the rebates will be replaced by lower direct sale prices.

April Fools 2005 roundup

Sat, 02 Apr 2005 17:23:05 +0000

April Fools on the web is always a great deal of fun. This year, there were some good ones. My favorites (ranked in order): Boring Boring parody of Boing Boing Google Gulp brain enhancer My previously mentioned Scientific American editors note in which SciAm gives up. 43 Folders’ April Power Hacks from Merlin Mann April Fools EFFector, the EFF gives their take on the state of the world via a nice bit of satire.

gmail 1472MB and rich formatting

Fri, 01 Apr 2005 20:11:19 +0000

A year after launching Gmail, Google has expanded the disk space from 1GB. They’re saying they expanded it to 2GB. Curiously, though, when I connected it said 1472MB. The next time I loaded my inbox, it said 1473MB. It is continuing to increase by 1MB every time I reload. Weird. I guess that’s a reward for using Gmail regularly? They also added rich text formatting, which is a nice addition.

The world’s resources being used up

Fri, 01 Apr 2005 03:59:03 +0000

A group of 1360 scientists report that two-thirds of world’s resources are being ‘used up’: The human race is living beyond its means. A report backed by 1,360 scientists from 95 countries – some of them world leaders in their fields – today warns that the almost two-thirds of the natural machinery that supports life on Earth is being degraded by human pressure. I have seen other warnings about human usage of freshwater.

WordPress and gaming search engines

Thu, 31 Mar 2005 14:55:31 +0000

I’ve got to agree with Ian on this one. It’s fine for an open source project to try to figure out how to bring in some money to support development. It’s another thing entirely to abuse search engine advertising to do it. The decision of WordPress’ founder to use his PageRank to get revenue via advertising for completely unrelated topics was a very poor one that will certainly alienate his constituency.

Hilarious send up of the creationism debate in SciAm

Wed, 30 Mar 2005 14:08:13 +0000

Scientific American’s April Fools joke talks about how SciAm has shortchanged ideas like creationism. In retrospect, this magazine’s coverage of socalled evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it.

Nice additions to Rails’ Ajax support

Tue, 29 Mar 2005 05:15:27 +0000

Ruby on Rails 0.11.1 features some improvements to the Ajax support added in 0.11. The Ajax wave is sweeping across Rails. In this release, we’ve added a :position option to both link_to_remote and form_remote_tag that can be set to either :before, :top, :bottom, or :after. These options make it possible to add new DOM elements to existing lists without replacing the whole list. When working on big lists that are in a fixed order anyway, there’s a considerable speed increase to be had.

Mark Cuban funding the Grokster legal case

Sun, 27 Mar 2005 19:45:37 +0000

Mark Cuban shows that he’s a content owner with a clue: Let the truth be told – MGM vs Grokster. Though content companies are fighting Grokster P2P in the Supreme Court, Mark Cuban, who is very much a content company owner, is putting his money on the side of Grokster. He wants to ensure that the rule of law says that software doesn’t steal content, people do. Good deal!

Sleeptracker watch: wake up at the right time

Sat, 26 Mar 2005 17:09:03 +0000

I should really order this. The SLEEPTRACKER watch wakes you up within a time period that you specify, attempting to do so when you’re in your “almost awake” state. The idea is that by having an alarm go off then, rather than when you’re in a deep sleep state, you’ll wake up feeling more refreshed. According to Gear Live, it really works.

FlySketch: super quick screenshots and annotations

Fri, 25 Mar 2005 15:08:56 +0000

I’m seriously considering Camtasia for doing annotated video demos (with audio and all), but FlySketch for the Mac looks like a great tool for doing screenshots. It’s hard to design something to be as easy as what you see there! (Via Ian Landsman)

Ian Landsman on Search Engine Optimization

Fri, 25 Mar 2005 13:58:26 +0000

Ian Landsman has put together a detailed article about Search Engine Optimization, which is a very important topic for any business today, and is way up there in importances for a micro ISV. If you’re considering making help desk software, don’t read this article though 🙂

document.body vs. document.documentElement in IE

Thu, 24 Mar 2005 18:24:43 +0000

Ahh, cross-browser fun. Even when you’re only supporting very recent browsers (my targets are IE5.5+, Moz/Firefox and Safari), there’s always cross-browser joy to be had. I was positioning a div in response to a click, and it worked just dandy in Firefox, but gave an error in IE. I was using event.pageX and event.pageY, which IE knows nothing about. I found many references that said to use event.clientX+document.body.scrollLeft, but it was clear that document.

Thanks, Merlin Mann

Wed, 23 Mar 2005 15:54:47 +0000

So, here I am, writing this post up in Markdown style using TextMate with my Hipster PDA close at hand. Feeling like a Merlin Mann stooge, I can kind of understand the “Damn you, Merlin Mann” sentiment. Instead, though, I’ll just say, “Thanks!” Merlin’s tips have been helpful, his posts interesting and so far Getting Things Done has been helpful.

Use iPhoto Buddy to attach network mounted libraries

Wed, 23 Mar 2005 15:44:08 +0000

MacOSXHints points out that you can use iPhoto Buddy to mount network-attached iPhoto libraries. That’s a very handy tip, given that we have a couple of Macs and a Linux-based fileserver that currently does backup duty. It would be nice if our fileserver would serve up the library live, rather than just on a backup basis. iPhoto Buddy is free

Ruby on Rails wins the marketing war

Wed, 23 Mar 2005 15:24:11 +0000

For my current project, I have integrated a few different open source Python projects that give me power at least equivalent to that of Rails. The pre-packaged integration is only one part of it, though: the Rails guys are good at marketing their ideas. Not only are they good at marketing to Ruby audiences, but they also have done a great job of getting Java folks to write about it. Here’s an example: Ajaxian Blog: Ruby on Rails 0.

DMA “leave me alone list” seems to work

Tue, 22 Mar 2005 05:32:47 +0000

Previously, I wrote about a form you can fill out for the Direct Marketing Association to get off of random junk mail mailing lists. It’s been three months since I sent that in, and I have recently noticed a significant drop in the number of credit card applications arriving. In short, it works! If you want to reduce your incoming real life spam, just write to the DMA. (Of course, this only applies in the US.

WATSUP: Automated Windows application functional testing

Sun, 20 Mar 2005 05:38:54 +0000

It’s been a good couple of weeks for automated functional testing tools. First, there was Selenium for webapps, and now there’s Windows Application Test System Using Python (WATSUP) for Windows applications. I’ve found that automated functional tests for anything with a GUI can be quite challenging, and these tools look like a good way to help.

Neat view of Pixar

Sat, 19 Mar 2005 21:37:13 +0000

Ain’t It Cool News got a tour of Pixar and posted some neat pics: [(The ncredibles At Pixar)][1]. Take a look at the workspaces they have there! Definitely not a cube farm. Via Boing Boing, of course. [1]: http://www.aintitcoolnews.com/display.cgi?id=19658 “”

XSH: XML File Shell

Sat, 19 Mar 2005 21:28:19 +0000

Tired of the point and click drudgery of XML Spy? Take a look at: XSH: Interactively Manipulate and Analyze XML Data. XSH is a perl script that lets you interactive cd to different nodes of the document, ls to see whats there, and run perl snippets with easy XPath goodness baked in.

iTunes upgrade scales back features

Fri, 18 Mar 2005 14:11:09 +0000

Cory Doctorow, ever a good watchdog when it comes to DRM issues, has brought to light that iTunes 4.7.1 reduces your ability to stream music. The five streaming limit is not a problem for me, but that’s not Cory’s point. Cory has shown, time and again, that the real problem is the changeability of the restrictions. If all of the music is DRMed, then there can be increased tightening on the terms until the time comes that all notion of fair use has been erased by technology.

Being smaller, managing cheaper

Fri, 18 Mar 2005 05:03:08 +0000

Seth Godin writes about the Long Tail, and rather than focusing on the how interesting the phenomenon is, he sums up what it means to work within a world that is Long Tail-based, rather than mass market. Not every product area can support a 50-person, venture capital-backed business. But, there’s now a greater likelihood than ever that a market can be found for a small business (like a Micro ISV). There’s an interesting take on the software aspect of this from JotSpot’s founder.

Two bits per entry!

Fri, 18 Mar 2005 03:54:03 +0000

Google Code is a new site that presents some open source code from Google. Need a sparse hashmap that only takes two bits per entry? Want more functional programming in Python? Those are a couple of the first releases.

Online poker googlebomb

Wed, 16 Mar 2005 19:37:57 +0000

After having witnessed huge quantities of trackback spam (squashed by MT-Blacklist) for online poker, it’s fun to see that someone had the idea of googlebombing the term. Wikipedia’s Online Poker entry is now #2 (it was #3 just yesterday). Hah! Take that PokerRoom!

VOIP experiment followup

Wed, 16 Mar 2005 18:16:35 +0000

I wrote about my Blazing Things VOIP experiment. I’m going to declare the first round a failure. The softphone X-Lite worked okay, though the sound quality wasn’t great. The sound quality of the SIPPhone Call-In-One adapter was better. However, there were some problems with the setup: Most importantly, the Call-In-One would freeze up when a call would come in via my LibreTel phone number. Had I gotten my number from SIPPhone.

Open Source + Service = Profit?

Tue, 15 Mar 2005 14:47:11 +0000

Sunday’s most popular Javablogs entry was Steven Noels’ provocatively titled Open Source Whoring. Basically, Steven is complaining that companies offering their closed-source products for free are just doing it for marketing. Here’s the trick, though: it only works as marketing if some open source projects take them up on the offer. Those projects will only take them up on the offer if they see value in what is being offered. Sure, Bugzilla has been around for years.

Usable XMLHttpRequest in practice

Tue, 15 Mar 2005 13:38:00 +0000

Thomas Baekdal discusses form usability in Usable XMLHttpRequest in Practice, with a very spiffy looking sample “business card maker” application. Very nice results! (via Patrick Lightbody)

Awful usability problem in Photoshop Elements 2.0

Sat, 12 Mar 2005 14:30:22 +0000

The funny thing about this particular “usability” problem is that I honest-to-goodness can’t use the application! I tried to fire up Photoshop Elements on my Mac just now, and it’s hung up trying to receive some kind of update from Adobe. There’s a Cancel button that doesn’t do anything. There’s a progress meter that’s stuck halfway. The cursor is the spinning color wheel (same as the hourglass, for those of you using Windows).

The Great Blazing Things VOIP Experiment

Fri, 11 Mar 2005 14:33:53 +0000

The time has come for me to establish a phone number for Blazing Things. I don’t anticipate doing that much business over the phone, however. Not right now, at least. So, in line with spending as little money as possible, I decided to go the VOIP route. Most people going with VOIP today are using Vonage. But, note that I said that I won’t be doing that much business over the phone.

AllOfMP3.com is legal for now

Tue, 08 Mar 2005 17:06:21 +0000

The beeb is reporting a ‘Legal okay’ for Russian MP3 site. According to Tass, prosecutors had decided not to pursue with legal action because Russian copyright laws only cover physical media such as CDs or DVDs and not digital files such as MP3s. Of course, the Russians can always change their laws to cover digital media. I’m not sure that the content owners have the same sway over the Russian government that they do over the US and European governments.

Generic functions in PyProtocols

Sun, 06 Mar 2005 05:38:50 +0000

There are certain situations where generic functions make a whole lot of sense. (If you find yourself writing a method or function with a bunch of if/elif/else cases, you might be looking at one of these situations.) This week, I had a clear cut case of rules that I wanted to combine in a certain way and to also allow extensions of the rules. The PyProtocols dispatch package made this straightforward.

Another incidence of C&D for simple linking

Sat, 05 Mar 2005 05:12:11 +0000

As I mentioned in my brief legal guide for bloggers, you shouldn’t be afraid of cease and desist letters that tell you not to link. Here’s a group who stood up for their freedom to link: News Hounds: Dear Bill O’Reilly: You Don’t Scare Us

Testing web apps with Selenium

Fri, 04 Mar 2005 20:01:37 +0000

I’ve seen a couple of people mentioning Selenium, including this link to a great tutorial on Selenium’s standalone mode: Agile Testing: Web app testing with Python part 2: Selenium and Twisted. Selenium does web app acceptance testing using your actual browser. All other testing frameworks I’ve seen do direct HTTP communication and try to emulate a browser, generally neglecting JavaScript. As webapps get more dynamic, something like Selenium seems critical.

Magic Sculp: create hard plastic items as needed

Fri, 04 Mar 2005 19:59:18 +0000

I’m not a handyman type, but even I can see that there are times when Magic Sculp will come in handy. You use it like clay and it hardens into a very tough plastic.

Quote of the day

Thu, 03 Mar 2005 18:24:46 +0000

Not that I do “quotes of the day” generally, but here’s a great one. A recurring theme in Seth Godin’s work is that you have to be different and not just be a cog in someone else’s machine. The end result is that it’s essentially impossible to become successful or well off doing a job that is described and measured by someone else.

GeekTool and Witch

Thu, 03 Mar 2005 14:49:30 +0000

In a discussion of “Remind” over at 43 Folders, there as mention of GeekTool which lets you put the output of unix commands on your desktop and Witch which provides an easy way to switch between all of your running windows with just your keyboard. I don’t need GeekTool right now, so i’ll keep a bookmark here. But, I’m going to give Witch a whirl.

Don’t trust that photo!

Tue, 01 Mar 2005 20:18:58 +0000

Photos haven’t really been trustworthy for a while. Greg’s Digital Portfolio will show you just how untrustworthy photos are. He’s done quite an impressive retouching job on these.

Skidoo fluid CSS layouts

Tue, 01 Mar 2005 04:53:35 +0000

Skidoo Too and the other Ruthsarian Layouts are some nice looking, tableless CSS layouts that are in the public domain. Worth remembering for the next time I want to re-layout Blue Sky On Mars. It’s fast approaching 2 years with this layout, which is not a very good layout in the first place… (Found this link via Agylen.)

Music labels trying to make more P2P users

Mon, 28 Feb 2005 22:12:33 +0000

Apparently, the music industry is trying to get more people to start using free peer-to-peer networks for their music. That’s the only conclusion one can draw from this: Top music labels try to raise prices for downloads. From a business perspective, trying to figure out what the price sensitivity is makes some amount of sense. However, $0.99 per DRMed song is, in my opinion, about as high as one would want to go.

UK students to perform 8-week crime spree

Sun, 27 Feb 2005 18:42:32 +0000

Exploting silly laws across our fair country, two UK students are going to break as many dumb laws as they can. Neat idea. Might make for an interesting conversation with the immigration officials when they’re arriving in the states, though.

Halle Berry wins worst actress award and shows up to accept it!

Sun, 27 Feb 2005 14:38:41 +0000

It sounds like the Razzies had a great year! George W. Bush won the worst actor razzie for his performance as President in Farenheit 911. Halle Berry won worst actress for Catwoman, but she actually showed up to accept! She had her Oscar in hand and said how she went from the top of her profession to the bottom. “I want to thank Warner Brothers for casting me in this piece of shit,” she said as she dragged her agent on stage and warned him “next time read the script first.

Michael Gorman’s followup to his article

Sun, 27 Feb 2005 14:21:59 +0000

Michael Gorman is apparently being chastised by his peers on an ALA mailing list for his Library Journal thrashing of blogs and Google. His response, or should I call it “backpeddling”, is interesting: The piece (LJ, February 15th 2005) was intended to be satirical, though I am certainly no fan of “blogs,” having an old fashioned belief that, if one wishes to air one’s views and be taken seriously, one should go through the publishing/editing process.

Michael Gorman vs. Google/Blogs

Sat, 26 Feb 2005 15:05:16 +0000

I usually avoid writing on the topic of blogging itself. I’ve been doing this for nearly four years and have not bothered to read most of the articles that are either breathlessly heralding blogging as the “new new” or as a bunch of trash that will never challenge “real journalism”. However, I felt the need to respond today. In Revenge of the Blog People!, Michael Gorman, president-elect of the American Library Association, trashes the usefulness of blogs and Google.

Yes.net: what song is on the radio?

Thu, 24 Feb 2005 19:50:14 +0000

In some ways, it looks like the “search” feature is an afterthought. But, #YES has a cool search feature that’s worth knowing about. Select your local radio station and the time, and you can find out the name and artist of the song that’s playing. Useful thing if you listen to the radio and want to track something down later.

Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy game is back

Thu, 24 Feb 2005 03:41:45 +0000

The BBC presents Infocom’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure, back as a Flash game with helpful graphics. Very nice and still entertaining!

Nice intro to QuickSilver

Wed, 23 Feb 2005 19:58:30 +0000

If you use a Mac, you must use QuickSilver. Take a look at this for a quick intro, and you’ll see why: Dan Dickinson: The Primary Vivid Weblog: QuickSilver – A Better OS X In Just 10 Minutes

AllOfMP3.com in jeopardy

Wed, 23 Feb 2005 19:08:57 +0000

[MP3s for pennies? Russian cops say no | CNET News.com][1] Though AllOfMP3.com has insisted that their licenses are valid based on the laws in Russia, apparently the police are investigating them for copyright infringement. (Found via Engadget. I’ll reiterate what others have said: the big deal about AllOfMP3 is not the price. The big deal is that you can choose your file format, and get files that you know you can use now and forever.

Tips for donating or recycling a computer

Tue, 22 Feb 2005 19:22:29 +0000

I’ve got old gear lying around, as I’m sure many people do. Here’s what to do with it: TechSoup – Recycled Hardware: Ten Tips for Donating a Computer

Hostik: $99, 2000GB of transfer

Tue, 22 Feb 2005 16:00:11 +0000

$119 setup, $99/month for a P4 2.4GHz with 2,000GB per month of transfer. Dedicated Servers DS-2005-1 for Windows Server and Linux Server Hosting

Inspiration: easy diagramming and idea organization

Sun, 20 Feb 2005 21:08:41 +0000

Though you’ll see from the website that it is geared toward children, Inspiration is reported by some to be a great tool for anyone who likes to think visually and organize their thoughts with outlines. I haven’t tried it, so I can’t personally recommend it. I wanted to keep a link here, though, because it sounds intriguing.

SiteGrinder: Photoshop plugin to create web sites

Sun, 20 Feb 2005 20:53:58 +0000

Nearly all people in the design world use Photoshop in some capacity or another. It’s not uncommon for web site designs to begin in Photoshop and then get “cut up” into working web pages. SiteGrinder provides a way to automatically turn a Photoshop design into web pages by using hints that you give in your layer names. Nice idea, but I’d have to try it to know for sure. On the plus side, it does seem to be modern web friendly (XHTML, CSS).

Project Ladybug has a designer

Sat, 19 Feb 2005 14:15:15 +0000

The product that I’m working on has a codename now: Project Ladybug. My daughter chose the codename without knowing it. For several of her 18 months, she’s been fascinated by ladybugs. That seems as good a way to pick a codename as any! After exploring a number of different avenues for getting design work done (including on a post here on Blue Sky On Mars), I have contracted with Kirsten Climer to do design work for Project Ladybug.

The Top 100 Gadgets of All Time

Sat, 19 Feb 2005 04:03:32 +0000

When they say The Top 100 Gadgets of All Time, they really mean it. They included the abacus and sextant, but didn’t forget the iPod.

Estimating the market for your software

Fri, 18 Feb 2005 04:53:53 +0000

A follow-up to Starting a Micro ISV, In The Beginningâ€¦.. there was nothing: Estimating the market for a specific softare product can be hard, because public data is usually quite scarce. You just have to look around and scoop up whatever data you can. I read a great article (I don’t have a link offhand, sorry) about a guy who started a new software company by writing up the datasheet and sending it out to the types of companies that would buy that sort of software.

Ian Landsman on starting a software company

Fri, 18 Feb 2005 04:26:37 +0000

I swear I’m not linking to this article because Ian mentioned me. Ian Landsman, who is in the process of starting up UserScape, wrote a great article for anyone considering starting a software business: Starting a Micro ISV, In The Beginningâ€¦.. there was nothing. Ian has been following many of the same sorts of people that I have, and the advice he gives is much of the same sort of advice that I would give, only he has written it up in a much better article than the ones I’ve posted so far.

Legal Guide for Bloggers

Thu, 17 Feb 2005 20:39:06 +0000

Update, June 14 2005: The EFF has released their Legal Guide for Bloggers. While the information below is still relevant, their guide is far more detailed and covers many more issues. Go there instead. Thanks! As more stories start arriving of bloggers getting legal threats from “established entities” that would rather not be talked about, it seems like a good idea to compile information to help bloggers stay on the right side of the law and be confident that they are on the right side of the law.

Being more productive with email

Thu, 17 Feb 2005 20:00:15 +0000

Merlin Mann has five fast email productivity tips, such as “shut off auto-check”. These are good tips and are very important if you want to stay productive despite an increasing flood of email. I also think that shutting off auto-notification is a good idea for RSS readers, but that’s a topic for another day.

Cheetah template tip: you want _namemapper for Windows

Tue, 15 Feb 2005 16:17:08 +0000

I do most of my work on my Mac, hopping over to the PC for additional integration and build testing. I already have someone who is running Windows builds regularly, though, so any Windows-specific problems will get shaken out. I was testing out my latest build on Windows and found that it was very slow. I tossed a timer onto the page and found that it was taking 21 seconds to render.

Random numbers and scientific method

Sun, 13 Feb 2005 19:43:13 +0000

A bunch of people appear to be linking to this article: RedNova News – Can This Black Box See Into the Future? which talks about the “Global Consciousness Project”: scientists who are using random number generators to try to tap into some aspect of a shared global consciousness. While I’m sure that there are things we do not yet understand, and possible capabilities of the human brain that we have not yet come to appreciate, this looks like baloney science.

MicroISV and Eric Sink on Transparency

Fri, 11 Feb 2005 20:11:08 +0000

Today, I happened across MicroISV, which is a blog for tiny independent software developers. Hey! That’s me! And, by golly, the articles posted there look mighty interesting. One example was a link to Eric Sink’s latest: Tenets of Transparency. Eric is a sharp guy who writes well and raises good points. This article advocates trusting your customers and taking care of them to improve your business. It’s cool to note that, as part of writing the article, he ended up changing SourceGear’s refund policy!

Trolltech license change and eric3 for Windows?

Fri, 11 Feb 2005 17:15:27 +0000

With the news that Trolltech has decided to extend its dual licensing strategy to Windows, that means that Windows users will be able to use Qt-based GPLed software for free. That’s great news, because many people use Windows for a variety of reasons, and there are many good Qt-based programs that can now be run there for free. I use a Mac primarily, but I also use Windows regularly. So, I’ve never given the eric3 IDE a try, because I couldn’t use it cross platform.

When to use XMLHttpRequest and when to use IFrame

Thu, 10 Feb 2005 19:46:11 +0000

Joel Webber dissects maps.google.com in Mapping Google. He spent a good deal of time getting into what all is being done by Google Maps. Here’s an interesting takeaway: I mentioned before that there was some advantage to be had by using a hidden IFrame over making direct XMLHttp requests. One of these is that the IFrame’s state affects the back button. So every time you do a search, it creates a new history entry.

memcached: high-performance in-memory caching

Thu, 10 Feb 2005 16:37:10 +0000

memcached: a distributed memory object caching system has APIs in Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, C and Java and is designed for websites that have heavy database-intensive, mostly-read pages. The interesting thing here is that memcached does not exist through some theoretical “what if?” premature optimization. It was created by the LiveJournal folks who were dealing with 20 million dynamic page views per day. Other high-traffic sites like Slashdot and WikiPedia are users.

coolest… webapp… ever… Google Maps

Tue, 08 Feb 2005 16:27:38 +0000

Maybe the headline is a little superlative… but, wow. Google Maps is really, really cool. Even better, it’s cool in a useful way. They made it easy to zero in on the area you want (even using the keyboard if you wish), and then, when you search, it searches in that area! The visuals are great.

Bad writing: Atlanta Nights and Eye of Argon

Tue, 08 Feb 2005 15:10:51 +0000

I’m a fan of bad stuff. Almost every year, I go to the Smithee Awards to enjoy some really bad films. So, I was pleased to find out about the sci-fi writers who collectively wrote a bad book in order to prove that a publisher was just a vanity publisher. The book is called Atlanta Nights, and you can conveniently buy a copy or download the PDF. I’ve read a couple of pages and it’s really quite awful, but it is awful enough to be entertaining.

Overdone spam protection

Sat, 05 Feb 2005 16:03:27 +0000

I got email from someone who uses Earthlink as his ISP. Challenge/response spam blocking systems have existed for a while and are probably the most effective. However, Earthlink’s system is a bit overboard. Rather than just clicking a link or responding to a challenge email, they require you to actually fill out a form requesting permission to email the user. C’mon… I’m not going to bother filling out a form to email someone.

End to End Unicode in Python

Sat, 05 Feb 2005 14:08:47 +0000

End to End Unicode Web Applications in Python by Martin Doudoroff probably would have been very helpful to me a few days ago, but I only just now stumbled across it. I’ve already achieved unicode enlightenment, but if you find yourself struggling with it, this doc looks like a good place to start!

Comment and trackback spam

Fri, 04 Feb 2005 20:22:06 +0000

Over the past few days, I’ve gotten blasted by a bunch of trackback spam. Comment spam has been all but nonexistent since I installed James Seng’s SCode plugin. The new round of trackback spam enticed me to check out whether there had been updates to the popular MT-Blacklist plugin. There had been, so I installed the update. Bam! I got a slew of new comment spam. I found it hard to believe that a human being would have entered all of that spam.

How to cut food

Fri, 04 Feb 2005 16:43:54 +0000

I’ve never been very adept at cutting food. Peter Hertzmann’s How to Cut… looks like a good way to fix that, which is probably why it’s circulating all over the net. There are nice diagrams for cutting several different types of food (with your right hand or your left!).

Deferring SQLObject database insertion until later

Fri, 04 Feb 2005 16:27:05 +0000

SQLObject automatically inserts entries in the database as soon as you instantiate them. It also runs updates as soon as you modify attributes. This is not always desirable and eter Butler has a recipe to choose when to insert and update new objects. It’s actually not a bad solution, because the object you’re holding is not truly one of your domain objects. That makes it clearer that something more needs to be done with it.

Hilarious Mac Mini review

Fri, 04 Feb 2005 14:04:57 +0000

I’m pretty sure that Mac Mini: The Emperor’s New Computer, a review of Apple’s new machine, is a joke. Or, rather, I’m positive it’s a joke, but I think it is an intentional one. Check out these howlers: While the hardware is about roughly equivalent to a Windows PC circa 1995, what got me interested were Apple’s claims about its size, weight and footprint. I recently retired my 1995 machine which had been doing Linux fileserving duties most recently.

Don’t mix unicode and encoded strings

Thu, 03 Feb 2005 15:52:40 +0000

The key to my unicode-in-python problems was that using unicode objects within Python feels the same as using a string object. But, they are really not the same (as pointed out by Diez Roggisch and Just van Rossum), and you see this when you start talking to C extensions. My original solution to working with elementtidy involved making elementtidy understand unicode objects. The cleaner solution is to pass in UTF-8 encoded strings.

Deluge of trackback spam

Thu, 03 Feb 2005 15:29:15 +0000

Captchas fixed my comment spam problem. Now, I’ve started getting trackback spam, and trackbacks certainly can’t use captchas. Bummer.

Worst web design mistakes of 2004

Thu, 03 Feb 2005 05:00:26 +0000

The title says it all: Web Pages That Suck presents the biggest web design mistakes in 2004. If you’re not familiar with Vincent Flanders’ site, you’re really missing out.

Using Unicode with ElementTidy

Mon, 31 Jan 2005 17:13:51 +0000

I want to do some HTML scraping, and there are at least two Python packages to help with that: BeautifulSoup and ElementTidy. For what I’m doing, the input and output need to be UTF-8. I have had some success if I set my default encoding to utf8 via sitecustomize.py, but it would be nicer if I could explicitly set the encoding as needed. I’m going to talk mostly about ElementTidy in this posting.

Microsoft opening their Office file formats

Mon, 31 Jan 2005 17:03:22 +0000

Facing the threat of shutout from government bids, Microsoft is opening up the file formats for Office 2003. This is a big step, because it means that other software products that want to be able to make use of Office files will be able to do so with far greater compatibility than in the past. Open source projects like Abiword, Gnumeric and Open Office will really gain from this. And, Microsoft even designed the license to ensure that open products can make use of the formats, even if a Microsoft patent covers the use of the format.

Bill Gates gets hefty portion of personal income gain in December

Sun, 30 Jan 2005 03:54:09 +0000

There are some fuzzy statistics going on here, but it’s still a funny article: Excluding Bill Gates, Dec. incomes seen rising 2.6% Excluding Gates’ $3.3 billion gain, personal incomes probably rose by 2.6 percent, with 0.3 percentage point of the increase going to just one really smart but not so tall man. Microsoft paid out $32 billion of its massive cash hoard to stock holders. Guess who owns 10% of Microsoft?

Info packed CSS wiki

Sat, 29 Jan 2005 22:04:55 +0000

Found via Ksenia Marasanova: the css-discuss wiki is a companion to the css-discuss mailing list and is full of good info. Particularly given the variety of CSS support in browsers, this is a great resource. Lots of links to resources all over the place.

It’s not an ASCII world any more

Sat, 29 Jan 2005 20:04:17 +0000

Actually, that’s not true. For many software developers, it is an ASCII world. But, if you’re making software for other developers to use, please keep character encodings in mind. I’ve had to jump through hoops with many packages along the way to get them using UTF-8. Luckily, when you use open source libraries, the lack of non-ASCII support is usually not a big problem, because it’s easy enough to add the support.

Creating the LLC

Sat, 29 Jan 2005 15:02:44 +0000

Creating an LLC or a small corporation is a very well-understood problem. If you’re getting VC, you should be talking to a lawyer. If you’re just bootstrapping your own business, you should check out Nolo. For anything you do that is standard, boilerplate kind of stuff, Nolo can save you a lot of money. They provide books and software on a whole bunch of topics, including forming an LLC or corporation.

It Lives!

Fri, 28 Jan 2005 19:18:55 +0000

Today, my new company was officially born as a Michigan LLC. The name, which you’re likely to see here quite a bit more in the future, is Blazing Things LLC. Woo hoo!

Handy list of default passwords

Fri, 28 Jan 2005 18:24:40 +0000

Default Passwords has the out-of-the-box passwords for hundreds of items. You never know when that will come in handy. Via Tug’s Blog.

Pyro: remote objects for Python

Fri, 28 Jan 2005 16:36:05 +0000

I’m sure that this is old news for everyone else, but it’s new to me. Look at the features of Pyro, Python Remote Objects. Wow. If you think Python would save you a lot of code and hassle compared to Java, that’s nothing compared to the pain that Pyro would save you over Java’s RMI! I don’t think I need Pyro right this second, but I have no doubt that I’ll be using this at some point.

Cable modem madness

Fri, 28 Jan 2005 14:37:19 +0000

Ever since Comcast upgraded us to 3 Mbps, our cable modem has frozen up from time to time (usually during large transfers). I had always assumed that it was because our modem is ancient. We got the Comcast service as soon as they (or rather, Media One as it was at the time) offered two-way service. That was probably about 5 years ago. The past few days, our service has gotten spotty.

Review: Purple Cow/Free Prize Inside

Thu, 27 Jan 2005 15:35:00 +0000

I just finished listening to the audiobook of Seth Godin’s Free Prize Inside / Purple Cow. This dual audiobook is abridged. So, if you’re looking for the full deal or you’re not into audiobooks, check out Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable and Free Prize Inside!: The Next Big Marketing Idea. I’m going to give away the central point of the book/audio book, but as with any good book, that won’t reduce the value of what you get by reading the whole thing.

Don’t let support do you in!

Sun, 23 Jan 2005 00:27:37 +0000

What do you think about first when thinking about starting a new small software shop? If you’re like me, you think about the product first. You think about the cool idea and some of the nifty bells and whistles. You think about some interesting parts of the implementation. That’s all well and good, because a great software company needs to start with a good product. But, when you’re starting your own small software shop, there are two things that will end up being more important to your success: marketing and support.

Not necessarily the end of candor

Sat, 22 Jan 2005 23:51:22 +0000

Warning: I got a bit of a ramble going on this one. I’m in the process of listening to the audiobooks of Seth Godin’s great Purple Cow and Free Prize Inside. So, out of curiousity, I stopped by his blog today and took a look. The writing is excellent, as you’d expect, and the topics look very interesting. One caught my eye, because this is a meme that’s been traveling around lately: The end of candor talks about how blogs are no longer authentic media.

Using CSS for print

Fri, 21 Jan 2005 14:51:38 +0000

Another good one from Slashdot. XML.com: Printing XML: Why CSS Is Better than XSL. Of course, it would be nice web browsers supported all of the CSS printing goodness that they outline. On the positive side, in the comments someone mentions css2xslfo. Ironically, this converts your nice, concise CSS to the very format that the authors are blasting. However, XSL-FO can produce nice output, and it can do it today. So, having a free tool to produce good PDFs out of your HTML/CSS is a bonus.

Enforceability of EULAs

Fri, 21 Jan 2005 14:43:57 +0000

Don Shelkey, the author of Enforceability of EULA’s 1 is a lawyer (not providing legal advice, of course). This article provides a quick review of how the courts have viewed End User License Agreements. It appears that in many cases, a click-through license agreement is enforceable as a contract. Good to know if you’re either clicking through, or creating/choosing a EULA for your software. This still leaves the GPL untested. Given that there’s no “consideration” for GPLed software, and that you generally don’t even clickthrough and many GPLed packages, the GPL will probably still have its day in court.

Looking for a graphics design person

Fri, 21 Jan 2005 03:40:59 +0000

I’m not a graphics person. There, I’ve said it. I can admit it to the whole world (of course, you already knew that, judging by Blue Sky On Mars :). I’m looking for someone to work with (on a contract basis) on the product I’m building and its associated website. I’m not particular about finding someone who has a lot of fancy resume experience. I’m looking for someone who has a good style and knowledge of putting together nice looking web pages.

Bill Gates in Teen Beat

Tue, 18 Jan 2005 14:24:30 +0000

If you ever wondered why they don’t have more geeks in Teen Beat, though I never wondered such a thing, look no further than these photos: Bill Gates Strikes a Pose for Teen Beat Photospread, 1983. It is, of course, unlikely that these photos were actually for Teen Beat, but they’re still funny.

That’s a big burger!

Tue, 18 Jan 2005 14:20:50 +0000

It is apparently not an urban legend that a 100 pound, 19-year-old woman ate a 6 pound burger with 5 pounds of trimmings. Gadzooks. And she did in in under 3 hours. Makes me quesy just thinking about it.

Mike Spille wants to take over Groovy?

Sun, 16 Jan 2005 06:11:01 +0000

Like many others, I read Mike Spille’s How Groovy Lost Its Groove Thang which eloquently detailed how Groovy was a lost cause unless someone stood up and started forcing the choices to be made. He is absolutely correct: for Groovy to become a fully realized and standardized language, someone has to sit down and document the rules. I guess one could document it in a TCK, but many people would probably like to see it in English.

Don’t import inside of PyObjC actions

Sat, 15 Jan 2005 00:00:34 +0000

Bob Ippolito came to my rescue today. I started using Cheetah for some template work, and it turns out that doing: from Cheetah.Template import Template from within your action is bad. (Bus Error bad, not simple exception bad.) So, if you’re using PyObjC, make sure you do your imports at the module level, not in a given block of code. Update: Bob tracked it down. Don’t import Cheetah inside of an action, because it will import PyObjC’s WebKit (thinking that it’s getting WebWare’s WebKit) and importing PyObjC’s WebKit inside of an action has some issue at present.

Cobb County’s creationism stickers ruled unconstitutional

Fri, 14 Jan 2005 20:11:25 +0000

MSNBC – Judge nixes evolution textbook stickers talks about Cobb County, GA’s ridiculous textbook stickers that describe evolution as “a theory, not a fact”. It’s an interesting ruling, and I think it makes sense. If they want to pursue the whole “Intelligent Design” idea, they should look for a textbook that talks about that, rather than slapping bogus stickers on real textbooks. Either that, or they can try to get President Bush to vie for a constitutional amendment that would “clarify” evolution’s position as a theory 🙂

Moving beyond xUnit for testing

Thu, 13 Jan 2005 15:44:02 +0000

I’ve used JUnit plenty over the past couple of years. I think that JUnit is an important piece of software, but not because of elegance of design or impressive feature set. JUnit is important because it is ubiquitous. It’s the first testing framework to gain widespread adoption. In fact, JUnit’s best feature today isn’t even a feature a JUnit itself: integration with IDEs. Doing Test Driven Development in Eclipse, you get into this nice rhythm Run Test->Red Bar->Fix Code->Ctrl-F11->Green Bar.

Screen capture tools

Thu, 13 Jan 2005 05:54:39 +0000

There are lots of interesting tools out there for capturing screen displays along with audio for demo purposes. Camtasia Studio – Screen Recording for Demos and Training looks like a good one for the PC. It allows you to easily add callouts and other features like that. It’s $299, but it’s really tuned for making demos and training materials. There are some nice low-end options on the Mac. On the way low end, there’s Screen Record for only $20.

Interface Builder rocks

Sat, 08 Jan 2005 05:04:52 +0000

If you’ve never developed on a Mac (or NeXT), check this out: Cocoa: Developing Cocoa Objective-C Applications: A Tutorial. See how you just draw a line from the GUI component to the object and select the “outlet” or the “action” that’s appropriate? Why can’t Swing be like that? And why did the Mono team work on cloning .NET when they could have worked on sprucing up OpenStep and cloned IB?

No viable market for open source consumer desktop software

Fri, 07 Jan 2005 23:45:55 +0000

In a comment on A tale of a copycat site, Robert Renling asked me to elaborate on why I say there’s no viable model for open source consumer desktop software. I started adding a comment, but it seemed long enough to turn into a post. Either there’s no viable model, or the people who have tried have not executed well. I’m not aware of any successful business doing open source consumer-oriented software.

Workstation ergonomics

Fri, 07 Jan 2005 16:17:45 +0000

I’m working at home full-time now, so the ergonomics of my home office are important. I just came across [Cornell University’s ergonomics pages][1] which provide a whole bunch of info. For example, I don’t think I would’ve considered a “negative-tilt” keyboard tray, but their diagram makes perfect sense. There’s a company that makes nice looking hardwood ergonomic desks. Notice how the first picture there has a negative tilt keyboard tray? Cool.

Jason Orendorff, where are you?

Fri, 07 Jan 2005 14:07:28 +0000

I’ve been reading lots of good things about Jason Orendorff’s path module lately. I’ve been sprucing up my app’s build/packaging process and using os.path a lot. I wish I had Jason’s path module, but his site seems to have fallen over. That seems to be the only place to get the module, short of begging people who already have it (something I’m not above doing 🙂

ClearSilver built for Windows

Tue, 04 Jan 2005 20:28:29 +0000

I don’t like make. There, I’ve said it. But, of course, there’s always more to say. I like make plenty when I don’t personally have to work with makefiles. Typing “./configure ; make” is a fine process for building software. But, it wasn’t that easy when I was trying to build ClearSilver for Windows with Python 2.4. There are instructions that came in the ClearSilver tarball that got me part of the way.

Micro Extreme Programming (Micro-XP)

Tue, 04 Jan 2005 14:58:38 +0000

I had planned to write an article about using extreme programming (XP) within very small (1-3 person) teams. Luckily, I did a Google search first, and came up with [micro-eXtreme Programming ( µ XP): Embedding XP Within Standard Projects]1 by Frank Adrian of Symantec, so now I don’t have to. Frank comes from the perspective that XP is good, but you can do a form of XP as an individual, even if the rest of your team is not doing it.

Cory burns up DRM strawmen

Sun, 02 Jan 2005 20:56:46 +0000

Cory Doctorow shows how it’s only sane to be concerned about DRM. And not just because of today’s restrictions: If you are thinking about buying a stereo with a key feature and the choice is between two models, wouldn’t it be useful to know that in one model, the feature is guaranteed to last forever, while in the other, the feature can be revoked at any time due to factors that are beyond your control and shrouded in secrecy?

The Good News

Fri, 31 Dec 2004 20:49:55 +0000

This is not exactly about 2004 specifically, but 2004: The Good News does provide good news in some big picture trends. There are always plenty of bad news stories to go around at the end of the year, so it’s nice to see FOXNews pick up the gauntlet and talk about some good stuff.

Python dynamic code replacement

Fri, 31 Dec 2004 20:34:54 +0000

It’s interesting the stuff you see when you’re looking at an aggregator. Michael Lucas-Smith of Software WithStyle writes about how updating live server code is so easy in Smalltalk. You replace the code, and all of the instances of those classes immediately get the new behavior. Not so in Python, laments Chui Tey. He says that Twisted has a metaclass trick to do this and mentions one on ASPN. I’m not sure if this is the one, but the RubyClass hack does look like it’s designed for code replacement.

Feeds updated

Fri, 31 Dec 2004 19:48:05 +0000

Based on the one bit of feedback and my own intuition, I have changed my categorization and feeds. You’ll now see three feeds available on the left: All – yes, you get all of my random blatherings about politics, music and whatnot. Python – Brand new feed designed for folks interested in Python. Also includes general Software Development articles (these would be process and technique related), and Software Business articles.

Growl: notification system for the Mac

Fri, 31 Dec 2004 19:39:21 +0000

I fired up my handy Cyberduck and discovered, among the new version’s features, Growl!. Growl is a centralized notification system for Mac OS X, so that any app that needs to do popup notification can do so in a consistent way. Nice idea, and they provide bindings for several languages. (BSD-licensed as well, so go ahead and use it!)

Follow-up to Blue Sky Development: looking at alternatives

Fri, 31 Dec 2004 16:13:26 +0000

David Heinemeier Hansson wrote an excellent and thoughtful follow-up to my Blue Sky Development article: Escaping Java but not its thinking. This article deserves a real follow-up, which I hadn’t intended to write right now, but I did it anyhow. I did actually take a good look at Ruby/Rails, Squeak/Seaside and even oCAML and LISP/Scheme. I also looked at some commercial Smalltalk and LISPs. I even looked at Haskell to see what a better statically-typed language could look like.

JPackage on Fedora Core 3

Thu, 30 Dec 2004 20:23:44 +0000

I wanted to install Tomcat and ant on my new Fedora Core 3 box. Installing Tomcat failed, because I was missing jta. Since jta is a non-free package, you need to jump through some hoops. So, I jumped the hoops and then jta was complaining about missing java-devel. I had actually installed J2SDK from Sun’s RPMs. I decided to go the full-blown JPackage route and install the J2SDK their way. Fine and dandy.

Cory Doctorow summing up why DRM is unacceptable

Thu, 30 Dec 2004 05:08:15 +0000

Cory responds to Wired Editor on DRM makes me want to go back to buying my music on AllOfMP3. I’ve been buying music on iTMS lately, because I have a gift certificate. Once that runs out, though, I’ll head back over and get my nice MP3 files. Cory is absolutely right, though. The only reason I’ve been buying from iTMS is because I know that I can ultimately have the songs in a usable form no matter what Apple works out with the labels.

A tale of a copycat site

Wed, 29 Dec 2004 20:36:27 +0000

Found on Slashdot, here is one developer’s tale of bringing down a copycat site. It is very hard to protect intellectual property on the net. While I think that open source is great, I also think that no viable business model for open source consumer desktop software has yet appeared. Until we can figure out a good model, we have to deal with IP violations.

Choosing python, what do you want on Javablogs?

Wed, 29 Dec 2004 15:24:16 +0000

For the past year and a half, I’ve been posting links and occasional articles on Java-related topics, averaging more than 60 reads from Javablogs. You may have been noticing an increasing number of links to Python related topics over the past couple of months. That’s because I’ve switched my development to Python. I will still be posting links and articles (more articles than before, even) on general programming related topics. I will also be posting info about running a software business.

Blue Sky Development

Wed, 29 Dec 2004 15:09:15 +0000

Preface My point with this article is to document my thought process in choosing a development platform. I am not out to start a language war. I’m pretty comfortable that my facts are correct, and I know that my opinions are correct, because they are just opinions and they are mine. You may choose to disagree with my opinions, if you wish. If you do find a factual error in here, please do add a comment to the posting.

My Favorite Songs of 2004

Mon, 27 Dec 2004 18:13:58 +0000

I posted my first such list on January 7th of this year. It’s a nice thing to look back on from time to time, so I’m sorry I didn’t start it earlier. This year was something of a milestone for me. I think this is the first year since 1989 in which I did not buy a single CD. All of the new music I bought this year just came in the form of files.

Broadband settings for Firefox

Mon, 27 Dec 2004 17:15:56 +0000

How To Speed Up Firefox (Helpful Vanity) includes a couple of settings to speed up your browsing when you’ve got a zippy connection. The main thrust of it is 1) try to request multiple things at a time, and 2) don’t wait to start displaying stuff. The second setting can actually slow things down a bit if the data doesn’t come in quickly, because Firefox will spend time rendering intermediate layouts until it gets the full information.

NeoOffice goes beta!

Sun, 26 Dec 2004 17:53:48 +0000

If you use a Mac, you should check out NeoOffice – OpenOffice.org for MacOSX. I’ve been using NeoOffice for a couple of months now. It works very well, and eliminates my need for MS Office. I don’t use an office suite much, which is why I’m quite thankful to these guys that I don’t need to shell out the cash for MS Office. NeoOffice is far nicer than using OpenOffice under X, as well.

Import binary Python extensions from zip files

Sat, 25 Dec 2004 23:10:52 +0000

More good Python news today. Hacks/ZipExtImporter is an import hack that lets you pull in compiled binary Python modules from zip files.

Compiling Python extensions under Windows

Sat, 25 Dec 2004 23:08:09 +0000

Martin Bless tells you everything you need to know to compile Python extensions for Windows. No more waiting and hoping that someone out there will build binaries for you!

Python on my cell phone

Sat, 25 Dec 2004 06:37:44 +0000

Neat. Not only has Nokia released Python for my cell phone, but people are already making software for it! It will be interesting to see their replicated XML database.

Cross-column pullouts from A List Apart

Thu, 23 Dec 2004 23:37:59 +0000

The code is not entirely pretty, but the effect is. A List Apart tells you how to do Cross-Column Pull-Outs, just like they do in those fancy dead-tree things… what were those called? Oh yeah, magazines!

Guido talks optional static typing for Python

Thu, 23 Dec 2004 16:33:49 +0000

Artima is carrying an article by Guido van Rossum with his thoughts on Adding Optional Static Typing to Python. Python can already act like Prolog if you want it to, so why not have it act like Java as well, if you wish… A bit more seriously, though, the issues that Guido raises are quite sticky. As he points out, with tools like PyChecker, the number of errors that static typing will catch is fairly small.

Where to put files on the Mac

Thu, 23 Dec 2004 15:54:50 +0000

Apple has some nice documentation about The Mac OS X File System that tells you where you should put files that your app is using.

Watch out for permissions in Fedora Core 3 with Subversion behind Apache

Wed, 22 Dec 2004 18:22:37 +0000

Getting Subversion in Fedora Core 3 is easy. You can use yum to get subversion and the mod_dav_svn Apache module. But it won’t work, because FC3 has SELinux configured out of the box. The Subversion FAQ talks about this now (but I didn’t see this in the Subversion Book yet). Yes, your files can be 777 and still not accessible to Apache. Unfortunately, the command listed in the Subversion FAQ didn’t work for me.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince coming July 16th

Tue, 21 Dec 2004 15:12:32 +0000

Yes, I know they’re kid’s books (though Goblet of Fire won a Hugo award). I’m still excited to see that the sixth Harry Potter book is due July 16th. No word one whether the trend of ever increasing page counts has continued. If it did, this would likely be a 900 page book.

GMail invites are back

Tue, 21 Dec 2004 06:43:26 +0000

I have some invitations to the gmail beta. If you’re interested in the best free webmail account, just add a comment here with your email address (or email me directly, use the link on the left). First come, first served.

Overcoming conditioning

Mon, 20 Dec 2004 04:28:31 +0000

Ever since I graduated from college, which is 10 years ago this month, my jobs have all had a typical Monday through Friday schedule. Even with my last business, Kendermedia, I remember working Monday through Friday. Once again, I’m self-employed. I’ve realized that there is no good reason for me to work Monday through Friday specifically. The M-F schedule is really built pretty firmly into our society here. But, why do it just because everyone else is?

Steve Pavlina leaves the ASP

Mon, 20 Dec 2004 03:55:20 +0000

There’s an interesting set of blog entries by Steve Pavlina in which he talks about some transitions that he’s been making in his life. In Environmental Reinforcement of Your Goals, Steve talks about how he’s conciously moving his career to speaking and writing, and has severed ties that he had to previous communities. This includes the Association of Shareware Professionals, where Steve was President a few years back. That and sidelining the business that he has built over the past few years is a powerful statement about his convictions in his new direction.

The kind of user you should strive to please

Sat, 18 Dec 2004 18:39:48 +0000

Mary Hodder ran into a problem with NetNewsWire that lost some of her data. The discussion that follows there and in the follow-up post is interesting and worth a read for any software developer working on a commercial product. There are a bunch of intertwined issues here: stability and level of support for an inexpensive product, expectations for a public beta and expectations for commercial software in general. It has traditionally been the case that features win out over low bug count.

Doing the important but not urgent things

Sat, 18 Dec 2004 15:39:19 +0000

For almost any white collar worker, there are many things to do that can be considered important, but not urgent. Many things that seem time-sensititve may not be as important as things that are vital for the long-term of the business. It’s more than likely that many of those items should be delayed, until they’re really to the top of the queue. Something that I consider important, but will never rise up to the level of urgent, is blogging.

LIAR and other ambiguous text

Sat, 18 Dec 2004 03:38:10 +0000

A second thing I was looking for was the collection of ambiguous references you can give for someone you used to work with. Not only did I find that, but here’s a whole Collection of Ambiguous or Inconsistent/Incomplete Statements. The stuff on that page varies in quality, but there’s funny stuff to be found all over the page. Lexicon of Inconspicuously Ambiguous Recommendations (Ways to handle those tricky situations! )

Fun proverbs

Sat, 18 Dec 2004 03:34:56 +0000

There were a couple of funny things that I remember seeing in email years ago, but I no longer have the email messages. Google to the rescue! The first one is Chinese Proverbs, which sound like proverbs but are actually just innuendo filled silliness! Great fun. Virginity like bubble, one prick, all gone. Man who run in front of car get tired. Man who run behind car get exhausted.

Joel on Pricing

Thu, 16 Dec 2004 18:19:34 +0000

Joel Spolsky talks about software product pricing in Camels and Rubber Duckies. As always, Joel gives an entertaining and worthwhile read. I’ll give you the spoiler now, though: Joel’s not going to give you the answer. The answer is complicated, and Joel does give you some points to think about in pricing your product. On Joel’s recommendation in his forums, I’m reading The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing which really gets into the nitty gritty of the things to consider when pricing your product.

Froogle Shopping List: Google getting personal

Wed, 15 Dec 2004 05:03:24 +0000

I just noticed an interesting new feature on Froogle: Froogle Shopping List. Froogle recognized my gmail account and allowed me to easily set up a Froogle account to store my shopping list. The feature itself is not that exciting (Amazon has certainly been doing this for a while). But, I do find it interesting that Google is starting to sneak out more personalized services.

eGenix mx Extensions for Python

Mon, 13 Dec 2004 21:51:46 +0000

The eGenix.com mx Extensions for Python offer a whole bunch of useful features in reportedly performant code. Most of their tools are available under a Python License-like license (free for commercial use), and all of their tools have commercial support available. Nice!

Plimus: a good looking, inexpensive software sales system

Sun, 12 Dec 2004 06:07:54 +0000

Plimus appears to have nice features, and their rates are excellent. As I get close to release, I’ll have to take a better look at this one.

Creating Mac OS X plugins in Python

Sat, 11 Dec 2004 04:43:39 +0000

Here’s a very spiffy development: Bill Bumgarner: PyObjC, py2app, & bundles. The thrust of it is that you can now create dynamically loaded plugins for anything that uses NSBundle on Mac OS X… the examples include a screensaver and a preference pane. Very nice!

Mice in the basement

Fri, 10 Dec 2004 23:14:09 +0000

Once again, we have mice in the basement. I hadn’t been worried about that for a couple of years, but I saw a mouse scurrying in the kitchen last night. Luckily, it appears that this was the first time this mouse had ventured up to the kitchen. I spotted him on the stairs back down toward the basement, so I’m pretty confident that’s where he came from. I sealed off the gap beneath the basement door and set some live-catch mouse traps.

Sciral Consistency: flexibly-timed, repeating todos

Fri, 10 Dec 2004 21:24:21 +0000

Sciral – Consistency is basically a todo list… or maybe a todo calendar. It lets you schedule a todo as needing to be done within a range of dates (and can repeat weekly, monthly, whatever). I’m surprised I haven’t seen a tool like this before. Very clever. I saw this on 43 Folders, which looks like an interesting blog that’s hitting topics that I’m not seeing elsewhere. Stuff like I-Search and TextExtras.

Tim Bray puts dynamic languages more firmly on Sun’s map

Thu, 09 Dec 2004 16:15:39 +0000

Here’s a good report from Tim Bray regarding a meeting he organized with some dynamic language people. Tim says that people inside of Sun were in favor of dynamic languages, but I hadn’t seen much of this until Tim’s posting. People from the worlds of Perl, Python and Groovy were all represented there, and they talked about things that Sun can do to make the JVM more hospitable to dynamic languages.

New member of the ASP

Wed, 08 Dec 2004 19:18:39 +0000

No, not “Active Server Pages”. I have just joined the Association of Shareware Professionals. Why? Inside scoop and help from others who are running successful, small software product shops. I had a brief email exchange with Martin of ButterflyVista (check out his JobFish software, if you’re hunting) about the difficulties of marketing. Make no mistake about it, creating a great software product is only a part of what’s in store for an independent product developer.

Long distance switch to Big Red Wire

Mon, 06 Dec 2004 16:15:29 +0000

I’ve just switched our long distance service to bigredwire. 2.7 cents per minute, no fees (though there are some taxes added to that). I’ve been meaning to switch ever since Sprint started charging a monthly fee. It’s crazy to pay Sprint $5 per month, given that I don’t even use their service! We’ve been using One Suite, which is a pre-paid service that offers super low rates (2.4 cents in the US, 9 cents per minute to Bangalore, India!

$5 charge to reduce labor?

Sun, 05 Dec 2004 16:13:20 +0000

The Direct Marketing Association provides a way to get off of many mailing lists all in one go. It’s free if you register by mail. It costs $5 to register online. How much sense does that make? Clearly, registering online is going to save them time rekeying and verifying information. Goofy. I did notice that when you fill out the form to mail in, they assign a tracking number… so at least they’ve got it set up so they only need to rekey the tracking number.

Idiomatic python vs. idiomatic Java

Fri, 03 Dec 2004 20:09:06 +0000

Phillip Eby came across a Python app developed by Java folks and wrote about what he saw: dirtSimple.org: Python Is Not Java. I agree with his points, except the one about XML. I don’t think XML should be used for a lot of the things it’s used for in Java. XML APIs in Java are generally quite painful to work with. If you need a little bit of dynamic nature in your Java app, use BeanShell, Groovy or Jython.

ReportLab: open source PDF generation in Python

Fri, 03 Dec 2004 05:13:23 +0000

ReportLab offers a toolkit in Python (BSD-licensed) that lets you generate PDF documents. It looks pretty slick, and they claim it can generate 10,000s of pages per hour. Good bookmark to keep here, in case I need to generate PDFs.

Dubya played by, err, Don Knotts

Fri, 03 Dec 2004 03:59:11 +0000

dubyamovie.com. I’m not really sure if I can add anything to that…

woot! one deal per day

Fri, 03 Dec 2004 03:18:45 +0000

Wanna buy some random, probably electronic, item at a cheap price? Happen to be up at midnight, central time? Woot! is the place for you! One item, each weekday, until the item is sold out. It sounds like sellouts happen pretty often. Today, there was a deal on a Microsoft Wireless Optical Mouse with Tilt Wheel and 27 AA batteries, for $21.99 including shipping. That is a good deal indeed.

End of two eras

Fri, 03 Dec 2004 03:10:21 +0000

Just thought I’d take a moment to say that today is the end of two eras for me. As mentioned in other posts, this was my last day at JSTOR, one of the best places I’ve worked at. Today is also that day that Kendermedia LLC, a company I founded 5 years ago, is officially dissolved.

Second to last day at JSTOR

Thu, 02 Dec 2004 04:39:41 +0000

Tomorrow is my last day at JSTOR. Today, the folks in the Production and Technical groups gave me a nice send off and lots of well-wishes for my new business. JSTOR has a great work environment and is filled with great people (that’s probably why the work environment is so good!). JSTOR is providing a hugely valuable service to the scholarly community, and there are all sorts of great things going on to make it even better.

Literate testing

Tue, 30 Nov 2004 20:41:42 +0000

The notion of Literate Programming has been around for a while, but I’ve never seen it used in real life. The concept is very simple: put your code and documentation in the same file. “Documentation” in this sense, is not comments, but something more akin to Javadoc. When you comment your code, you’re basically adding comments to a source code file. In literate programming, you add your code to a document file.

Selling software with eSellerate

Tue, 30 Nov 2004 03:28:18 +0000

The other day, Tim Bray pointed to eSellerate, a company that provides software download fulfillment services. Sounds like Tim had a good experience as a purchaser using their service. The cost is 10-15% of your revenue, which is pretty steep when compared to doing your own credit card processing (2-4% + some fixed fees, depending on which cards you accept, etc.). However, eSellerate handles everything for you and it sounds like they do it well.

Making rich webapps actual webapps

Mon, 29 Nov 2004 02:53:44 +0000

I was going to write a follow-up to Scott Delap’s rich webapp rant, but it turns out that Frank Carver has already written it. There are a number of things that creating a webapp gives you “for free”: back/forward, printing (of everything), bookmarks, URL cut/paste, reload/stop, etc. People like these features. In fact, the Swing app I’ve been working incorporates a few of these features, because they represent a minimum set of functionality that people have come to expect.

John Gruber: Ronco Spray-On Usability

Sat, 27 Nov 2004 04:52:36 +0000

I’m going to be blogging some of the great articles that appeared in Joel’s nominations for best of 2004. Daring Fireball: Ronco Spray-On Usability by John Gruber is one such article. The gist of the article is that usability is, in fact, important work and not something to toss in as an afterthought. He picks on Eric Raymond’s article on Linux usability. I’ve read ESR’s article and it was interesting, but I think that Gruber is spot on when it comes to the real problem and the basic lack of a solution.

Rich web applications

Fri, 26 Nov 2004 16:40:47 +0000

Rich web apps are all the rage these days (at least for those folks who are not trying to revive Swing on the desktop), and with good reason. Modern browsers, even the comparatively broken IE, have enough standards support to reasonable program sophisticated interaction. From Joel On Software’s Best Articles of 2004, comes this nominee: Koranteng’s Toli: On rich web applications, AlphaBlox and Oddpost. This article talks about the large amounts of JavaScript hacking that went into creating usable spreadsheets and presentation programs that run in the browser.

Comments are working again

Thu, 25 Nov 2004 17:07:03 +0000

Thanks to the good folks at Sitelutions who provide much better support than you’d really expect from a $7/month hosting plan!

Science textbook disclaimers

Thu, 25 Nov 2004 05:02:08 +0000

Swarthmore’s NatSci department has produced textbook disclaimer stickers. Just right for all of the creationist, ahem Intelligent Design, school districts out there.

Comments are broken

Wed, 24 Nov 2004 04:30:07 +0000

Thanks to alert reader Andreas, I have discovered that comments on my blog are broken right now. I’m looking into it. There appears to be some problem with SCode, the MT plugin that produces captchas for the comments. I’m not willing to turn off SCode, because I had too much cleanup to do due to comment spam.

My new company name is NOT…

Tue, 23 Nov 2004 15:21:01 +0000

Normally, companies announce events, as in something actually happening. In today’s age of blogging, I decided that I’ll go ahead and announce that the name of my new company will not be Zesty Software. This is literally a non-event. For a while now, I had been thinking of using the Zesty name. I’ve been pretty sure all along that zesty.com would be taken. That’s a strike against, for sure, but not a deal-breaker.

Art tips for programmers

Tue, 23 Nov 2004 03:57:23 +0000

In a couple of weeks, I’ll be starting in on my new business. In addition to being a businessman, I’m a programmer. (Of course, I’m also the janitor for my new business 🙂 One thing I’m not is an artist. Making a modern piece of software requires at least decent taste, if not the actual ability to make good, appropriate visuals from scratch. The 80×24 text mode days are long gone.

Hibernate bug – not a bug after all

Sat, 20 Nov 2004 03:40:22 +0000

The bug in Hibernate that I reported yesterday turned out to be a bug in my Interceptor. To get to this conclusion, we did a bit more tracing through the code and managed to put together a minimal failing test (see the forum posting). I had read the Interceptor docs several months back when we implemented the first features we needed. Max from the Hibernate team reminded me of this requirement:

Hibernate 2.1.6 bug with flush and then lazy access

Fri, 19 Nov 2004 05:25:05 +0000

Today, I finally had time to spend a couple good, solid hours in the debugger, during which time I came to the conclusion that the problem my code was having was not in my own code. Sure, the exception was actually happening in an org.hibernate class, but what are the odds of encountering an honest to goodness Hibernate bug? Looks like I did find one, though: Hibernate Forums – View topic – NullPointerException – Set in Collection not initialized

Passive aggressive email responses

Thu, 18 Nov 2004 03:36:42 +0000

Hilarious! communication skills – zefrank via boing boing.

J2SE 6.0 snapshot builds available

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 19:53:01 +0000

It may not be Open Source™, but you can now get both source and binaries for J2SE 6.0/Mustang. This being build 12, I don’t gather that it does much more than J2SE 5.0. Release early, release often seems to apply to Sun now.

Keep you plans secret for now

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 04:20:52 +0000

So sayeth the great fortune cookie. Possibly apropos, given that I’m starting a new business. But, who doesn’t have plans that the can keep secret for now? Besides, I want to blog the business building as it progresses. Helps keep me from forgetting things that might be interesting, if not useful, to remember later.

Koders – a search engine for Code

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 04:19:22 +0000

Neat idea: the Koders – Source Code Search Engine lets you search for code with keywords, language and license. Reportedly, they’ve got 125 million lines of code you can search. Nifty thing about this is that I’d imagine it’s all automated. People have written neural net code to automatically identify programming languages, and they can just grab the license off the top of the code. To be sure, Google has worked pretty well for me, but this engine is quite targeted and worth a shot when I’m looking for something specific.

Taking the plunge again

Sat, 13 Nov 2004 21:24:40 +0000

I’ve decided to take the plunge into self-employment once again! This is a big step, given that I have a 1 year-old child this time around. But, as anyone who has a kid knows, there’s just not enough time to run a business part-time when you have a young child. I wish my new product was a Day Extender for Parents. That would undoubtedly be a hugely popular product. Also, as Steve Pavlina says, there’s no better way to spur yourself to action unless you really have your skin in the game and take it full-time.

EasyDialogs Python module for Windows

Sat, 13 Nov 2004 05:04:51 +0000

When a GUI toolkit is more than your program needs, but you want to be able to do something compact and cross-platform, check out Jimmy’s Python Pages for EasyDialogs. EasyDialogs comes with MacPython, and Jimmy has a compatible version for Windows. Very, very easy.

Getting past conspiracies and protecting our republic

Tue, 09 Nov 2004 03:23:52 +0000

It was inevitable, and it probably happened in 2000 as well: conspiracy theories that the election was stolen. “Too many voting ‘irregularities’ to be coincidence” appears to wrap a bunch of theories into one handy post. This post has bad information presentation: the graphs presented don’t go down to a zero baseline, thus exaggerating the effect that the author wants to portray. There’s incomplete information: just a few states are presented, possibly a cherry-picked set to illustrate his point.

I lost my frog

Sat, 06 Nov 2004 23:29:14 +0000

Contrary to the post about IQs and voting, I’ll go ahead and post a link to ps. i’ll find my frog. All it needs is a music video with a catchy techno tune. All your frog are belong to us.

Correlation between IQ and vote

Sat, 06 Nov 2004 23:25:53 +0000

All of Kerry’s electoral votes came from [the more intelligent half of the country][1]. In fact, according the chart presented there, the states with the 16 highest IQs all went to Kerry. Make of that what you will. [1]: http://attenuation.net/files/iq.htm “”

mod_pubsub publish and subscribe for JavaScript

Sat, 06 Nov 2004 22:20:28 +0000

mod_pubsub is a client/server real time data delivery package.

Boing Boing election wrap up part two

Sat, 06 Nov 2004 17:01:35 +0000

Boing Boing has continued to bring up some great links, post-election. My Modest Proposal: The U.S.A.R. is a “modest proposal” to split the USA into USA Blue and USA Red (look at an election map to see the split). This about somes it up: Then the new USAR (United States of America Red) can ban books, repeal civil rights, persecute gays and have all the wars they like. They want prayer in schools?

Boing Boing election wrap up

Thu, 04 Nov 2004 06:42:32 +0000

Yep… this sums things up pretty well: Boing Boing: Kerry concedes. At least I live in the United States of Canada (look toward the bottom of the posting).

I told you so

Thu, 04 Nov 2004 04:51:55 +0000

I’m not generally one given to “I told you so”s, but I’ll make an exception in this case. I’m projecting that in 4 years, I’m going to be saying “I told you so” to the 51% of voters that chose to re-elect Bush. It’s hard to imagine that Bush will truly rise up over the atrocious record of the past four years. Meanwhile, I wasn’t surprised to see this: Bush Wins White House, Reaches Out to Foes

Redskins lose, go Kerry!

Tue, 02 Nov 2004 05:51:37 +0000

I forgot to pay attention to this yesterday. The Redskins lost their game to Green Bay. Since 1944, whenever the Redskins have lost their game before the election, the incumbent lost as well. Sure, that’s a meaningless bit of trivia, but at least the outcome of the game matches up what I’d like to see.

Apple spending money to remove features from your iPod

Mon, 01 Nov 2004 03:37:40 +0000

Boing Boing: Apple to iPod owners: “Eat shit and die” Every time you buy an iPod, you are financing legal and technical countermeasures aimed at taking away legitimate features that enable you to do more with your lawfully acquired music and hardware. This is true, and it is also true that Apple has been working closely with the RIAA. At some point, they may have leverage enough to push back on stupid piracy countermeasures.

S5: Standards Based Slide Shows

Mon, 01 Nov 2004 03:34:36 +0000

Take that, PowerPoint 🙂 S5: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System. (Nevermind the fact that Tufte says, rightly, that low content density presentations are not very useful)

100 Facts About The Bush Administration

Mon, 25 Oct 2004 05:15:55 +0000

The Nation presents 100 Facts about Bush’s administration, plus 1 opinion. I’ll echo the opinion here: Four more years of the Bush administration will be a disaster for America. John Kerry for President.

Why write your own article when you can quote someone else?

Fri, 22 Oct 2004 06:13:52 +0000

Is it just me, or is it a bit lame that Sys-Con’s XML Journal quoted most of Tim Bray’s article rather than just linking to it? Apparently, they couldn’t get Tim to actually write for them. Ick. By the way, NeoOffice/J is cool. It is quite nice to be able to run OpenOffice without running X. XML Journal is free to quote the following from my blog: Sys-Con’s XML Journal is apparently out of ideas and in need of ad revenue, said Kevin Dangoor.

Oracle and JDBC and CLOBs, oh my!

Thu, 21 Oct 2004 22:15:07 +0000

It’s pretty well-known that the Oracle JDBC drivers pre-10g don’t support CLOBs that are larger than 4K. The 10g drivers do support large CLOBs (up to 4GB, I think) and even work with 9i, which is what we’re using. But there appear to be some creepy, made-for-Halloween bugs in there…

Clearsilver template system

Mon, 18 Oct 2004 04:35:57 +0000

Neotonic ClearSilver is an open source template system that is written in C, but with bindings for Java, Perl and Python. That’s right, a language-neutral template system, designed to be easier to grok and user for most things than XSLT. Though it’s new in my little universe, it’s not a new package. It is in use at Bloglines, Google Groups 2, and in other conspicuous places. Seems pretty high on the spiff-o-meter.

Mac scripting in Python

Mon, 18 Oct 2004 04:15:09 +0000

Want to make your Mac apps do cool stuff, but don’t like AppleScript? Pick up appscript and you can be writing your scripts in Python! Woohoo!

Coming out of the woodwork

Fri, 15 Oct 2004 21:02:18 +0000

As much of a nailbiter as the 2000 election was, I don’t think there was anywhere near the passion that you see in this election. People are coming out of the woodwork and Leaning Into It and making their voices heard. I’ve written anti-Bush sentiments here before. I don’t know that I’ve written any pro-Kerry sentiments. Here’s one: Kerry is the right man for the job. He’s come across well in the debates, he knows the ropes in Washington and his policies are sensible.

Heap Analysis Tool from Sun

Tue, 12 Oct 2004 20:19:19 +0000

Sun has released hat: Java™ Heap Analysis Tool 1.1 (HAT), which lets you view a heap dump object graph in your web browser.

Zoomquilt: very cool, very deep painting

Thu, 07 Oct 2004 03:25:37 +0000

zoom into the zoomquilt. You won’t regret it. It’s the deepest painting I’ve ever seen. (Found via boing boing)

All of your spam in one spam.

Tue, 05 Oct 2004 05:04:52 +0000

Snopes Son of Spam has a hilarious version of the Nigerian scam spam that covers just about every spam I’ve ever seen (and there are plenty that roll through my mailbox…)

TGI Fridays Menu Switch

Tue, 05 Oct 2004 04:27:19 +0000

The Cockeyed TGI Fridays Menu Prank is hilarious. They made some great use of the Atkins frenzy and spiffed up a TGI Fridays menu in the process!

SpaceShipOne wins the Ansari X Prize

Tue, 05 Oct 2004 04:05:28 +0000

The big geek news of the day is definitely that SpaceShipOne Wins $10 Million Ansari X Prize in Historic 2nd Trip to Space. Given that it cost $20-30 million to fund the missions, it’s definitely not the prize money that’s a factor. It’s being able to say that you ushered in commercial space flight. Time will tell, but this is quite possibly one of those milestones that will be remembered for generations.

Google hits $135/share

Tue, 05 Oct 2004 04:03:21 +0000

Way back (in August, I think), when Google was floating potential prices for their stock, they talked about as high as $135 per share. I remember the press thinking this was ludicrous. Google, of course, ended up selling their shares via Dutch Auction at $85. It turns out that they may not have been off in their original pricing… Google today hit $135 per share. GOOG is a great company with great market positioning, so they have good reason to be a Wall St.

Steve Pavlina has a blog

Sun, 03 Oct 2004 21:04:07 +0000

Check it out, Steve Pavlina has a blog, and he’s working on a book. Should make for interesting reading. If you’ve never read Steve’s articles, you should really check them out, if you’re into software development and business.

Review of Juvenile Felis Catus

Sat, 02 Oct 2004 19:59:55 +0000

Yeah, yeah… everyone’s already seen this on slashdot. That doesn’t make it any less funny. Review: Juvenile felis catus is a geeks review of a new kitten (later compared with other possible acquisitions like a puppy, a baby and a new video card).

The tricky legal position of Google News

Fri, 01 Oct 2004 04:08:46 +0000

The rise of the Net has led to all kinds of interesting legal questions. I’m not a lawyer, but some of these new questions raised are pretty interesting. Adam Penenberg says that Google News doesn’t show ads because of legal questions. The notion is that carring headliens and lead paragraphs from news sources is in all likelihood fair use when you’re not making money from it. Mix money into the equation, and you might just run afoul of copyright law.

Bush’s Top Ten Flip Flops

Fri, 01 Oct 2004 03:50:44 +0000

You can never have too many political top ten lists. Bush’s Top Ten Flip-Flops. Personally, I think that the “flip flop” thing is generally overblown. People can change their minds over time as new facts come in. That’s only natural. Actions speak louder than words.

Top Ten Secrets about the Debates

Fri, 01 Oct 2004 03:44:24 +0000

Here we are, 15 minutes before the first presidential debate of this election season. Thank goodness for NPR. NPR : Connie Rice: Top 10 Secrets They Don’t Want You to Know About the Debates I had been hoping to see a lively, entertaining debate, but it doesn’t look like we’re going to get it.

J2SE 5.0 is now available

Thu, 30 Sep 2004 22:38:39 +0000

As promised, J2SE 5.0 was released today. Certainly a big release, and I think everyone’s pretty much aware of the features. Now that 5.0 has been released, there’s a good probability that the project I’m working on may be able to start working with it within a month. There are certainly good features. The trick will be ensuring that all of the libraries we use will not have problems. The Java folks are good at backwards compatibility (almost to a fault!

Eclipse 3.1M2 is out

Tue, 28 Sep 2004 21:19:28 +0000

Missed this by a couple of days: Eclipse 3.1 M2 News. Java 1.5 should be out any day now… I’m hoping to be able to start working with Java 1.5 soon!

PowerBook fixit FixIt Guides

Tue, 28 Sep 2004 05:31:24 +0000

Here’s a very nice free resource for PowerBook owners: the PowerBook FixIt Guide Series. Do it yourself repair and upgrade manuals for many PowerBook models. Nicely done.

Rand “computer of the future” is a hoax

Tue, 28 Sep 2004 04:42:02 +0000

Last week, a photo that purported to be a Rand Corporation mock computer of 2004 was circulating widely on the net. It was a nifty, seemingly plausible picture (though I did wonder what the steering wheel was for :). Snopes has the scoop, though. It’s a hoax. Or, not so much a hoax but a photoshopping contest entry. And a mighty fine one at that, if you ask me.

Extended Return of the King to rock, mightily

Tue, 28 Sep 2004 04:21:37 +0000

New Line has announced details of the extended edition of Return of the King. It clocks in at over 4 hours in length and has bunches of new scenes (including the scouring of the Shire), new effects and new music. Sounds dazzling, but we’ve gotta wait until December 14th to pick it up. ROTK has passed $1 billion in worldwide box office, only the second movie to do so.

Bush and the international community

Tue, 28 Sep 2004 04:12:34 +0000

Those that have followed my blog for a while, know that I’m supporting the guy who is not Bush. John Mauldin’s new “Outside the Box” newsletter has certainly been interesting so far, and this week’s entry is no exception. George Friedman writes about Bush and the international community. The perspective is very interesting and one that I haven’t seen. The theory is that politicians in other countries don’t like Bush, but are too invested in him to let him go.

U2’s new single “Vertigo” on iTunes now

Tue, 28 Sep 2004 04:00:39 +0000

I haven’t heard it on the radio yet, but iTMS has Vertigo, U2’s new single already available for download. I still say that 30 second clips suck, but this one has a good sounding 30 seconds.

Star Wars trivia

Sun, 26 Sep 2004 21:04:38 +0000

In honor of this week’s long-awaited Star Wars DVD release, there has been no shortage of SW related articles. Like this one: CNN.com – Naked Wookiees and broken R2-D2s – Sep 21, 2004. Some fun bits of trivia there. You know, Lucas didn’t write or direct Empire Strikes Back, which is often considered the best of the series. That should’ve been a hint.

NeoOffice/J: OpenOffice wrapped in Java for Mac OS X

Fri, 17 Sep 2004 04:09:36 +0000

Annoyed that OpenOffice requires X? Check out NeoOffice/J which gives a Java-based front end to OO.

Earthlink releases open source Java P2P system

Fri, 17 Sep 2004 02:39:11 +0000

Earthlink R&D has released SIPshare: SIP-based P2P Content Sharing Prototype. It’s written in Java and released under a BSD-style license. Apparently, the Earthlink folks think that SIP is good for more than just phone calls and wanted to prove it with code. Neato.

Snapshot backups using rsync

Thu, 16 Sep 2004 02:45:25 +0000

Here’s a detailed explanation of how to do Easy Automated Snapshot-Style Backups with Rsync. It takes only a little more than twice the size of what you’re backing up, but you can recover from different points in time.

Bush: OB-GYNs not practicing their love

Thu, 09 Sep 2004 04:07:31 +0000

With quotes like this, reality might be giving The Onion a run for its money. Reuters AlertNet – Bush: OB-GYNs kept from ‘practicing their love’. When talking about wanting to place limits on medical liability: “Too many OB-GYNs aren’t able to practice their love with women all across this country.”

Reproduction and its effect on politics

Thu, 09 Sep 2004 02:05:42 +0000

Scary, but logical: Political Victory: From Here to Maternity In states where Bush won a popular majority in 2000, the average woman bears 2.11 children in her lifetime — which is enough to replace the population. In states where Gore won a majority of votes in 2000, the average woman bears 1.89 children, which is not enough to avoid population decline. It makes sense. If religious fundamentalists have more kids than everyone else, after a while there will be more religious fundamentalists than anyone else.

Steve Pavina on indie software development

Tue, 07 Sep 2004 16:39:43 +0000

Steve Pavina, founder of game maker Dexterity Software, has written an interesting series of articles about indie software development. This is a guy who knows time management (a four-year degree in three semesters!), and he also knows business. The Motley Fool constantly bombards you with the message Cash Is King, and Steve raises that point more than once as well. No cash, no business. I got to Steve via Eric Sink (who really belongs on my blogroll) and Eric’s latest MSDN article about Micro-ISVs.

A whole unknown world of GTA

Mon, 06 Sep 2004 04:09:26 +0000

So slashdot had a posting about MultiTheftAuto : blue – The revolutionary new multiplayer core that talked about the “new core” without actually saying what MultiTheftAuto was. A couple clicks and I see that it’s a multiplayer extension to Grand Theft Auto Vice City. Since I play GTA on a PS2, I’m SOL unless I get Vice City for the PC. That might have interested me previously, but I have very little time for games, and I think all of that time will be consumed by San Andreas.

Bush by the numbers

Sun, 05 Sep 2004 15:33:54 +0000

I’d be curious to see a contrary version of this: Bush by the numbers. Can anyone come up with any real, ratonal numbers that look good for Bush?

Cedric releases TestNG 1.0

Sun, 05 Sep 2004 15:26:35 +0000

Cedric has released TestNG 1.0!. It’s very good to see activity in this area, and I think the annotations approach seems like a good one. Though I am likely to be using Java 1.5 soon, I plan to really give TestNG a try until after there is an Eclipse plugin. I’m too used to Control-F11, look for the green bar, move on…

JarPlug: manipulate jars within Eclipse

Sun, 05 Sep 2004 00:52:34 +0000

JarPlug: Say Goodbye to File Explorer! Here’s a plugin that gets rid of one of the definite annoyances in Eclipse… working with jar files that you have around.

The way voting should work

Sun, 05 Sep 2004 00:40:20 +0000

San Francisco is using Ranked-Choice Voting. This is the way presidential elections should work. The only way such a change can come about is if we the people actually make it happen. The biggest benefactor would be third parties, which can count on receiving more votes under such a system. Perhaps the Democrats might like it, too… given that Gore would probably have won in 2000 under such a system.

Nominee for worst error message (Oracle edition)

Thu, 02 Sep 2004 22:34:47 +0000

So, we’ve been happily using Hibernate to store our object graph in Oracle with a minimum of fuss. Yesterday, trying to work with a certain set of data, we started hitting this lovely error message from Oracle: ORA-01483: invalid length for DATE or NUMBER bind variable By setting logging to “COPIOUS BUCKETFULLS” we could conveniently see that the query in question was an insert into a table with three columns. There was only one column that was a date or number, so one would think that column was the problem.

ImageJ image processing and analysis in Java

Tue, 31 Aug 2004 04:56:26 +0000

I’m not sure how I missed this… ImageJ is image processing and analysis software in Java. This is complete, with UI, macros and plugins (a whole host of ’em!) to do all kinds of image processing. It also claims to be quite fast, desptie not requiring a native library like JAI. Oh yeah, and it’s public domain. (Your tax dollars at work, if you’re in the US… And if you’re not in the US, enjoy it on us!

Sneaky comment spam

Sat, 28 Aug 2004 23:24:49 +0000

Since installing SCode (an MT plugin that adds a captcha for submitting comments), I had not received a single comment spam. This was an improvement, because I think I had comment spam to eliminate every day last week. Somehow, a comment spam made it through last night. Sure, I’m only using a 3 digit captcha, but I figured any captcha would be enough to keep the spammers at bay. If I had time, I’d take a look at the logs and see if I could figure out how they made it through.

Some Jython musings: Red Robin for Eclipse, Zope under Java

Sat, 28 Aug 2004 04:51:46 +0000

Sadly, Groovy’s Eclipse plugin has been out of commission for a while (since I’ve been using the 3.0 Eclipse versions for a while). I don’t think Groovy’s plugin at its height was as complete as Red Robin, the Jython (Python) plugin for Java. Looks like a bunch of great features, and it’s 3.0 compatible. I plan to give this a whirl next week. On the more general topic of Groovy and Jython… I like Groovy because it has some nice language features but can also run a good deal of Java code straight up.

Tricks of the Trade(s)

Thu, 26 Aug 2004 04:19:31 +0000

Want to look like a pro at some random thing you’ve never done before? Take a look at Tricks of the Trade by Matthew Baldwin. Sure, you might wonder if these are real… but, they certainly sound plausible enough to be useful!

Details on Java image loading

Tue, 24 Aug 2004 19:59:20 +0000

Chet Haase has provided very detailed information on strategies for loading images in Java and acheiving good display performance: java.net: ToolkitBufferedVolatileManagedImage Strategies. We’re doing quite a bit of image work (with 600 dpi 8.5″x11″ images), so I’ve already become acquainted with Java 1.4 ImageIO and JDK 1.2 BufferedImage. Most recently, I’ve been looking at the operation chaining features of Java Advanced Imaging in an attempt to quickly provide high-quality screen resolution scalings of those 600 dpi images.

Godchecker: your guide to the gods!

Tue, 24 Aug 2004 19:45:47 +0000

I don’t know why I haven’t been blogging interesting links much lately. I don’t know how many times I wished I could remember some cool thing that I had spotted, only to find that I didn’t blog it. Here’s a cool one: Godchecker – Your Guide To The Gods. Mythology with a twist!. Very entertaining guide to all sorts of mythology.

Simple tool for finding Swing threading mistakes

Tue, 24 Aug 2004 19:42:08 +0000

Scott Delap provides a nice, simple way to Easily Find Swing Threading Mistakes. It involves a replacement RepaintManager that confirms that repaints are all taking place on the Swing event dispatch thread. Nice solution. (You’ll note from the comments and the followup article that this solution isn’t perfect… but that doesn’t mean it’s not useful!)

Handy reference for reading and scaling images in Java

Mon, 23 Aug 2004 16:16:15 +0000

Here’s a good thread on image scaling that includes some nice tips like how to get a scaled BufferedImage instead of a scaled Image.

POV Ray Hall of Fame

Sun, 22 Aug 2004 05:27:30 +0000

There are some very well done scenes in the POVCOMP 2004: Hall of Fame. All ray traced with the open source POV-Ray!

Switching to CAPTCHA to avoid comment spam

Sun, 22 Aug 2004 02:34:33 +0000

Despite having MT-Blacklist installed and religiously purging evil comment spam, I’ve still been getting a fair amount of it. It can be a pain to get rid of (particularly when I get a raftload of comment spams). I have installed James Seng’s SCode plugin, which requires entry of a security code that is displayed in an image. I suspect this will completely eliminate my comment spam. I understand the trouble these pose for the blind.

Back online

Sun, 22 Aug 2004 01:36:29 +0000

My web hosting company changed something in their configuration which prevented me from posting. To their credit, I sent them an email and all was well within a very short period of time. Sitelutions still gets my vote as a good, low-cost web hosting company.

Marathon Swing testing framework lives again!

Wed, 18 Aug 2004 03:55:05 +0000

The last I looked at it (a few months back), Marathon was dead and required a bit too much patience to make work, especially when compared to Abbot. According to the much fresher looking site, a new set of people have taken over Marathon as of June and new releases have started flowing. Time to take another look. Abbot is good, but GUI testing can be hard and any tool that has a chance of making it easier is worth at least a quick looksee.

ATHENS 2004 linking policy: that’s so 1999

Wed, 18 Aug 2004 03:33:17 +0000

The very fact that ATHENS 2004 even has a Hyperlink Policy shows that they’re a bit out of touch. I thought that stuff had already made its way through the courts? It’s craziness. They certainly can put (some) restrictions on the use of their trademark, but trying to restrict links is an amusing bit.

Excellent Swing layout thread on Javalobby

Mon, 16 Aug 2004 16:25:30 +0000

If you saw the amusing GridBag cartoon from a few days back and are wondering how you can actually get your layouts to work, take a look at [this Javalobby thread][2]. Great stuff packed in there. I’ve had good luck with both FormLayout and ExplicitLayout, and this thread pointed me to Explicit TableLayout which uses ExplicitLayout to conveniently create table-like layouts. [2]: http://www.javalobby.com/threadMode_printfriendly.jsp?forum=61&thread=13372 “”

Hugh Macleod on creativity

Sun, 15 Aug 2004 17:01:07 +0000

This has been on blogdex for a few days, so I finall decided to check out: gapingvoid: how to be creative. I’m linking to it already without even having finished reading it. It’s an excellent essay on unleashing your inner creative spirit. Very good observations…

Groovy needs to play Nice

Tue, 10 Aug 2004 04:59:13 +0000

I came across Nice a few months ago, but continued on my way. I’m not one to get into fringe languages and Nice seemed a bit academic. Xoltar’s Groovy features in Nice made me look again at the Nice site, and there are some interesting features there. Multiple return values is something that is sorely missing from Java, and I’d like to see that in Groovy. Syntax for optional method parameters would be a bonus, and I don’t think that’s something in Groovy yet either.

IBM DeveloperWorks on Groovy

Thu, 05 Aug 2004 03:52:12 +0000

alt.lang.jre: Feeling Groovy is a good introduction to the Groovy language. Now if only the Eclipse plugin was a little farther along. Groovy does indeed reduce the coding effort, but without completion things can be pretty painful.

Eclipse 3.1 draft plan

Tue, 03 Aug 2004 20:08:24 +0000

The Eclipse Project Draft 3.1 Plan was posted on July 29th. The first milestone is due Friday the 13th, but the release isn’t scheduled until 2Q2005. Here we come, Java 5!

Earth blowing up in trailers

Tue, 03 Aug 2004 14:17:34 +0000

The trailer for TEAM AMERICA is the second trailer in a row (following the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy) that I’ve seen blowing up the Earth. Always a scary trend 🙂

IBM to open source Cloudscape database

Sun, 01 Aug 2004 04:58:49 +0000

I’m not sure that I was aware of IBM buying Informix, or of Informix buying Cloudscape. But, those two things had happened and now [Cloudscape is becoming open source][1], under an Apache-style license. Cloudscape is an embedded, transactional, Java database. [1]: http://news.com.com/IBM to make Java database open source/2100-7344_3-5291025.html?part=rss&tag=5291025&subj=news.7344.20 “IBM to make Java database open source | CNET News.com”

MusicLab MIDIoverLAN

Sat, 31 Jul 2004 02:02:40 +0000

Here’s a clever idea: MIDIoverLAN CP lets you send MIDI over ethernet between Macs and PCs. This lets you use soft synths (or even hardware synths) conveniently with far fewer cables and weird MIDI routing nonsense.

Great hackers and Java

Fri, 30 Jul 2004 20:29:47 +0000

A frog’s eye view of the world: What a load of crap is fairly typical of the responses from the JavaBlogs of the world to Paul Graham’s Great Hackers article. (There’s nothing wrong with the Frog’s Eye View post, I just happened to have followed that particular link). I’m sure there are many great programmers who use Java. There are also doubtless a significant percentage of those who would rather be using some other language.

How to distribute cover songs on the net

Fri, 30 Jul 2004 19:54:00 +0000

A great bit of advice for distributing cover songs on the Net (in the US). They include the complete set of steps you need to go through in order to get a compulsory license (you can’t be refused!). Very spiffy.

“Great Hackers” and XP

Fri, 30 Jul 2004 18:58:23 +0000

This is my first longish article in a while. Paul Graham has written another interesting piece: Great Hackers. In it, he describes the care and feeding of “great hackers”, the coders who are multiples more productive than the average. I agree with him in general about providing an environment where great hackers can thrive. He glosses over the business needs a bit, I think, but is otherwise on target. The Slashdot thread broke into the usual language wars, which miss Graham’s point.

Programming by contract in Python

Fri, 30 Jul 2004 17:36:24 +0000

PEP 316 — Programming by Contract for Python. It’s a nifty thing that many PEPs include a reference implementation written in Python.

Real annoys Apple, BusinessWeek gets confused

Fri, 30 Jul 2004 16:18:44 +0000

Real Networks has [introduced software that allows them to make their songs compatible with iPods][1]. This means there are now two three legitimate places to buy music for the iPod. Of course, Apple promises to make the next version of the iPod software disable these Real songs. Choice #3, AllOfMP3.com is really the best choice because you don’t need to worry about stupid DRM wars. Apple’s promise to disable these songs is reminiscent of Microsoft ensuring that their software had compatibility problems with DR-DOS, which was later found to be anticompetitive behavior.

IronPython: open source, fast Python for the CLR

Thu, 29 Jul 2004 19:29:13 +0000

Jim Hugunin who, if memory serves, was one of the originators of Jython has open sourced IronPython – A fast Python implementation for .NET and Mono. This comes on the heels of his announcement that he is going to work for Microsoft in their CLR group. Though I’m a Java programmer most of the time these days, I’m still quite fond of Python. IronPython sounds like a great way to develop desktop apps, if that’s your thing.

JGoodies data binding presentation

Tue, 27 Jul 2004 19:55:29 +0000

McBlog has a link to Karsten’s recent presentations on JGoodies data binding. It’s good to see different projects that are approaching the problem of using Swing in real apps. There are a number of things that are far more painful in Swing than they should be.

BugMeNot’s clever registration form

Sun, 25 Jul 2004 19:55:54 +0000

In response to the criticism that BugMeNot.com has received from publications that they provide access to, the good folks there have created a Registration form to show exactly what they think of mandatory registration, all in the name of a “better online experience”. Very clever stuff.

JGoodies Data Binding framework released

Fri, 23 Jul 2004 19:29:59 +0000

I just discovered that Karsten has released his data binding framework for Swing apps. I’ve got some reading to do 🙂

A bunch of Firefox tweaks

Thu, 15 Jul 2004 19:44:06 +0000

Found via Erik’s link blog: Tweakfactor.com: Firefox Tweak Guide – Page 1 – Get your tweak on!. I’m not using Firefox yet, but these tweaks will be good when I do make the switch from Moz.

Link: obscure but useful java projects

Thu, 15 Jul 2004 04:55:50 +0000

Catching up on earlier Javablogs posts, I come across Top Ten Truly Obscure But Useful Java Projects. John Munsch also posted his list, but I’m more familiar with the items on his list than the ones from Carlos’ list.

MacroTracker Toolkit: additional goodies for Swing developers

Fri, 09 Jul 2004 04:20:15 +0000

While looking around at Mozdev, I found MacroTracker Project‘s toolkit, which includes a number of Swing components and other classes that provide some useful utility functionality. They start off with the somewhat boring “MBoldLabel”, but there are more interesting sounding things farther on down the list. Curiously, this toolkit is being used to create an IDE for Mozilla application development. What’s odd about this, is that there are two IDE frameworks already in Java (NetBeans and Eclipse) and even an IDE written on top of Mozilla (Komodo).

Kerry picks Edwards

Tue, 06 Jul 2004 15:48:33 +0000

Lessig will doubtless be happy about this. Kerry Picks Edwards to Be Running Mate. Edwards is pretty savvy, so this is a good move.

Interesting summary of recent PHP scaling discussion

Sun, 04 Jul 2004 22:18:51 +0000

There’s been a lot of discussion recently about PHP vs. Java in terms of scalability. This discussion happened as a result of Friendster’s move from Jav to PHP. Here’s one summary (PHP leaning), by Chris Shiflett, of the discussions: PHP Scales. My takeaway from both this and the recent talk of eBay’s use of Java is to keep in mind how the web works. It is inherently stateless. The more you really on maintaining state, the harder it is to scale your application.

They Might Be really important to the future of music

Sun, 04 Jul 2004 21:15:08 +0000

Via /.: They Might Be Giants now has an online store that they run themselves. This shows how artists (not labels) would likely do things if they were informed and had their way. They sell individual MP3s (that’s right, high-quality MP3, no DRM) and full albums at iTMS-like prices. This seems like a reasonable way to do things. Online music stores might help you find new music, but artists may as well sell songs on their own individual site.

The Joy of Cash

Sun, 04 Jul 2004 04:56:11 +0000

Here’s a good Motley Fool commentary by Whitney Tilson that shares how I feel about the current state of investing: Fool.com: The Joy of Cash. One interesting thing to get from this: mutual funds are not always the best place to have your money. A Vanguard index fund is good because it’s cheap, but if the stock market goes sideways for the next few years, you’ll basically get no return.

FCKeditor: very nice multi-browser HTML editor

Fri, 02 Jul 2004 07:28:19 +0000

Need a webapp that allows the user to enter HTML formatted text? Take a look at FCKeditor – The text editor for Internet. Very spiffy indeed.

Using your Eclipse .classpath files from build.xml

Thu, 01 Jul 2004 15:29:08 +0000

Some nameless person says that you should JavaGu(i)(y): Stop adding Eclipse .classpath and .project files to cvs!. Most of the comments in reply to this say that you should check those files in and use Eclipse’s mechanisms for dealing with variations (classpath variables and the like). I agree that you should check these files in. We’ve gone even farther than that. Our ant build.xml file has a little piece of Groovy script that reads the .

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince

Wed, 30 Jun 2004 02:57:59 +0000

JK Rowling has announced the title of the 6th Harry Potter book. Her website is rather spiffy, and she revealed the title behind a door with a wall behind it. (If you want to check it out for yourself, click on the scrunchy hairband sort of thing at the front of her site.) For the solution on how to get behind the wall look here: Wizard News: J.K. Rowling announces title of Book 6

One mapping that doesn’t work well in Hibernate or Java

Tue, 29 Jun 2004 16:41:59 +0000

Hibernate does a good job of managing relationships for you. If your data forms a nice object graph, not only do you not have to write SQL, you don’t even need to write Hibernate’s query language! Just traverse your graph and Hibernate will load objects as needed. I’ve stumbled across a relationship that Hibernate doesn’t handle particularly well. Hibernate does a good job of staying true to the semantics of the Java collections framework.

Chu Yeow: yourname+something@gmail.com… cool spam busting trick

Tue, 29 Jun 2004 04:44:52 +0000

redemption in a blog: Sending to yourname label@gmail.com labels your email talks about using different gmail addresses to automatically sort your mail into labeled groups. gmail apparently allows you to use yourusername+ANYTHING as an address. This is also a good anti-spam technique. Use a different address for every site that you register at. If someone sells your address, you’ll know who it was and you’ll be able to just shut down mail that originated there.

JADE: Java Addition To Default Environment

Tue, 29 Jun 2004 04:36:31 +0000

J.A.D.E. Java Addition to Default Environment is a library of several packages that go beyond the J2SE core functionality. There are a number of classes for scientific/mathematic use, but there are also other goodies like a superfast XML parser and a collection of classes that avoid garbage collection. (Of course, if you’ve been following the articles about Java GC, you’d know that the current garbage collectors don’t tend to be quite so icky when you create lots of objects.

Mac OS X Tiger looks very nice

Tue, 29 Jun 2004 03:51:03 +0000

Mac Rumors has a roundup from the Apple WWDC. Mac OS X Tiger (10.4) due out in the first half of 2005 looks very nice. Lots of new searching features, Safari upgrade and more. I do hope they add Type Ahead Find to Safari.

Fahrenheit 9/11 has box office mojo

Sun, 27 Jun 2004 16:41:36 +0000

I’ve never seen this site before: Box Office Mojo has all of the monetary stats you could want, organized in a very easy to access way. For people interested in this kind of data, it looks great. Speaking of great, Fahrenheit 9⁄11 had a great opening on Friday. In one day it became the 4th highest grossing documentary with more than $8M banked. If that kind of score holds up, it could end the weekend as the highest grossing documentary ever, beating out Michael Moore’s own Bowling for Columbine.

Break the law, then find out if it’s legal?

Sun, 27 Jun 2004 16:34:36 +0000

How about this news: CIA Reportedly Halts Use of Harsh Interrogation Ploys The CIA (news – web sites) has stopped using interrogation techniques such as “stress positions,” sleep deprivation and denial of pain medication while the Bush administration reviews their legality, The Washington Post said Sunday. Doesn’t that seem a bit odd? Let’s do something we’re not quite sure is legal, and then when people find out we’ll stop and check to see if it’s actually legal.

Eclipse 3.0 ships!

Sat, 26 Jun 2004 21:31:16 +0000

Congrats to the Eclipse team for shipping 3.0, a most excellent upgrade over 2.1. I’ve been slavishly following the 3.0 milestone releases. Each milestone had a good number of new features. Sure, there were bugs, but there was only one release (M6) which caused me too much trouble to continue using.

PyLucene: Real Lucene in Python via GCJ and SWIG

Sat, 26 Jun 2004 04:32:49 +0000

The OSAF has released PyLucene, which takes the fine Lucene search engine and compiles it to native code using GCJ, and then wrapping it for Python use using SWIG. There is a Python port of Lucene called Lupy, but it’s slower than the Java version and, since it’s a port, lags behind Lucene in development. There’s been a lot of interesting work lately in bridging Python and Java (CPython, that is, not Jython, which is already quite attached to Java).

JDNC: Simplified Java GUI app creation

Thu, 24 Jun 2004 04:30:29 +0000

Sun has introduced a new open source project called JDNC which, unfortunately, stands for JDesktop Network Components. (It’s the “Network” part that seems a little out of place…) I probably would not have started working on my own framework a few months back had this existed. JDNC takes a markedly different approach to the one I took, but there are very similar goals. Sadly, the project was apparently initially motivated to make the JDNC markup language, which is yet another XML UI definition language.

A couple of links I had lying around

Wed, 23 Jun 2004 14:09:02 +0000

I’ve had these browser windows open for a couple of days and figured I would drop the links in here. Carlos Perez writes up Manageability – Nuggets of Wisdom from eBay’s Architecture, which summarizes a presentation on how eBay has achieved scalability. Interesting stuff. Christian Bauer writes about using triggers to store the history of an object and points to the Hibernate wiki which includes a Hibernate Interceptor implementation of a history logger.

A choice headline

Wed, 23 Jun 2004 05:23:38 +0000

If you think the news agencies are fully impartial, check out this headline: Yahoo! News – Bush Claimed Right to Waive Torture Laws. This headline is true on the surface. But, a headline that more accurately sums up the article would be “Bush agreed to follow torture laws”. Here’s the full quote from the memo: “I accept the legal conclusion of the attorney general and the Department of Justice (news – web sites) that I have the authority under the Constitution to suspend Geneva as between the United States and Afghanistan, but I decline to exercise that authority at this time,” the president said in the memo, entitled “Humane Treatment of al-Qaida and Taliban Detainees.

First manned commercial flight to space

Tue, 22 Jun 2004 02:59:34 +0000

This is certainly a big deal. With a number of teams racing to win the X-Prize by launching passengers into space, Scaled Composites has successfully sent a man into space. The craft used cost just $20 million. With a price tag like that, it’s not unreasonable to think that at some point not too-far-off commercial space travel will be a reality.

Themed fonts out the wazoo

Mon, 21 Jun 2004 02:38:37 +0000

Via Boing Boing: TypeNow.net Themed Fonts Movie and Music Fonts contains a whole bunch of fonts recognizable from movies, music and miscellaneous brands. Very spiffy. There’s also a nice collection at Uncle Bear.

Cory Doctorow talking to Microsoft about DRM

Sat, 19 Jun 2004 21:49:10 +0000

Cory Doctorow, sci-fi author and EFF-dude, [spoke to Microsoft about DRM and why it sucks.][1] This is one of the best summaries of why DRM is so colossally bad. From a MSFT standpoint: None of your customers want you to make expensive modifications to your products that make backing up and restoring even harder. And there is no moment when your customers will be less forgiving than the moment that they are recovering from catastrophic technology failures.

Tim Bray drinks the TDD Kool Aid

Mon, 14 Jun 2004 19:20:00 +0000

As anyone who’s read my blog for a bit would guess, I’m pleased to see another person (particularly one as widely read as Tim Bray) rant in favor of test-driven development. I agree with his assessment… TDD has had a bigger impact on the programs I write than OO did.

Public domain files of President Bush’s speeches

Sat, 12 Jun 2004 17:34:41 +0000

You never know when you might need audio files of George W. Bush’s speeches. These folks provide MP3 files plus you can get CD-quality copies of these files for just $10 on CD-ROM.

GTA: San Andreas details coming out

Sat, 12 Jun 2004 03:35:57 +0000

On a whim, I decided to see if there was new news of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Indeed there is. The “eating and working out” part of the game mentioned sounds like the kind of thing that could make the game a drag if it’s done poorly. The GTA series has had great gameplay, though, so I have faith that Rockstar North will get it right.

Almost payola

Sat, 12 Jun 2004 02:29:02 +0000

Apparently, the record labels have started paying radio stations to play songs as ads. It is illegal for record labels to pay stations to play songs. But, it is apparently legal for them to take out ads on the stations. Unless there are regulations on how much advertising a station can have within an hour of programming (and it’s possible that there are such regulations), it seems like the stations can just keep increasing their advertising slots per hour until most of what you hear on the radio is directly paid for.

Zilverline: a nice, easy packaging of Lucene

Fri, 11 Jun 2004 05:06:10 +0000

Zilverline is a search engine that you can use for your files (or for your intranet, as I’m doing). It uses Lucene under the covers. I found it quite easy to set up. If you know Lucene query syntax, you can get very good search results. I’ve passed along an idea that should help get excellent results just entering straight keywords. We’ve got 91,000 documents indexed in there, and the searches are zippy even on a fairly modest box.

10 Foods You Should Never Eat

Fri, 11 Jun 2004 04:11:41 +0000

Craving some Bugles? Maybe you won’t after reading 10 Super Foods You Should NEVER Eat!. I’ve been concious of the labels you see on packages for the past few years, but it’s still good to see specific offenders called out like this. (Even better that alternatives are listed!)

Rome: RSS reading for Java

Thu, 10 Jun 2004 04:35:14 +0000

Tim Bray points to rome: All feeds lead to Rome, which is a (you guessed it) RSS/Atom feed parser for Java. They list the version as 0.1. I’m not sure how this would compare with Informa which includes goodies like Lucene searching and Hibernate storage. Update: Sam Newman posted a brief article about this with an interesting point about Informa’s ease of use.

A newspaper person responds to BugMeNot

Thu, 10 Jun 2004 04:31:24 +0000

A couple days back, I posed the link to BugMeNot, a site which provides registration information for a significant number of websites. A newspaper industry person (not an official industry rep, I believe, but someone in the industry) had an interesting response: Lockergnome – Windows Fanatics – June 8, 2004. As also mentioned in this article, there are clearly plenty of sites that make money off of ads without obtrusive advertising.

Andy Tanenbaum’s rebuttal to Ken Brown

Thu, 10 Jun 2004 04:09:56 +0000

I haven’t been linking to the various parts of this story as it has unfolded. I finally decided to include a link to Andy Tanenbaum’s Rebuttal to Ken Brown on the subject of Ken Brown’s report that Linus Torvalds stole code for Linux from MINIX (Tanenbaum’s creation). This story is really funny, because this looks like one of these cases where someone (Ken Brown) was asked to do research where the conclusion was decided up front.

Digital Photography Composition Tips

Thu, 10 Jun 2004 04:05:27 +0000

Here’s a good set of Digital Photography Composition Tips. The links included here provide a bunch of simple ways to improve your photos.

SeatGuru: finding the right seat on a flight

Wed, 09 Jun 2004 13:37:12 +0000

Via Tim Bray, here’s SeatGuru.com – Your Enlightened Guide to Airplane Seating. I’ve flown 100,000+ miles, so I’ve generally gotten a feel for which seats are good ones. That said, this site would be handy for unfamiliar aircraft.

Carbon Copy Cloner: open source Mac disk imaging

Wed, 09 Jun 2004 03:19:56 +0000

The 3 C’s of Mac Backup describes (briefly) Carbon Copy Cloner, a Mac OS X backup program that includes the ability to create bootable disk images. Backups are good!

JDIC: browser integration and more (sorry Mac users)

Sun, 06 Jun 2004 05:06:04 +0000

Sun has announced the Java Desktop Integration Components (JDIC) project, which is designed to help you integrate your applications with the native desktop better than you can currently. (No writing JNI stuff yourself!) Part of this includes support for embedding the native browser. That’s a great feature, but it currently only works on Windows, Linux and Solaris. I do hope they add Mac support for that. That niggle aside, this may come in handy with my current project at work.

Meta-Efficient: a guide to the most efficient things in the world

Sun, 06 Jun 2004 04:21:02 +0000

Just the stuff listed on the front page of the site can save gallons of water and lots of energy. There’s also a nifty picture of Aerogel there. Meta Efficient: A Guide To the Most Efficient Things in the World: Energy Efficiency, Self-Sufficiency, Off-Grid, Efficent Appliances, Product Reviews, Best Products

Is the draft legal when the premise for the war is bogus?

Thu, 03 Jun 2004 04:20:11 +0000

It would be hard to deny that the premise for the war in Iraq was exaggerated at best. Even with the exaggerations, the Bush Administration was unable to convince the UN that there was a pressing need for war. Given that, does it make sense to start a draft? I was 19 during the Gulf War, and we were worried about the possibility of a draft then. But, at least there was a clear mission: get Saddam out of Kuwait.

ClamWin Antivirus: open source anti-virus software!

Thu, 03 Jun 2004 04:03:46 +0000

I generally don’t run antivirus software, because I’m not a likely target. I use up-to-date software and am careful about what I download and install. That said, there are plenty of people for whom antivirus software is important. It’s great to see: ClamWin Antivirus. A Free Open Source (GPL) Virus Scanner for Windows. This always seemed to me like the kind of thing that would work well as open source. Once you get the basic software put together (a non-trivial task, to be sure), updating the definitions is not quite so hard.

BugMeNot: bad news for ad-driven sites

Thu, 03 Jun 2004 03:42:43 +0000

Via Lockergnome, I find BugMeNot, a site that provides registration codes for tons of sites that require “free registration”. The NY Times is one of the best examples of this. One interesting thing about this is that this turns into a data point for those sites. It tells them how many people dislike free registration so much that they would hop over to another site to get a password. Sure, if they see a lot of people using a password from BugMeNot (or if they just monitor BugMeNot themselves), they can keep this from working.

Three years of this blog

Thu, 03 Jun 2004 03:18:32 +0000

I noticed on my “Looking Back…” sidebar that it has now been three years since I started this blog! For those keeping score, this is the second incarnation of my second blog. This was originally called “We Write Online”. The Blue Sky On Mars incarnation has been more popular and is now somewhere around a year old. My first blog came before they were called blogs and was humor based: Byproducts.

Cog: language-neutral code generator

Thu, 03 Jun 2004 01:16:40 +0000

Here’s a Python Success Story describing Cog, an easy-to-use code generation system. It’s written in Python, but it can mark up files in any language (the author’s project apparently has 4 different languages in use). This looks nicely done and useful for a variety of applications.

Two hours of Tufte style presentation

Thu, 03 Jun 2004 01:10:55 +0000

Today, I gave a training session at work that lasted a little more than two hours. The session covered a Swing GUI framework that we’ve been building. (Yes, this framework is genuinely different from the others I’ve seen out there, and it’s even different in a good way :). I prepared for the presentation completely outside of the normal workday, because our project is due at the end of July and we’re busy pairing all day long on the code.

Better Desktop Java wiki page

Tue, 01 Jun 2004 19:46:45 +0000

Definitely one for the bookmarks. Joshua Marinacci has created a BetterDesktopJava wiki page on java.net. There are a bunch of things that I’ve never seen before here… that’s a great sign in a resource, since I’ve done quite a bit of looking at Swing stuff.

Eclipse 3.0RC1 released

Tue, 01 Jun 2004 16:55:48 +0000

With the endgame plan in full swing, you can now grab the Eclipse 3.0 RC1 release. Hopefully, this will fix the weird undo and flickering JUnit bar bugs that I noticed in M9.

McSweeney’s: Pros and Cons of John Kerry’s Top Twenty VP Picks

Tue, 01 Jun 2004 04:09:05 +0000

McSweeney’s PROS AND CONS OF JOHN KERRY’S TOP TWENTY VICE-PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES (their capitalization, not mine) is hilarious. It starts off realistically enough and then heads into some really ffun weeds.

Did Cheney coordinate the Halliburton deal?

Mon, 31 May 2004 20:22:50 +0000

According to Time Magazine, he did. The e-mail says Feith approved arrangements for the contract “contingent on informing WH [White House] tomorrow. We anticipate no issues since action has been coordinated w VP’s [Vice President’s] office.” Three days later, the Army Corps of Engineers gave Halliburton the contract, without seeking other bids. TIME located the e-mail among documents provided by Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group. This is the trouble that a secretive government will run into.

jMock: the latest mock library for Java

Thu, 27 May 2004 04:04:33 +0000

Via Erik’s always helpful Linkblog, jMock – A Lightweight Mock Object Library for Java. This started as a fork of the mockobjects.com DynaMock package (which I was using earlier today, in fact). I’ll give this one points on readability, which is certainly important in tests. I have to subtract points, though, because you need to extend their base class (or at least that’s all they show in the examples I’ve seen thus far), which is not always an option.

JUnit-Addons: useful tools for unit testers

Thu, 27 May 2004 03:41:25 +0000

Bill Venners wrote a good article comparing different ways to test private methods in your Java classes. In there, he points to JUnit-addons v1.4, which I don’t remember coming across previously. This package provides a bunch of useful new asserts, plus a class that helps you run your private methods via reflection. (There’s a bunch more in there, too… check it out!)

Eric Idle’s ode to the FCC and Bush Administration

Tue, 25 May 2004 04:10:10 +0000

Thank goodness that the Net still has free speech. The FCC Song is a little ditty written by Eric Idle. I don’t know if he was actually fined by the FCC or is just making a commentary, but it’s quite a commentary. Don’t listen at work. Direct link to the song: [The FCC Song][2] [2]: http://song pythonline.com/plugs/idle/FCCSong.mp3

Cool trick for speeding up Safari

Sat, 22 May 2004 03:02:55 +0000

O’Reilly Network: Speed up Safari serves up a great, simple trick for getting pages to appear quicker in Safari. With slower pages, you might notice things “bounce around” as stuff renders… but who cares? You see your page quicker.

Eclipse 3.0M9 (aka RC0) released!

Sat, 22 May 2004 02:27:38 +0000

Let the endgame begin! Eclipse 3.0 M9 News There are some great new features, and these are the last ones we can really expect for 3.0, now that the endgame has started. The CVS improvements are huge. “Commit Sets” let you group commits together by comment or time, which is almost as good as atomic commits. (Not quite, though… I still want Subversion at some point.) You can also update to a different tag without rechecking out, and check out based on date.

Seven Open Source Business Strategies

Tue, 18 May 2004 04:48:48 +0000

I’m sure many have already seen this on Slashdot, but I wanted to save a link to it: IT Manager’s Journal | Seven open source business strategies for competitive advantage. This article provides a great run down of seven successful strategies for applying open source software in a big way in your business. Sure the traditional “give the software away and make money on services” line is there, but there are many other strategies that can succeed (and are!

Metacritic: rottentomatoes for everything

Sun, 16 May 2004 04:31:49 +0000

I’ve been a longtime fan of Rotten Tomatoes, and I still am! I find that the Tomatometer is a pretty good indicator of whether a movie is decent or a stinker. Sure, there are times when I’ll disagree with the critics… but more often than not, I’ll agree with the consensus of the critics, if not the opinions of a single critic. I went looking for a site that would do the same for music, and I found metacritic: Film Reviews, Game Reviews, Music Reviews, DVD Reviews.

Movable Type whining is silly

Sat, 15 May 2004 04:12:55 +0000

MT 3.0 is coming out now and many bloggers seem to be shocked beyond belief that Six Apart wants to make money off of their work. Nevermind that they’re still offering a free edition of Movable Type that would probably work just fine for most bloggers. They’ve always specified that MT couldn’t be used for free by commercial interests. They’ve just added the restrictions that if you have more than one author and more than three blogs, you’ve gotta pay up.

Mystery Meat Navigation

Thu, 13 May 2004 04:46:07 +0000

A few years ago, I clued Vincent Flanders in on a few outrageous websites. One of Vincent’s big categories of site suckage is Mystery Meat Navigation, where the site provides unlabeled pictures as a navigational “aid”. Today I came across Fuddruckers : World’s Greatest Hamburgers. Here’s my message to Vincent: To their credit, they do provide non-mysterious links at the bottom. The part that really got me, though, was the giant picture of a hamburger.

JCards: handy looking little filing app

Wed, 12 May 2004 20:03:09 +0000

For all of those things that are handy to keep track of in a flat database, JCards looks like a good, cross-platform fit. You can even store passwords in it, because you can save the file in a Blowfish-encrypted format.

Hear Your Music Anywhere (HYMN) Project

Wed, 12 May 2004 03:42:10 +0000

The tool designed to return fair use rights to iTunes songs is back online, thanks to FSF India: hymn — Hear Your Music aNywhere. Available for many platforms, and including a drag-and-drop GUI for the Mac.

Doing undo with Aspects

Mon, 10 May 2004 03:46:47 +0000

Jon Tirsen has a neat tip for doing Undo in AspectJ. I’m actually already using AspectJ for field modification interception and hadn’t thought of implementing undo like this. A method like this could indeed save a lot of code.

Investing over the long term in index funds?

Sun, 09 May 2004 21:18:07 +0000

The Market According to GARP says: The experts say this is a stock picker’s market. By that they mean the market could move sideways for some time, and offer its biggest rewards to those investors who know how to select good stocks. I definitely believe that we’re going into a sideways market. Even the term “sideways” makes things sound somewhat pleasant. Stocks will move down, then up, then down, then up until we finally reach the “hey things have moved sideways” point.

jvmstat: watch the garbage collector do its thing

Sun, 09 May 2004 06:31:20 +0000

Losing memory? Running into GC lag? Check out jvmstat (free from Sun!)

Sun Policy on Public Discourse

Sun, 09 May 2004 03:04:42 +0000

Tim Bray helped to create the Sun Policy on Public Discourse. This is an interesting document and is probably a good fit for nearly any company. Some of it seems like common sense, but it’s often better to explicitly state such things, if you’re going to bother to write a policy about it. As more companies deal with bloggers and the effect bloggers can have on the public perception of the company, a policy like this can make a good template for others to think about when creating their own.

AllOfMP3: the right service, a challenging price

Sat, 08 May 2004 03:34:02 +0000

After seeing a bit of press about it, I decided to check out the Russian ALLOFMP3 music service. AllOfMP3 is run by a Russian company called, generically enough, MediaServices. If you’re not familiar with it, AllOfMP3 is notable for having pretty much any current hit I could find (unlike any other service I’ve seen). It’s also notable for offering downloads in basically whatever format you choose (MP3, AAC, WMA, lossless FLAC, etc.

Super Size Me: is anyone surprised?

Sat, 08 May 2004 02:41:40 +0000

There’s been a lot of positive press for Super Size Me. I haven’t seen the movie, and it may very well be a well-made, entertaining documentary. That aside, the subject matter seems so obvious that it doesn’t warrant creating a movie about it. The movie tracks the filmmaker’s (Morgan Spurlock) month of eating nothing but McDonald’s food. Obviously, he wasn’t eating McDonald’s salads every day, because he gained 25 pounds and got rather sick.

Jython vs. Groovy smackdown

Wed, 05 May 2004 19:52:35 +0000

OK, sorry for the headline. Tim Bray recently wrote a bit about Jython. I agree wholeheartedly about the use of dynamic scripting languages with Java. I also agree that Jython is a very fine product and love the Python language. But, when looking to do scripting on top of Java, I think Groovy is going to be a great choice. The big trouble with scripting your Java apps in Jython is that you need to make the mental shift over to Python syntax.

Value Investing 10 Commandments

Wed, 05 May 2004 06:09:23 +0000

Lately, I’ve been seriously thinking about where I think the stock market is going to go. Everyone says “you can’t time the market”, and staying in stocks pays off in the long term. However, I really think that most large cap stocks are overvalued. It doesn’t matter that the economy is doing fairly well right now. Stock prices are just too far ahead of corporate earnings. Right now, I’m reading Bull’s Eye Investing by John Mauldin.

So, I guess guns aren’t safe, huh?

Sun, 02 May 2004 21:03:04 +0000

At least, that’s the conclusion when a gun safety presenter shoots self: A federal drug agent shot himself in the leg during a gun safety presentation to children in what police describe as an accident. His bosses, however, are still investigating the incident.

Eclipse M9 delayed (Eclipse 3.0 Endgame plan)

Sat, 01 May 2004 16:41:21 +0000

The old Eclipse 3.0 plan listed M9 as coming on Friday, May 7. The new Eclipse 3.0 Endgame Plan rebrands M9 as RC0 and expects a few RC releases before 3.0 final on June 28.

JavaHelp intro on DeveloperWorks

Sat, 01 May 2004 04:34:42 +0000

Via Erik Thauvin’s great link blog, there’s an excellent intro to JavaHelp 2.0 on DeveloperWorks by Nancy Chen Junhua.

Review of the Sony Librie eInk ebook

Fri, 30 Apr 2004 04:20:10 +0000

After reading the press releases and initial press coverage of the Sony Librie ebook, along comes dottocomu: First look at the Sony EBR-1000 Librie eBook reader, Kakyou’s review of the unit. The short of it: great screen, crappy usability, even crappier DRM. Looks like a “wait for second generation, and its associated software hacks” sort of product.

Super Volcanoes update: Yellowstone not likely to explode

Thu, 29 Apr 2004 04:24:41 +0000

An ever popular BSOM posting was about Super Volcanoes, and the possibility of Yellowstone erupting and eradicating life as we know it. New research apparently concludes that massive eruptions are rare, and Yellowstone does not appear to be gearing up for one. So, you can officially quit worrying about super volcanoes and go back to worrying about sudden climate change.

Apple introduces iTunes 4.5

Wed, 28 Apr 2004 17:20:39 +0000

Not much of a shocker… On the first anniversary of the iTunes Music Store, Apple posts major iTunes upgrade. A bunch of nice features in there. With our giant hard drives these days, the Apple Lossless Encoder seems like a good feature (though isn’t there a standard format for lossless encodings?) They’re now allowing you to authorize five computers for listening to your purchased music, which is pretty reasonable and might be a response to the recent activity around PlayFair and DeDRMS.

iTMS adds 1000 new albums for their 1 year anniversary

Wed, 28 Apr 2004 03:13:09 +0000

I’ve been keeping an eye on the iTunes Music Store’s “Just Added” section to see if there’s anything new I’d like to buy. This week, they added somewhere between 900 and 1000 new albums, which is quite a bit more than normal. My guess is that they made a big push to hit some magic number for Apple’s iTunes conference call tomorrow. I haven’t been keeping track, but I’m sure that they want to be able to say that they have more than 500,000 songs.

Groovy: what’s in a name

Tue, 27 Apr 2004 19:21:03 +0000

John O’Conner says Groovy? Are you serious? But couldn’t it have a different name? Groovy? I wonder how many people have just overlooked it so far because of its silly name? Is it irresponsible to overlook it for that reason? Yes, most definitely. But will some of you? Come on, be honest. Doesn’t the name put you off just a little? Can serious professionals use something that sounds so silly?

DeDRMS: Fair use for iTunes songs on Windows

Mon, 26 Apr 2004 19:57:16 +0000

DVD Jon has created a tool that provides fair use capabilities for owners of iTunes songs under Windows. As long as you have a legitimate key to play the song file, this tool will strip out the DRM. It leaves your username and email address in the file, which is not a problem for you as long as you’re trying to play fair.

CNET launches free music download service

Mon, 26 Apr 2004 19:48:10 +0000

CNET launches free music downloads: “We are the first large-scale provider to offer free music downloads in a discover-focused environment, saving music fans valuable time in finding tunes that match their tastes,” said Scot Arpajian, senior vice president of CNET Download.com. Here is yet another avenue for unsigned artists to get some exposure. MP3.com wasn’t able to stay in business with this model, but hopefully CNET can keep this going.

American Idol once again proves why we can only have two parties

Fri, 23 Apr 2004 03:47:05 +0000

Though I haven’t yet watched this week’s American Idol, I got an unfortunate preview from this article: ‘American Idol’ Voting Strikes Sour Note. Once again, we see the ugly side of plurality voting (I wrote about this last year. When you have more than two candidates, just choosing your single favorite candidate does not do the job. I will say that it’s quite crazy that the three best singers, in my opinion, ended up in the bottom three… that’s unexpected even with plurality voting.

Everybody works for somebody, including the President

Wed, 21 Apr 2004 03:45:40 +0000

A fascinating article talking about Bob Woodward’s new book about the Bush presidency and his cabinet. The following comes in the context of Bush trying to provoke his cabinet members, without letting on that that’s what he’s doing: President Bush: “I do not need to explain why I say things. — That’s the interesting thing about being the President. — Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.

Dan Creswell on distributing objects

Mon, 19 Apr 2004 23:09:43 +0000

If you haven’t read this already, check out Dan Creswell’s article rebutting Fowler’s first law of distributed design. Good overview on why distributing is not always that hard and is sometimes the best path.

Green Haze Day

Sun, 18 Apr 2004 15:38:30 +0000

An interesting thing happens every year (and it’s interesting despite the fact that it happens every year). One morning, we wake up, and there is suddenly a green haze of budding leaves out in back of our house. One day, it’s all brown. The next day, it’s getting green at eye level. The taller trees take a bit longer to bud. It’s a nice phenomenon, and today was the day that it happened this year.

Nigerians in Space

Sun, 18 Apr 2004 04:35:55 +0000

(via slashdot) This is hilarious. The only thing I can figure is that the scammers are trying to see the limits of gullibility: Cosmic 419er lost in space I am Dr. Bakare Tunde, the cousin of Nigerian Astronaut, Air Force Major Abacha Tunde. He was the first African in space when he made a secret flight to the Salyut 6 space station in 1979. He was on a later Soviet spaceflight, Soyuz T-16Z to the secret Soviet military space station Salyut 8T in 1989.

Bush’s incredible credibility

Fri, 16 Apr 2004 05:20:54 +0000

Nice rundown of the credibility gap that Bush suffers, not due to inconsistency of his statements, but due to a gap between his statements and what reality is showing. Bonus points for noting that credibility being “incredibly important” is rather funny.

Tufte Rocks

Fri, 16 Apr 2004 04:00:39 +0000

I saw Edward Tufte in a one-day course today. It was excellent and I highly recommend it for anyone who does software, presentations or works with statistics. If you’re not familiar with him, Tufte is the author of a book on Amazon’s best 100 non-fiction books of the 20th century: This book also has the interesting distinction of being self-published. All three of his books are beautifully printed. Tufte is a big believer of always providing handouts for a presentation, and he hates PowerPoint.

The WB fails to understand Hung’s appeal

Fri, 16 Apr 2004 02:59:16 +0000

WB Seeks to Reward Bad Singers with Big Prizes – yes, the “Anti-American Idol”, where the good singers get sent away. They’re hoping to reproduce William Hung’s sensational popularity (and, more importantly, American Idol’s). My take: not gonna happen. The Idol audition shows were entertaining, certainly. And, William Hung had a style that truly made him stand out. But, I don’t think that’s enough show for an entire season to work.

JTimeTracker: java-based time tracking

Thu, 15 Apr 2004 04:30:13 +0000

Need to keep a link to this: JTimeTracker Homepage. As simple as time tracking may seem to be (and is), these tools vary wildly in terms of what they do and their price. This is an open source tool and it looks, on the surface, like it does everything I need it to do.

Summary of Bush’s press conference from last night

Thu, 15 Apr 2004 04:21:44 +0000

I admit it. I didn’t watch the press conference, or even read the transcript thereof. However, I find A Busy Person’s Guide to the Bush Press Conference to be entirely believable and mildly entertaining. They bumped American Idol for that?

William Hung phenomenon peaks

Thu, 15 Apr 2004 02:25:13 +0000

William Hung’s number 34 debut of his album, Inspiration marks his jumping the shark moment. With 38,000 sold, despite a lack of actual singing talent, Hung has jumped the shark and is now going to begin his ride off into the sunset. You heard it here first.

Python RSS aggregator using Twisted

Thu, 08 Apr 2004 19:52:08 +0000

Python Cookbook : Rss aggregator with twisted is a nice little piece of code that can handle truckloads of RSS feeds in a short period of time. One thing that always bothers me about things like this is that there is no license listed for this code, which essentially means it can’t be used. Maybe there’s a blanket license of all of the ASPN cookbook code, but that’s not clear to me.

The irony of “would rather pay with money”

Thu, 08 Apr 2004 16:00:04 +0000

Paul Brown writes about his troubles getting AspectJ editing to work in Eclipse. His solution was to switch over to Emacs. Ironically, he uses this experience to relearn the lesson that “it is better to pay with money than with time” and saying that this is “also why people shouldn’t be shy about paying for or charging money for (working) software”. I’m not so sure that RMS would be pleased about someone finding a solution in Emacs and then saying that people should not have a problem paying for working software 🙂

Superman and Jerry Seinfeld

Tue, 06 Apr 2004 03:44:21 +0000

The Adventures of Seinfeld & Superman is a hilarious series of AmEx commercials. Good fun to be had.

American apology makes it on to laptop bag care label

Tue, 06 Apr 2004 03:34:38 +0000

A small laptop bag maker has put the “American apology” on the care label of their bags. It’s really funny, a trifle subversive, and likely to pass right by the many Americans who (a) don’t speak French and (b) don’t read care labels. (The apology, by the way, is “We are sorry that our President is an idiot. We didn’t vote for him.”) There are t-shirts available from the originator of the slogan.

PlayFair: DRM removal for iTMS songs

Mon, 05 Apr 2004 04:32:15 +0000

Over the past few months, I’ve been buying all of my music from the iTunes Music Service. The reason I finally gave in and started buying digital tracks is that Apple was offering a convenient, “real download” (as opposed to subscription) service that would let me keep my tracks forever. The DRM used by iTMS also wasn’t overly heinous. Despite that, I’m not comfortable with having my songs tied to specific machines and software packages.

JmDNS: JRendezvous reborn

Sat, 03 Apr 2004 20:36:48 +0000

A while back, I read about JRendevous, a Java implementation of Zeroconf (specifically multicast DNS and DNS service discovery). JRendevous disappeared from its original home at Strangeberry. Today, I found it again as the JmDNS project.

Poll: which guitarist coder are you most like?

Sat, 03 Apr 2004 04:57:00 +0000

Actually, I’m not taking one of those silly polls 🙂 I am, however, linking to Rory Blyth’s article about wanting U2’s The Edge to write code. Read the bit about The Edge calling every note “expensive”, and you’ll see that The Edge is a YAGNI sort, applied to music. Cool.

Hibernate 3 info

Fri, 02 Apr 2004 04:14:29 +0000

I’ve been doing a lot of work with Hibernate 2.1 this week, so I was very interested to read Gavin King’s plans for Hibernate 3. Looks like good stuff. The event system sounds particularly useful for less-obvious O/R mapping needs.

Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness

Fri, 02 Apr 2004 02:47:21 +0000

Some of these are really funny… like the Elevator Sign that has buttons for “Do Not Use Elevator” and “In Case Of Fire Use Stairway For Exit”. I also enjoyed “If your binoculars make a snowman, do not feed them tea when they come in to warm up.”

JConfig configuration management library

Wed, 31 Mar 2004 20:07:37 +0000

Just need to keep a link to this one to check it out soon… jConfig aims to make managing configuration information easier, providing multiple storage mechanisms along the way.

I’ve been lasered!

Wed, 31 Mar 2004 02:29:16 +0000

This blog went an entire week without entries, which is quite unusual. The week before that was quite quiet, too. I don’t think Blue Sky On Mars has ever had that lengthy a quiet period. It started with a trip to Niagara Falls, for a JSTOR-wide company retreat. That was a packed couple of days, but it was a good chance to meet people from our New York office. Things were busy after getting back, because we’re full-steam-ahead on our project at work, and I’m pair programming all day these days.

Strike That Out, Sam

Wed, 31 Mar 2004 02:27:43 +0000

[strike out] is a neat site that shows a little insight into Microsoft marketing folks in the form of Microsoft Word’s “Track Changes” feature. It looks like there are even people in Microsoft who don’t know how to use this feature correctly when posting a document online. The author of “Strike Out” found that 5% of the documents that tracked down on Microsoft’s site had deletions still tucked away within the document.

Mike Hogan’s RDF web app framework suggestion

Wed, 31 Mar 2004 02:23:29 +0000

Mike Hogan pitches an application architecture that should yield superior productivity. He talks about using RDF as his data model, though he admits that there isn’t very good tool support for RDF at this point. That’s certainly one trouble I’ve seen with putting RDF to practical application. He talks about storing the data in Prevayler. Sure, there is a class of applications for which having all of your data in memory is fine.

FormLayoutMaker

Tue, 30 Mar 2004 21:55:59 +0000

I just came across the FormLayoutMaker project which provides a visual editor for the JGoodies Forms layout package. This looks like a handy way to set things up. Though FormLayout is the nicest LayoutManager to use by hand, sometimes it gets a little painful to make changes to your CellConstraints by hand.

James Strachan on recent Groovystuff

Tue, 30 Mar 2004 16:15:00 +0000

James Strachan has written about some interesting applications for Groovy, with a link to an excellent discussion of using Groovy in conjunction with Ant. This post also includes, notably, an apology for Jelly.

Mike Spille’s informative Groovy review

Tue, 23 Mar 2004 04:18:44 +0000

Groovy: First Contact provides a detailed look at Groovy’s features and Mike Spille’s likes and dislikes thereof. Here was my comment about the review: Excellent post, indeed. I think it’s important for Groovy to have a Java-like syntax, because that makes it easier to move back and forth between the two languages. I also agree that having more than one way to do things is the slippery slope to Perl (resulting in write/execute-only code — don’t try to read it).

JetBlue CEO understands customer service

Sat, 20 Mar 2004 16:25:33 +0000

Here’s an inspiring (in a businessy sort of way) tale of JetBlue’s CEO doing steward duty on one of their flights. This CEO, Dave Neeleman really puts the customer first, relying on first hand knowledge of customer wants instead of statistics in customer surveys and the like. His tactics are also great for motivating employees, who see their CEO taking all sorts of jobs seriously.

Audio Lunchbox: Unrestricted indie music store

Fri, 19 Mar 2004 22:22:11 +0000

It’s great to see a new site that follows the iTMS pricing model, but offers unrestricted MP3 and Ogg Vorbis files. Audio Lunchbox only has indie tunes, but maybe someday most artists will be “indie” 🙂

Massachusetts unveils open source government code site

Fri, 19 Mar 2004 22:20:10 +0000

Massachusetts Builds Open-Source Public Trough is a big deal, because government is one area where I’m sure the needs are similar from place to place and one city is not really trying to beat another city by having a more efficient DMV. This site will allow government agencies to more easily share software among each other.

Dasani not even as good as tap water in UK

Fri, 19 Mar 2004 21:40:56 +0000

Recently, it was reported that Coca-Cola’s Dasani brand of bottled water is purified tap water in the UK (and most other countries). Now comes news of a recall of Dasani water in the UK The Coca-Cola Co said on Friday it had recalled its entire Dasani range of bottled water from the British market after levels of bromate, a potentially harmful chemical, were found to exceed legal standards. Oops.

Top Ten Reasons That TDD Sucks

Fri, 19 Mar 2004 21:20:43 +0000

With all of that talk about test driven development, I thought I would enumerate why TDD is completely misguided. I never have enough time to write the tests, **[once I’ve finished the main functionality]1**. Testing isn’t my job, because it’s QA’s job to make sure I do quality work. Unit tests don’t help me, because my code works perfectly the first time. Unit tests don’t help me, because my code always works perfectly when I add new features.

A more grim Guantanamo account

Sun, 14 Mar 2004 04:06:21 +0000

A British citizen captured in Afghanistan talks about his hell in Camp X-Ray. This is in stark contrast to the report from a couple of boys that came earlier in the week. It seems somewhat suspicious that the Britisher, Jamal al-Harith, “accidentally” ended up in Afghanistan while he was visiting Pakistan. That aside, this account is quite horrible. If this is accurate, it seems like war crimes charges would be warranted, does it not?

DARPA Grand Challenge: no winners

Sun, 14 Mar 2004 03:58:46 +0000

Not surprisingly, no one won the DARPA Grand Challenge, a 150-mile automated robot driving race. Two robots managed to make it 7 miles, which is actually not bad. That’s a tough challenge, and it will be quite a milestone when someone does end up winning the prize.

Change is a-comin’ in the music biz

Sun, 14 Mar 2004 01:21:27 +0000

Ever since Napster, it was clear that the distribution of music was starting to change. Some recent articles show that there is more change brewing. Huge ’80s success George Michael, who had quite the row with his record label, has announced that he’s only going to release music for free online henceforth. “I’ve been very well remunerated for my talents over the years so I really don’t need the public’s money.

Woman tries to pass $1 million bill at Wal-Mart

Thu, 11 Mar 2004 04:13:02 +0000

Amazing. At first, I thought the tale of the $1 million bill that leads to arrest was one of overzealous enforcement. Everyone’s seen $1 million bills in joke shops, right? But look at the article and see that: Pike [the acused] then tried to use two gift cards worth only $2.32 to buy the merchandise, but when that did not work she again asked to cash the $1 million bill, Cotton said.

JSDT: Shared Data toolkit for Java

Wed, 10 Mar 2004 03:58:50 +0000

Via Ted Neward, here is JSDT: Enterprise developers can use the JSDT software to create network-centric applications, such as shared whiteboards or chat environments. It can also be used for remote presentations, shared simulations, and to easily distribute data for enhanced group workflow. I’m working on a Swing application right now that will quite possibly benefit from this library being available. (It’s LGPL, by the way.)

John Buckman’s Magnatune blog

Mon, 08 Mar 2004 20:03:07 +0000

I’m adding John Buckman’s blog to my blogroll. He’s the founder of Magnatune, the “We are not evil” record label. His talk of why there’s no African music shows how not-evil they are. It’s also great to see that they’ve signed up distribution deals with EMusic, iTunes and Napster. Let’s hear it for the alternative music industry!

Interesting account of the Guantanamo prison

Mon, 08 Mar 2004 19:50:35 +0000

“Cuba? It was great, say boys freed from US prison camp” gives the account of three boys who were captured in Afghanstan and recently released. They certainly paint a rosy picture of Guantanamo for the people worried about the treatment of the prisoners there. I was never really concerned about the prisoners there being tortured or mistreated. My thought has been that they have been detained for years without representation.

AT&T Phone Non-Upgrade

Mon, 08 Mar 2004 18:53:32 +0000

I received a card in the mail from AT&T Wireless, my cellular company, saying that they’re sending me a Sony Ericsson T226 to replace my T68i free of charge. I thought “gee, that’s cool”. Turns out that it’s not really cool at all. The new phone has fewer features (no Bluetooth!). The advantage offered is better reception. A number of people commented that they switched to T-Mobile and happily got better reception and a better phone.

A record of Kerry’s waffling

Fri, 05 Mar 2004 20:14:55 +0000

The article John Kerry’s Waffles – If you don’t like the Democratic nominee’s views, just wait a week. describes a variety of issues on which Kerry’s past statements and voting records contradict what he currently says. On the one hand, I think people should be allowed to change their minds about things, and some of the issues mentioned date back to the ’80s. On the other, some amount of consistency in recent times would certainly be welcome.

Real Life Far Side

Fri, 05 Mar 2004 00:11:40 +0000

Worth1000 has a great PhotoShop contest to create real life versions of Far Side cartoons. Some really nifty ones in there.

Avi Rubin on e-voting

Wed, 03 Mar 2004 19:32:39 +0000

Famed crypotographer and CS geek Avi Rubin wrote a fascinating essay about his day as an election judge. Rubin has been very critical of the security surrounding e-voting systems, and Diebold’s systems in particular. He was a judge in a precinct using Diebold systems. He concluded that while some attacks he was concerned about are not possible, the potential for massive fraud is still far too great and is a real threat to our democracy.

Audacity 1.2 cross-platform sound editor

Tue, 02 Mar 2004 20:40:12 +0000

Now that I’m using my Mac at least as much as my PC at home, a cross-platform sound editor seems like a good thing. Not having to buy one seems like a good thing, too. Audacity is a free, open source, sound editor that works on both the Mac and Windows. On Windows, I’ve already got Sound Forge, so I don’t know how likely it is that I’ll use Audicity there.

How to opt out of credit card offers

Tue, 02 Mar 2004 20:32:45 +0000

A good tip on kuro5hin: How to Stop Receiving Credit Card Offers.

Scott Sullivan pleads guilty, Ebbers to be charged

Tue, 02 Mar 2004 19:45:39 +0000

Former WorldCom (MCI) CFO Scott Sullivan has pleaded guilty to the criminal charges against him that were involved in the $11 billion accounting game they played. Additionally, Attorney General John Ashcroft is to Announce Charges Against Ex-WorldCom CEO, Bernie Ebbers. Ebbers has generally claimed innocence in all of this, so we’ll see in court how much knowledge he actually had of all of this. It’s hard to imagine a CEO not knowing about $11 billion in misdirected accounting.

Rockstar announces Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

Tue, 02 Mar 2004 19:24:33 +0000

I don’t play many games, but I’ve spent a lot of time with GTA3 and Vice City. So, the announcement of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is quite exciting! Hopefully, come October 19th, I’ll be able to scrape up a little time to play!

FactCheck.org continues to keep the pols honest

Tue, 02 Mar 2004 03:41:39 +0000

I’m subscribed to FactCheck.org’s email subscription list, so I receive their updates when they come up. Mozilla had caught them as spam for some reason (I wish the filter would tell me which words triggered this, but I guess the point of Bayesian filtering is to keep the details out of sight). I have just caught up with them. Lots of good stuff, and they certainly do seem balanced, finding fault with statements from Kerry and Bush both.

Charles Miller defends YAGNI

Mon, 01 Mar 2004 22:09:39 +0000

It turns out that there’s no need for me to ever write up a good defense of the “you’re not going to need it” strategy, because Charles Miller has already done so. Sure, nothing applies 100% of the time, but more often than not I think that YAGNI is the right strategy to use.

Return of the King sweeps the Oscars

Mon, 01 Mar 2004 20:03:47 +0000

Lord of the Rings scooped up a few Oscars in the past couple of years, but this year Return of the King won all 11 that it was nominated for. Miramax had reportedly tried to get Peter Jackson replaced as director before deciding to just hand the series over to another studio. That other studio, New Line, took a $300 million gamble to film all three at once. Worldwide box office for the three films is approaching $3 billion.

Report says that suing customers and not giving them good products is bad for business

Mon, 01 Mar 2004 20:00:43 +0000

Or, at least, that’s more or less what the Committee for Economic Development said in their report. This is a Washington-based policy group that has had significant influence in the past and is generally pro-business. They say that there is a fundamental difference between physical product and bits of data and that this difference should be recognized. Unfortunately, the report endorses the private use of DRM (private meaning not mandated by the government).

MSDN article about platform selection even mentions Linux and Mac OS

Sun, 29 Feb 2004 20:14:15 +0000

Eric Sink wrote about choosing software platforms in Be Careful Where You Build on MSDN. Eric has written a number of good, practical articles based on his experience at SourceGear. It shows a lot of editorial integrity that this article appears on MSDN, because it provides realistic portrayals of how things stand with Windows (MFC), Windows (.NET), the Mac, Java and Linux. His central theme is absolutely correct: it’s all about the user.

12 Reasons Gay Marriage Will Ruin Society (not)

Sun, 29 Feb 2004 19:56:40 +0000

I think 12 Reasons Gay Marriage will Ruin Society does a good job of breaking down the arguments against gay marriage. It even makes banning gay marriage sound downright un-American. Heterosexual marriage has been around for a long time, and it hasn’t changed at all: women are property, Blacks can’t marry Whites, and divorce is illegal.

Ballmer chuckles over implementation troubles in Munich

Sun, 29 Feb 2004 03:30:07 +0000

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer chuckles over Linux woes in the Munich rollout, according to the Toronto Star. Apparently, the rollout is turning out to be more expensive than anticipated (and Ballmer is gloating that the Linux TCO is higher). I wonder what the specific problems in Munich are. Are they people problems, or software problems or both? If they’re software problems, then hopefully those problems are being addressed as part of Munich’s work, thus paving the way for other municipalities to roll out Linux.

JK Rowling: writing on napkins to billionaire in less than 10 years

Sun, 29 Feb 2004 02:53:09 +0000

The headline talks about Google pair make billionaire row, referring to Larry Page and Sergey Brin, each estimated at $1 billion. I found it more interesting to see that JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, has become a billionaire. That’s pretty dramatic for someone who writes books to have generated that kind of money in the 21st century.

New EFF music licensing proposal

Fri, 27 Feb 2004 19:46:46 +0000

The EFF has proposed a licensing system for music to replace the existing, starting-to-fail model, in A Better Way Forward: Voluntary Collective Licensing of Music File Sharing. The RIAA, not surprisingly, dismissed the proposal as too drastic. I agree with many of the comments on the slashdot thread. The numbers used in the EFF article are unrealistic. They’re assuming that all 60 million file sharers in the US will pay $5 a month, and that the $3 billion taken in is pure profit, compared to the $11 billion in revenue the RIAA members have today.

Cool Toy Fair products

Wed, 25 Feb 2004 20:02:40 +0000

Though listed as the “Strangest” products at the Toy Fair, some are quite cool. Like #3, the Blade Racers from Dynatech Action. Those sound nifty. Other things, like Ned’s Head, are indeed strange.

Elmore Leonard on writing

Tue, 24 Feb 2004 23:46:53 +0000

Elmore Leonard provides nice tips to avoid getting in the way of the story in: Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle.

Bush endorses amendment banning gay marriage

Tue, 24 Feb 2004 20:21:32 +0000

President Bush has taken the leap and now endorses a Constitutional Amendment banning gay marriage. As the article points out, amending the Constitution is difficult, so let’s hope that this doesn’t pass and put a black mark on our Constitution. I wonder if some of the gay marriage opponents think that legalized gay marriage will somehow mean that their churches will be forced to marry gay couples. The US government can’t do that… the only marriage-related action the government can take is on a civil basis.

Climate change is a new national security threat

Mon, 23 Feb 2004 23:47:12 +0000

The Guardian Observer reports that a secret Pentagon report tells Bush that climate change will destroy us. It’s scary stuff. This report suggests that within 20 years climate change will cause wars over water and energy shortages and mass migrations from places like Europe that will become less inhabitable. The head-in-the-sand, let’s dig up Alaska attitude will undoubtedly have to stop sometime. I didn’t expect that the harm would reach that point within the next twenty years.

Subversion 1.0 released

Mon, 23 Feb 2004 16:38:32 +0000

Finally, and with typical slashdot fanfare, Subversion 1.0 has been released. This is not your typical 1.0, because Subversion has been in development for a long time before being branded 1.0. There are already graphical clients and an Eclipse plugin. Let’s hope those mature quickly to be as seamless as their CVS counterparts, but with the great characteristics that Subversion brings (directory versioning, constant time tagging/branching, WebDAV, etc).

US, Pakistani Officials Deny Knowing bin Laden’s Whereabouts

Mon, 23 Feb 2004 16:16:35 +0000

Yesterday, Britain’s Sunday Express reported that US forces had Osama bin Laden surrounded. Today, U.S., Pakistan Deny They’re Closing in on Osama. Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts remain a mystery to U.S. and Pakistani forces as they crank up efforts to flush out al Qaeda and Taliban rebels hiding near Afghanistan’s eastern frontier, officials said on Monday. I don’t remember where I first read this idea, but someone out there suspected that the US will hold off on capturing or announcing the capture of bin Laden until closer to the election.

321 Studios ordered to stop selling DVD X Copy

Mon, 23 Feb 2004 04:38:27 +0000

In an unfortunate turn, a federal judge has ruled that DVD-copying software is illegal. As I understand it, the notion of Fair Use (which is what allows us to legally make copies of things for our own personal use) is based in legal tradition and not codified directly in law. I guess that means that the DMCA, which outlaws software that circumvents copy protection, trumps Fair Use. The article contains this odd statement:

Making Swing split long words in HTML output

Mon, 23 Feb 2004 04:30:06 +0000

Keith on the Joustlog has a nice tip for joustlog: How to make the Swing HTML renderer split long words when wrapping. Not something I need at the moment, but certainly a good thing to keep in mind. (In case the link rots, the basic idea was to subclass HTMLEditorKit, creating a new ParagraphView that gets returned by a new ViewFactory.)

BSOM greatest hits

Sat, 21 Feb 2004 03:19:42 +0000

I have this site configured to allow comments even on the older posts. I’ve had a little bit of comment spam, but I’ve also noticed that a couple of posts in particular have continued to get comments. India’s President Talks Up Open Source appeared in May of last year. Since then, new comments have appeared in August, November, December, January and again today. And the comments are weird. They’re kinda spam-like, but kinda not.

William Hung: American Idol reject turned mini-star

Sat, 21 Feb 2004 03:11:31 +0000

This is a pretty remarkable story. William Hung had the spotlight on him nearly a month ago for his interesting rendition of Ricky Martin’s “She Bangs” during the American Idol auditions. It’s obvious that the Idol judges send through the best and the worst, hoping to provide some entertainment value at the expense of the less talented among the hopefuls. Hung was undoubtedly sent through for entertainment value. But, I think he has provided more entertainment than anyone anticipated:

Union of Concerned Scientists issues “Integrity in Policymaking” report

Fri, 20 Feb 2004 20:13:15 +0000

Sixty scientists, including twenty Nobel laureates, believe that Bush distorts science: The Union of Concerned Scientists, an independent organization, also issued a 37-page report, “Scientific Integrity in Policymaking,” detailing the accusations. The statement and the report both accuse the Bush administration of distorting and suppressing findings that contradict administration policies, stacking panels with like-minded and underqualified scientists with ties to industry, and eliminating some advisory committees altogether.

Genady’s Java 1.5 Eclipse plugin looks usable!

Fri, 20 Feb 2004 16:26:19 +0000

I was surprised to see the editor screenshot for Genady’s Java 1.5 Eclipse plugin. I thought the plugin only allowed you to compile the code, but didn’t really give you nice integration. From that editor screenshot, it looks like it does give pretty good integration. My group is currently working on internal tools that are due to be released mid-summer, so we could reasonably consider moving to 1.5. I wonder what the 1.

Praise for CGLIB and its creators

Fri, 20 Feb 2004 02:29:35 +0000

Over the past few days, I’ve been doing some work with CGLIB – the Code Generation Library. It’s a great package for times when you want to implement AOP-like features in an efficient manner without classloader monkeying. The package is definitely actively maintained and developed (2.0 final was just released), and Chris Nokleberg and Juozas Baliuka were a big help in resolving some issues I had. Thanks for the great project and support!

Annoying change to Sun’s website

Thu, 19 Feb 2004 20:31:13 +0000

I’m in the habit of using Google to look up Java class APIs. Usually, the first couple of links point to a couple of different versions of the javadoc at Sun’s site. If you don’t care about exactly which version of the javadoc you’re looking at, this generally works fine. But, check out this Google Search for JCheckBox. The first link points to the 1.4.1 javadoc which, as of today, points to a page saying that 1.

Self-Tuning Guitar!

Thu, 19 Feb 2004 19:35:18 +0000

Neat. A company has come up with a way to make guitars self-tuning. They can retrofit your guitar with their gear, so that you can change your tunings in seconds. Pretty nifty.

Curry flavored Kit Kats anyone?

Thu, 19 Feb 2004 19:27:50 +0000

Apparently, Nestle is toying with new KitKat flavors: As well as the cumin and masala flavour, NestlÈ is considering offering lemon cheesecake, liquorice, saffron and passion fruit. Can Curry Puffs Cereal be far behind?

Sun’s 1.5 Generics tutorial

Thu, 19 Feb 2004 18:04:23 +0000

Just what is a Set<?> ??? All the answers are provided in Gilad Bracha’s Generics tutorial, which is a good read for getting into the details of the generics syntax.

Congrats! You owe more than $25,000

Thu, 19 Feb 2004 03:53:03 +0000

Regardless of whatever debts you may personally have, the US national debt now tops $7 trillion: In its daily financial statement released on Wednesday, the Treasury said the U.S. debt subject to a congressionally set limit totaled $7.015 trillion, up from $6.983 trillion on Friday. The government was closed on Monday for the Presidents Day holiday. Assuming 275 million Americans, that means that every American owes more than $25,000.

JSTOR is hiring full-time Java developers in Ann Arbor

Thu, 19 Feb 2004 03:28:01 +0000

JSTOR’s a great place to work. If you’re in the Ann Arbor area, maybe you’ll be interested in doing Java development here.

Java object allocation and deallocation is cheap

Wed, 18 Feb 2004 20:22:47 +0000

I missed this one a couple weeks ago, but Gavin King brought it up in the context of evil finalizers. Java theory and practice: Garbage collection and performance talks about how modern JVMs perform allocation and deallocation of objects and how it’s cheap, so you really shouldn’t make your programs harder to read for anticipated GC-related performance gains.

List of Linux Live CDs

Wed, 18 Feb 2004 19:33:31 +0000

Here’s a very nice list of Live Linux CDs, in case you want to try out Linux without reformatting your hard drive.

Small Dog Electronics replaces iPod batteries

Tue, 17 Feb 2004 19:57:10 +0000

Though my iPod is still new enough that its battery is fine, I’m sure I’ll run into the reported battery problems down the line. According to MacNN, Small Dog offers iPod battery replacements in a do-it-yourself kit for $48. They’ll do the installation for you for an extra $20. These both represent a pretty good discount on Apple’s $99 price.

Swing/multithreaded unit testing tips

Mon, 16 Feb 2004 03:47:56 +0000

Came across a few great links at the Java.net JavaDesktop site. Multithreaded Tests with JUnit describes how to use GroboUtils to manage multithreaded test scenarios. I wrote some tests a couple months ago that really could have benefitted from this. JavaDesktop also linked to jfcUnit for doing tests of Swing code. This looks similar to Jemmy which has worked well for us so far.

People unclear on the Internet

Sat, 14 Feb 2004 04:55:17 +0000

VoIP: It’s not so easy to listen in talks about how it is difficult to wiretap net phone calls. The two providers are prime examples of a problem the Federal Communications Commission now faces after voting Thursday to investigate whether Internet phone providers should rewire their networks to government specifications to provide police with guaranteed access for wiretaps. This quote comes from the author of the article, but probably sums up a real sentiment at the FCC.

Java is not something I’m going to pay for

Sat, 14 Feb 2004 04:48:59 +0000

ESR has called on Sun to open source Java. Sun insists that they want input from outsiders, but don’t want Microsoft to be able to go off and do evil things with Java. If they take a look at Linux, they’d realize that there is power in trademarks for software. Sure, anyone can take Linux and create their own bastardized form of it. But they can’t call it Linux, because Linus owns the name.

Part of Win2K and Win NT 4.0 source leaked

Sat, 14 Feb 2004 04:28:36 +0000

The hunt is on for the folks that leaked code from two of Microsoft’s OS versions. Some parts of the code are reminiscent of [older Win98 leaks][3]. [3]: http://www.hopf.demon.co.uk/humour/win98.txt “”

Somebody get Rumsfeld a copy of the Constitution

Sat, 14 Feb 2004 03:47:15 +0000

Rumsfeld Defends U.S. Policy on Guantanamo Prison “I recognize that in our society the idea of detaining people without lawyers seems unusual, detaining people without trials seems unusual. After all, our country stands for freedom and it stands for the protection of rights,” Rumsfeld said. But he said the prisoners are not “common criminals.” “They’re enemy combatants and terrorists who are being detained for acts of war against our country.

Eclipse 3.0M7 is out!

Fri, 13 Feb 2004 22:50:50 +0000

Go get it, if you can! It doesn’t look like the mirrors have it yet. Check out the Eclipse 3.0 M7 News for all the detail. Here are the things that interest me: Export Standalone Mac OS X apps – very nifty, if you’re a Mac person Content Assist in dialog boxes – which fixes something that’s always bugged me a little… specifically, the New Class dialog box that they show.

DJ Danger Mouse’s Grey Album banned

Fri, 13 Feb 2004 19:21:56 +0000

I saw this coming when I first read about DJ Danger Mouse mixing Jay-Z’s Black Album with the Beatles’ White Album to produce the Grey Album: DJ Danger Mouse’s recent Grey Album […] has been hailed as a innovative hip-hop triumph. Despite that and the fact that only 3,000 copies of the album are in circulation, EMI sent cease and desist letters yesterday to Danger Mouse and the handful of stores that were selling the album, demanding that the album be destroyed.

55+ places to publicize your blog

Fri, 13 Feb 2004 05:36:15 +0000

In case you feel like you’re just not spending enough on bandwidth, here is Robin Good’s RSSTop55 – Best Blog Directory And RSS Submission Sites.

Discussion of Swing components at Glen Smith’s blog

Thu, 12 Feb 2004 20:10:27 +0000

Just dropping in a link to Glen Smith’s blog where there is a little discussion of Commercial Swing Components?. I’m definitely on the lookout for nifty Swing widgets these days. There was a suggestion to check out components made by Claude Duguay in various magazine articles, but these look like they may have the same licensing issues that JavaWorld code does.

Oyoaha’s Java2D-based look and feel

Wed, 11 Feb 2004 23:06:32 +0000

Though it’s not done, Oyoaha has created a Java2D (Avalon-like) Look and Feel. It looks very spiffy and is fully-scaleable, since it’s done in vectors instead of bitmaps. While you’re there, check out Oyoaha’s themeable look and feel, which has some nice themes.

Foul tale of outsourcing gone awry

Tue, 10 Feb 2004 20:21:51 +0000

As seen on Slashdot. A government agency exposed sensitive day-care data on the Net. This data included the schedules of hundreds of children. The data was posted to RentACoder for programming assistance. Why wasn’t this data treated more sensitively? County attorney David Morris said that programming work for the day-care center had been outsourced to the locally-based Genesee Community College. The manager of the college’s program refused to speak to a reporter, but Morris said Dennis was a third party consultant hired by Genesee.

Lawsuit against Janet Jackson dropped

Tue, 10 Feb 2004 16:38:30 +0000

Just a few days after the suit was filed, comes the news that the woman has dropped her lawsuit over Jackson’s stunt. Less than a week after filing a class-action lawsuit because of her outrage over Janet Jackson ‘s Super Bowl stunt, Terri Carlin believes she’s made her point. Is it because she thinks she’s made her point, or because it was a stupid lawsuit that would likely have dragged on for a lot of time, wasting her time, her lawyer’s time (which he apparently wasn’t billing for), and everyone else’s time?

Using the Eclipse plugin system to document your project

Tue, 10 Feb 2004 04:16:43 +0000

Documenting your project using the Eclipse help system is easier than you might think. This article shows you how, step-by-step. The Eclipse help system is pretty powerful, and for people who’ve standardized on Eclipse this seems like a positive idea. Keep in mind that Eclipse help is standard HTML/XML/JSP/whatever running behind Tomcat, so you’re not really tying yourself to Eclipse by adding the plugin wrapper.

Making your blog Google compatible

Tue, 10 Feb 2004 03:25:42 +0000

Dave Pollard discovered that his blog has stopped indexing in Google. The comments provided all sorts of good reasons why, which a number of useful tips and links for fixing the problem. Luckily, my blog has continued to appear in Google searches, but these tips are things for me to keep in mind.

Australia to mess up their IP laws

Mon, 09 Feb 2004 18:50:32 +0000

I seem to remember that one of the reasons the government supported the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act was to harmonize with other countries. Now, Australia is signing up for the United States – Australia Free Trade Agreement which, in part: Harmonises our intellectual property laws more closely with the largest intellectual property market in the world, which is recognised as a global leader in innovation and creative products.

Good week for quotes

Mon, 09 Feb 2004 02:24:10 +0000

Here’s a dandy article about how hard it is to gain access to public records in Florida, despite the Constitution guaranteeing that access. The amusing quote regards one county superintendent who refused to turn over his cell phone bill: “He could have been a terrorist,” Howard said. “We have to ensure the safety of children.” Howard couldn’t explain how a terrorist might use his cell phone bill to harm children.

Music industry not dead yet – but record stores will be

Sun, 08 Feb 2004 16:04:42 +0000

A couple of new articles about the state of the music biz. Music Business Registers Pulse in Time for Grammys is one of these “business is up, despite some failures” sort of articles. After all, sales are relatively sluggish for the latest releases by such acts as rock bands Limp Bizkit and P.O.D., pop singers Pink and Britney Spears (news), rapper Missy Elliott and Latino crooner Enrique Iglesias. For some reason people are still surprised when albums from established artists don’t do well.

MacBand: a place to share loops and songs

Sat, 07 Feb 2004 04:33:31 +0000

MacBand.com is a site allowing people to exchange their GarageBand creations. It’ll be interesting to see (a) if they can pay their bandwidth bill and (b) if any good music shows up.

Class action suit filed against Janet Jackson and others

Fri, 06 Feb 2004 20:43:43 +0000

Wow. First, Snopes posted a story about a fake lawsuit against Janet Jackson. Now comes the news of a real lawsuit: A Tennessee woman has filed a class action suit against Janet Jackson and others involved in her breast-baring Super Bowl halftime show, saying millions of people are owed monetary damages for exposure to lewd conduct, court records showed on Friday. Sure, people can sue for anything… but, wow.

Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind Of Science is online

Fri, 06 Feb 2004 20:25:22 +0000

I’ve been curious about reading Wolfram’s A New Kind Of Science for a while, but not quite curious enough to shell out the dough yet. Now I don’t have to… They’ve put the entire book online for reading. If I start reading it and like what I see, I’ll likely buy the book… but this is a good way to check it out. Which reminds me… I’ve really come to the conclusion that the 30 second song samples that are commonplace in online music stores suck.

JSTOR has Java contract work in Ann Arbor

Fri, 06 Feb 2004 20:04:13 +0000

If you, or anyone you know, is a good Java developer in the Ann Arbor, Michigan area and you’d like a fun contract gig for the next few months, send me mail! (Use the link on my blog). This is an XP-style project, so if that frightens you, you might think twice about it. The work involves creating Swing-based tools (persisted in a database using Hibernate) to manage the process of QA-ing more than 2 million pages of content annually.

Explicit silence: only 99 cents

Fri, 06 Feb 2004 03:46:00 +0000

Crank it! iTunes sells sounds of silence–for real Even more humorously, three of the tracks–all titled “Silent” and all by hip-hop group Slum Village–are labeled as explicit, even though there is only silence. For those who worry that the lack of sound will be too racy, iTunes offers “clean versions” as well.

Make Your Swing App Go Native, Part 3

Fri, 06 Feb 2004 03:34:43 +0000

Joshua Marinacci rounded out his three part series on making a native-feeling Swing app. In the third part, he talks about adding icons, compressing the finished product and adding a splash screen. A most excellent tutorial that may even lead to some better looking Swing apps. I’ve actually noticed a bit of an uptick recently in decent Swing apps, since I started using a Mac. When you look for alternatives to Windows apps, you sometimes find some really nice ones.

Look and Feel improvements in J2SE 1.5

Fri, 06 Feb 2004 02:55:59 +0000

Brian Duff talks about the new Look and Feel features in J2SE 1.5. I didn’t even realize that they had made these improvements! Very nice, since I’m doing Swing right now. Of course, you can bet that I haven’t been using the awful Metal look and feel. Plastic (from JGoodies) and Skin L&F are both quite cool.

Eclipse 3.0 plan updated, M7 due next week

Thu, 05 Feb 2004 21:11:21 +0000

The Eclipse Project Draft 3.0 Plan was revised on January 30th. There are some more items marked completed, some things that have been deferred. Still no clue as to when 1.5 features will start to land. 3.0M7 is due a week from tomorrow.

The height of ridiculousness

Thu, 05 Feb 2004 19:35:12 +0000

Personally, I think the whole “Janet Jackson Superbowl” thing is overblown. I wish America would take a cue from Europe: be more critical of violence on TV than sex and nudity. Regardless of what one thinks of the Super Bowl spectacle, not allowing JC Chasez to perform at the Pro Bowl is just downright crazy. Due to the controversy caused by the Justin Timberlake-Janet Jackson boobgate, the NFL has decided to cancel a halftime performance by Timberlake’s fellow ‘N Syncer, JC Chasez, NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy confirmed to E!

Cory Doctorow releases “Eastern Standard Tribe” with CC license

Wed, 04 Feb 2004 21:57:37 +0000

Cory Doctorow has just released Eastern Standard Tribe, his second novel. His first, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom apparently sold very well and I seem to remember Entertainment Weekly naming it one of the best of 2003. The link above goes to Cory’s page where he talks about the future of publishing and why Down and Out and Eastern Standard Tribe are out in CC licenses. The thing that’s extraordinary about that first novel is that it was released under terms governed by a Creative Commons license that allowed my readers to copy the book freely and distribute it far and wide.

Windows Domain Authentication via JAAS

Wed, 04 Feb 2004 16:15:43 +0000

Tagish’s free (LGPL) JAAS Modules “perform user authentication against a number of mechanisms including a Windows NT (or 2000) domain.” That sounds handy.

What bothers me about iTunes Music Service

Wed, 04 Feb 2004 03:05:16 +0000

I like the iTunes Music Service, but I do have a problem with it, which I’ll get to farther down in this article. iTunes for Windows and Mac iSbogus is a nicely done commentary on iTunes. Nicely done, but I’m starting to disagree with the message there. Ever since Napster hit it big in ’99, many people have been justifying their file sharing by saying that the artists don’t get any of the money anyhow.

Can JavaWorld tips be used for anything?

Tue, 03 Feb 2004 05:36:42 +0000

JavaWorld has published a good deal of potentially useful information, and it’s a shame to see them stop. I say “potentially useful” because it’s hard to tell if you’re actually allowed to use the information. Take a look at the JavaWorld.com Copyright Information. It’s all standard seeming stuff for a publication… no reprints or redistribution, except for personal, non-commercial use. That seems fine for articles, but there are useful pieces of code there.

Bush announces $2.4 trillion insanity

Mon, 02 Feb 2004 17:42:20 +0000

Not surprisingly, the proposed $2.4 trillion budget includes deepest cuts for Agriculture and the EPA. I’m not as familiar with the Agriculture Dept, but Bush has certainly not been a friend to the EPA. This budget includes a $521 billion deficit. That’s like $2,000 per person in the US. There are three of us in my household, so that’s like Bush grabbing my credit card and charging up $6,000 of my money, albeit at a much better interest rate than a credit card typically offers.

Pack ant task: smallest set of classes needed to run

Thu, 29 Jan 2004 22:31:54 +0000

Joel raised maybe slightly less hubbub than usual with his latest article Please Sir May I Have A Linker?. In there, he rants about the giant size of the .NET runtime and his desire to just include the classes he needs. Though this doesn’t eliminate the need for the Java runtime, Ant Task” href=”http://sadun-util.sourceforge.net/pack.html”>The Ant Task does give you one jar file with everything you need (and no more!). (*) Assuming it works as advertised… I haven’t tried it yet.

Virtual Private Servers for hosting

Thu, 29 Jan 2004 19:54:48 +0000

Joe Cheng writes about using virtual private servers for your hosting. For only $20/month you get root access to a virtual server, giving you full access to run whatever code you need to run. That’s really, really cool. I’m quite happy with my $8.45/month service that I have now through Sitelutions, but there are times when being able to run any arbitrary software seems nice.

Gavin King on Hibernate Performance

Wed, 28 Jan 2004 17:00:05 +0000

If you missed this from the Keith Pitty’s mention yesterday, Gavin King has written up some Hibernate performance tips.

ServerSide series on Naked Objects

Wed, 28 Jan 2004 16:37:59 +0000

The Server Side is presenting The Naked Object Architecture Series, which is an interesting comparison of the Naked Objects approach vs. a standard Swing approach. The discussion attached to the link is also interesting. I have had a tendency to think that using a generated UI would not be as productive for our users as a custom-tuned, task-oriented UI. The Naked Objects folks have some more info coming up about this topic, so I’ll have to keep an eye out for that.

Get that man some ribs!

Mon, 26 Jan 2004 17:29:06 +0000

On January 22nd, at 11:25AM MST, there were these Remarks by the President to the Press Pool: THE PRESIDENT: I need some ribs. Q Mr. President, how are you? THE PRESIDENT: I’m hungry and I’m going to order some ribs. This is a fairly amusing exchange. I tell ya, reporters have no respect. As Bush said, this was not a press conference, but the reporters just have to get their questions in.

Groovy 1.3b3 out – lots of stuff

Sun, 25 Jan 2004 22:43:22 +0000

James Strachan announced the release of Groovy 1.0b3, and it’s clear that a lot of work has gone into this release. Groovy looks to be shaping up very nicely. Now if only they’d add “import foo.bar.*” 🙂

LibDB: software and model for cataloging stuff

Sun, 25 Jan 2004 17:59:11 +0000

I’ll need to read more about Morbus Iff’s LibDB, because I am very much in a library/cataloging world.

Greatest Superbowl Commercials

Sun, 25 Jan 2004 16:57:59 +0000

CBS is going to have a greatest Superbowl commercials special, and this page has their top 10.

NYTimes misappropriates Copyleft

Sat, 24 Jan 2004 20:37:20 +0000

It’s great to see an article like The Tyranny of Copyright? in the mainstream press (NYTimes in this case). Most people are probably not aware of the culture theft that is going on. It’s unfortunate that they use the term Copy Left to represent this “movement”, because the FSF which coined the term “copyleft” is far anti-copyright. The folks like Lessig and myself are pro-reasonable copyright.

Furl: your web page filing cabinet

Sat, 24 Jan 2004 16:48:16 +0000

Some folks have started a new service called Furl which allows you to archive and search interesting pages you find on the web. Unlike a bookmark or a blog post, they actually store the content. So, if the original site goes away, you still have a copy of the content. Very nice, if it doesn’t run afoul of copyright laws.

Discussion of when to use EJBs

Fri, 23 Jan 2004 20:43:26 +0000

Via Bill Dudney comes an informative discussion of when to and not to use EJB. (Many people seem to conclude that very rarely do you actually need to use EJB.)

Google employees get to work on personal projects

Fri, 23 Jan 2004 20:24:02 +0000

With the announcement that Google Releases Orkut Social Networking Service comes this interesting nugget: All employees at Google are allowed to spend twenty percent of their time working on personal interests, a policy Google has to encourage creativity. What an amazing policy! Many companies would look at that as wasted time, which it would be if you had lackluster, unenthusiastic employees. But if you’ve got employees that dig what they do, this seems like a great way to experiment in whole new areas (while making employees that much happier).

Simple tricks for more usable web forms

Fri, 23 Jan 2004 20:20:55 +0000

A concise and code-filled article that gives you Simple Tricks for More Usable Forms.

Super Size Me: foolish anti-McD documentary

Fri, 23 Jan 2004 20:20:17 +0000

Super Size Me is the documentary created by a guy who ate nothing but McDonald’s food for a month: Within a few days of beginning his drive-through diet, Spurlock, 33, was vomiting out the window of his car, and doctors who examined him were shocked at how rapidly Spurlock’s entire body deteriorated. This seems amazingly obvious, particularly because he was probably trying to eat unhealthy food. Tell ya what… try another experiment.

My Yahoo! adds RSS feed reading!

Fri, 23 Jan 2004 20:16:05 +0000

Jeremy Zawodny talks about the launch of My Yahoo! RSS Beta. Way cool. I’m already a My Yahoo! user, and this may be just the thing for me to kick the Amphetadesk habit. My Yahoo! is great, because I can access it everywhere. I use the Amphetadesk outline view, and would be interested in a presentation somewhat more like that.

The Ant Rebellion

Fri, 23 Jan 2004 16:42:06 +0000

Jon Tirsen, Martin Fowler, and Bruce Eckel have all written recently about stumbling blocks that they’ve run into with Ant. The problem is that Ant is great when it does what you want, but if something doesn’t do what you need, there’s no full-fledged programming language to get the job done. So, Jon uses Ruby to control his build, Martin has started playing with Rake (a Ruby-based make), and Bruce is generating his Ant build files.

FactCheck.org: a site to watch

Fri, 23 Jan 2004 04:11:49 +0000

FactCheck.org – Annenberg Political Fact Check is a non-partisan fact checking group (apparently out of U of Pennsylvania) that attempts to correct errors that come up during political speeches and commercials. This looks like a good site to watch during this election, as both Bush and Dean have been shown to have interesting interpretations of the facts along the way.

MySQL graphical administration tool

Thu, 22 Jan 2004 19:50:27 +0000

Sure, there are plenty of web and rich client GUIs for managing MySQL, but none look as spiffy as MySQL AB’s just announced MySQL Administrator. That looks very slick, and I think the timing is good as MySQL’s feature set grows to handle more “enterprise class” applications. GPL/commercial license, soon to be available for Windows and Linux.

Mirkwood Designs Cut Out Templates

Thu, 22 Jan 2004 19:32:39 +0000

Mirkwood Designs – Templates cover a bunch of box and card designs. Never know when this kind if thing will come in handy.

State of the Union by the numbers

Wed, 21 Jan 2004 19:43:17 +0000

The Independent has gathered up a bunch of stats to show the real state of the union, and it’s not pretty. Some figures seem to be there for dramatic effect and are not very meaningful. Some are enlightening, though. (Did you know that 88% of American households will save less than $100 because of the capital gains cuts, whereas Cheney will save more than $100,000?)

America as a One-Party State

Tue, 20 Jan 2004 22:54:19 +0000

Robert Kuttner wrote [“America as a One-Party State”][1], which describes how the current Republican party roster has been making dramatic process changes that essentially shut out the Democrats and make it difficult for the Democrats to regain control. If the Democrats win the White House this year, that will certainly make things more difficult in this particular Republican agenda. [1]: http://www.prospect.org/print-friendly/print/V15/2/kuttner-r.html “”

WordNet: lexical database for the English language

Tue, 20 Jan 2004 20:16:56 +0000

I don’t have a use for WordNet right now, but it seems like the kind of thing that may be useful later. WordNet provides synonym sets for the English language that represent one underlying lexical concept. This can be useful if you have software that needs to figure out what someone has written.

Win2VNC: control another machine as if it was another monitor

Tue, 20 Jan 2004 20:00:09 +0000

What a great idea! Win2VNC gives you the standard VNC functionality of controlling another machine. The way it does it is really spiffy, though… you go to the edge of your monitor and all of a sudden, you’re looking at the other machine’s screen! Just like dual monitors, only with multiple computers!

JForm Swing data binding and validation framework

Tue, 20 Jan 2004 17:09:15 +0000

Via JavaGeek, I came across JForm which does data binding and validation. The approach looks interesting, but it is different from one I have been thinking of. I’ve been thinking of something that does data binding in a dynamically typed manner, which provides quite a bit of flexibility for the kind of data model you’re working with. JForm does implement some interesting features, though, such as automatic validation and highlighting of the field that is being edited.

Musicplasma: the music visual search engine

Tue, 20 Jan 2004 17:02:35 +0000

musicplasma : the music visual search engine is exactly what it sounds like. It visually helps you find artists you might like. You enter an artist and it creates a maps that shows connections between artists in terms of artists that people tend to like. Search for “Nirvana”, and it’s not surprising that many Nirvana fans like the Foo Fighters. There are a number of other bands that match for Nirvana that might not be quite as obvious.

Kerry, Edwards, then Dean in Iowa

Tue, 20 Jan 2004 16:51:12 +0000

In a sure sign that money is not everything, former front runner Howard Dean came in third in the Iowa caucuses with just 18%. Kerry won Iowa with 38%, followed by Edwards with 32%. Makes it look like a whole different race! May the best man win, because we need a good candidate come November.

Bright Side Factory: components to make EJB/J2EE easier

Tue, 20 Jan 2004 03:51:52 +0000

I need to read a bit more in depth about the Bright Side Factory, which aims to ease J2EE/EJB development by providing common components. The Smart Value Object sub-project sounds interesting, because it tracks changes to graphs of objects.

Revised Reviews: iTrip and Roomba

Sat, 17 Jan 2004 03:53:29 +0000

It’s been nearly two months since we got Roomba, and despite my initial glowing review, it’s going back to the store. Roomba really worked quite well at first (or at least the first couple of rooms worth). Since then, Roomba consistently stops well before its done, giving the unhappy sounding tune that says there’s a problem. We’ve extensively cleaned it, made sure it was charged, made sure there were no obstacles for it to get stuck on (it would stop and complain in the middle of the room, anyhow).

Agility and rewriting code

Fri, 16 Jan 2004 03:44:46 +0000

Neil Gunton somehow managed to get Rewrites Considered Harmful? posted to Slashdot. As others pointed out (and the author himself posted on his article), Joel has written a better piece about this same topic. (Joel is an excellent writer, so that’s not really meant as a knock against Neil. I’m certainly not as good a writer as Joel.) The interesting bit here is the discussion on Slashdot. There were a lot of comments along the lines of “specs can’t go that far in the future” or “sometimes rewrites are necessary because the code is too hard to work with”.

MovableType 2.66: eliminates value of comment spam

Thu, 15 Jan 2004 21:22:03 +0000

The new version of movabletype (2.66) includes a feature to prevent someone from flooding you with comment spam. A change I think is more important, however, is this one: Also in 2.66, we’ve changed the behavior of <$MTCommentAuthorLink$> to use redirects when linking to URLs given in comments. The goal of this is to defeat the PageRank boost given to spammers by posting in the comments on a weblog.

WeWriteOnline taken over by porn

Thu, 15 Jan 2004 18:33:30 +0000

Weird. It’s been a while since this blog became Blue Sky On Mars. Prior to that, it was WeWriteOnline.org. I didn’t think there were really that many links into that site, or that many people reading it. Blue Sky On Mars has been the most popular incarnation of this blog (which was started in June 2001). So, I let the WeWriteOnline.org domain name lapse. Oddly enough, the domain name was then registered by a porn site.

New on the blogroll: Erik Thauvin

Thu, 15 Jan 2004 18:22:23 +0000

I have a fairly small blogroll, because I don’t look at that many sites frequently. However, I think I’ve been missing out by not following Erik’s Weblog. JavaBlogs has been good, but Erik provides a bit more “concentrated” output. There’s a bit less spiralling, a bit less bile, and a bit less debate over who’s blogging anonymously. Everything you want in a tech blog 🙂

Jon Eaves: TDD is like teenage sex

Thu, 15 Jan 2004 18:12:52 +0000

Don’t let the title fool you. TDD is like teenage sex makes some good points about test-driven development and includes a number of nice links. TDD is the biggest change to my programming style since objects came along.

iReport GUI report designer for JasperReports

Thu, 15 Jan 2004 03:31:44 +0000

I haven’t looked at database reporting tools any time recently. Via Niel Eyde, I discovered that there is a spiffy GUI designer for JasperReports called iReport. It looks like a spiffy tool, and I have a feeling that I’ll be developing some database reports in the next few months. Luckily, some folks have already thought about Using JasperReports with Hibernate.

RipDigital will rip your CD collection for you

Wed, 14 Jan 2004 21:20:07 +0000

What a great business idea! RipDigital will take your CDs in, rip them at high quality, and send you back MP3s on DVD-ROM or a hard drive. I remember how long it took to rip our collection of CDs a few years back. They’ve priced the service to make it a good deal relative to the amount of time a person would spend ripping. It’s a great business for them, though, because they only need to rip the songs once!

Fowler brands IoC “Dependency Injection”

Wed, 14 Jan 2004 21:01:08 +0000

Martin Fowler provides a good dissection of the current lightweight container hullabaloo. He’s promoting the term “Dependency Injection” over “Inversion of Control”, because IoC is a bit generic for the pattern. The article also contrasts Dependency Injection with the Service Locator pattern, and does a nice job of list the pros and cons of each approach. For Dependency Injection, he ultimately sides with PicoContainer’s constructor injection approach, admitting that ThoughtWorks folks are involved in PicoContainer’s development.

Colin “Balloonfoot” Powell?

Wed, 14 Jan 2004 20:04:53 +0000

Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill has backtracked on earlier claims that Bush was intent upon invading Iraq from the moment he entered office. That may be the case, but the big story is that W. insists on giving nicknames to his staff! The president immediately began calling [Treasury Secretary O’Neill] “Pablo.” Later he started calling his treasury secretary “Big O.” He said Bush called Secretary of State Colin Powell “Balloonfoot.

Bush In 30 Seconds: home grown political commercials

Wed, 14 Jan 2004 04:08:31 +0000

For anyone who doubted that this election is any different from ones previous, check out Bush in 30 Seconds, a contest sponsored by MoveOn. A thousand commercials were submitted, and the judges picked 4 to highlight. A contest like this would have been inconceivable in the days prior to cheap digital video and Internet distribution. The contest winner, which I think is a great commercial that uses strong imagery to talk about the problem with the budget deficit, will be aired on TV.

Former Treasury Secretary misrepresenting his documentation

Tue, 13 Jan 2004 21:24:10 +0000

This week former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill and author Ron Suskind have been on the attack, making claims that the Bush administration was planning to invade Iraq well before 9⁄11. The claims are believable, because this administration has had a bit of a credibility problem. But, this article: Power Line: Lid Blown Off O’Neill/Suskind Hoax shows that some of O’Neill’s claims seem to be a bit of a stretch: So the “smoking gun” documents that Suskind and O’Neill claim prove that the administration was planning to invade Iraq in March 2001 are part of a package that includes identical documents relating to the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

Vasanth Dharmaraj: Keeping Eclipse plugins separate

Tue, 13 Jan 2004 20:37:16 +0000

An excellent tip from Vasanth Dharmaraj providing an easy way to drag your third party plugins along as you move between versions of Eclipse: Here is how to do it: Create a folder called ‘links’ in your eclipse directory. Create a file with the extension .link, say plugins.link. Open the file and add a line ‘path=c:\myplugins’ and save the file. Create the directory mentioned in the link file.

Bush Attacks Cuba and Other Latin America Rivals

Tue, 13 Jan 2004 16:05:15 +0000

Reuters needs to be careful with their headlines. In this time of preemptive warmaking, Bush Attacks Cuba and Other Latin America Rivals could be interpreted as being a bit more dire than it is.

Irresponsibility at Amazon.com

Tue, 13 Jan 2004 03:20:46 +0000

Searching for “old fart” at Amazon.com today produces this page with billionaire Jeff Bezos dressed as Austin Powers. The unbelievable irresponsibility of this! The programmers should be fired for pulling a stunt like this! There could be hundreds of people out there, trying to find the thousands of “Old Fart” products on Amazon today, only to be turned away by Bezos’ smiling face. Amazon could be losing literally dollars in sales.

What I tested wasn’t really a mock

Mon, 12 Jan 2004 23:58:13 +0000

Aslak Hellesoy’s uncommon sense – Oh no, we’re testing the Mock! describes an anti-pattern (and I agree with him here) about testing a subclass of the class you’re trying to test, rather than the class itself. In his example, he used inversion of control to make things easier to test, which is great. Unfortunately, I had a case a few months ago where implementing his anti-pattern seemed the simplest and most reasonable testing solution (below is my comment to his post):

Ward Cunningham: To Plan or Not To Plan

Mon, 12 Jan 2004 22:54:40 +0000

Part 3 of Bill Venners interview with Ward Cunningham: To Plan or Not To Plan What you end up doing is this: in your head you think, “Oh! Oh! I know how this is going to come out!” But then you think, “Well, it will come out soon enough.” You could discuss it, but it will come out soon enough. You see stuff coming, but you ask yourself, “How would I make things better by discussing it?

iPhoto Library Manager

Mon, 12 Jan 2004 21:53:26 +0000

The iPhoto Library Manager makes it easy to manage multiple iPhoto libraries. I’ve been thinking about this recently, because my iPhoto library is currently 750MB and will undoubtedly grow very quickly. My PowerBook only has a 40GB drive, so there’s only so much space for media directly on my machine. The ability to move older pictures into a separate, network-connected iPhoto library would be nice.

AmazingMail: custom postcards snail mailed for $1

Sun, 11 Jan 2004 17:30:18 +0000

Real Photo Postcards via US Mail – AmazingMail. $0.95 each for fifty… Not a bad way to do Christmas postcards.

Weed: file-sharing and multi-level marketing

Sun, 11 Jan 2004 13:59:38 +0000

Slashdot is reporting that Sir Mix-A-Lot is using Weed to distribute music. Weed is a rather nifty sounding DRM/file-sharing combo that lets you preview music. If you buy it and share it, you get a cut of the sales of your shared music. While I find DRM generally annoying, at least here is someone trying to do something truly innovative with it.

Why do the music services vary in selection?

Sat, 10 Jan 2004 05:33:04 +0000

This is an oddity. Napster and Walmart both have Nickelback songs online, including their current “Someday”. Walmart also has Linkin Park songs, but not “Numb” (or anything else from Meteora). Since it appears that Linkin Park has agreed to single song downloads, why don’t Napster and Walmart have everything by them? Is it because they want to sell as many traditional CDs as they can before releasing for single-song downloads?

Minor problem with John Walker’s JavaScrypt lean

Fri, 09 Jan 2004 22:48:09 +0000

John Walker’s really nifty JavaScrypt: Browser-Based Cryptography Tools comes in a monolithic “lean” version, which you can theoretically cart around with you and use on demand. I discovered that this version wasn’t working for me offline, because utf-8.js was still externally referenced. This would be super simple for John to fix, but he doesn’t have any contact info on his website. So, I’ll post this here and maybe he’ll eventually notice 🙂

What happened to separation of church and state?

Fri, 09 Jan 2004 20:22:20 +0000

A choice quote from Dean Says Faith Swayed Decision on Gay Unions (washingtonpost.com): Polls show voters want a religious president and one who talks about faith. Actually, there’s nothing wrong with either of those aspects… as long as religion doesn’t turn into policy.

Fontifier: get your handwriting in a font for free

Thu, 08 Jan 2004 20:14:46 +0000

Fontifier makes it easy to get your handwriting into a font. I’m not sure why anyone would want to read my handwriting, but it’s a neat thing anyhow.

More JGoodies coming

Thu, 08 Jan 2004 17:17:40 +0000

The JavaDesktop Forums has a thread in which Karsten Lentzsch talks about additional java desktop goodies he’ll be releasing later this year (a data binding framework and a validation framework, as well as a demo app that ties it all together). I’ve been following the discussions about java desktop app building because I’ve been working through some data binding ideas as well.

What’s in Mac OS X

Thu, 08 Jan 2004 16:57:40 +0000

Amit Singh put together a great overview of what all is part of Mac OS X. It’s a great introduction for people like myself who are fairly new to the Mac… What is Mac OS X?

My Favorite Songs of 2003

Thu, 08 Jan 2004 03:18:53 +0000

This is not a top 10 list, because 10 is such an arbitrary number. These are the songs that I really, really liked this year and that I am likely to continue to listen to in the coming years. There are plenty of other songs that I’ve enjoyed on one level or another, but that just don’t have that guaranteed replay value for me (“Hey Ya!” by OutKast comes to mind as an example of this).

Apple debuts GarageBand music software

Tue, 06 Jan 2004 20:29:46 +0000

Apple has just announced GarageBand, a new part of their iLife series. It’s a digital music studio program including 64 track mixing, 1000 included audio loops, 200 effects, 50 software-based instruments. I’m a longtime Cakewalk user on the PC, so this is a cool announcement. Laptop music editing is becoming increasingly popular, and GarageBand should make it easy for me to record some tracks at home on the PC and edit/mix them on my Mac laptop.

Ward Cunningham on dealing with new requirements

Tue, 06 Jan 2004 19:29:23 +0000

Via Bill de hÓra, here’s an interview with Ward Cunningham: Working the Program. A great bit on how you accomplish emergent design: But the nature of the work is first changing the program so the new requirement is an easy fit, and then doing the easy work to incorporate the requirement. In other words, instead of patching the new requirement onto an architecture that was not made to accommodate it, just buckle down and do the hard work to change the architecture so the requirement is easy to implement.

DVD-Jon breaks iTunes encryption

Tue, 06 Jan 2004 19:08:34 +0000

Jon Johansen has broken the encryption on iTunes files, allowing them to be played under Linux. Jon has twice prevailed in Norwegian courts for his decryption of DVDs. This is great news for anyone who has started buying music from iTMS, because it can really future-proof your purchase.

Building Native-feeling Swing apps, part 2

Tue, 06 Jan 2004 18:20:53 +0000

Joshua Marinacci continues his excellent three part series with Make Your Swing App Go Native, Part 2 in which he talks about packaging up your app like a “real” desktop app.

Eclipse 3.0M6 classloader is a little wonky

Tue, 06 Jan 2004 18:15:43 +0000

I had a BeanShell script to configure a Hibernate Session that was working before Christmas. It stopped working, and I just traced the problem to Eclipse. For those of you following the Eclipse 3.0 track, there appears to have been an odd change to the classloader that can cause problems under certain circumstances… In 3.0M5, SomeClass.class.getClassLoader() returns a reasonable classloader. In M6, that returns null, which can certainly throw things off when they’re expecting a valid classloader.

Impressed by World Idol

Tue, 06 Jan 2004 16:46:14 +0000

I’ll soon be posting my favorite songs of 2003 list. I’m definitely a pop music person. I finished watching the competition show for World Idol. Yes, I know the outcome (because the linked article says what the outcome is). I was impressed by a couple of things. 1) The music performed covered a wider range than American Idol tended to. You can only handle so many Diane Warren ballads, and it was nice to see some other stuff performed.

Nick Bradbury on software piracy

Mon, 05 Jan 2004 18:45:25 +0000

Nick Bradbury, author of TopStyle and FeedDemon laments the cost of piracy to his business. There is some interesting discussion in the trackbacks, including some pointers as to why the figures Nick uses aren’t accurate. Anyone who creates intellectual property today has to deal with the reality of the Internet. Distributing digital goods costs folks next to nothing, and cheesing people off with copy protection is not a good strategy for trying to prevent loss of sales.

Paul Graham: What You Can’t Say

Mon, 05 Jan 2004 04:13:11 +0000

What You Can’t Say is a great essay on open minded thinking by Paul Graham. In it, he frames a historical and cultural basis for identifying thoughts that people are trying to supress. He stresses that you should be open in your thinking, even if you don’t outwardly express everything you’re thinking. I wonder how many people think the whole notion of attacking taboos in general is heretical? As he points out in the beginning, this article is also useful for people publishing weblogs.

One more comment about Pluto

Sat, 03 Jan 2004 22:43:42 +0000

Not everyone has the oodles of time it would take to set up a system that does what Pluto does. The current Wired has a picture of a house that a guy spent $2.5 million outfitting with goodies. I bet some portion of that went to consultants that installed and configured everything. That’s Pluto’s business… making this accessible for people without years to burn on this stuff.

Why Pluto is $15000

Sat, 03 Jan 2004 22:34:06 +0000

Since you can’t read their site because of the slashdotting, I thought I would mention what that $15K buys. It’s not a single box… For that price, you get the Pluto Core, which is the Linux-based server. You get some number (unclear to me how many) of media distributors (PCs with DVD drives and network interfaces) that hook up to your TV and the Core to show video and play music.

Pluto: Linux-based do-everything system

Sat, 03 Jan 2004 03:22:36 +0000

Ever wanted an easy-to-configure, whole-house, internet-accessible, Linux-based VOIP PBX with video, PVR, firewall/router, security system, MP3 player, file server, personal web server, home automation (lights, thermostat) controller? I just came across the Pluto which claims to do all of this (and more, of course!). It’ll set you back $15,000 if you’re living in a small bachelor pad, but you didn’t need that car anyway, did you? After 14 failed attempts, I finally got something posted to Slashdot.

FastCompany on the problem with Apple

Wed, 24 Dec 2003 19:38:30 +0000

An excellent, and I think accurate, article from FastCompany: If He’s So Smart…Steve Jobs, Apple, and the Limits of Innovation. There’s one last essential element to successful innovation that has often been missing at Apple: follow-through. This is why next year is going to be very interesting. Apple will either show some serious follow-through with their music strategy, or they will become an also-ran. There have been so many products competing with iTunes and iPod over the past few weeks that a wrong turn can seriously knock Apple down.

Woah. SnipSnap made a release!

Wed, 24 Dec 2003 16:38:24 +0000

I’ve been following the development of SnipSnap and was amazed to discover SnipSnap v0.5a-Farnham released. I thought they were just going to keep adding features and refactoring around the latest nifty Java gizmo to come out.

Digital imaging for personal recordkeeping?

Wed, 24 Dec 2003 03:11:31 +0000

If the legal issues can be worked out, someone should develop a digital recordkeeping system for mere mortals (as opposed to MegaCorps). Just look at Fool.com: Records You Need to Keep, and you can see how even average folk can get buried in a mountain of paperwork.

Amusing ways to ruin Return of the King

Wed, 24 Dec 2003 00:16:04 +0000

BBspot – Top 11 Ways Peter Jackson Could Ruin The Return of the King

Win The Onion Platinum Prestige Encore Gold Premium Collector’s Collection

Tue, 23 Dec 2003 22:39:22 +0000

This contest is just too cool: Blogstakes presents: The Onion Platinum Prestige Encore Gold Premium Collector’s Collection

Good time to support the EFF

Tue, 23 Dec 2003 22:26:29 +0000

As Larry Lessig points out, the EFF is doing a lot of work to make sure that our technology stays usable and innovation continues, despite pressure that existing monopolies and IP holders will bring to bear. Donations are tax-deductible.

Saddam believed to have been captured by Kurds before US

Tue, 23 Dec 2003 22:23:51 +0000

I’d imagine Bush will continue to get the credit for Saddam’s capture despite stuff like this in the press: Yahoo! News – Saddam was held by Kurdish forces, drugged and left for US troops “Saddam was not captured as a result of any American or British intelligence. We knew that someone would eventually take their revenge, it was just a matter of time.”

Charity Navigator: intelligent giving

Mon, 22 Dec 2003 21:32:12 +0000

This time of year, assuming all of the money hasn’t gone into Christmas gifts, it’s always a nice thing to think about donating to a worthy cause. How do you know which causes are worthy? Charity Navigator is certainly one way! They take a look at how well a charity uses the money you give them, so that you can choose who will best make use of the money that you provide.

Eclipse 3.0 M6 is out!

Mon, 22 Dec 2003 18:35:19 +0000

I had forgotten about the impending Eclipse 3.0 M6 release. It looks like they’re moving into “smoothing” mode to put the proper polish on the 3.0 release. There was a tantalizing mention of running Eclipse 3.0 under an early access Sun JDK 1.5, but no mention of support for 1.5-specific features. There are a number of nice refinements listed (including full access to the new Java source formatter), so if you’re running 3.

Planning something that no one else has done is hard

Sun, 21 Dec 2003 05:12:35 +0000

Check this out: The project was scheduled to be completed five years ago, but now isn’t expected to be fully finished until 2005. Since planning started, the cost estimate for the project has ballooned from $2.6 billion to $14.6 billion. Except for the sheer magnitude of the overage, this could sound like any number of software projects. There has been lots written about why software projects fail (or come in late and over budget).

Why UserLinux might succeed

Sun, 21 Dec 2003 04:00:03 +0000

I just had to link to this excellent letter by Bruce Perens regarding GUI selection for UserLinux. Different Linux vendors/distributions have had different target audiences and goals. This letter shows the kind of thought that is going into UserLinux, and the kind of decision made in this letter is exactly what it will take to get Linux on to corporate desktops.

Chronicles of Narnia to be filmed in NZ

Sun, 21 Dec 2003 03:16:41 +0000

The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe is going to be filmed in New Zealand. I’m a big fantasy buff. With all of the hubbub around fantasy these days (Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings have each banked about $1.8 billion in box office receipts), it would sure be nice if someone would make movies from the first six DragonLance books.

My Way: free, clean portal

Fri, 19 Dec 2003 19:36:05 +0000

The previous item that I posted about the RIAA losing an Appeals Court ruling linked to My Way, which I had never heard of before. MyWay is very similar to My Yahoo!, but one big difference is that they’ve taken the Google approach to revenue generation: unobtrusive text ads. No banners or popups (I’m using Moz so popups are a thing of the past anyhow). Very interesting. They claim to have been profitable from the get-go.

Appeals court rules against RIAA subpoenas

Fri, 19 Dec 2003 19:30:52 +0000

A federal appeals court rules that the RIAA cannot subpoena an ISP for information about its users based upon the provision in the DMCA. In other good news, the Dutch Supreme Court has ruled that Kazaa is not responsible for the actions of its users, paving the way for individual Dutch folk to get sued, just like they are here in the states!

GUITAR GUI test automation tools

Fri, 19 Dec 2003 17:42:58 +0000

Found via Carlos’ list of open source automated test tools: The GUITAR Project is designed to generate, run and report on tests that exercise a GUI (and it looks like it supports both Java and Windows GUIs). Reports include coverage information. The website for this tool definitely has the “research” sort of look to it, so I don’t know if anyone applies this to “real” apps. Anything that can help automate GUI testing is a boon, though.

Interesting transcript of Diane Sawyer interviewing Bush

Thu, 18 Dec 2003 20:03:49 +0000

LiberalOasis has a transcript of part of Diane Sawyer’s interview with Bush. Clearly, you know what kind of slant a site like “LiberalOasis” would have. Anyhow, it’s interesting to read what Bush does when being dogged about the lack of evidence of actual weapons of mass destruction.

Appeals Court Says Bush Can’t Detain US Citizen Caught on US Soil

Thu, 18 Dec 2003 19:18:17 +0000

The court ruled that Congress could order such detentions, but that the President’s power does not extend to detaining US citizens on US soil. Federal prosecutors have argued Padilla should not have access to attorneys because they said he posed a threat to national security and defense lawyers would interfere with his interrogation. They also believe defense lawyers could unwittingly be used to pass messages to al Qaeda operatives.

iTunes Music Store winding up the year with sales, accolades

Tue, 16 Dec 2003 21:05:11 +0000

I may have been a little skeptical when it was first launched, but Apple has had a great first year with the iTunes Music Store (iTMS). No other music service has come close in sales. Since the launch in April, Apple has sold 25 million songs. AdAge picked Apple as Marketer of the Year. Time named iTMS Invention of the Year. Fortune called iTMS Product of the Year. Wow. That’s quite a year.

Great breakdown of the GPL on Groklaw

Tue, 16 Dec 2003 20:15:51 +0000

Via slashdot, I came across this GROKLAW article that explains in detail how there is no way you can be forced to open the source to a proprietary program that has been linked with GPLed code. FSF’s Eben Moglen is quoted in the article: The claim that a GPL violation could lead to the forcing open of proprietary code that has wrongfully included GPL’d components is simply wrong. There is no provision in the Copyright Act to require distribution of infringing work on altered terms.

Cringley’s answer to the voting problem

Mon, 15 Dec 2003 20:05:46 +0000

Robert X. Cringley, Why The Best Voting Technology May Be No Technology At All: To vote, you write an “X” with a pencil in a one centimeter circle beside the candidate’s name, fold the ballot up and stuff it into a box. Later, the scrutineers AND ANY VOTER WHO WANTS TO WATCH all sit at a table for about half an hour and count every ballot, keeping a tally for each candidate.

Ward Cunningham is off to Microsoft

Mon, 15 Dec 2003 00:39:34 +0000

Via Dave, I discovered that Ward Cunningham is going to Microsoft. There’s a page of Tips For Ward At Microsoft on his Wiki, of course. From what I have read, Ward is very big on openness (Wiki) and extreme programming (the original XP), so it will be interesting to see how that goes. The comments on the linked page are also rather interesting.

Music Industry: Stop Shirking

Sun, 14 Dec 2003 19:19:46 +0000

Red Herring brings us Umair Haque’s Music Industry: Stop Shirking, which makes the argument that the music industry’s job is to sort through all the music and find what people want. I think that’s basically true. The article then goes on to say: Many people were more happy to spend time searching for new music on the Net and compiling their own collections – a service previously performed by recording companies – than they were simply buying the goods the industry selected and promoted by the record labels.

JavaScrypt – JavaScript based encryption

Sun, 14 Dec 2003 19:11:53 +0000

JavaScrypt: Browser-Based Cryptography Tools actually seems like a useful project. I’ve been looking for a convenient, cross-platform encryption system to encrypt my silly website password list. (I had been using a Windows-based system, but I spend a lot of time using a Mac now). This seems handy, because I’ll always have a browser available… and I should be able to only save the encrypted file to disk.

Yatta!

Sun, 14 Dec 2003 19:05:01 +0000

I admit it. I was a fan of All Your Base Are Belong To Us. But, that didn’t have the same heart that Yatta! does. All I can say is “wow”.

Saddam Hussein captured

Sun, 14 Dec 2003 19:03:07 +0000

Yahoo! News – Saddam Captured Hiding in Hole Near Tikrit U.S. troops seized Saddam Hussein hiding in a filthy hole near his hometown of Tikrit in a coup for Washington’s beleaguered occupation force in Iraq This is certainly good news for the people of Iraq who have suffered under this dictator for a long time. This is not, in my opinion, a reason to keep Bush in office, and I do hope that the Democrats run a powerful campaign in the 11 months that remain.

Creating native-feeling Swing apps

Sat, 13 Dec 2003 01:06:40 +0000

Joshua Marinacci writes the first of three parts in Make Your Swing App Go Native, which looks like it’s going to be a fabulous tutorial on giving Java applications the polish they need to really win over users.

Bush to attack Dean as inexperienced in security policy

Fri, 12 Dec 2003 17:29:33 +0000

Bush has $110 million, which he plans to spend: Although Bush has no primary opponents, Republican advisers said he is preparing to unleash his war chest early next year, most likely against Dean. They described the former Vermont governor as the probable Democratic nominee and vulnerable to attack as liberal and inexperienced in security policy. It’s worth pointing out that Bush, as governor of Texas, was inexperienced in security policy, though Cheney did have experience coming into the VP office.

Groovy 1.0 beta 1 is available!

Thu, 11 Dec 2003 23:30:41 +0000

Hop on over and pick it up! Groovy : a powerful dynamically typed language for the JVM is now available in the 1.0b1 release! The Eclipse plugin hasn’t had a release yet, unfortunately, but it’s still great to see Groovy coming out of the kiln.

SDO appears at the right time

Thu, 11 Dec 2003 23:29:06 +0000

James Strachan’s Radio Weblog pointed me in the direction of IBM and BEA’s new Service Data Object (SDO) specs. By strange coincidence, I stumbled across this today and I’m having a meeting tomorrow to discuss an API that has some things in common with SDO. It would be beneficial for us to use SDO rather than reinventing the wheel. In fact, had SDO existed some months back, some of the other things we’ve developed may have been different.

Roomba Works! Robotic Vacuums for everyone!

Thu, 11 Dec 2003 17:22:38 +0000

Waiting for us when we returned from our trip was a brand new Roomba Pro Robotic Floorvac, which we got from Linens & Things for about $185 + shipping, which is well below the typical $230 price. The short review is just what they say on their site: Roomba works! You set it down, turn it on, and it vacuums your room. You can tell that it does a decent job when you empty out its particle bin and see how much stuff, dust and lint it collected.

Tog on security

Wed, 10 Dec 2003 19:51:12 +0000

Catching up on news that came along while I was enjoying 85 degree weather. In AskTog: Security D’ohLTs, Tog talks about how many security procedures put into place do not take real human beings into account. Therefore, the users end up doing what the need to do to get their jobs done, often compromising security. A good read for anyone who is adding security-related features to software. Unless you take a comprehensive approach to security, both at the human level and at the system level, you are likely to not only fail to increase the user’s security, you may actually succeed in decreasing the user’s security.

Modified Foolish 8 Criteria

Tue, 09 Dec 2003 04:45:11 +0000

The ever useful Motley Fool’s Rex Moore has a modified Foolish 8 screening criteria for stocks. The Fool is a great resource, and their stock picks are based upon really intelligent criteria (like: is the company producing actual usable cash, and do you know what their business is so that you can make intelligent decisions about the management?). In the article, Rex mentions a program that helped him do the stock screening.

AppleScripts for iTunes

Mon, 08 Dec 2003 23:31:28 +0000

Now that I’m an iTunes convert, Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes looks like a useful resource for spiffying up my iTunes library.

W is a ‘miserable failure’ according to Google

Mon, 08 Dec 2003 20:12:41 +0000

I wonder if the White House will pressure Google to change this. As reported by the BBC, a Google search for “miserable failure” links to Bush’s bio on whitehouse.gov. Unless weblogs tilt the balance in favor of the BBC article, miserable failure will probably point to Bush’s page until the end of his term. I wouldn’t be surprised if Republican activities try to reorient the term elsewhere.

Javootoo: look and feel packages for java

Thu, 20 Nov 2003 22:24:57 +0000

javootoo.com has a number of look and feel packages for java, including some theme packs for the Skin L&F which lets you use GTK and KDE themes with Java apps. See, there are ways to make Swing look good!

Enhydra now available under LGPL

Thu, 20 Nov 2003 22:12:23 +0000

An Austrian company, Together Teamlösungen, has purchased Enhydra from Lutris and released it under the LGPL. Nice.

Robert Kennedy Jr. calls Bush the worst environmental president

Thu, 20 Nov 2003 19:52:22 +0000

This makes it seem rather remarkable that the Republicans dropped the drilling of Alaska. Salon.com | Save the Earth — dump Bush is an interview of Robert Kennedy Jr. The NRDC Web site lists over 200 environmental rollbacks by the White House in the last two years. If even a fraction of those are actually implemented, we will effectively have no significant federal environmental law left in our country by this time next year.

Kurt Wenner – Master Street Painter

Thu, 20 Nov 2003 19:35:27 +0000

Take a look at the amazing Kurt Wenner – Gallery of Work. He does a fabulous job of 3D-looking street paintings.

Eclipse to get GUI builder – try it now under 2.1 :(

Tue, 18 Nov 2003 20:18:45 +0000

The Eclipse project has announced The Eclipse Visual Editor Projects, which will include extensible reference implementations for SWT and Swing. Unfortunately, the download page for the builds lists Eclipse 2.1.2 as a requirement. Part of the trouble is that GEF doesn’t work under 3.0 yet. So, I could go back to using 2.1. I don’t think I will, though. I like the new stuff in 3.0. I’ve gotten used to hitting ; in the middle of the line and having the ; appear at the end of the line (most of the time).

Rekall database app software open sourced

Tue, 18 Nov 2003 19:34:27 +0000

The Kompany, known for its products for KDE, has released Rekall under the GPL. Rekall is like Microsoft Access, but it works with MySQL and PostreSQL (DB2 as well, but no Oracle yet). So, you get the form builder capability and easy import/export. It is scriptable with Python. They’ve set up a site called Rekall Revealed to host the open source project. Rekall does not rely on KDE, but will run on Windows and Linux using Qt.

Sun sells 1 million Linux desktops to China

Tue, 18 Nov 2003 19:15:26 +0000

It sounds like people are getting serious about Linux on the desktop, but this announcement shows just how big it is starting to get: [Sun CEO Scott] McNealy announced today that the Chinese government has pledged to deploy a million computers in the next year using Sun’s Linux desktop software. The cost: $50 per license for Sun’s desktop software The more this kind of thing spreads, the more price pressure that will put on Microsoft.

Web Development bookmarklets for Mozilla

Tue, 18 Nov 2003 17:36:28 +0000

A very nice collection of Web Development Bookmarklets for Mozilla. It gives you easy access to all of the scripts used on the page, plus a way to edit the style sheet of the page you’re looking at. (Don’t like the black background? Just change it!)

EII Commons Swing components

Tue, 18 Nov 2003 16:34:25 +0000

Among the postings in the java.net thread that I was just talking about, there was a reference to EII Commons which provides: a sortable table model and corresponding sortable JTable a set of masked edit controls a wizard framework (i.e. “< Back”, “Next >”, “Finish”, “Cancel”) an Eclipse-like view framework for Swing various tree, table, and list utilities miscellaneous utilities such as: a resource loader (loads images and other resources relative to a class) a class that will copy an InputStream to an OutputStream, or a Reader to a Writer a class-based processor repository that dynamically delegates

On the failure of Swing

Tue, 18 Nov 2003 16:27:16 +0000

Joshua Marinacci opened up a big discussion with his java.net blog entry: Swing has failed. What can we do?. He makes some good points, and the discussion that follows has all sorts of interesting input. (Comment from ocean): There are plenty of valid reasons to criticize Swing but “Swing is not VB” is not one of them. Swing is **not an application framework**. This is absolutely correct. SWT has already gotten a lot of praise for its use of native widgets, and IBM may get another leg up with the Eclipse Rich Client Platform, which provides an application framework.

The Wal-Mart You Don’t Know

Mon, 17 Nov 2003 21:40:14 +0000

Actually, I was already somewhat familiar with the Wal-Mart described in Fast Company | The Wal-Mart You Don’t Know. The article is a very interesting discussion of Wal-Mart’s tough tactics in dealing with suppliers and just what it means to be a $240 billion company. One interesting quote: “about 12% of the economy’s productivity gains in the second half of the 1990s could be traced to Wal-Mart alone.” That’s the kicker here.

Iraq and al Qaeda linked

Mon, 17 Nov 2003 21:33:01 +0000

According to the Weekly Standard (Case Closed): OSAMA BIN LADEN and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship […] according to a top secret U.S. government memorandum obtained by THE WEEKLY STANDARD. I’ve been critical of the current administration’s handling of Iraq from the get-go. If all of this evidence had been swirling around, it’s surprising that this “top secret” memo was written on October 27th. The administration made the claim much earlier.

Software Engineering Reading List

Mon, 17 Nov 2003 04:28:47 +0000

Hey, you can hear about interesting things on Slashdot: Software Engineering Reading List (from Tom Van Vleck).

It is the coolest DHTML calendar widget

Sun, 16 Nov 2003 16:12:13 +0000

Check out the spiffy menus, too… [Mishoo] The DHTML Calendar

Microsoft LOAF includes DRM

Fri, 14 Nov 2003 23:13:10 +0000

I hear that in order to prevent unauthorized LOAFing, Microsoft is including LOAF-based DRM in Longhorn. I wonder if Microsoft LOAF will be available as shared source?

Oracle Workspace Manager

Fri, 14 Nov 2003 21:45:24 +0000

Today, I came across the Oracle Workspace Manager and almost literally stood up and said “wow!”. Has anyone out there used this beast? Assuming it has good performance characteristics, it sounds fantastic for the kinds of things I’m working on. The brief summary, for those who don’t feel like reading the whole datasheet, is that Workspace Manager provides row-level version control for your database, will branching/merging capabilities and flexibility in terms of which tables are versioned and how they are versioned.

Mondrian open source Java OLAP server 1.0

Fri, 14 Nov 2003 03:43:14 +0000

I’ve been occassionally checking out Mondrian, which is an open source(!) OLAP server written in Java. In August, Mondrian hit 1.0 after two years of work. OLAP is a great thing, and Microsoft was the company with the most affordable OLAP solution.

Federal discretionary spending up 12.5%

Thu, 13 Nov 2003 19:54:58 +0000

A couple of days ago, I read something that talked about how politicians will sometimes pass deficit-causing tax cuts to force a reduction in spending and reduce the size of a government that is perceived to be too large. I guess that’s not the case with this administration, given that they haven’t held to the 4 percent growth cap set by the President. Confounding President Bush’s pledges to rein in government growth, federal discretionary spending expanded by 12.

UPX: Packer for Executables

Wed, 12 Nov 2003 03:32:07 +0000

Here’s a nifty tool: UPX: the Ultimate Packer for eXecutables. It will compress your executable programs and then decompress them (quickly!) on the fly, thus allowing them to take up less disk space. The authors claim there is no additional memory usage caused by the in-place decompression. Of course, with machines having 100GB+ hard drives it’s hard to see where the gain is in compressing a 4MB program down to 3MB… but this tool could be useful if you’re distributing software or if you’ve got a program that you want to be able to run from a floppy.

Berklee releases course materials

Tue, 11 Nov 2003 20:05:35 +0000

MIT has gotten a lot of press for their initiative to release course materials for all of their courses. The Berklee College of Music looks to be following in MIT’s footsteps with Berklee Shares: free music lessons, mp3, quicktime and pdf files download. This looks like a great site and a great initiative. As a musician (albeit one with very little time on his hands), I would love to read and hear what some of the Berklee folks are teaching.

MediaStation linux-based keyboard

Tue, 11 Nov 2003 19:58:07 +0000

Here’s an idea that I had a couple of years ago, and I’m glad to see that someone has brought it into existence: a Linux-based keyboard. It seemed to me that open source audio software was getting to the point where it could be applied in the pro realm. Beyond that, it seemed to make sense to use commodity parts and software rather than the custom chips and operating systems of years past.

Time Magazine pulled George Bush article about Iraq

Tue, 11 Nov 2003 19:22:21 +0000

The Memory Hole resurrects an article by George Bush Sr.:Reasons Not to Invade Iraq, by George Bush Sr.” href=”http://www.thememoryhole.org/mil/bushsr-iraq.htm”>The Reasons Not to Invade Iraq, which Time Magazine removed from the table of contents of the 1998 issue in which the article appeared. Since when does the press work for the White House? This is not good for whatever credibility Time had.

Tim Bray’s response to Clay Shirky’s SemWeb piece

Mon, 10 Nov 2003 22:52:45 +0000

For some reason, I had expected Tim Bray to be more strongly in the pro-RDF/semantic web camp. It turns out that he sees things similarly to the way I do: Metadata, Semantics and All That. He talks about wanting a critical mass of “metadata”, but his example of company information seems to me to be actual “data”. He talks about XBRL for reporting business information, which I think makes my point from Saturday.

Al Gore on Freedom and Security

Mon, 10 Nov 2003 20:26:34 +0000

Al Gore gave a great speech covering freedom and security in a democracy, specifically talking about many of the encroachments on our civil liberties that have taken place under the current administration: [For] the first time in our history, American citizens have been seized by the executive branch of government and put in prison without being charged with a crime, without having the right to a trial, without being able to see a lawyer, and without even being able to contact their families.

ITMS: Coolest Invention of 2003

Mon, 10 Nov 2003 19:46:35 +0000

Time Magazine has named the Apple ITunes Music Store the “Coolest Invention of 2003”. Its release was definitely a landmark occurence in the online music biz. However, if Dean Kamen’s water purifier works as described, that sounds like a much bigger deal. Ten gallons of clean water an hour, without much power consumption, from a $1000 device. That’s impressive.

Clay Shirky on the problem with the Semantic Web

Sat, 08 Nov 2003 15:43:32 +0000

It was hard to classify this between “Technology” and “Software Development”. I ended up going with Software Development because the thought process that the W3C has gone through is not unusual for those of us in development. We look at the world we’re trying to model and try to simplify and generalize as much as possible so that we can make a powerful software system. Clay Shirky reasons that there are problems when you take this too far in: The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview

Royal Family denies some allegations

Sat, 08 Nov 2003 03:24:21 +0000

The British royal family is always the top thing for the tabloids over there, but this story: Yahoo! News – Britain Agog Over What Charles ‘Didn’t Do’ is a bit surreal: “I just want to make it entirely clear, even though I can’t refer to the specifics of the allegation, that it’s totally untrue and without a shred of substance,” Sir Michael Peat said. Wow! What a statement! Coming out and making a statement like that makes people even more curious what these “totally untrue” allegations are all about.

Penn State gives Napster to all students

Fri, 07 Nov 2003 19:44:33 +0000

Using a portion of students’ $160 IT fees, Penn State is providing free access to Napster’s streaming service. Some students think this is a misuse of those funds. Penn claims that they are paying significantly less than the $9.95 per month standard fee, so maybe this deal does make a certain amount of sense. It’s definitely a smart move for the recording business because they get cash from Napster and possibly reduce the amount of filesharing happening on campus.

Church Sign Generator

Fri, 07 Nov 2003 19:11:48 +0000

This showed up on Blogdex and is just too cool to ignore: Church Sign Generator

Stuart Langridge’s JavaScript/DHTML goodness

Thu, 06 Nov 2003 22:32:13 +0000

Stuart Langridge’s browser experiments provide some nifty, unobtrusive bits to spruce up web apps. They include sortable tables, drop shadows, and expandable tree menus. At least one of the scripts is explicitly stated as being available under an MIT license. The other scripts are less clear. Update: Just came across another sortable table that apparently works in any modern browser.

Oiling up the draft machine?

Tue, 04 Nov 2003 20:53:23 +0000

A scary article over at Salon: Oiling up the draft machine?: The Pentagon is quietly moving to fill draft board vacancies nationwide. While officials say there’s no cause to worry, some experts aren’t so sure. There are signs that a draft may be necessary to rebuild Iraq. People wonder why such a big deal has been made over things that this administration has said to justify the invasion of Iraq… in addition to the 87 billion new reasons that have come up recently, now we’re talking about a situation that could get as ugly as Vietnam.

Ole Eichorn on Longhorn

Tue, 04 Nov 2003 20:39:47 +0000

Tim Bray linked to The Emperor’s New Code by Ole Eichorn. It’s a rant about the new technologies in the eventually coming Windows “Longhorn” release. The jury hasn’t even stepped into the box yet with regards to Microsoft’s new UI paradigm (XAML) and the WinFS filesystem/database, because no one is really using that stuff yet. Ole comments on these untested technologies. Rather than commenting on that, I’m going to comment on the commentary.

Single song downloads emerging

Mon, 03 Nov 2003 19:34:52 +0000

First up, Billboard reports that online single sales are eclipsing physical single sales. In the latest week, online singles sold 857,000 units, over 170,000 for physical singles. This shouldn’t surprise anyone, given the high cost of physical singles. The fact of the matter is, though, the online sales figure can go much higher. In the Wired review of the new Napster service: Despite its flexibility, the service can also be confusing.

1.4 String.matches is dumb

Fri, 31 Oct 2003 21:46:29 +0000

The regex package found in Java 1.4 is a very nice thing to have available as a standard library. It also seems like a great convenience that there are methods right on java.lang.String for using regexes. The crazy thing is that with String.matches the regex is essentially turned into “^regex$”, meaning that the entire string has to match the pattern you give it. Why on Earth would they make the only regex searching function built into java.

Eclipse 3.0 due in June 2004

Thu, 30 Oct 2003 21:58:42 +0000

The Eclipse Project Draft 3.0 Plan has been updated and now shows milestones up through M9 with final 3.0 release in June 2004. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like anything else has been updated to show what is in the Nov 21 M5 release. I really want the J2SE 1.5 features, but those are still under “proposed items”. There is some code that may make it into M5 that provides some of the backend stuff (AST) support for generics.

Quirks Mode library of browser info

Thu, 30 Oct 2003 20:09:18 +0000

Peter-Paul Koch has created a site that will likely help him keep busy as a freelance web designer. QuirksMode – for all your browser quirks covers all sorts of useful information about JavaScript, the DOM and CSS all with an eye toward cross-browser compatibility. That’s a good thing for folks who are still plagued with supporting Netscape 4.x. (I’m not!) The Quirks Mode news page also looks valuable. From there, I discovered the handy phrogz.

Mozilla Tabbrowser Extensions

Thu, 30 Oct 2003 19:16:21 +0000

Tabbrowser Extensions – outsider reflex” href=”http://white.sakura.ne.jp/~piro/xul/_tabextensions.html.en”>Tabbrowser Extensions provides a slew of new features for people who like tabbed browsing in Mozilla. I was thinking that Type Ahead Find was the only thing keeping me from switching to Safari on my Mac, but this extension offers so many cool things that it may just keep me stuck to Moz.

Woah! Two bucks in Amazon earnings

Thu, 30 Oct 2003 17:58:25 +0000

Whenever I link to a book or DVD or whatever on Amazon.com, I include the token referral link, not really expecting to get anything out of it. But, someone out there actually bought some stuff after following one of my links! Hey, thanks! My first $2 in Amazon earnings. Only a couple thousand more for that plasma TV 🙂

rdiff-backup efficient mirroring/incremental backup

Thu, 30 Oct 2003 03:35:54 +0000

From time to time, the discussions on slashdot lead to some useful information… like this: rdiff-backup is a program that utilizes rsync’s rdiff code to do incremental backups. Using rdiff, it can save just the parts of files that have changed, making it possible to store incremental changes in a much smaller amount of space. It can run on Linux, Windows (via cygwin) and Mac OS X, so I’ll be able to back up all of the data we’ve got.

Pashua: super simple Aqua dialogs

Wed, 29 Oct 2003 22:39:51 +0000

Pashua makes it very easy to create dialogs for Python, PHP, Shell, Perl and AppleScript programs. (Nope, no Java.) The example screenshot shows that it is very simple to use.

Velocity whitespace handling is not as written

Wed, 29 Oct 2003 22:17:22 +0000

In the Velocity User Guide, it says that “Velocity’s behaviour is to gobble up excess whitespace.” and gives some examples that it says will produce the same output. That’s not the way it works for me: public void testVelocityWhitespace() { VelocityEngine ve = new VelocityEngine(); try { ve.init(); VelocityContext context = new VelocityContext(); String test1 = "Send me #set($foo = ["$10 and ","a cake"])#foreach($a in $foo)$a #end please."; String test2 = "

Diebold is not alone

Wed, 29 Oct 2003 19:31:44 +0000

Why War? has links and information leaked from Diebold Election Systems’ internal mailing lists. Check this out: “I have become increasingly concerned about the apparent lack of concern over the practice of writing contracts to provide products and services which do not exist and then attempting to build these items on an unreasonable timetable with no written plan, little to no time for testing, and minimal resources. It also seems to be an accepted practice to exaggerate our progress and functionality to our customers and ourselves then make excuses at delivery time when these products and services do not meet expectations.

Librarian tee shirts

Tue, 28 Oct 2003 19:50:56 +0000

Seeing as I work with a bunch of librarians, I found this collection of Librarian tee shirts to be most amusing.

Rebates: Apple wins, TCA sucks

Tue, 28 Oct 2003 17:17:23 +0000

Rebates on computer products often suck. I waited a year to get a rebate on my Envision LCD monitor. TCA Fulfillment Services has conveniently lost not one, but two separate rebates for Computer Geeks products! TCA (who runs “wheresmyrebate.com”) has just denied a CompUSA rebate of mine, because they didn’t like the receipt I sent them. Beware, beware, beware! On the flip side, there’s Apple. I had a far bigger rebate coming from them, and they got the check in my hands 3 weeks after I sent it in!

Troggan’s JCalendar

Mon, 27 Oct 2003 22:17:48 +0000

I bet sometime sooner than later I’m going to need a Swing calendar component.

IsaViz and Zoomable UIs

Mon, 27 Oct 2003 20:27:58 +0000

ZVTM is a Zoomable user interface toolkit for Java. One of the example applications put forth is IsaViz, an RDF editor that represents RDF as a directed graph. I’ve always thought that the RDF XML syntax was more than a little unwieldy for normal humans, so IsaViz seems like a great tool.

GUI Command generic command pattern for Java GUIs

Mon, 27 Oct 2003 20:10:18 +0000

I’ve been thinking about (and working on/with) Java Swing GUI frameworks quite a bit lately. The GUI-Commands project incorporates some ideas that I’ve seen in Eclipse (the notion of menus and toolbars being built up dynamically, called contributions in Eclipse). I’m somewhat surprised to not see any mention of UndoableEdits in there, because that’s a great benefit to using the command pattern with Swing… it’s fairly straightforward to do undo.

Amazon makes 120,000 books searchable

Fri, 24 Oct 2003 20:59:27 +0000

This is one of those “wow” things. Wired News: The Great Library of Amazonia An ingenious attempt to illuminate the dark region of books is under way at Amazon.com. Over the past spring and summer, the company created an unrivaled digital archive of more than 120,000 books. The goal is to quickly add most of Amazon’s multimillion-title catalog. The entire collection, which went live Oct. 23, is searchable, and every page is viewable.

Museum of Hoaxes: Hoax Photo Test

Fri, 24 Oct 2003 02:40:31 +0000

The Hoax Photo Test is more difficult than you might expect. It’s quite a collection of photos… I scored 4⁄10 on level 1, and 6⁄10 on level 2.

Memory morphing by ads

Thu, 23 Oct 2003 19:35:44 +0000

An intriguing article about a technique for marketing called memory morphing. The basic idea is that you plant some notion about a product in service in someone’s mind that makes them tend to think differently about previous experiences. She reported an experiment in which people were shown an advert suggesting that children who visited Disneyland had the opportunity to shake hands with Bugs Bunny. Later, many of those who had seen the advert “remembered” meeting Bugs on childhood visits to the theme park, a feat that would have been impossible, given that the cartoon is a Warner Brothers character.

Microdom Python API for dealing with HTML

Wed, 22 Oct 2003 22:37:42 +0000

XML.com: microdom: an XML DOM Designed For HTML [Oct. 15, 2003] This article introduces microdom, a XML DOM implementation written in Python which was designed for dealing with HTML’s legacy issues both when parsing and when generating documents.

Signing on to The Skeptical Software Development Manifesto

Wed, 22 Oct 2003 17:57:09 +0000

From Hacknot comes The Skeptical Software Development Manifesto. It’s meant to be an attack on XP and the Agile Manifesto, but is really just an essay on skeptical thought. I don’t think anyone will debate this principle: Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer by adopting those working practices which give us the highest chance of successful software delivery. Absolutely. I even agree with the statement that we need to identify the degree/frequency of customer involvement.

Exceptions in the Rainforest

Tue, 21 Oct 2003 19:05:16 +0000

Ned Batchelder: Exceptions in the rainforest is a response to Joel Spolsky’s article on exceptions. He had a nice little breakdown of system code to go with his explanation of why exceptions are “better”: In my experience, there are three layers to real code (from bottom to top, so this list might look upside-down): Adapting the software beneath you. Building pieces of your system. Combining it all together.

Using CGLIB to speed up XML parsing

Tue, 21 Oct 2003 16:01:13 +0000

Good stuff from Chris Nokleberg… using CGLIB to make SAX parsing zippy: For validated documents this is safe and gives a 3X speedup. I don’t think I’d be likely to use the if/else if/else if structure that he mentions, because that seems like the kind of thing that is screaming out for separate objects. I believe Fowler even has a refactoring for this, but it’s too early in the morning to recall which one.

SWT and memory management

Mon, 20 Oct 2003 19:23:25 +0000

Pazu laments the pain of SWT. I was seriously considering Eclipse as an application framework, and SWT’s memory management needs were among the reasons that I opted for another path. For those who haven’t looked at SWT, here’s the scoop: every SWT component (including ones that you write) have a dispose() method. If you make a panel that has several widgets (or even fonts and colors!) on it, you need to keep track of those and explicitly call their dispose() methods from your own dispose() method.

Hessian binary web services protocol

Mon, 20 Oct 2003 19:15:55 +0000

Via WIRED I learned about Hessian, which is a web services protocol designed by Caucho, the Resin people. It’s designed to be a very easy API, and since the protocol is binary you don’t need attachments to send binary files, which is something that may have value in some work that I’m doing.

Agile Methods: The Bottom Line

Mon, 20 Oct 2003 19:08:48 +0000

Bob Martin provides a great article that sums up the value of Agile programming in Agile Methods. The bottom Line.. The summary: agile methods provide the data necessary to make business decisions. That’s a great observation, and I think it is an important part of what XP is about.

Huh? Corp

Mon, 20 Oct 2003 18:56:15 +0000

The web site for Huh? Corp is a great piece of satire. There were so many companies with websites like this one a couple of years back. (I even worked for one!) It really shows how much it can pay to be known for something rather than everything.

iTunes: Where’s the music? MP3s?

Mon, 20 Oct 2003 18:34:33 +0000

This weekend, I fired up iTunes for the first time (on both my Mac and PC). I also made my first purchases from the iTunes Music Store (ITMS). First thing: I do like iTunes. It’s a nice piece of software with a good interface. Some people have complained about memory usage and performance, but on my 2.4GHz Celeron and 1GHz G4, there doesn’t seem to be a problem. Using iTunes and the ITMS was very easy and painless.

Java Developers Almanac

Sat, 18 Oct 2003 04:13:51 +0000

This looks like a treasure trove of good tips. If this site is as useful as it looks on the surface, I may have to buy the book! Java Examples from The Java Developers Almanac 1.4

Bush is in charge?

Fri, 17 Oct 2003 19:38:53 +0000

Earlier this week, Bush declare that he was in charge in his government after media outlets continued to talk about the infighting between Bush’s cabinet members. Now we get a story of Bush’s latest secret order to his staff: President Bush – living up to his recent declaration that he is in charge – told his top officials to “stop the leaks” to the media, or else. News of Bush’s order leaked almost immediately.

iTunes for Windows announced

Thu, 16 Oct 2003 21:05:12 +0000

From MacRumors’ live coverage of Apple’s music event today, they are reporting that Apple has announced iTunes for Windows. Steve Jobs said that Apple current has 70% of the downloaded music market, and have raised the bar on the number of downloads they expect. Now, we are clearly the market leader here. We set some goals. We wanted to sell 1 million in the first 6 months, but sold 1 million in the first week.

Swing and CSS

Thu, 16 Oct 2003 20:25:54 +0000

In the article Swing and CSS, Joshua Marinacci shows a simple implementation of a CSS-like system for styling Swing interfaces. It’s an interesting idea, and the implementation looks potentially flexible enough to do interesting things. However, I agree with some of the commenters that what this is trying to do is essentially the same as what L&Fs are all about. Maybe the syntax will be more accessible to non-programmers. CSS is great for the web, because the web is presenting documents.

Avoiding comment spam

Tue, 14 Oct 2003 21:00:17 +0000

I haven’t been hit yet, but as I’ve seen Blue Sky On Mars show up in an increasing number of Google searches, I’m sure that comment spam is just around the corner. Though this is not a high-traffic, high-comment site, I enjoy having the comments turned on because I’ve received a lot of useful feedback. Yoz Grahame’s Cheerleader: Seven quick tips for a spam-free blog provides some useful and easy to implement solutions to the comment spam problem.

Disagreement with Joel

Tue, 14 Oct 2003 16:24:45 +0000

In his most recent article, Joel Spolsky declares that exceptions are bad. He’s gotten a lot of pushback on this (Charles Miller has a nice collection of this), which is not surprising. Many of us have worked with error return codes and exceptions both and have a strong preference for exceptions. I think it is a powerful testament to how much people appreciate Joel’s writing that so many people have spoken out on this one saying “I always enjoy Joel’s writing, but…” Joel has had a great collection of articles that show he really has a clue.

Tim Bray’s spam solution

Mon, 13 Oct 2003 19:37:05 +0000

Tim Bray’s Another Whack at Spam declares: We can’t go on like just trying to live with and filter spam. Though I agree with this sentiment, I don’t agree with his solution. I think the unmetered, free access to email is one of the things that makes it a successful medium. Tim mentions the one-to-many email newsletter… what about the many-to-many email lists? I think the Jakarta Struts list has around 2,000 subscribers.

NY Times on online music pricing

Mon, 13 Oct 2003 16:34:47 +0000

The NY Times sums up the current view of online music pricing in What Price Music?. After all, some say, antipiracy, anticopying technology may be available within the year. If that happens, the industry is likely to back away from the kind of pricing innovations with which it is now experimenting. Already, a strain is evident between record labels that want to restrict what consumers can do with the music they buy and the new on-line retailers, which argue that people won’t use their services if they can’t use it freely.

Cool checkerboard optical illusion

Mon, 13 Oct 2003 01:17:25 +0000

I just had to link to this. Is it grey or is it white? redemption in a blog: Unbelievable optical illusion

Eclipse 3.0M4 is out

Sun, 12 Oct 2003 23:55:54 +0000

Periodically on Friday I went to Eclipse.org to see if M4 had been released (since the schedule date was for Friday). Not sure when exactly they dropped the release, but it’s out and the release notes list the typical variety of good things that you get in a new Eclipse release. There are lots of refactoring improvements, a mystery improved code formatter, some new coding style checks, a few nice CVS improvements, more things that happen in the background (yay!

Beautiful magazine-like layouts using CSS

Fri, 10 Oct 2003 18:15:17 +0000

Standardice – Mimicking Magazines shows several layouts that were inspired by magazines, done completely with CSS. They look great, and if you View Source you’ll see that the code is so simple! CSS rocks, as long as you’re using a Better Browser.

Suing your customers is bad

Thu, 09 Oct 2003 19:38:13 +0000

G. Richard Shell at Wharton writes that suing your customers doesn’t work, and there’s a precedent to prove it. The article draws a comparison between the RIAA’s current strategy of suing its customers and a similar strategy used 100 years ago against people who bought Ford cars. It would seem like you could apply this to the SCO stuff, too, except for the fact that SCO doesn’t have customers and are trying to sue people into becoming customers.

Mac OS X 10.3 coming October 24

Wed, 08 Oct 2003 22:08:11 +0000

Apple has started taking preorders for Mac OS X 10.3, which has some nifty new features. It’s unfortunate that Apple doesn’t do aggressive upgrade pricing, especially given that I just got my PowerBook. But, the educational price of $69 is not too bad.

Two porn folks in California Top 10

Wed, 08 Oct 2003 21:53:06 +0000

California Governor Gray Davis has officially been recalled. Looking at the results for the candidates to succeed him, it is clear that Arnold Schwarzenegger is the new governor of California. It is also interesting to see Hustler publisher Larry Flynt at number 7 and porn actress Mary Carey (aka Mary Cook) at number 10. Gary Coleman did not disappoint, showing up at number 8. Even Gallagher, the watermelon-smashing comedian managed to place 16th.

Limitations of Java generics

Wed, 08 Oct 2003 19:45:08 +0000

Merrick Schincariol wrote a detailed article about what Java’s generics lack that C++’s have. This really doesn’t surprise me a whole lot, given that the C++ folks are fine with multiple inheritance and the Java folks thought that was too complicated. As Merrick points out, though, at least Java collections will be less painful to use.

Rechargeable battery recycling

Tue, 07 Oct 2003 23:03:57 +0000

From what I’ve read, standard alkaline batteries are safe to toss in the trash. Rechargeables, however, are not. Rechargeable Battery Recycling Corporation is a non-profit company that will recycle NiCd, NiMH, Li-ion and small sealed lead batteries. This is a very good service.

Internet doorbell

Tue, 07 Oct 2003 19:10:12 +0000

That’s right… you can hear your doorbell ring (and even talk to the person) from a thousand miles away.

Dave Barry vs. Telemarketers

Mon, 06 Oct 2003 20:29:56 +0000

The always funny Dave Barry caused some trouble for telemarketers earlier when he mentioned their phone number in his column. Well, he’s done it again. The best bit actually comes from the telemarketers themselves: Tim Searcy of the ATA was quoted in The Los Angeles Times as saying that the impact of the Do Not Call Registry would be (I did not make this quote up) ”like an asteroid hitting the earth.

Nice summary on aggregator HTTP decency

Fri, 03 Oct 2003 21:02:00 +0000

Mark Pilgrim has written a nice little summary of how aggregators should do their HTTP. It goes beyond just what the HTTP protocol says into a higher level of what an app should do. Things like this can make the world a better place if everyone implements that way.

Tim Bray on OSX stuff

Fri, 03 Oct 2003 20:02:15 +0000

I have joined the ranks of Mac OS X users with a new 12″ PowerBook. If you’re wondering why I opted for the 12″ model, I chose it because I wanted a really portable notebook. The 12″ is one pound (20%) lighter and considerably smaller than the 15″. Onto the main topic… using the new machine! I’ve spent quite a bit of time with Windows and Linux machines and only a little time with Macs.

20 cents per watt solar cells

Fri, 03 Oct 2003 19:46:35 +0000

I can’t wait for one of these articles to come along and say that someone has something available for purchase now. However, this article claims that by the end of next year they’ll have solar cells 20 times cheaper than today’s: Over a typical 20-year life span of a solar cell, a single produced watt should cost as little as $0.20, compared with the current $4. They took an interesting and pragmatic approach: use materials that are less efficient, but dramatically cheaper, than the current state of the art.

Laptop music studios

Thu, 02 Oct 2003 19:20:58 +0000

Having used a few different PC-based music tools, Wired’s The Incredible Shrinking Studio article is not too surprising: “You can take your laptop and work almost anywhere and use it to make incredible music on stage,” [Berklee Professor Michael Bierylo] said. “That’s pretty revolutionary. The whole idea of the studio as a single place where all the production is done has more or less flown out the window. High-end studios still have their place, of course, but more and more and more musicians are tracking in different locations.

More friendly URLs in movabletype

Thu, 02 Oct 2003 15:51:59 +0000

I spotted a TypePad blog that had these nice URLs with the posting title spelled out and I thought, why don’t I have that? Well, it turns out that it’s really easy to set up. I don’t know why it’s not the default. Anyhow, I have friendlier URLs for individual postings now. At the moment, my permalinks are still pointing to a day’s postings rather than individual postings… I find that this brings in commentary for a wider variety of my postings.

Open source workflow engines

Wed, 01 Oct 2003 20:05:59 +0000

Carlos Perez has assembled a nice list of Open Source Workflow Engines Written in Java

Moby tempted to invite lawsuit

Wed, 01 Oct 2003 20:00:13 +0000

Can a day go by without a recording industry story? Perhaps, but not today… Moby’s great. Here’s a multiplatinum recording artist saying that he disagrees with the RIAA tactics and is even tempted to see if they’d sue him for sharing his own music! That would make a great headline. Unfortunately, unless Moby owns his recordings, they probably could sue him. That would be yet another fiasco for the RIAA, though, since they’ve been contending that they’re doing these suits for the artists.

Apple iPod – sounds great and looks great

Wed, 01 Oct 2003 16:25:39 +0000

Even the packaging of my new Apple iPod was a work of art. I’ve got a Nomad Jukebox C which I’m selling (if you’re interested). The iPod is a fabulous device… easy and quick controls, fast transfer, great sound quality, excellent form factor and design. Not much to complain about, really. I’m looking forward to getting an iTrip to go with it.

Airtoons: airline warnings you haven’t seen

Wed, 01 Oct 2003 15:54:12 +0000

AIRTOONS are hilarious send ups of airline art.

Event Electronics Support: A Mixed Bag

Wed, 01 Oct 2003 15:01:21 +0000

About 7 weeks ago, I shipped my EZ8 sound card back to Event Electronics because it was locking my computer up. Within 20 minutes of playing audio, my machine (running Windows XP) would consistently freeze up. Event’s phone support has been helpful and made a number of suggestions, but I ran through a lot of experimentation before finally sending the card back to them. They’ve had the card in their possession for 6 weeks.

Witchcraft in Java

Mon, 29 Sep 2003 23:17:04 +0000

In this article regarding Muslim law in Indonesia, a mention is made that: Beliefs in witchcraft and mysticism are still widespread, especially on the main island of Java. Hmm… If clinging to strong typing and checked exceptions is a form of mysticism, then the software development island of Java certainly has more than its share.

JQuery Eclipse source code browser

Mon, 29 Sep 2003 17:07:50 +0000

When working with large source trees, JQuery can be a big help. JQuery is a flexible, query-based source code browser, developed as an Eclipse plug-in. After selecting a java working set of interest, a JQuery user can define his or her own top-level queries (or “browsers”) on-the-fly by formulating logic queries and running them against his/her source code. Alternatively, the user can choose from a variety of pre-written browsers, and use as-is or modify to suit their specific needs.

Enhydra JaWE and Shark Workflow projects

Mon, 29 Sep 2003 16:03:43 +0000

Via Christoph Cemper I came across Enhydra’s workflow projects. We’re looking at open source workflow engines right now, so this is worth taking a look at. I do hope that we don’t have to drag along the rest of Enhydra’s infrastructure to use it.

Bill de hÓra on Subversion

Mon, 29 Sep 2003 15:37:27 +0000

Bill de hÓra wrote about his experiences moving to Subversion. I’ve been following Subversion for a while, but haven’t made the switch from CVS. It’s interesting to read about some of the differences in style of use.

Do Not Call list stopped again

Fri, 26 Sep 2003 20:05:03 +0000

A federal judge in Denver has halted the [implementation of the national do-not-call list]1 on free speech grounds. I particularly enjoyed this quote from the article: “Our Constitution allows consumers to choose not to receive commercial telemarketing calls,” [FTC Chairman Timothy] Muris said in a statement. That’s crazy talk. Which Constitution is he reading? The one that was written pre-1800 certainly didn’t get into “telemarketing calls”, and I don’t think it’s necessarily obvious that Congress can block phone calls.

My iPod’s been Shanghai’d!

Fri, 26 Sep 2003 16:14:42 +0000

I’m getting a new PowerBook, and Apple is running a $200 rebate on iPods for education folks, so I’m getting an iPod, too. I was rather surprised when tracking the Airborne tracking number, Airborne reports that the last (and only) scan location for the package was Shanghai, China. I thought that was a mistake in the tracking, but a call to Airborne yesterday confirms that the iPod is hung up in customs because it was actually coming from overseas.

Eudibamus knowledge-enabled software engineering for Eclipse

Thu, 25 Sep 2003 19:41:19 +0000

The Eudibamus Project from Fraunhofer FIRST is an integration of SnipSnap and Eclipse to allow developers to create links (in both directions, I believe) between code and documentation. I wonder how it integrates with CVS, since the documentation would ideally be shared as well… Sounds like something that is worth a further look!

Updated Eclipse 3.0 Plan

Thu, 25 Sep 2003 02:28:57 +0000

I just spotted that the Eclipse Project Draft 3.0 Plan has been updated as of September 18th. There will be an M6 release in January, with a target release of 2Q2004. Unfortunately, they haven’t yet committed to early J2SE1.5 support.

Joel’s Bionic Office

Wed, 24 Sep 2003 20:09:57 +0000

Joel Spolsky describes his new “Bionic Office” layout, which he designed based on what he thinks will help produce great software. There are some neat ideas in there, and he even made it pair-programming friendly. Something of note is that I and many others have found that an open workspace can improve collaboration, but different people do have different work habits.

Tricks for reloading python modules

Wed, 24 Sep 2003 19:45:12 +0000

Chris DiBona had an idea for reloading Python modules properly. It looks like the PyUnit folks have come up with an even more robust solution. The ability to reload is pretty useful in an environment as dynamic as Python.

Slumbering Lungfish on micropayments

Wed, 24 Sep 2003 19:20:27 +0000

Lore Sjöberg throws a volley into the argument about micropayments, though his article is not strictly about micropayments. It’s more about the notion that if people want to make money from their content, they should just plain start charging for it. While Lore talks about using PayPal to charge a buck today for content, he doesn’t really talk about the fact that many people may be more inclined to pay a smaller amount for a discrete piece of content.

Seagate ships hard drive with Lindows

Wed, 24 Sep 2003 18:36:10 +0000

This is a first. Seagate is shipping hard drives with the Lindows operating system preinstalled. Just drop the hard drive in your machine, and the OS will configure itself. This is really clever marketing on the part of Lindows, who are trying to make their money by selling update services.

RIAA sues the wrong person

Wed, 24 Sep 2003 18:33:26 +0000

It will be a miracle if the recording industry survives the PR fiasco they’re creating for themselves. The latest is that the RIAA filed a lawsuit against a woman who was clearly not a file trader: But [defendant Sarah] Ward, 66, is a “computer neophyte” who never installed file-sharing software, let alone downloaded hard-core rap about baggy jeans and gold teeth, according to letters sent to the recording industry’s agents by her lawyer, Jeffrey Beeler.

More debate on checked vs. unchecked exceptions

Tue, 23 Sep 2003 16:03:06 +0000

TheServerSide has a thread regarding the use of checked and unchecked exceptions, in response to an Artima interview with James Gosling. This is a good read. CompSci always boils down to the tradeoffs you make, and it’s good to conciously decide how you’re going to handle something.

InfoWorld and the old editor vs. IDE debate

Tue, 23 Sep 2003 15:47:58 +0000

Maggie Biggs writes in InfoWorld: Code editors renew approach to IDEs that many people are finding that they are more productive with standalone editors (vim, Emacs) than IDEs. Of course, Emacs with all of the Java tools incorporated could readily be considered an IDE. My opinion is that using a “standard” text editor in conjunction with ant is less productive than an IDE (again, including tricked out Emacs in the IDE camp).

CGLIB reflection twice as fast

Tue, 23 Sep 2003 15:34:25 +0000

Chris Nokleberg reports on new classes in CGLIB that do reflection twice as fast as Java 1.4, using a similar API. This could be a big win for scripting languages which use reflection extensively.

StreamRipper saves audio streams

Sat, 20 Sep 2003 04:46:23 +0000

StreamRipper32 saves MP3 audio streams directly to MP3 files.

Weird Al Ultimate Video Collection

Fri, 19 Sep 2003 20:35:46 +0000

Coming November 4th, for just $13.99, it’s Weird Al Yankovic-Ultimate Collection, which has all of his videos to date! Plus, on-screen lyrics! Don’t forget to also get a copy of UHF while you’re at it!

Magnatune “We Are Not Evil” Record Label

Fri, 19 Sep 2003 19:59:10 +0000

Magnatune is an experimental record label that offers music for download at $5-18 per album (you pick the price you think is fair). They split the proceeds 50⁄50 with the artists. All music is released under a Creative Commons license which allows sharing and derivative works as long as it’s non-commercial and attribution is given. It’s great to see such experiments, and I’d love to see an artist become a breakaway success from something like this.

Cheney falling short of the truth

Thu, 18 Sep 2003 20:07:15 +0000

Via the Democrats’ Kicking Ass blog, I come across this dissection of Cheney’s appearance on “Meet the Press”: In his appearance on “Meet the Press” Sunday, Cheney fell woefully short of truth. On the subject of Iraq, the same can be said for President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz. But Cheney is the latest example of administration mendacity, and therefore a good place to start in holding the administration accountable.

P2P Sockets: convenient firewall circumvention

Thu, 18 Sep 2003 19:46:19 +0000

Standard Internet routing techniques allow any machine on the network to talk to any other. It’s a basic part of how the net works. Then, people started setting up firewalls to protect their less-secure (or more private) hosts. Now, some folks have reimplemented java.net.Socket to allow you to run any service over JXTA, essentially doing nothing of value other than circumventing your firewall. I guess there is a little value in that a lot of people are not behind firewalls, but are behind NAT devices because of their limited IP space.

PatternBox pattern generator for Eclipse

Thu, 18 Sep 2003 16:43:10 +0000

Via Martin Perez: PatternBox: Design Pattern Editor Plugin for Eclipse. Want to use a GoF pattern? Start with one of the templates included here.

Artists blast record companies over lawsuits

Wed, 17 Sep 2003 21:46:37 +0000

Artists blast record companies over lawsuits against downloaders: “File sharing is a reality, and it would seem that the labels would do well to learn how to incorporate it into their business models somehow,” said genre-busting DJ Moby in a post on his Web site. “Record companies suing 12-year-old girls for file sharing is kind of like horse-and-buggy operators suing Henry Ford.” A number of artists chime in here with thoughtful commentary.

MP3s are not the devil

Wed, 17 Sep 2003 18:44:49 +0000

Sci fi author Orson Scott Card chimes in on the file sharing debate with MP3s Are Not the Devil In other words, the people complaining about all the internet “thieves” are, by any reasonable measure, rapacious profiteers who have been parasitically sucking the blood out of copyrights on other people’s work.

Greenspun on the death of music CDs

Wed, 17 Sep 2003 04:29:22 +0000

I agree with most of what Greenspun says about how music CDs are dead, and really should have died years ago. I don’t wholly agree with this part: Most people don’t want to make a lot of 25 cent or 99 cent purchase decisions every day. They’d rather pay a fixed known subscription and have the freedom to “flip channels” to their heart’s content. I think that people actually want both and I think there’s quite a bit of history on my side in that argument.

Eclipse as an application framework

Tue, 16 Sep 2003 00:46:58 +0000

Last week, I was looking at Swing application frameworks. It’s hard to consider creating a Java GUI application today and not consider the Eclipse platform as a possible framework. There is a document in CVS, Rich Client Platform Facilities, that describes how Eclipse 3.0 will work as a platform for non-IDE applications. This is a specific, stated goal for Eclipse 3.0, and there appear to be many people in- and outside of IBM who are interested in this.

Cheap, very efficient solar cells?

Mon, 15 Sep 2003 23:40:53 +0000

This is one of those Wired articles that talks about stuff “3 to 4 years in the future” that I am a little doubtful of. Through the Solar Looking Glass talks about translucent solar cells that sit where you would normally have window shades. Dyson said a single solar cell will cost about 25 cents. The cells are situated about a square foot apart and will have a “way more than 50 percent” energy-conversion rate, she added.

Misunderstanding Micropayments

Mon, 15 Sep 2003 23:32:43 +0000

Scott McCloud follows up on a piece by Clay Shirky in which Shirky shoots down micropayment systems, specifically talking about BitPass. McCloud’s article, Misunderstanding Micropayments is great, as I think his other essays have been, and he really hits on the proof that micropayments can work: Most users are neither Saints nor Sinners. If getting it legitimately is just a few more cents, while getting it for free is just a little more work (or even risk), a significant number will “do the right thing” at the drop of a hat.

Apple sued by the Beatles (again)

Fri, 12 Sep 2003 19:00:56 +0000

Back in May, I had figured that Apple Computer had worked out the legal issues in their deal with The Beatles’ Apple Music. It turns out that I was wrong and Apple has been sued by The Beatles over iPod, ITMS “When it first happened with the iPod, we said, “What could they be thinking?” said a Beatles legal insider, who agreed that posters announcing the iPod from “AppleMusic” were among the most egregious violations.

Bush’s failure with America’s allies

Thu, 11 Sep 2003 19:22:10 +0000

Fred Kaplan writes Bush’s Many Miscalculations – On Sept. 11, the president was handed a historic opportunity. He ignored it.: An American leader could have taken advantage of that moment and reached out to the world, forged new alliances, strengthened old ones, and laid the foundations of a new, broad-based system of international security for the post-Cold War eraâ€”much as Harry Truman and George Marshall had done in the months and years following World War II.

Seal’s media player

Thu, 11 Sep 2003 19:12:39 +0000

The Seal Player offers access to a bunch of Seal music including all of his new Seal IV album. I’ll have to give this a listen later, because I like a fair amount of Seal’s earlier work. Apparently, this album is actually his 5th, because he created an entire album that he threw out before releasing this one.

JHelpDev open source JavaHelp editor

Thu, 11 Sep 2003 17:50:26 +0000

Markus Krätzig has created JHelpDev, which is possibly the only open source JavaHelp authoring tool. It relies on you creating HTML pages however you normally do that, and then provides tools for creating table of contents, etc.

Swing GUI frameworks part deux

Thu, 11 Sep 2003 15:47:35 +0000

Yesterday, I was looking at Swing GUI frameworks. I got two comments, one from Klaasjan Tukker regarding the UIC project, and the other from the ever-diligent Gerald Bauer about XUL-based solutions. There are a wide variety of things that fall into the category of “framework”. Both of the commenters presented GUI widget assembly solutions. I’m looking for something different than that. Using Eclipse, I actually don’t find it that difficult to hand assemble my widgets into panels, particularly using something like JGoodies Forms.

Looking at Java Swing GUI frameworks

Wed, 10 Sep 2003 22:54:14 +0000

I’ve been poking around today to see if I could find good, general code that glues together Java GUIs. One of the first things I found was Java For U.com, which has a nice directory of a whole bunch of Java packages. It’s basically just someone’s bookmarks file, but it’s a good collection of bookmarks! I came across the Explicit Layout Manager, which sounds like it warrants further investigation. I’ve been using the JGoodies Forms layout manager, and that’s pretty nice.

Groovy: yet another JVM language

Wed, 10 Sep 2003 15:45:39 +0000

In case you still think there’s nothing wrong with Java, take a look at Groovy. It’s not Groovy itself that shows what’s wrong with Java, so much as the fact that people have gone and created yet another JVM-based language. I’ve been using BeanShell a bit over the past few days, and it certainly makes some things easier. From what’s described on their wiki, I do think that Groovy will make things easier still, which is the whole point of such a language.

Kids music that may be palatable

Wed, 10 Sep 2003 15:18:05 +0000

Parentstages talks about offbeat kids music. Looking at their selections, it looks like they may be talking about music that I can actually stand, as opposed to some of the stuff you see on TV. Those commercials for CDs that have a bunch of kids singing nursery rhymes make me want to gag. They’ve got real kids singing those nursery rhymes, so they’re way off pitch. Call me a snob if you will, but I don’t want a CD like that.

Spin: Transparent threading for Swing apps

Tue, 09 Sep 2003 22:44:53 +0000

Earlier, I had come across Foxtrot for easing the burden of handling long-running tasks in Swing apps. [Spin][2] has the same goal, but less code has to know that that’s what you’re doing. You do need to use Interfaces for your model classes, but you were probably already doing that, right? [2]: http://spin.sourceforge.net/ “”

The Myth of External Program Documentation

Tue, 09 Sep 2003 22:10:04 +0000

B. Scott Anderson writes in The Myth of External Program Documentation: Weinberg asked the audience who among them had ever participated in a feasibility study where the answer came back “No”. Not a single hand of the 1,500 in attendance was raised. Which begs the question “how many of these documents are good science and how many are simply position papers. I like his comment about how XP practitioners are at least honest in the fact that they don’t produce the stereotypical bits of documentation artifacts (whereas everyone else deludes themselves into thinking they are producing useful documentation artifacts).

Technical Debt

Tue, 09 Sep 2003 19:29:07 +0000

Martin Fowler talks about a metaphor developed by Ward Cunningham. Technical debt is what your project owes when you take a quick and dirty approach to a problem. That is a very apt metaphor.

It’s an RV. No, it’s a boat. No, it’s BOTH!

Tue, 09 Sep 2003 19:17:39 +0000

The article New Motor Home Transforms Into Yacht includes a picture that seems utterly unbelievable… and we’re still months from April 1st!

Nifty page of optical illusions

Tue, 09 Sep 2003 19:04:19 +0000

The latest works is a page of illusions that move, expand, disappear, etc. All tricks of the eye, not of the computer…

Music industry bullies 12-year-old girl

Tue, 09 Sep 2003 18:50:51 +0000

It was bound to happen… 12-Year-Old Sued for Music Downloading The music industry has turned its big legal guns on Internet music-swappers — including a 12-year-old New York City girl who thought downloading songs was fun. The bad publicity will likely continue until (as someone else pointed out a couple weeks ago) the RIAA sues a relative of a Congressperson.

wx4j Java binding for wxWindows

Tue, 09 Sep 2003 00:14:43 +0000

Not sure how I missed this, but some folks have put together wx4j: A Java Binding for wxWindows. There’s been plenty of talk about SWT and its use of native widgets. wxWindows is one of the best-known and longest-lived toolkits for using native widgets in a portable (Windows, Mac, Linux) way. Nifty stuff.

Why getters and setters are evil

Tue, 09 Sep 2003 00:10:12 +0000

Allen Holub brings OO back to the front with Why getter and setter methods are evil The getter/setter idiom is a commonplace feature in many Java programs. Most of these accessor methods, however, are unnecessary and can severely impact your systems’ maintainability. Using accessors violates the basic object-oriented (OO) principle of encapsulation, so you should avoid them. This article discusses getter/setter cons and offers an alternative design methodology.

Roxes ant tasks

Mon, 08 Sep 2003 19:48:40 +0000

ROXES has released a set of three useful ant tasks for putting the finishing touches and distributing your projects: sfx makes self-extracting archives, jstub makes a native executable wrapper, and jnlp simplifies the creation of Java Web Start JNLP files. jstub and sfx both support Windows, Mac OS X and any Unix variant.

Testing Swing GUIs with JUnit

Fri, 05 Sep 2003 23:20:07 +0000

William C. Wake wrote an article way back in January 2000 about [unit testing Swing GUIs with JUnit.][1] No other package required. I’m not particular about unit testing the layout of the frames, but writing unit tests to ensure that things work functionally (you click button A and result B happens) seems worthwhile. [1]: http://www.xp123.com/xplor/xp0001/index.shtml “”

Overengineering: just like they taught you in school!

Fri, 05 Sep 2003 20:21:22 +0000

Things may have changed a bit in the past 10 years, but back when I was in school it was assumed that change to software was expensive. Working with that assumption, it makes sense to try and design everything to handle any eventuality. As Luke Hutteman, Rod Johnson and others point out, over-engineering really causes more problems than it solves. The notion of refactoring to patterns appeals far more to me than trying to impose patterns prematurely.

Tim Bray on code performance

Thu, 04 Sep 2003 19:50:46 +0000

Tim Bray is apparently doing some real development in C right now, and says something that is near and dear to the hearts of XP folks: This work has reinforced my conviction that you never really understand the problem until you’ve written some of the code. That is why agile methods are becoming so popular. Folks who spend months putting together giant design docs without trying anything in code will certainly need to anticipate many “change requests”, because they won’t truly understand the needs.

Universal to reduce CD prices

Thu, 04 Sep 2003 19:26:28 +0000

CNN reports that Universal Music is reducing CD prices: In a press release Wednesday, Universal Music said it will reduce wholesale prices and implement a $12.98 manufacturer suggested retail price on virtually all of its top-line CDs in the U.S. Interesting to note that CDs remain $4 more expensive than cassettes, despite the fact that CDs are easier to produce.

BeanShell 2.0 beta 1 – full Java compatibility

Wed, 03 Sep 2003 16:10:12 +0000

BeanShell is out and [offers full Java compatibility][2]. Check this out: BeanShell scripted classes are fully typed and appear to outside Java code and via reflective inspection as ordinary classes. However their implementation is fully dynamic and they may include arbitrary BeanShell scripts in their bodies, methods, and constructors. Users may now freely mix loose, unstructured BeanShell scripts, method closures, and full scripted classes. [2]: http://www.beanshell.org/bsh20announce.txt “”

Eclipse 3.0M3 is out

Fri, 29 Aug 2003 19:26:18 +0000

Always a happy occasion… here comes Eclipse 3.0 M3.

Bush’s legal infractions

Wed, 27 Aug 2003 19:58:35 +0000

Not Up to Code? Embellishing the Flag, Then the Web Site (washingtonpost.com) talks about a number of laws that Bush has broken recently. This is partly a testament to how complex our legal system is, and partly a testament to how Bush is willing to bend the rules to get what he wants. There’s still that larger question hanging out there of how far the truth was extended in order to win support for the war against Iraq.

Clever satire of iTunes

Wed, 27 Aug 2003 19:56:18 +0000

iTunes iSbogus is a nicely done satire of iTunes that blasts people for supporting the existing music industry. I’ve been generally against the music industry and many of its practices, but the fact of the matter is that artists voluntarily sign contracts with these records labels. And, no one has stepped forward with a viable business model that pays for the recording of the music and promotion that follows the release… there is a lot more that goes into it than just the artist’s original output.

Yahoo! News In RSS

Wed, 27 Aug 2003 19:32:11 +0000

Yahoo! is expanding out beyond My Yahoo! (which is already a great service) to provide RSS feeds for several news categories.

LDBC Makes All Databases Look The Same

Tue, 26 Aug 2003 19:38:38 +0000

If you’re writing Java code and trying to support multiple databases, your best bet is probably to use Hibernate and not write queries directly. Assuming you just really like SQL, you can also useLDBC Liberty Database Connectivity which provides a common SQL syntax and common behavior regardless of which database engine you attach to.

Dynamic Drive DHTML Scripts

Tue, 26 Aug 2003 19:32:04 +0000

Via Slashdot of all places, I came across a link to Dynamic Drive DHTML(dynamic html) & JavaScript code library!, which looks like a great resource!

XP Debiled

Tue, 26 Aug 2003 00:05:33 +0000

I’m not sure why I’m taking the bait from this anti-XP rant at the BileBlog, but I am. Before I start: I am not saying that everyone should use XP everywhere all the time. Now that that’s out of the way… The customer wants to get the most bang for the buck, and wants to cram in as much as possible for as little expenditure (both financial and time) as possible to them.

The bulb that glows in the dark

Fri, 22 Aug 2003 19:58:48 +0000

Something that could come in handy in a future power outage: American Environmental Products, Inc has developed Glow-Lux Emergency Afterglow Lighting, a bulb that glows in the dark even when the power has been turned off.

SCO claims IBM behind attacks

Fri, 22 Aug 2003 19:30:07 +0000

In the “oh, come on!” department: SCO CEO says IBM behind open source attacks includes this choice tidbit: “We have absolute direct knowledge of this. If you go behind the scenes, the attacks that we get that don’t have IBM’s name on them, underneath the covers, are sponsored by IBM,” [SCO CEO Darl] McBride said. I’ve been avoiding adding more coverage to the already massive coverage of this crazy lawsuit, but these guys are even more deluded than it had seemed previously!

India’s western-ish foods

Thu, 21 Aug 2003 22:40:39 +0000

Time has a nice article about the changing consumerism in India. Huge change is afoot indeed. The cutting edge of this consumer boom is on full display in Gurgaon, a satellite city south of New Delhi that is rapidly developing into mall-rat heaven. Since December, three mammoth, glitzy malls have opened their doors there, crammed with a collection of stores airlifted straight from America’s suburbs — Nike, Benetton, Pizza Hut, Subway sandwiches, even a showroom for Bose audio systems.

Test vs. Type

Thu, 21 Aug 2003 19:35:09 +0000

Another article in the long, ongoing debate (30 years? 🙂 about static and dynamic typing. Oliver Steele’s Test versus Type is probably the most accessible and believable of the arguments I’ve seen. One variable that he does not account for is that IDEs are able to provide you with more hints and assistance in statically typed languages. I’ve come around to the point now where I think that static typing is actually not a bad thing.

ArsDigita’s Java Performance Optimization tips

Thu, 21 Aug 2003 16:50:33 +0000

Found via jblog, the Performance Optimization for Java tips used in Java ACS. Update: Even more useful is this rebuttal which includes a link to a presentation given by one of the HotSpot creators. If you really want to know what’s going on with performance, listening to a HotSpot person seems like a good place to go.

Python descriptors

Thu, 21 Aug 2003 15:52:02 +0000

Raymond Hettinger has written a How-To Guide for Descriptors which is a very good intro to the topic. I thought Python’s new staticmethod and property syntaxes were rather odd compared to Java’s way of doing it, but reading about the general purpose Descriptor mechanism makes it clearer. Looks like a very useful language feature indeed.

Ernie Ball goes Microsoft-free

Wed, 20 Aug 2003 19:43:43 +0000

Ever since the BSA raided made an example of Ernie Ball (the guitar string maker), they’ve gone Microsoft-free. Sterling Ball, the CEO, says that they’re a real-life example of a company successfully using open source and that analyst estimates of the cost are too high: What support? I’m not making calls to Red Hat; I don’t need to. I think that’s propaganda…What about the cost of dealing with a virus?

Blogstakes: Blog as clever marketing tool

Wed, 20 Aug 2003 19:16:43 +0000

Blogs take on many shapes: diaries, photo journals, lists of links that act as as massive, time-ordered bookmark list. Blogstakes has come up with a neat way to get people to put advertising right in with their blog links. By creating links to contests like the The Clip-n-Seal Fresh Party Pack and Free BrowserCam for a Year, bloggers may bring a fair amount of traffic to the sponsors. Blogdex listed Blogstakes and the two contests today (3 of the top 40 links).

Black Sun eclipse plugins

Tue, 19 Aug 2003 19:48:29 +0000

The Black Sun Eclipse Plugins include some nice additions like regex searching and a method view that shows all of the methods for the class you’re looking at (including its super classes).

Open Snippets

Tue, 19 Aug 2003 15:46:11 +0000

Erik Thauvin in the JDJ newsletter talked about Java software repositories and linked to Open Snippets :: GPLed Source Snippets, Served Daily. Open Snippets looks pretty cool and supports several languages. Beware, though: the default license for the code is the GPL. As mentioned, you can write to the author to ask for a different license, but it’s still a shame that something like a “snippet” would be traded under the GPL.

PowerFrontiers blog about energy related issues

Sat, 16 Aug 2003 17:54:07 +0000

PowerFrontiers – Power and Energy News covers a variety of energy topics. I’m still waiting for the day that we get affordable solar power systems.

Warren Buffett is Schwartzenegger’s economic advisor

Thu, 14 Aug 2003 15:59:26 +0000

Arnold has taken a step that will surely help build a credible campaign: Seeking to add muscle to his team, Arnold Schwarzenegger named financial heavyweight Warren Buffett (news – web sites) his senior economic adviser on Wednesday as the actor prepared a high-profile run for California governor.

Universities win subpoena battle with RIAA

Thu, 14 Aug 2003 04:04:52 +0000

Two universities win battle against RIAA subpoenas: Both MIT and Boston College won their requests to reject subpoenas issued by the Recording Industry Association of America Inc. (RIAA) over jurisdictional issues, according the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Jurisdictional issues are not that exciting, but it will be far more inconvenient for the RIAA to wage this particular brand of war against their customers.

Google’s new calculator

Wed, 13 Aug 2003 22:43:35 +0000

In another expansion of its massive brainpower, Google will now add 2+2 for you: To use Google’s built-in calculator function, simply enter the expression you’d like evaluated in the search box and hit the Enter key or click the Google Search button. The calculator can evaluate mathematical expressions involving basic arithmetic (5 2*2 or 2^20), more complicated math (sine(30 degrees) or e^(i pi) 1), units of measure and conversions (100 miles in kilometers or 160 pounds * 4000 feet in Calories), and physical constants (1 a.

Windows Media Recorder

Tue, 12 Aug 2003 21:12:52 +0000

See a streaming show that you’d like to be able to “tape”? Use WM Recorder!

Lawlessness doesn’t work in virtual worlds either

Tue, 12 Aug 2003 19:03:32 +0000

The BBC has an intriguing article about a man who is selling Ultima Online virtual goods for a living. Near the end, they talk about his ethical dilemma in dealing in stolen UO goods: Mr Dibbell greatest fear is that he falls prey to real cyber criminals who pillage his Ultima items or steals the cash from his PayPal account. I’m pretty sure PayPal has reasonable protections, but in UO someone could just come along and bump off his character.

California adopts new alphabet for election

Tue, 12 Aug 2003 15:55:25 +0000

California Determines Recall Ballot Order Under the lottery-style system, the reordered 26-letter alphabet — beginning R, W, Q, O, J, M, V, A and eventually ending with L — is applied throughout candidates’ names. That means that David Laughing Horse Robinson, chairman of the Kawaiisu Indian tribe, goes first, not Rainforth, because O comes before A in the state’s newfangled alphabet. But wait — it gets more complicated. And that’s exactly when Robinson’s advantage would seem to run out.

Python Bayes implementations

Fri, 08 Aug 2003 23:24:01 +0000

A couple of bookmarks of Python naive Bayes implementations for myself: Divmod Reverend is licensed under LGPL and the ever popular SpamBayes is licensed under the Python license.

Schwarzenegger runs for California governor

Thu, 07 Aug 2003 21:44:18 +0000

In a surprising move, Arnold Schwarzenegger announced his bid for governor of California: Although Schwarzenegger has never before sought political office, his fame and fortune are expected to make him a formidable candidate against a crowded field of lesser-knowns in an abbreviated two-month campaign. If he wins, he would certainly not be the first Republican actor elected governor of California. Unlike Ronald Reagan, however, Arnold is ineligible to run for President.

Links for the Day

Wed, 06 Aug 2003 20:32:11 +0000

I’m playing catch-up in my aggregator after two weeks away. I’m sure that plenty of interesting things from last week have dropped off the radar, and that’s okay. If they’re really, really interesting they’ll pop back up sometime. Tim Bray has put together a table of contents for his excellent series on search engine technology. Apache Geronimo is being incubated as a new J2EE container. Sure, competition is good, but I am led to wonder if time would be better spent improving other open source projects.

Dan Gillmor tries VOIP

Mon, 04 Aug 2003 17:31:33 +0000

Dan Gillmor of the SJMerc wrote about why he likes internet phone calling. There’s some interesting discussion of Free World Dialup, and how you can connect some of these VOIP phone systems to FWD giving you a real, live phone number to your computer. This type of stuff will be increasingly cool for businesses (think of companies like JetBlue where all of their call center people work from home!)

Mailinator: even more spam busting temp addresses

Sun, 03 Aug 2003 02:26:32 +0000

On the heels of Spam Gourmet and Jetable comes Mailinator which offers a twist: Later, come to this site and check the email for that account. Its that easy. Mailinator accounts are created when mail arrives for them. No signup, no personal information, and when you’re done – you can walk away. The emails will automatically be deleted for you after a few hours. This is interesting, because you don’t even have to leave the site you’re on in order to create a new address.

Cringley’s Snapster 2.0

Sun, 03 Aug 2003 00:07:19 +0000

A follow-up to the idea of sharing ownership of music. Cringley’s new take is to make sure only a single copy of a CD is in use at any point in time: Every time a shareholder wants to download or play a song, he or she must ensure that their download is matched on a one-for-one basis with a physical CD somewhere in the system. Given that the MP3.

Small electric car, 0-60 in 4 seconds

Fri, 01 Aug 2003 01:05:41 +0000

A father-son team in Spokane built this nifty electric car called the Tango: At 39 inches wide and 8 feet 5 inches long, it’s skinnier than some motorcycles and shorter than many a living-room couch. It runs on batteries, not gas. People may be more readily accepting of this than the Segway. Only time will tell, however, if people really are willing to pay the price for environment-friendliness.

Cringely’s Son of Napster proposal

Wed, 30 Jul 2003 23:07:59 +0000

Robert Cringely has an idea for working around the RIAA in putting together a new music service. His idea centers around the notions of ownership and fair use. In a publicly traded company, the owners of the company are the stockholders. So, Cringely figures, create a company that buys a bunch of CDs and allow the “owners” of those CDs (the stockholders) to download MP3 backups of the music. He envisions a very low price point, with none of the money circulating back to artists and labels.

Doc Searls on Saving The Net

Wed, 23 Jul 2003 19:10:39 +0000

I haven’t gotten to read this yet, but I wanted to leave myself a bookmark for it: Saving the Net

MIT refuses RIAA subpoena

Wed, 23 Jul 2003 03:42:12 +0000

MIT opts for student rights when torn between a restriction on giving away student information and a subpoena from the RIAA.. Verizon says that they’ll only comply after legal options are exhausted, whereas Comcast will happily turn over information. Always interesting to see who works with their constituents.

John Gilmore censored by British Airways

Mon, 21 Jul 2003 18:48:39 +0000

John Gilmore was removed from a British Airways flight for wearing a button that said “Suspected Terrorist”: After the whole interaction was over, I offered to tell her, just for her own information, what the button means and why I wear it. She was curious. I told her that it refers to all of us, everyone, being suspected of being terrorists, being searched without cause, being queued in lines and pens, forced to take our shoes off, to identify ourselves, to drink our own breast milk, to submit to indignities.

Eclipse 3.0M2 is out!

Mon, 21 Jul 2003 16:30:44 +0000

No Earth-shattering changes here, but Eclipse 3.0 M2 does have a number of nice new features. I’ve been using 3.0 M1 since it came out, and I can say that the “stable build” is an accurate depiction. It works great!

Pizza cuts cancer risk

Mon, 21 Jul 2003 15:56:57 +0000

This is my kind of study: A study of 8,000 Italians found that regular pizza-eaters were 59 percent less likely to contract cancer of the esophagus, while the risk of developing cancer of the colon fell by 26 percent. Of course, maybe this only impacts Italians (and maybe the pizza they serve in Italy is different). But, still, it’s encouraging!

D’oh! I’ve been had!

Fri, 18 Jul 2003 19:33:07 +0000

Thank you, snopes! According to the new Urban Legends Reference Pages: Inboxer Rebellion (Metallica) article, yesterday’s story about Metallica suing over the E, F chords is false. I should know enough to look at the URL and realize that the article yesterday was not actually MTV.com.

LGPL answers from the FSF

Fri, 18 Jul 2003 16:31:24 +0000

Though we on JavaBlogs had pretty much figured stuff out, Slashdot provoked answers from the FSF. David Turner himself responded and had a nice summary of what Section 6 of the LGPL really means: Make sure your licensing follows the simple requirements in the 1st para of section 6. Provide the LGPL library in a separate jar, and allow that jar to be replaced by newer versions of the library.

Metallica sues over E, F chords

Thu, 17 Jul 2003 20:01:11 +0000

Not unlike the band that’s being sued, I thought it was a joke when I read that Metallica is suing a Canadian band over E, F chords: “People are going to get on our case again for this, but try to see it from our point of view just once,” stated Metallica’s Lars Ulrich. “We’re not saying we own those two chords, individually – that would be ridiculous. We’re just saying that in that specific order, people have grown to associate E, F with our music.

RSS and Bayesian classification

Thu, 17 Jul 2003 19:46:57 +0000

With the sheer volume of information coming out of blogs, I’d like my blog reader to do more to figure out what I’d be interested in reading. Bayesian classification is one tool there, and Nick Lothian has started down that road.

Java library licensing continued

Thu, 17 Jul 2003 19:38:29 +0000

Charles Miller suggests forking the LGPL. He does bring up the interesting question of what license should people use in place of the LGPL? Charles suggests that we should “”visibly and widely” annoint some other license without just having projects switch to that license.” I’m not sure how one would “visibly and widely” annoint some other license without just having projects switch to that license. If the OSI were to list “recommended” licenses for certain purposes, that might help people work through the quagmire.

Bill would put song swappers in jail

Thu, 17 Jul 2003 15:46:10 +0000

This doesn’t even really need comment… Bill Would Put Internet Song Swappers in Jail: The Conyers-Berman bill would operate under the assumption that each copyrighted work made available through a computer network was copied by others at least 10 times for a total retail value of $2,500. That would bump the activity from a misdemeanor to a felony, carrying a sentence of up to five years in jail.

In depth look at Microsoft’s loss in Munich

Wed, 16 Jul 2003 20:56:59 +0000

USA Today has an excellent article about how Microsoft lost the city of Munich to SuSE and IBM’s Linux offering. On May 28, the city council approved a more expensive proposal — $35.7 million — from German Linux distributor SuSE and IBM, a big Linux backer. This article really highlights the incredible marketing mistakes that Microsoft has made over the past couple of years. Increasingly, Microsoft has been using strong arm tactics with its licensing changes, right at a time when its biggest threat has far fewer licensing restrictions.

LGPL code in jar files places some restrictions

Wed, 16 Jul 2003 18:41:18 +0000

(This entry has been revised… see below…) I’m surprised I hadn’t heard this before, but it appears that Java code that uses an LGPL’ed library must [be released under the LGPL as well][1]. Gadzooks. I’ll have to pay a bit more attention. The AspectWerkz folks convinced JMangler to switch back to the LGPL, but I guess it’s still viral! Update: Thanks to Paul Rivers for pointing out his post in the comments for the link above.

Netscape gets the ax, Mozilla gets a Foundation

Wed, 16 Jul 2003 17:01:45 +0000

So, the word on the street is that Netscape staffers have been slashed, which is far from surprising given AOL’s deal to include Internet Explorer for the next few years. Mozilla work continues via the Mozilla Foundation, to which AOL has pledged $2 million. Reportedly, the number of Mozilla volunteers is now exceeding the number of people who were paid by Netscape to work on it, so this could just be an interesting, new, independent phase for Moz.

Sharecropping Redux

Tue, 15 Jul 2003 23:33:45 +0000

Tim started a lively discussion with yesterday’s The Web’s the Place, and he’s posted some of the feedback that he’s received.

Mike Hogan’s maintainability patterns

Tue, 15 Jul 2003 21:15:15 +0000

Two good articles by Mike Hogan: Maintainability Pattern: Write less code and Maintainability Pattern: Manage Dependencies. I heard a good analogy from some folks who do XP training near here. In a software shop, code is your inventory and it’s something to be managed well. Having vast numbers of lines of code is not necessarily something to be proud of… you want to have just the right number of lines.

White House to project record deficits

Tue, 15 Jul 2003 16:01:57 +0000

Apparently, the White House is set to project record deficits: The White House was expected on Tuesday to forecast a record budget deficit approaching a half trillion dollars this fiscal year — $150 billion worse than its earlier projections — with little hope of a turnaround any time soon. This is just plain awful fiscal management. Not only is it incredible that a tax cut was issued with a projected $300 billion deficit, but now we see “oops!

Is JavaBlogs getting your updates?

Tue, 15 Jul 2003 15:51:04 +0000

I discovered last night that JavaBlogs was not reading my RSS file and had not since July 7th. It said that it was next scheduled to read it on July 8th, but clearly that didn’t happen! It seems like that’s around the time of the server upgrade… It looks like others have had this problem as well: [#BLOG-25] RSS feed not being read. If you’re getting fewer reads than normal, you may want to check this out.

Confusing quote from Ari Fleischer

Mon, 14 Jul 2003 19:22:51 +0000

In the NYTimes article Bush Defends War, Sidestepping Issue of Faulty Intelligence, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer is quoted as saying: “I think the burden is on those people who think he [Saddam] didn’t have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they are.” Am I just reading this wrong? How can someone tell the world where something that Saddam doesn’t have are?

Tim Bray’s sharecropping: hit and miss

Mon, 14 Jul 2003 18:51:06 +0000

Tim Bray wrote another interesting article, this one with a wide enough interest level to reach the Blogdex top 5. In The Web’s the Place, Tim draws the comparison between developers working within proprietary systems and sharecroppers (farmers who work land owned by someone else). I think that’s a great analogy! How many companies have made utility programs for Windows that then got blown away by a built in feature in the next Windows version?

WebWork2 overview

Mon, 14 Jul 2003 17:25:49 +0000

Jason Carreira did a write-up of Mike Cannon-Brookes’ talk about WebWork2 at TSSS. This is a nice, concise overview that offers more than a bullet point list.

Yahoo! to buy Overture

Mon, 14 Jul 2003 17:06:56 +0000

Yahoo to buy Overture for $1.63 billion Ending months of speculation, Yahoo said Monday it’s buying online ad company Overture Services for $1.63 billion in stock and cash. First, we see the stock of surviving dotcoms edging upward into overvalued-land, and maybe here comes the resumption of multi-billion dollar mergers. Actually, this merger makes good sense for Yahoo. As much as search engine purists hate the notion of paid search listings (which is what Overture offers), their system worked really well for me when I was running Byproducts.

Supporting Eric Eldred act

Sun, 13 Jul 2003 20:50:32 +0000

Well, I signed the petition a few weeks ago for the Eric Eldred Act, and now I’ve written my representative. If you support a vibrant public domain and a balance between corporate interests and the needs of the people, please voice your support as well!

Courtney Love talks about Virgin Records

Sun, 13 Jul 2003 19:51:43 +0000

Courtney Love famously had a falling out with her old record label and had plenty to say about economics of major labe contracts. Billboard interviewed her and asked her why she signed with Virgin instead of an indie: I am not against majors. I am against two things — major-label accounting practices (which are addressed in my deal) and the rise of what I call “executive culture,” e.g.: where the executives are more important than the artists and where the ego of a president, no matter how nuts or crazy that president is, is more important than dozens and dozens of careers … Virgin has a culture where you don’t hear the names of the executives more often than the artists.

Labels considering a grab for touring revenues

Sat, 12 Jul 2003 23:54:42 +0000

ABCNEWS.com : Concert Tours Are Where the Real Money Is: Now the music labels, hungry for revenue from any source, are mulling over whether to make a grab for a piece of the tour biz. One company already has: In October EMI Recorded Music signed a deal with Brit singer Robbie Williams that gives the label a cut of the pop star’s merchandise, publishing, touring revenue and sponsorship. This is in line with predictions that others have made and actions taken elsewhere in the world (like China).

Another view on Lawrence

Fri, 11 Jul 2003 20:17:58 +0000

Randy E. Barnett on Supreme Court & Sodomy on National Review Online writes: Contrary to what has been reported repeatedly in the press, the Court in Lawrence did not protect a “right of privacy.” Rather, it protected “liberty” — and without showing that the particular liberty in question is somehow fundamental.” A few days back, I pointed to an article that said that the Court had gone too far because they were overriding a law without referring to specific language in the Constitution.

Nano tech to bring cheap, big, flat TVs

Fri, 11 Jul 2003 18:10:51 +0000

USA Today reports on a Motorola breakthrough that will give us 50-inch flat screen TVs for the cost of a 32-inch CRT! Woohoo! Supposedly, this tech allows them to “grow” the TV screen. The quoted Motorolite says that these could hit the market within 3 years.

Trans-fat labels to appear by 2006

Wed, 09 Jul 2003 23:50:37 +0000

In a move that will keep us from having to scan through the ingredients for “hydrogenated”, the government will be requiring food to be labeled with the quantity of trans-fatty acids in foods. This is a big boon for folks who eat packaged foods, which often have trans-fatty acids lurking.

Spring another IOC framework

Wed, 09 Jul 2003 21:19:25 +0000

And here’s some more reading to do… Spring – j2ee Application Framework sounds like it offers many of the goodies of a modern inversion of control framework.

Electronic polling systems allow changes

Wed, 09 Jul 2003 20:55:28 +0000

Though these articles are written in a very “conspiracy theory” sort of way, it is interesting to read about some of the internals of electronic election systems. This is scary stuff, because we certainly wouldn’t want our election systems becoming less accurate than with old paper ballots. (And having a less accurate audit trail to boot!)

Easy disposable email addresses

Wed, 09 Jul 2003 20:21:43 +0000

I just came across (via Larry Lessig) jetable disposable email addresses. These addresses are good for a short period of time and will forward messages on to you until that expiration. It’s even simpler and quicker than Spam Gourmet.

Does TDD shun reuse?

Wed, 09 Jul 2003 00:05:41 +0000

Mike Hogan asks whether Test Driven Development discourages component reuse. He gave a simple, clear example where he made a “grep” routine more flexible by delegating some of the function to other interfaces. My response: Reusability is not really orthogonal to function, but comes as part of the function. Because we’ve all been taught in school that changing software is really expensive, the tendency has been to generalize software where it’s not required.

Buoy UI toolkit

Tue, 08 Jul 2003 00:41:32 +0000

The Buoy UI toolkit provides, in the words of the author, A much simpler, cleaner, and more consistent API A better mechanism for laying out interface components A far more powerful event handling mechanism, which is based on dynamic binding of arbitrary methods as event listeners Built in support for serializing user interfaces as XML, then reconstructing them again Since Swing is already a wrapper of components around AWT and has never been praised for its speed, one has to be a little wary.

Creative Commons bringing musicians together

Tue, 08 Jul 2003 00:29:31 +0000

A guitarist lays down a few tracks, and then a violinist decides to add a track on top… and all of this happens without any needed rights clearing.

Tim O’Reilly’s Software Predictions

Mon, 07 Jul 2003 23:23:39 +0000

In this interview with Tim O’Reilly, he talks about: EBay Inc. will someday buy Oracle, open source licenses don’t work, and the software market is about to change forever. Very interesting interview. He says that Amazon.com is possibly the farthest along the path to the future in that they have this critical mass of a customer base that provides a whole lot of data and value and that they are exploiting it by providing commerce services for many people and offering web services that allow people to create all sorts of applications that they themselves wouldn’t necessarily think of.

Why are RSS and Echo pull (or poll) systems?

Thu, 03 Jul 2003 22:04:23 +0000

There has been huge discussion about Echo, the in-progress replacement for RSS and the Blogger API. I agree that the notion of coming up with a new, clean, unambiguous syntax can help the state of blog reading and production tools. Something that has bothered me for some time, however, is the question of “why are RSS feeds provided on a pull basis?”

Supreme Court went too far?

Thu, 03 Jul 2003 20:48:05 +0000

Jeffrey Rosen argues in The New Republic Online: Sex Appeal that the Supreme Court went too far in the recent Lawrence decision: The Court could have struck down Texas’s sodomy law on the narrow grounds that it violated the equal protection of the laws by forbidding homosexual but not heterosexual sodomy. But instead the Court embraced and extended a sweeping and amorphous right to sexual liberty that is even harder to locate in the text or history of the Constitution than the right of reproductive autonomy that the Court discovered in Roe.

The Onion’s still got it

Thu, 03 Jul 2003 19:50:57 +0000

Even after all these years, The Onion is still really witty. Bush Asks Congress For $30 Billion To Help Fight War On Criticism Ashcroft said the Justice Department, working closely with the CIA and FBI, has identified more than 300 potential targets, ranging from the Bush Administration’s inability to produce the weapons of mass destruction used to justify the war with Iraq to its deficit-ballooning fiscal policies.

The Carnival Is Here

Thu, 03 Jul 2003 18:57:02 +0000

Ann Arbor is a great place in the summer. Beautiful weather (though it is as hot as it looks in these pictures!), fun festivals like Top of the Park and the Art Fair. There’s also a carnival that comes through on 4th of July weekend and takes over a good portion of Pioneer High School’s parking lot. It’s odd to think that I can just walk over and pick up elephant ears or a funnel cake on my way home from work, since I park in that parking lot.

Scott McCloud takes a stab at micropayments

Thu, 03 Jul 2003 16:51:13 +0000

Comic author Scott McCloud, who has previously written about micropayments, is now trying it out himself. Penny Arcade didn’t quite buy into it a couple years ago. There is not a whole lot of information about the BitPass system that Scott has signed up with. From what I’ve been able to gather, you buy a minimum of $3 using PayPal or a credit card and then you deduct the small payments from your balance.

FeedDemon comments

Wed, 02 Jul 2003 19:56:30 +0000

I’ve been trying out the FeedDemon beta the past couple of days. I have just posted this to the FeedDemon newsgroup: FeedDemon is a fabulously slick feed reader, particularly given its 1.0 beta status! To date, my feed reader of choice has been Amphetadesk with the outline templates. Here are some things that would make me open up the wallet to buy FeedDemon: 1) Show me what I’m most likely to read.

Bush raises $34 million

Wed, 02 Jul 2003 15:46:38 +0000

Reuters is reporting that Bush has raised a record $34 million in the latest quarter. First of all, I do hope that this election is not decided by the person who raises the most campaign contributions. Granted that what I’m about to say sounds naive, but this should be about electing a leader who will do the things you want while in power, not the person who has the most TV ads.

Carlos on the BeanContext API

Tue, 01 Jul 2003 16:20:45 +0000

Carlos Perez talks about the BeanContext API as the Forgotten Standard Java API. He is absolutely correct that we programmers have reinvented the wheel repeatedly, making the same mistakes that were made before, and I don’t think programmers are the only ones in this world who suffer from this. Still, if there is a Java standard API that’s often (but not always!) a better bet than some random API available out there in the wild.

TPed!

Tue, 01 Jul 2003 15:31:43 +0000

Well, it’s happened… for the first time in my adult life someone has toilet papered some of our trees. And the little prankster also wrote, in shaving cream, “I own you” on our driveway. Hee hee. They TPed some of the neighbors’ trees as well. TPing trees is one of those pranks that will probably never go out of style. (South Park even did an episode where the boys TPed someone’s house.

Navy Sonar vs. Whales

Tue, 01 Jul 2003 00:33:21 +0000

Environmental groups and the Navy are going head-to-head Wired in court about the Navy’s new ultra-loud Sonar system. By authorizing the Navy to test LFA in as much as 75 percent of the world’s oceans, the Bush administration may have violated a number of environmental regulations, including provisions of the Endangered Species Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the National Environmental Policy Act. Does anything more really need to be said about this administration and the environment?

Ten Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq

Tue, 01 Jul 2003 00:23:28 +0000

Alternet offers Ten Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq So, months after the war, we are once again where we started – with plenty of rhetoric and absolutely no proof of this “grave danger” for which O.J. Smith died. The Bush administration is now scrambling to place the blame for its lies on faulty intelligence, when in fact the intelligence was fine; it was their abuse of it that was “faulty.

Harry Potter vs. Tonya Grotter

Tue, 01 Jul 2003 00:05:47 +0000

Slate features the article Harry Potter and the International Order of Copyright – Should Tanya Grotter and the Magic Double Bass be banned? which makes the case the Harry Potter follow-ons published around the world should be allowed: In the end, few people are likely to mistake Tanya Grotter for Harry Potter; it is akin to mistaking Burger King for McDonald’s. The international copyright system is justified in preventing the most basic forms of piracy.

NYTimes on Harry vs. Hulk

Mon, 30 Jun 2003 23:30:19 +0000

Last week, I wrote about Harry Potter’s defeat of the Hulk in terms of revenue produced opening weekend. The New York Times has an article now, Harry Crushes the Hulk which talks not only of the financial aspect but of how Harry is more “naturally” successful: The book’s success bubbled up spontaneously from below, propelled by kids’ word of mouth, rather than being imposed by synergistic browbeating from above.

Michigan Senate passes antispam bill

Thu, 26 Jun 2003 23:56:58 +0000

My state is moving to the forefront of anti-spam legislation: Modeling itself on a federal bill that would create a national spam opt-out list, the Michigan Senate passed what one member described as the nation’s toughest antispam bill. Unfortunately, I think that antispam legislation, particularly at the state level, is probably about as productive as trying to stop P2P systems. The more productive use of effort would be to implement newer technical measures, difficult though they may be.

Google AdSense can support a site?

Thu, 26 Jun 2003 20:35:46 +0000

Tim Bray investigates the monetary implications of his experiment with Google’s AdSense program: Which is nothing that you’re going to retire on, but it would certainly cover the site’s costs and buy a couple of beers. And if you could drive the hits up, you could actually generate noticeable income. Tim has a fairly busy site, but it looks like he could get several hundred a month from Google’s AdSense.

Lessig has good meeting in DC

Thu, 26 Jun 2003 20:17:40 +0000

Larry Lessig had a good meeting in DC with some members of Congress and it sounds like the arguments plus the 15,000 signatures are going to result in getting the Public Domain Enhancement Act introduced! Now comes the part of actually telling your members of Congress that you support this.

Two on Bush

Wed, 25 Jun 2003 17:48:51 +0000

In the NYTimes, Denial and Deception talks about how so many people seem to stick their heads in the sand regarding how some of Bush’s statements have turned out to be false. Meanwhile, over in Slate-land, Timothy Noah contends that Bush can be both ignorant and a liar and that people shouldn’t allow Bush off the hook. Next year, it will be interesting to see if the Internet and the weblog world turns into a real political force.

More than 300 failed dotcoms

Wed, 25 Jun 2003 17:36:44 +0000

Here is an excellent collection of farewell screenshots from failed dotcoms. I wonder what the total amount of funding raised for those 300+ companies was.

InstaPundit followup to Gephardt gaffe

Wed, 25 Jun 2003 17:31:13 +0000

Glenn posted a good collection of quotes and comments on Dick Gephardt’s now infamous “executive order” statement. I agree with the quote in there that if you criticize Ashcroft for making statements that are at odds with the Constitution, you should criticize Gephardt as well. Gephardt’s spokesperson, not surprisingly, backpedaled on the statement saying that Gephardt essentially just meant that he would use the tools of his office in his commitment to diversity.

Protege knowledge modeling tool

Wed, 25 Jun 2003 00:23:02 +0000

JavaWorld has an interesting article about Protege, An AI tool for the real world: This article introduces Protégé, arguably the most successful open source knowledge-modeling platform. Using Protégé, developers and domain experts can build conceptual models and knowledge bases and access them via an easy-to-use Java API. The resulting models can implement decision-support systems, capture software requirements, populate databases, generate Java classes and UML diagrams, share and reuse domain models, and access the Semantic Web.

Smell that fresh air

Wed, 25 Jun 2003 00:00:34 +0000

There’s nothing quite like the smell of fresh blacktop.

Unit testing against interfaces

Tue, 24 Jun 2003 19:03:47 +0000

Carlos points out a nice testing technique used by the Commons VFS folks: What they developed was a test harness based on JUnit to test all the different implementations without having to rewrite all the tests for each implementation. One set of unit tests will ensure that the FTP, SMB, JAR, etc. implementations all work correctly. We’re working on project with a very componentized architecture right now, and testing against the interfaces this way seems like a very useful idea.

Gephardt’s foot-in-mouth disease

Tue, 24 Jun 2003 17:46:33 +0000

To the Democratic Party: Please, please, please put forth someone we can vote for. With all of the scary warmongering, privacy invasions, bad treatment of the environment, poor fiscal management, and the appearance of backroom deals with big business that we’ve seen these past 2.5 years, you’d think the Democrats could find someone to counter Bush. This is not the way to win the election: “When I’m president, we’ll do executive orders to overcome any wrong thing the Supreme Court does tomorrow or any other day,” [Rep.

Book beats movie

Tue, 24 Jun 2003 15:41:10 +0000

What was the biggest thing in entertainment this past weekend? Could it be the long-anticipated, quite hyped Hulk? Hulk grossed more than $62 million to have the biggest June movie opening to date. But, this weekend, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix debuted in bookstores around the world. Scholastic reports that it sold 5 million copies on Saturday (including preorders). Even with the common 40% discount, that still marks a $90 million debut!

Supreme Court upholds CIPA

Tue, 24 Jun 2003 00:36:51 +0000

Today, the Supreme Court ruled that requiring public libraries to use Internet filters is legal. For some portion of the population, public libraries are the only way to get access to the Net. It’s well-known that these filters prohibit access to quite a bit of non-pornographic information, so this law ensures that a portion of the web is simply unavailable to part of the population. That’s the real danger.

Eric Kidd: The Missing Future

Mon, 23 Jun 2003 21:05:40 +0000

In The Missing Future, Eric Kidd laments the foreseen disappearance of small, independent software developers: But this dream is nearly gone. It’s getting crushed between the awful power of Microsoft, and the onrushing juggernaut of open source. A 30-person company can’t compete with Microsoft. And a 30-person company will have a hard time competing with 300 open source contributors giving software away for free and making their living as in-house developers (though it can be done).

Piccolo ZUI library

Mon, 23 Jun 2003 19:41:14 +0000

Piccolo provides what the authors call a “zoomable user interface”. It looks like a nice, intuitive way to view large quantities of data. I may have a real world application for this in the work that I’m doing… Here’s the intro: Welcome to Piccolo! It is a revolutionary way to create robust, full-featured graphical applications in Java, with striking features such as zooming and multiple representation. Piccolo is an extensive toolkits based on the Java2D API.

JGoodies stable builds out

Mon, 23 Jun 2003 16:52:25 +0000

I had already tried JGoodies via the java.net CVS repository. But, now the official Looks and Forms builds are out, and under a BSD license! Most excellent stuff!

A journey through three AOP frameworks

Mon, 23 Jun 2003 16:10:07 +0000

Nick Lothian wrote a nice comparison of three AOP frameworks: Nanning, JBoss4 AOP and AspectWerkz. He chose a very simple example and wrote it in all three systems to show a “side-by-side” comparison of the style that each one uses. Very handy for someone looking at these things.

The woes of the music retailer

Sun, 22 Jun 2003 22:03:58 +0000

BusinessWeek dives into the unsurprising poor financial health of music retailers. The continuing drumbeat of bad news has some predicting that the traditional music store will soon go the way of the eight-track player. If the major labels seemed a little outmoded, that’s nothing compared to the specialty retailers. I usually sample music online and then either buy it at Best Buy (not a specialty retailer) or online. If someone will sell me appropriate downloads, I would go that route.

Musicians get $0.12 per download

Sun, 22 Jun 2003 21:47:02 +0000

Business 2.0 shows the breakdown of a $1 iTunes download. Most artists get about 12%. In the case of Aimee Mann, she probably gets 50% because she has her own label and publisher.

Corporations getting public property

Sun, 22 Jun 2003 18:37:37 +0000

Philip Greenspun writes that the stock market is climbing because the government is giving away public property. Look around you at stuff that you believe to be public property. Very likely it will soon be given away to America’s largest corporations and consequently their stock will go up even if they don’t innovate. This is only as likely as we make it. Never forget that we, as consumers and voters, hold the real power.

White House edits EPA report

Fri, 20 Jun 2003 22:16:14 +0000

The NYTimes says that a Report by the E.P.A. Leaves Out Data on Climate Change, because of edits done by the White House before the release of the report. Agency officials said it was tentatively scheduled to be released early next week, before [agency administrator Christie] Whitman steps down on June 27, ending a troubled time in office that often put her at odds with President Bush. If she is at all effective as a leader of the EPA, it’s not at all surprising that she would be at odds with Bush.

DejaView Camwear replay for your eyes

Fri, 20 Jun 2003 21:41:08 +0000

If this becomes popular, that will mean that video of just about any major (or minor) event will be readily available. A big boost for reality tv.

Harrison Ford’s finger on the web

Fri, 20 Jun 2003 21:11:21 +0000

Harrison Ford: A Web Guide to the Films has a page starring Harrison’s finger.

Jump the hurdles of Struts development

Fri, 20 Jun 2003 20:25:09 +0000

While looking at some JAAS related stuff, I happened across a JavaWorld article that offers Tips for solving common difficulties in Struts.

Tim Bray’s Basic Basics of Search

Thu, 19 Jun 2003 21:20:43 +0000

It’s pretty introductory, but Tim Bray gives a nice little tutorial on how search engines work. This will be an interesting series to follow.

Scoring lower against Java

Thu, 19 Jun 2003 21:18:49 +0000

Hoover’s Online has reposted a rather unfortunate article called Scoring Higher with Java talking about how Java has not “turned into the ‘Windows killer’ that it was once supposed to be”. This is clearly not an article from a technology source: Not only has the impact on Microsoft been minimal so far, Java now faces a growing threat from the open source Linux operating system. Even IBM, a strong supporter of Java in the early years, is now focusing on Linux and was noticeably absent at JavaOne this year.

iTunes – the “i” doesn’t stand for innovation

Thu, 19 Jun 2003 20:50:32 +0000

Salon has an article about the new era of music brought on by single song sales: How many times have you bought a band’s album for an overplayed song, only to discover that the more gratifying tunes are the ones you’ve never heard before? But now that iTunes and other online music vendors have finally arrived, don’t expect to experience that same epiphany in the future. iTunes is helping to usher in an era where songs are sold individually, thus putting an end to what I call “bundled innovations.

Bush’s Segway Fall Conspiracy Theory

Thu, 19 Jun 2003 19:09:52 +0000

Hah! Hopefully with tongue in cheek, Kevin Maney of USA Today writes: President Bush meant to fall off his Segway. Oh, I’m sure of it. What we’ve got here is a clever conspiracy — a pre-emptive strike to save the oil industry from a technology that could sap its power. He does confirm that the President did not turn on his Segway, which is why the stabilizers didn’t work.

REBOL/Core is free now

Thu, 19 Jun 2003 18:28:50 +0000

This isn’t completely new news, but it’s new to me. As of the REBOL/Core 2.5.5 Release from March 10, 2003: This release also amends the end user license agreement to allow the free use of REBOL/Core for commercial and educational purposes. Separate licensing for such end uses is no longer required. I always thought that REBOL looked like an interesting scripting language because of its simplicity in handling Internet tasks.

A Duck!

Thu, 19 Jun 2003 16:35:41 +0000

I knew that phone cam (I have a Sony Ericsson T68i) would come in handy. The camera is small enough that I can have it with me all the time and capture (albeit at low resolution) nice things like a family of ducks swimming on a pond.

Agiledox and I’ve been doing it wrong

Wed, 18 Jun 2003 23:45:54 +0000

Joe Walnes writes about Agiledox, and the first tool Testdox. Testdox creates documentation from unit test method names. More often than not, I’ve been naming my tests based on the method they are testing. This is sometimes descriptive, because I tend to write more small methods instead of fewer large methods. However, I like what Testdox does and the implications that has for using a TestCase as documentation for how to use a class.

Anthill looks pretty spiffy

Wed, 18 Jun 2003 22:51:37 +0000

Looking to turn on automated builds, I started looking at Cruise Control yesterday. The documentation left a little to be desired and before I had gotten too far I searched to see what other docs there were. That’s when I encountered Anthill, which is an automated build system that runs in a webapp. Anthill is available in both open source and commercial versions. Deploying Anthill was very quick and easy, and all configuration could be done through the web.

Kent Beck interview at DeveloperWorks

Wed, 18 Jun 2003 21:50:30 +0000

IBM DeveloperWorks gives us Working smarter, not harder: An interview with Kent Beck. It’s not a very long interview, but there are some decent quotes: So, simplicity is about acknowledging the tricks exist but not using them. Wouldn’t it be cool if we could use the Java Security Manager here? Yeah we could, but let’s just put the name of the class. I used to feel proud of myself when I used something no one else knew about.

Review: Weird Al Yankovic’s Poodle Hat

Wed, 18 Jun 2003 16:15:32 +0000

Hard to say whether this is a music review or a comedy review… either way, it’s a review of “Weird Al” Yankovic’s latest, Poodle Hat. Poodle Hat, Al’s first album in 4 years, follows the exact same formula as his ’90s albums: mix in about 45% parodies, 45% originals, and a polka medley of songs for good measure. If you didn’t like this formula in the past, I don’t think you’ll start liking it now. This review also covers the latest AL-TV.

Stairway to Maven

Tue, 17 Jun 2003 23:50:23 +0000

Siegfried Goeschl has put together a visual tour of what Maven gives you.

President Bush falls off Segway

Tue, 17 Jun 2003 21:25:48 +0000

I thought the Segway was supposed to prevent this from happening: President Bush momentarily loses his balance while riding a segway personal transporter The photo shows Bush tumbling forward, with the Segway’s handlebars on the ground. I thought the Segway’s high tech balancing system was supposed to prevent that?

IDE Bloat addendum

Tue, 17 Jun 2003 16:17:12 +0000

Yesterday, I responded to talk about bloated IDEs by saying that they make me more productive. I forgot about Joel’s great article on the topic. Joel says that 80% of the people use only 20% of the features of the product, but it’s a different 20%. He’s right, and the same rule applies to IDEs just as much as it does for word processors and spreadsheets. That’s why plugins are a good thing for IDEs.

On IDE Bloat

Mon, 16 Jun 2003 22:34:04 +0000

Danno Ferrin chose to respond to the IDE rant on BileBlog. (BTW, if you’re in the mood for commisserating with a perpetual ranter, check out BileBlog. You may start feeling like your own life isn’t so bad after all 🙂 Anyhow, Danno had the following to say about IDE bloat: Issue #1 : IDE Bloat. Yea, I’ve noticed this alot lately. All the IDEs need to have some fangleled spangeled tool to do the latest programming fad.

Rebate tracker site

Mon, 16 Jun 2003 15:49:55 +0000

This morning, I was having a hard time remembering the rather obvious name of this site: Rebate-Tracker.com does just what it sounds. It helps you track rebates that you’re expecting to receive. This can be important, because I just had to send an email message to a company because twice they’ve agreed that I’m owed the rebate and I still haven’t gotten the check. I’ve actually had good luck overall with rebates, and don’t quite follow the attitude that some people have that receiving a rebate should be considered a “bonus” and that you should be happy with the price you paid at the store.

JSTOR in secondary schools

Fri, 13 Jun 2003 16:00:40 +0000

JSTOR has been expanding into high schools. The Porter-Gaud School in Charleston has become one of the first secondary schools in the country to give students online access to more than 300 years of academic journals through JSTOR, an electronic archive mostly found at colleges, universities and major research institutions. This is cool, because we have a lot of very deep information that high school students can benefit from if they’re really interested in a subject.

PBS Debate Between Lessig and RIAA’s Oppenheim

Thu, 12 Jun 2003 19:53:07 +0000

Online NewsHour: Forum — Copyright Conundrum Is downloading copyrighted music tantamount to stealing? Lawrence Lessig, an expert on Internet law from Stanford University’s Law School, and Matt Oppenheim, senior vice president of business and legal affairs for the Recording Industry Association of America, answer your questions about this heated debate.

Dullest Blog in the World

Thu, 12 Jun 2003 19:37:27 +0000

The dullest blog in the world is actually kinda funny.

Library of prebuilt regular expressions

Wed, 11 Jun 2003 18:15:12 +0000

Via Simon Brunning, I find this Regular Expression Library. At first I thought someone was rewriting ORO, but it turns out that it’s actually a collection of regular expressions for doing things like validating email addresses or postal codes. Pretty nifty idea.

Poetry of Donald Rumsfeld

Wed, 11 Jun 2003 16:01:16 +0000

This is just way too funny. Hart Seely has compiled a book of the poems of “D.H. Rumsfeld”, culled from the transcripts of the Defense Secretary’s press conferences. This excerpt describes “The Unknown” as “his most disturbing work”. I describe it as “Rumsfeld makes speech, hilarity ensues”. The Unknown As we know, There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know There are known unknowns.

Followups to Joel’s VC article

Tue, 10 Jun 2003 19:25:20 +0000

Joel posted a number of followups to his earlier article about fixing what’s wrong with venture capital. These are worthwhile reading, too, to get the other perspective. One way to look at this (and this goes for musicians who are looking at recording contracts!), actually read the contract and don’t neglect the fine print.

Java.net: sourceforge+articles for Java

Tue, 10 Jun 2003 18:15:32 +0000

Through the wonder of JavaBlogs, I have come across java.net – the Source for Java™ Technology Collaboration. My initial thought upon seeing it is that it appears to be like SourceForge combined with Slashdot, but run by a big company rather than a few very interested individuals. The projects part of Java.net is actually CollabNet software. Sun will probably get no end of grief because the Wiki is TWiki (which is written in Perl 🙂

Worth1000 Photoshop Contests

Tue, 10 Jun 2003 17:46:07 +0000

This morning I encountered Worth1000.com | Photoshop Contests | Are you Worthy? for the first time. The actual link I had followed took me to a photoshop contest to do up Martha Stewart’s jail cell. Most amusing, and many of these photoshops were of very high quality (and creativity!).

Iraqi card deck fad sold via spam

Tue, 10 Jun 2003 17:30:31 +0000

The NY Times chronicles how the Iraqi card deck was successfully sold via spam. Hundreds of millions of e-mail messages about the cards have been sent since, and some 1.5 million decks have been sold by GreatUSAflags.com C’mon, folks! It’s stories like this that explain why I get so much spam! If people would just refuse to buy goods from spammers, these marketing campaigns wouldn’t work.

500,000 songs per week on iTunes

Mon, 09 Jun 2003 22:01:42 +0000

Though the BBC proclaims that “confidential Apple music details [have been] leaked”, I doubt Apple really cares if these details are confidential. It’s all good, from what I see. The computer manufacturer is selling about 500,000 songs a week and about half of those are sold as albums, allaying fears that people would choose individual tracks instead of a whole record. So, despite only being available to 3% of the computing public, iTunes is generating a not-inconsequential $26 million a year.

Is lying about the reason for war an impeachable offense?

Mon, 09 Jun 2003 21:54:55 +0000

Most of the article is not specifically about whether lying about the reason for a war an impeachable offense. Most of it covers the White House position on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, with specific quotes from Bush. Author John Dean writes: Presidential statements, particularly on matters of national security, are held to an expectation of the highest standard of truthfulness. A president cannot stretch, twist or distort facts and get away with it.

Danno Ferrin’s Java GUI Testing Tools Roundup

Mon, 09 Jun 2003 20:15:56 +0000

I’m about to do a little Swing work and I haven’t decided what kind of automated testing I want to do for this UI. But it was handy to see Danno Ferrin’s GUI test tool roundup. He and Glen Stampoultzis both came across a tool called Marathon which Danno describes thusly: Marathon – not perfect but Good Enough. Record option, junit playback, was able to get it working with my detateched test harness.

Scale Solar System Model

Mon, 09 Jun 2003 16:48:37 +0000

The Maine Solar System Model is a 1:93,000,000 scale model of the solar system. That’s right, it’s made to scale. In this model, Pluto is 40 miles from the Sun. Very cool.

Eclipse 3.0 M1 is out

Mon, 09 Jun 2003 16:28:33 +0000

As promised on the roadmap, Eclipse 3.0 Milestone 1 has been released. Though there is still a lot to come in Eclipse 3.0, Milestone 1 already offers a number of new features. Many things smooth over the interface, like “Smart Insert”: The automatic insertion of closing braces in the Java editor has been improved. Rather than occurring as soon as the opening brace is inserted, it now happens when a new line is entered after opening brace.

Shareware Amateurs vs. Shareware Professionals

Sun, 08 Jun 2003 18:55:37 +0000

Steve Pavlina has written an excellent article about why some shareware authors succeed where others fail. This article actually applies in a much broader sense than just shareware. Here’s a choice bit: There are three good reasons why experienced professional shareware developers are often able to release more consistent hits than less experienced amateurs. First, the pros have already plugged many of the holes in their system that are shared by all products, such as optimizing their web sites to sell, refining the ordering process, implementing a money-back guarantee, crafting a solid marketing plan, gaining excellent search engine placement, etc.

Movable Type Rich Text Editing

Sun, 08 Jun 2003 18:43:05 +0000

Apparently, under IE Movable Type has nice editor controls. I didn’t realize this until Mitch Kapor mentioned missing this feature after switching to Moz. Someone has worked up a workaround.

NYTimes free archive access for bloggers

Sat, 07 Jun 2003 18:48:06 +0000

Interesting. Dave Winer has worked out an arrangement with the NY Times that ensures that appropriately formatted archive links will continue to work free of charge, despite their policy of charging for articles after 7 days. The special coding tells the Times’s server that the link is coming from a weblog, and now and in the future, this link will work without a fee to access the archive. That’s impressive that the Times is really that serious about wanting people to comment on and link to their stories.

Pollen tracking

Fri, 06 Jun 2003 19:40:58 +0000

It’s definitely an allergies sort of day. Pollen.com tells me that grass, sorrel/dock and plantain are the predominant pollens here today.

Dubya’s Resume

Fri, 06 Jun 2003 18:14:41 +0000

Though some of it’s a stretch, and it’s certainly not out to point out anything positive, this version of George W. Bush’s Resume is a bit scary because of how much of it is true. You can’t blame Bush for things like Worldcom’s accounting in 1999-2001, but you can blame him for many of the other things listed.

Manageability on Microkernels

Fri, 06 Jun 2003 18:03:49 +0000

Over on ::Manageability:: is a great set of pointers to the action in Java microkernels, with the following prediction: This leads me to another fearless forecast. The combination of Aspect Oriented Programming and Microkernel Architectures will lead to the extinction of the current monolithic J2EE containers that we’ve known and loved (or despised?) so well. I betcha he’s right.

FeedDemon RSS reader

Fri, 06 Jun 2003 17:56:34 +0000

I’m currently using Amphetadesk (with the outline plugin) as my RSS reader. That’s the best I’ve found so far. I want an RSS reader that uses as much “smarts” as possible to figure out what I might want to read. Ideally, content would not be separated by which blog it came from. SharpReader adds threading for related posts, which is an interesting idea. The forthcoming FeedDemon has an intriguing screenshot that shows a “newspaper-like” view, but still seems to be splitting based on source.

JDJ Looks At JavaServer Faces (JSF)

Fri, 06 Jun 2003 16:38:19 +0000

Java Developer’s Journal has a new article about JavaServer Faces. In short: In this article, we will survey the various Java Web development frameworks that are popular today and then take an in-depth look into the JavaServer Faces (JSF) technology. The “survey of frameworks” didn’t say a whole lot and doesn’t draw comparisons between JSF and the open source frameworks. But the article was a good intro to JSF for the uninitiated, like myself.

Joel on VCs

Thu, 05 Jun 2003 20:13:12 +0000

I always enjoy reading Joel Spolsky’s writing, and his latest (Fixing Venture Capital) is no exception. The fundamental reason is that VCs do not have goals that are aligned with the goals of the company founders. This creates a built-in source of stress in the relationship. Specifically, founders would prefer reasonable success with high probability, while VCs are looking for fantastic hit-it-out-of-the-ballpark success with low probability. I think Joel is right on the money (in a manner of speaking).

Scriptable Struts Actions

Thu, 05 Jun 2003 18:13:00 +0000

I came across IBM AlphaWorks’ Struts Action Scripting a few weeks ago. It sounded interesting, but it suffers from the same problem as everything AlphaWorks: ambiguous licensing. It’s not open source, and it’s not even concretely commercial (there’s no defined “price” and distribution terms under which you can use the software). So, I’m happy to read about this project: Scriptable Struts Actions Using BSF This project allows Struts Actions to be written in the scripting language of one’s choice rather than as Java classes.

Sen. Brownback planning DRM bill

Thu, 05 Jun 2003 00:23:03 +0000

Senator Sam Brownback is reportedly planning to introduce a bill that would limit copy protection, to ensure that consumers continue to have fair use rights and the ability to resell their digital goods. The bill, authored by Sen. Sam Brownback, would regulate digital rights management systems, granting consumers the right to resell copy-protected products and requiring digital media manufacturers to prominently disclose to consumers the presence of anticopying technology in their products.

JSTOR: A History

Wed, 04 Jun 2003 20:58:31 +0000

Nifty. I was just handed a copy of JSTOR: A History, a book about the organization that I work in. In my three months here, I have learned quite a bit about where we are going. This is a better opportunity than most people have to learn about where the organization has come from.

CruiseControl for continuous integration

Wed, 04 Jun 2003 19:59:23 +0000

CruiseControl is a tool designed specifically for nightly builds and continuous integration. It monitors the source repository and, when there are changes, checks out the sources, builds and runs the tests.

Larry Lessig interview in AlwaysOn

Wed, 04 Jun 2003 19:49:42 +0000

AlwaysOn has a two part interview with Larry Lessig about the changes that are needed in our copyright law. It starts with Silicon Valley vs. Hollywood and moves on to Scrapping Copyright Law As We Know It. From the first part, Yes, [teenagers have] grown up stealing music, and this is what really frustrates me. In 1998, people were saying we ought to have a compulsory license. If you had passed the Compulsory License Act then, we would have five to ten companies out there right now distributing music.

Petition for Public Domain Enhancement Act

Wed, 04 Jun 2003 16:31:27 +0000

One of the most important champions for realistic law in the Internet age, Lawrence Lessig, has started a petition for the Public Domain Enhancement Act. I think this act is very reasonable: That act would require American copyright holders to pay $1 fifty years after a work was published. If they pay the $1, the copyright continues. If they don’t, the work passes into the public domain.

Naked Objects

Tue, 03 Jun 2003 23:21:11 +0000

This is the first time I’ve come across the Naked Objects framework. A “naked object” is basically a fairly standard Java object that descends from a base class provided by the framework. The interesting bit is what the run time system provides: A viewing mechanisms that creates, in real time, a user-manipulable representation of any naked object that the user needs to access. The viewing mechanism included with the framework generates the style of user interface shown throughout this site.

Keanu Reeves to give away 50 million

Tue, 03 Jun 2003 17:25:12 +0000

Keanu Reeves has a deal that gets him 15% of the gross receipts of Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions. Plus, he’ll likely get something from the undoubtedly huge video sales to come. He’s likely to make a minimum of $150 million for the two theatrical releases. Realizing that this is way more money than he needs, Keanu is giving away £50 million. His gift to the Matrix series’ 29 behind-the-scenes whiz-kids will see each of them receiving £1.

Two years and counting

Tue, 03 Jun 2003 15:56:29 +0000

It’s now been more than two years since I started this blog. It kicked off with The Software Commons, which is still a valid topic today. I wouldn’t be surprised if a real software commons develops within the next 5 years.

Get My Features In Email

Tue, 03 Jun 2003 15:51:21 +0000

Many of the entries on this weblog are basically links to other sites. But, along the way, I write features on mostly technology-related topics. If you’re interested in following my feature articles, just enter your email address below and you’re signed up! This will be a very low traffic, one-way mailing list.

The Programmers’ Stone

Mon, 02 Jun 2003 19:06:58 +0000

The Programmers Stone looks like something to read in my “copious free time”. welcome to The Programmers’ Stone. The purpose of this site is to recapture, explore and celebrate the Art of Computer Programming. By so doing we hope to help the reader either become a better programmer, understand what less experienced programmers are struggling with, or communicate more effectively with other experienced programmers. Many topics are covered, so this will require a bit of reading before I can even formulate an opinion on its value.

Java Unit Testing Tips

Mon, 02 Jun 2003 18:06:50 +0000

I’m not going to waste time with an introduction to unit testing. There are plenty of other resources for that. This article is a handful of practical tips for unit testing real world apps.

A Taste of Ann Arbor

Mon, 02 Jun 2003 16:51:15 +0000

It’s been nearly 13 years since I moved to Ann Arbor, and yesterday was the first time that I had gone to the “Taste of Ann Arbor”, an annual event in which local restaurants set up booths along Main St. making it easy to sample some of their items. Samples aren’t free though: you buy a bunch of 50 cent tickets (that is, tickets that cost fifty centers, not tickets to see 50 Cent), and pay anywhere between 2 and 12 tickets for things.

Movie Review: Finding Nemo

Mon, 02 Jun 2003 16:49:00 +0000

I didn’t have particularly high expectations for the latest Pixar flick, Finding Nemo. What little I knew of the plot didn’t seem to have the same wacky, fanciful quality shared by the other Pixar films (Monsters, Inc., Toy Story). But, the 99% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes told me that maybe there is something going on here. The movie turned out to be excellent. Since I don’t get paid to write reviews, I’m not going to rehash the plot, beyond the very basics.

Report projects $44 trillion debt

Fri, 30 May 2003 21:52:01 +0000

According to the Financial Times, The Bush administration has shelved a report commissioned by the Treasury that shows the US currently faces a future of chronic federal budget deficits totalling at least $44,200bn in current US dollars. This figure is apparently 94% of all US household assets. That’s some scary stuff. This makes the government sound like a dot com. Next thing you know, Bush will be calling for Aeron chairs for everyone in the country.

State of the Art: A Medium Reborn

Fri, 30 May 2003 21:47:31 +0000

The first of the three CNET articles about online music is State of the art: A medium reborn. It talks about current efforts in online music and the genesis of the Apple iTunes Music Store. Here’s an interesting bit: Jobs initially wanted to sell music that had no restrictions at all, with songs that could be played and used as easily as free files downloaded from Kazaa using standard MP3 technology.

Microsoft and the music biz

Fri, 30 May 2003 21:37:18 +0000

Part 2 of CNET’s three parter on music talks about Microsoft’s positioning in the online music biz. There’s a lot of talk about Apple’s niche position in the marketplace, MS’ monopoly, and the formats that will ultimately win. Toward the end of the article, Ecast CEO Van-Adibé said: “In the Windows marketplace, WMA is now a de facto standard for secure music.” In my opinion, the trick here is that “secure music” is a sham.

CNET: Free vs. Fee: Underground still thrives

Fri, 30 May 2003 21:27:47 +0000

In the last of three articles about the state of online music, CNET explores free (Kazaa) and paid online music services (Apple iTunes Music Store). I absolutely disagree with this statement: Rather than fear their demise, free music services say the large music companies and e-tailers will have no choice but to work with file-swapping technology instead of against it. The most successful paid online music service, iTunes, does not “work with file-swapping technology”.

Modern Day JavaScript and CSS can be fun!

Fri, 30 May 2003 16:37:26 +0000

The last time that I really spent any time directly working on web interfaces was in 1999, and I didn’t have a lot of time then to spend on a web UI. Lack of browser compatibility (and even support, in the case of CSS) made Javascript and CSS painful to use. Since 1999, my work has been focused on server-side technologies, because I have had other people to lean on to do the front end. Now, I’m in a 3 person group and the HTML is my concern… but, I’m actually enjoying it!

Kendermedia Done Right

Fri, 30 May 2003 15:57:57 +0000

Back in the heady days of 1999, everyone (and their sisters, brothers, parents, cousins) was sending off business plans to venture capitalists. I was part of that group. By February of 2000, I had a business plan that I was happy with and a financial model that looked like it would be solidly profitable. By the summer of 2000, I found the flaw in my model. Nick Denton has created what my model should have been.

About Blue Sky On Mars

Fri, 30 May 2003 15:49:17 +0000

History This site was originally called We Write Online (at http://www.wewriteonline.org/blog) when I created it in June, 2001. There is actually more of a story about what We Write Online was going to be, and I’ll write about that sometime. All it ever actually became was my blog. For 2001, I was running Thatware and wrote a fair bit about technology and other stuff that interested me. In 2002, I switched to Drupal as my weblog program.

CSS Zen Garden

Fri, 30 May 2003 05:26:54 +0000

The site css Zen Garden: The Beauty in CSS Design is, indeed, a beautiful site that really shows how powerful CSS is.

Microsoft pays AOL $750M to bundle IE

Fri, 30 May 2003 05:23:08 +0000

Microsoft, having been found guilty of abusing monopoly power and sued by Netscape which it had essentially driven from the market, has reached a settlement with AOL, current owner of Netscape. According to the settlement, Microsoft will pay AOL $750 million. But, check this out: Under the terms of the settlement, AOL, the world’s No. 1 Internet services provider, won the option to use Microsoft’s flagship digital media software as well as its Internet Explorer technology for Web browsing on a royalty-free basis for seven years.

MVC web frameworks that don’t hurt?

Thu, 29 May 2003 22:49:25 +0000

I just came across this slightly older writing from Patrick about the pain of ActionForms in Struts. I, personally, have not written Struts code. In my last job, I managed some people who were writing Struts code, though. I’m aware of the benefits of MVC, but it really did seem like there was a whole lot of programmer overhead in writing Struts apps. xDoclet seems like one possible solution, but it really makes you wonder if the framework can or should be doing more.

India’s President Talks Up Open Source

Thu, 29 May 2003 18:39:36 +0000

Take on Gates, Kalam tells Indian techies – The Times of India President A P J Abdul Kalam on Wednesday urged Indian IT professionals to develop and specialise in open source code software rather than use proprietary solutions based on systems such as Microsoft Windows.

Hey! I agree with Bush on something!

Wed, 28 May 2003 23:32:41 +0000

Or, at least, I agree with the speculation and general concept. According to the article about Bush signing the new tax cut bill, Eventually, Bush could create a flat-tax system, under which savings and investment would be tax-free, said Stephen Moore, president of the Club for Growth, a political action committee. “We’re crossing this river in five or six jumps rather than one huge leap,” he said. See, here’s the deal: I am very much in favor of a greatly simplified tax plan (like the Fair Tax).

Microsoft Smart Display Sweepstakes

Wed, 28 May 2003 21:04:44 +0000

Microsoft is giving away a Smart Display every day until July 4th. Nifty.

Novell Steps In Against SCO

Wed, 28 May 2003 18:47:15 +0000

In an increasingly interesting story, Novell now says that it claims UNIX System V, and that SCO is full of it with regards to the letters that they have been sending Linux users. SCO has sued IBM and alleges that IBM has put some of SCO’s code into Linux. As the CEO of Novell says, SCO really needs to show the world what proof they have of anything.

Niche Search Engines

Wed, 28 May 2003 16:38:21 +0000

PC Magazine brings us a list of Niche Search engines for finding that stubborn piece of data. They even include the search engine of my organization.

Nifty button maker

Wed, 28 May 2003 15:55:46 +0000

Don’t want to lose this link: a web-based UI for creating spiffy little buttons.

Irrational Internet Exuberance

Wed, 28 May 2003 15:21:22 +0000

Do people not learn? At the very least, they don’t read the Fool. One can expect that a good growth company will have some growth built in to the price. But, with 4 Internet stocks hitting new 52-week highs, you have to wonder if people learned the lessons of the Internet bubble: only so much is justified. Granted, some of the increase in these companies comes from short sellers covering their positions.

New categories

Wed, 28 May 2003 15:09:33 +0000

With more than 300 articles in the Random category, I’ve decided to add a couple of new ones: Money and Parenting. There’s certainly a fair bit of things that I read and link to that are business-related, so the money category will be useful. Parenting is something I don’t have a lot of experience with, but will be learning a lot more firsthand come July 🙂

Dave Winer’s concerns about inaccuracies on blogs

Tue, 27 May 2003 18:26:00 +0000

Dave Winer wrote about the problems of weblogs that are riddled with inaccuracies. I had saved my copy of the Scripting News email because I wanted to respond to this, but I hadn’t yet had the chance. Now, I don’t need to, because [Andrew Oliver said it for me][2]. It’s guaranteed that people will post things to their blogs that are plainly wrong. But, just like in the open source world, you can’t require bloggers to check their facts.

Electrojacket

Mon, 26 May 2003 06:14:30 +0000

Wired News: Shocking New Jacket Hits Street Dubbed “exo-electric armor,” the No-Contact Jacket looks like an ordinary fashionable women’s coat. But an inner layer of conductive fiber carries a low-amp charge that delivers a nasty but non-lethal shock to anyone who messes with its wearer.

Cheap cinema in Britain

Mon, 26 May 2003 00:56:21 +0000

The founder of EasyJet, the dirt cheap trendsetting airline in Europe, is trying again with movies. How much did you fork out last time you went to the cinema? It was probably considerably more than 20p. But that’s how much you can buy a seat for at Britain’s newest cinema, which opens in Milton Keynes on Friday. Apparently, the film studios are giving him the blockbuster movies because of the lowball rates.

Opsound music commons

Mon, 26 May 2003 00:33:30 +0000

Sal Randolph is interviewed at the Creative Commons site. She’s creating a new service called Opsound that offers CC-licensed music and sounds that other people can use. The article has a lot of discussion about gift economies. Sal concludes with: With a large pool of sound files available, many things will be possible. Musicians, sound and video artists will be able to draw on them as elements in new work.

65 years in retirement

Sat, 24 May 2003 02:15:22 +0000

Wow. Make sure you’re paying into your 401(k)… Indian man’s 65 years as a pensioner: A man in the Indian state of Rajasthan has been collecting a pension for the past 65 years, it has emerged. Habib Miyan has been drawing pension money since he retired in 1938, and says he is 132. According to his pension book, he’s actually 125. Unfortunately, they can’t really confirm his age, but he’s got to be up there to have been retired for 65 years!

Artists mentioning brands in songs

Sat, 24 May 2003 01:51:35 +0000

It’s not the best in terms of “artistic integrity”, but it sounds like some artists might be getting some pay for mentioning brands in their songs: Yahoo! News – Bling! Bling! Ka-Ching! Pop Stars Cash In. Sayeth the article: [Lil Kim’s] latest single, “The Jump Off,” scores the greatest number of brand mentions per song this year, with 14 different references, according to a company that tracks such information.

Allergies picking up

Sat, 24 May 2003 01:46:03 +0000

This evening, my allergies seem to be bothering me a bit. Last weekend, we went out to a park and I was fine. According to pollen.com, the pollen level was high that day, and I remember that oak was one of the predominant pollens. We have a big oak across the street, and since I was fine then, it probably wasn’t the oak. Predominant pollens listed now are oak, mulberry and grass.

Quick reference cards

Fri, 23 May 2003 23:56:32 +0000

By way of Dong’s Blog, I have learned of this Quick Reference Card site. Very nice indeed!

C# Delegates in Java

Fri, 23 May 2003 16:51:21 +0000

Here is a way to get something like C# Delegates in Java. A delegate is basically an object representing a bound method. I didn’t realize that C# had this, and it’s a very nice feature that I wish Java had. The implementation the authors have done is pretty good, but it would be nice to have the same kind of syntactic sugar that C# provides here. Maybe J2SE 1.6?

Eclipse 3.0 on the way

Fri, 23 May 2003 16:34:55 +0000

According to the latest Eclipse Project Draft 3.0 Plan, 3.0 Milestone 1 is scheduled to be released June 6th! Of course, their release plan goes all the way up to M5 in November, but still it will be great to start seeing new Eclipse features showing up. Here are the things that interest me most that are committed for 3.0: Lots of editor improvements including more typing actions, better integrated key bindings, folding in the editor window and splitting of the editor window to edit different parts of the same document Make Eclipse usable as a rich client platform, not just for IDEs.

American Idol releases coming

Fri, 23 May 2003 16:02:06 +0000

American Idol winner Ruben Studdard has signed a record deal and so has runner-up Clay Aiken. June 3rd (!), J Records will be releasing Ruben’s “Flying Without Wings” as a single. Personally, I didn’t think too much of that song. Clay’s “This Is The Night” comes out on June 10th, which I think coincides with Justin’s album release. So, we’ve got at least 3 new AI releases in the next couple of weeks, plus the movie.

Elder Bush says W. is misunderstood on Europe

Fri, 23 May 2003 15:54:03 +0000

The article basically states that former President Bush was defending George W.’s attitude toward Europe. He cited W.’s work with the Spanish Prime Minister on the Iraq issue as an example. Of course, the Spanish agreed with Bush, so that’s not saying much. The article then talks about the reason why the elder Bush was saying anything at all: President Bush rankled many in Europe by refusing to join the Kyoto accord on global warming (news – web sites) and the International Criminal Court.

Bush gets a tax cut

Fri, 23 May 2003 15:48:32 +0000

It’s not as much as he wanted, but Bush is getting a $350 billion tax cut. From the article: It lowers the top tax rate on dividends and capital gains to 15 percent through 2008 and accelerates scheduled income tax cuts. It also provides tax breaks for businesses to encourage investment in new equipment. The bill also provides for checks of up to $400 per child to be issued in 2003.

cnet review of iTunes Music Store

Fri, 23 May 2003 05:13:35 +0000

Apple iTunes Music Store – Software Reviews – CNET.com The good: …uses AAC format… That’s kind of a strange plus. Overall, they gave the service an 8.6 (and Editors’ Choice), so there were definitely quite happy with it.

William Gibson on digital music

Thu, 22 May 2003 21:29:05 +0000

Actually, this was a talk he gave to the Director’s Guild of America, but it’s pretty relevant: Some futurists, looking at the individual musician’s role in the realm of the digital, have suggested that we are in fact heading for a new version of the previous situation, one in which patronage (likely corporate, and non-profit) will eventually become a musician’s only potential ticket to relative fame and wealth. The window, then, in which one could become the Beatles, occupy that sort of market position, is seen to have been technologically determined.

Ruben Studdard, American Idol

Thu, 22 May 2003 15:30:18 +0000

Despite landing in the Bottom 2 a few weeks ago, Ruben Studdard was named the second American Idol last night. I’ve seen 130,000, 13,000 and 1,300 all listed as the difference in votes between Ruben and Clay (with Ryan Seacrest using the 1,300 figure at the end of the show). E! claims it’s 130,000, which is still a pretty narrow gap out of 24 million votes. It’s hard to say how accurate the vote was, given that I had tried calling in Tuesday evening and kept getting a busy signal (I finally just sent a text message).

Buffett: Dividend Voodoo

Wed, 21 May 2003 00:24:07 +0000

Warren Buffett writes, in Dividend Voodoo: Now the Senate says that dividends should be tax-free to recipients. Suppose this measure goes through and the directors of Berkshire Hathaway (which does not now pay a dividend) therefore decide to pay $1 billion in dividends next year. Owning 31 percent of Berkshire, I would receive $310 million in additional income, owe not another dime in federal tax, and see my tax rate plunge to 3 percent.

NYTimes on candid blogging

Wed, 21 May 2003 00:10:45 +0000

In Dating a Blogger, Reading All About It, Warren St. John writes about how many bloggers write very candidly about their lives, sometimes with unexpected consequences: When her bosses were alerted that Ms. Armstrong was writing about her office life, they fired her, she said. She is now much more careful about what she publishes in her blog, and she had a word of caution for bloggers who write furtively about others.

Product Review: Line6 Variax and PODxt

Tue, 20 May 2003 16:03:47 +0000

After too long a time away from music, I’m finally getting a little bit of time with it. It’s been 10 years since I bought my first guitar, a $200 Yamaha electric strat-style. For a while, I’ve been thinking that I’d like a new guitar, and now I’ve finally found the guitar for me: the Line6 Variax. I also decided to upgrade my guitar effects to the Line6 PODxt.

Roxio to buy Pressplay

Tue, 20 May 2003 03:44:25 +0000

Roxio, makers of one of the most popular CD burning programs, and owners of the Napster name announced a plan to buy Pressplay from the two major labels that founded it. Roxio is spending $39.5 million on Pressplay. Add that to the $5 million they spent on Napster, and the $20 million they plan to spend, and they’ve got themselves a $65 million gamble. If they can do anywhere near the business Apple is doing, it may not be such a bad gamble… but that’s a big if.

Matrix Reloaded Meta-Review

Mon, 19 May 2003 16:01:05 +0000

This article has no spoilers beyond what is shown in the previews for the movie. Besides, does it really matter now that the movie has made more than $135 million? Short review: I liked Reloaded, a lot. I’m sure I’m not the only one who would say that my favorite scene was the Burly Brawl (the fight between Neo and the many Agent Smiths). I also thought that the movie did a good job of continuing forward movement of the story and bringing some new depth to the world of The Matrix.

Intuit learns that copy protection doesn’t work

Fri, 16 May 2003 22:29:20 +0000

A few months back, there was an uproar over Intuit’s copy protection (now called DRM or “product activation”) scheme for TurboTax. Intuit has just decided to drop the copy protection. “Intuit has a long heritage of doing right by customers, and some of our customers didn’t have the great experience they expect from Intuit,” [Intuit CEO Steve] Bennett added. “In addition, we didn’t get the revenue and profit growth we expected.

17% more efficient with 18 cent coins

Fri, 16 May 2003 22:14:12 +0000

In the “err, yeah” department we have this dandy Science News article: Coins for Making Change Efficiently, in which Jeffrey Shallit, a Computer Science person: He discovered two sets of four denominations that minimize the transaction cost. The combination of 1 cent, 5 cents, 18 cents, and 25 cents requires only 3.89 coins in change per transaction, as does the combination of 1 cent, 5 cents, 18 cents, and 29 cents.

Approximating closures in Java

Fri, 16 May 2003 18:16:54 +0000

Charles Miller wrote a nice article: The Fishbowl: Closures and Java: a Tutorial. He talks about using inner classes to somewhat approximate closures. He also says that “To implement them properly would involve making changes to some pretty fundamental parts of the JVM”, which I’m not sure is completely true. It may be possible for Sun to create java.lang.Function and then add some syntactic sugar to the compiler to create

Menlo Innovations in Forbes

Fri, 16 May 2003 15:45:03 +0000

This popped up a few days back. Rich Sheridan of Ann Arbor’s own Menlo Innovations was on the cover of Forbes (Forbes.com: Accidental Entrepreneur)! The article is both a bit grim and inspirational. It’s inspirational in that some of the stories they tell, including Rich’s, are of people who had good success after losing their jobs. On the grim side, they talk about the fairly large number of people getting laid off and the difficulty of getting a business going in this economy.

Strong vs. Dynamic Typing Continued

Thu, 15 May 2003 18:58:13 +0000

In the continuing discussion on Dave Copeland’s site, Dave asked what is limiting about a strongly typed language like Java. This is a very good question, and I’ve given it a little thought. Clearly, anything that can be done in Python, Ruby, etc. can also be done in Java. It’s just a question of how much pain is involved. There are some decent points in this discussion on Artima: – “Duck Typing”: See http://c2.

SCO Threatens to Sue Linux Users

Thu, 15 May 2003 15:50:00 +0000

A month after suing IBM, claiming that IBM’s Linux offerings infringe on intellectual property rights of SCO, Linux > SCO Threatens To Sue All Commercial Linux Users (UPDATED) > May 14, 2003″ href=”http://www.internetweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=9901350″>SCO seems to be on the verge of suing more commercial Linux users. And check out this choice quote: “Similar to analogous efforts underway in the music industry, we are prepared to take all actions necessary to stop the ongoing violation of our intellectual property or other rights.

99 Cows

Thu, 15 May 2003 03:33:53 +0000

Seth Godin, a guy who certainly seems to know a thing or two about marketing, has put together a great ebook called 99 cows. It highlights 99 different things you can see on the net that represent innovative marketing. The book itself is a good example, because he’s allowing people to email it and post it on the web, and is giving away any proceeds that Amazon pulls in from the “official” ebook.

The UK Parliament Talks About Spam

Wed, 14 May 2003 20:59:01 +0000

I’m not one to watch CSPAN, let alone the proceedings of the UK Parliament, but it is interesting to see The United Kingdom Parliament discuss spam. Lord Faulkner of Worcester: My Lords, I can help the Minister with the origin of the word. It comes from aficionados of Monty Python, and the famous song, “Spam, spam, spam, spam”.

Perl/Python Advantage is not Dynamic Typing

Wed, 14 May 2003 20:22:54 +0000

The latest entry into the strong/dynamic typing debate comes from Dave Copeland. He does make a good point in that Perl and Python have many features other than dynamic typing which make them faster to program in. I think he misses something when he talks about code being skipped in unit tests because there isn’t time. For those of us doing test driven development, the tests come first! The only code that I don’t write tests for now is code that is really, really onerous to test, and there’s not much of that.

Music is 50 percent of internet traffic?

Wed, 14 May 2003 18:54:41 +0000

In an article about Apple selling more than 2 million songs already, an interesting tidbit came up: Music is one of the most popular categories on the Internet. [Smith Barney analyst Richard] Gardner pointed out in his note that traffic to music sites represent 50 to 55 percent of all Internet traffic. Woah. If that’s accurate, that would be a sign of huge demand. Note to music biz types: look in the dictionary under “opportunity”.

Rumsfeld Wants To Cut “Red Tape”

Wed, 14 May 2003 18:47:32 +0000

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has asked Congress to cut the red tape so that he can be “freed from archaic rules and regulations”. Rumsfeld submitted a proposal to Congress on April 11 that would scrap virtually every reporting requirement intended to let lawmakers oversee major defense spending programs. This comes from a government in which the Vice President has secret meetings to create energy policy and has to be taken to court to get information!

Welcome to Blue Sky On Mars

Wed, 14 May 2003 00:02:44 +0000

“Blue sky on Mars, that’s a new one” was one of the dandy lines from the cinematic classic Total Recall. The notion of life on Mars and human inhabitation of Mars often makes for some fun sci-fi. And, hopefully here, it makes for a good blog. I’ll post an entry here sometime that talks about what We Write Online was all about, but I’m definitely a lot happier with the new blog name.

Tim Bray’s View on Dynamic Languages

Sun, 11 May 2003 04:13:10 +0000

XML guru Tim Bray’s article Language Fermentation is his entry into the discussion about dynamic vs. static languages. He also does some cheerleading for test driven development: As these guys say, once you start doing this, it is wholly addictive; I have only recently done this and JUnit is now part of my life.

Google and the “blog noise problem”

Sun, 11 May 2003 02:02:01 +0000

Andrew Orlowski writes in “Google to fix blog noise problem” that Google is taking steps to change their algorithms to avoid skew caused by blogs. Personally, I find this kind of crazy. I use Google all the time, and have great success in finding what I’m looking for. Blogs generally link to content produced by others, so it seems to me that they do a good job of boosting content that is valuable.

More gushing praise for the iTunes Music Store

Sun, 11 May 2003 00:16:18 +0000

In Apple Web Music Venture Ignites Industry, we get to read more praise for Apple’s iTunes Music Store. I’m generally bullish on the store, but the article contains this lovely “well, duh!” moment: “Apple’s success has shown that by loosening the restrictions on what consumers can do with the music, that’s the right way to compete with free” file sharing, [Dan] Hart [chief executive of rival Echo serivce] said.

Halliburton given contract to work with Iraqi oil

Fri, 09 May 2003 04:29:39 +0000

Oh, come on! BBC NEWS | Halliburton’s Iraq role expands. Thanks to Dave Winer for bringing it to my attention (and I’m sure that of many other people) that the company that VP Dick Cheney formerly ran was given a lucrative contract in Iraq without any competitive bidding. According to the Guardian, Cheney was paid $1 million in “deferred compensation” from Halliburton in 2001. This money is apparently money he is owed from before he left Halliburton to become VP.

Lotteries: A Losing Bet

Fri, 09 May 2003 04:19:27 +0000

Fool.com: Lotteries: A Losing Bet [Fool’s School Daily Tip] April 25, 2003 – I’ve heard it said that the lotteries are a tax on the mathematically challenged. Here, the Motley Fool points out that you are far more likely to “die from flesh-eating bacteria” than win a Powerball jackpot.

CoreCrib Do It Yourself Mac

Fri, 09 May 2003 00:14:50 +0000

The CoreCrib Blog talks about buying parts to build your own expandable Mac for considerably less than what Apple charges for a similarly expandable Mac. I tell you, Mac OS X is very tempting to me. It seems like a great OS… it’s just a shame that the hardware is so expensive. (Compare this writer’s $775 with what you can get for $350 in the PC world…)

Ridiculous Passport vulnerability

Fri, 09 May 2003 00:07:37 +0000

A vulnerability has been discovered in Microsoft’s Passport service which is absolutely crazy. Here’s a service that Microsoft is pitching for handling your security needs all over the net, and they leave such a glaring hole there. What’s worse, the reporter said that they discovered the problem on April 12th and could not get a response from Microsoft.

Hackers and Painters

Fri, 09 May 2003 00:03:45 +0000

The always enjoyable Paul Graham has a new article entitled “Hackers and Painters”. He talks about “computer science” and “software engineering” as being misrepresentations of what hackers do. He draws the parallel, not surprisingly, to painters and other “makers”. It’s an interesting parallel. He’s downbeat on the notion of pair programming for certain: When a piece of code is being hacked by three or four different people, no one of whom really owns it, it will end up being like a common-room.

Comparison between JavaScript and ObjectScript

Thu, 08 May 2003 22:26:18 +0000

This is a comparison of Rhino JavaScript and ObjectScript. Since both languages offer a Java-like syntax and reasonable compiled performance, the details of the language will ultimately break the tie. The solution in boldface is, in my opinion, the winner on that topic. Both have functions as first class objects and allow for true closures Both are dynamically typed ObjectScript provides lexically scoped variables, which is what we’re used to from Java, etc.

Transcript of Chandler Talk

Thu, 08 May 2003 17:16:24 +0000

Last month, Mitch Kapor and Andy Hertzfeld of the OSA Foundation gave a talk about the technology in Chandler, OSA’s forthcoming personal information manager. The technology behind Chandler is cool… they’re using wxPython, which is a great way to build an app.

Mock testing with AspectJ

Thu, 08 May 2003 17:11:33 +0000

Simon Monk and Stephen Hall give us an article about implementing mock testing techniques using AspectJ. Interesting approach, and it’s very low impedance.

California Senate panel sends royalty bill to vote

Thu, 08 May 2003 15:58:11 +0000

Against record industry opposition, the California Senate Judiciary Committee OKed a new music royalty measure. The bill makes record companies responsible for accurately accounting for the royalties of musicians. Previously, it was just a contractual obligation of the record companies, and the artists would have to sue if they thought they were getting cheated. How many musicians (who aren’t getting their full share of royalties!) can afford to sue a multibillion $$$ corp?

3-6 month electronic book life

Wed, 07 May 2003 20:49:19 +0000

Panasonic is making an ebook that has two side-by-side LCD screens, two appear like a real book. The big news, though, is that this ebook is supposed to run for 3-6 months on two AA batteries. It is also apparently 180dpi, which is pretty good quality.

Red Chair Notmad Explorer for Nomad

Wed, 07 May 2003 20:11:45 +0000

Through the wonders of Slashdot discussions, I’ve come across Red Chair Software’s Notmad Explorer, which aims to provide a better interface to the Creative Nomad series. I’ve got a Nomad Jukebox, and the software that Creative provides is nasty. It’s big and slow… I think I’ll give the trial version of this one a go!

A look at SAIC

Tue, 06 May 2003 22:52:28 +0000

Business 2.0 – Magazine Article – In the Company of Spies provides an interesting look at Science Applications International Corp. Sayeth the article: Most people have never heard of either Beyster or SAIC — and that’s fine with Beyster, the company’s reclusive founder and CEO. Privately held SAIC makes much of the supersecret technology that’s at the core of the sleuthing done by the National Security Agency, CIA, and other spook services.

Interview with Michael Robertson

Tue, 06 May 2003 20:18:27 +0000

In the Slashdot interview of Lindows’ Michael Robertson, Michael said: The Xbox is Microsoft’s first attempt at a closed architecture PC. What they learn from the Xbox will be in their next generation closed desktop PC system. This is an interesting statement, because Microsoft is apparently working with HP on what sounds like a “closed desktop PC system”. Though $99/year may sound expensive, Michael’s goals of pushing the state of the art in desktop environments are certainly worthy.

Defensive patent application filed for SARS

Tue, 06 May 2003 19:54:34 +0000

In a noble and welcomed move, the people responsible for sequencing the suspected genes of SARS have filed a patent application to ensure that the information remains publicly usable. It’s nice to see that they’re not trying to use SARS as a profit opportunity.

Apple sells 1 million songs

Tue, 06 May 2003 18:44:15 +0000

Apple issued their gleeful press release: iTunes Music Store Sells Over One Million Songs in First Week. Something that’s even more remarkable is that more than half of the 200,000 songs they carry were downloaded in the past week. I never would have expected that such a broad range would sell. These numbers are also interesting given that this service only works with Macs and iPods. I wonder if these AAC files will eventually work with my Nomad?

Bruce Eckel on Strong Testing

Mon, 05 May 2003 22:52:37 +0000

The debate over strongly typed languages vs. weakly typed languages rages on, and now we get Bruce Eckel’s MindView, Inc: 5-2-03 Strong Typing vs. Strong Testing. Bruce is a big Python fan (as am I), and he makes a good case as to why dynamic languages like Python are more productive and still safe as long as you practice “strong testing”. I’m a believer in test driven development, so if you’re doing tests anyway, why do you need the rather weak confirmation that strong typing gives you?

How To Make A Telemarketer Cry

Mon, 05 May 2003 20:18:30 +0000

A DC-area lawyer wrote the amusing How To Make A Telemarketer Cry (or, Suing Bozos for Fun & Profit), which details his lawsuit against a telemarketer that used a prerecorded message (at 5:45am, no less!) Lots of links to information on tracking down telemarketers and the laws in question. I don’t think you need to be a lawyer to take advantage of this. Plus, a new option for suing telemarketers is coming later this year with the national “do not call” list.

MPAA lobbying states for new laws

Mon, 05 May 2003 19:58:43 +0000

The San Francisco Chronicle’s article Heading off film piracy / Movie trade group staying one step ahead in lobbying efforts talks about how the MPAA is getting state legislatures to pass new laws with tougher anti-piracy restraints. Don’t let them fool you. Copyright infringement is already illegal and these new laws do nothing other than restrict consumer choice. Also, don’t let the MPAA’s lobbying muscle dissuade you from taking a stand here.

Software Bullet Sought to Kill Musical “Piracy”

Sun, 04 May 2003 20:25:53 +0000

The NYTimes has an article about research that companies are doing into tougher antipiracy measures. I think the article was a fairly balanced view, whereas most of the discussion you find online is very heavily anti-RIAA. From the article: Whether the record companies decide to unleash a tougher anti-piracy campaign has created a divide among some music executives concerned about finding a balance between stamping out piracy and infuriating its music-listening customers.

Problem with X10 Switch

Sat, 03 May 2003 23:32:04 +0000

Today, I installed two X10 light switches, so that we can easily control some of our lights. I had attempted this before, and am running into the same problem I had before. I can’t readily explain why it happens, but it’s easy enough to explain the symptom: using X10, I can turn the light on, but I can’t get it to respond to the light off signal. There is one odd thing about this light: this is the light over our front door and garage door, and our landscape lights.

New exploit to crash IE

Sat, 03 May 2003 19:18:02 +0000

Secunia has a description of a way to crash IE with a trivial bit of HTML. I usually don’t get into security vulnerability news, but this is funny because of how trivial the exploit is. Create a form with an “input type crash” tag and boom, IE crashes. Wonder how long it will be before someone makes an email bot of some kind that sends this in an email message to crash people’s Outlook and Outlook Expresses.

Beatles’ Apple is still going strong

Sat, 03 May 2003 05:22:45 +0000

I don’t think it’s particularly well known, but Apple Corp. is the name of the Beatles’ company. According to Macworld, the Beatles’ Apple still a strong force in music world. Apple Computer was sued in 1989 for trademark infringement, paid some cash and was told to stay out of the music business. With Apple Computer’s new iTunes Music Store, they’re clearly not staying out of the business. I’m pretty sure they would have worked out the legal ramifications of that by now…

Pro Tools Nation

Fri, 02 May 2003 21:54:17 +0000

Rolling Stone describes the impact of Pro Tools on music production. Though Pro Tools is definitely the big wig in the music production industry, I think they’re giving it too much credit for the revolution in music production. Cheap hard drives, fast computers, a wide variety of high-quality and inexpensive audio interfaces and many useful audio production programs are all contributors to the boom in home recording. There are still some parts of pro music making that many people can’t afford: high-end microphones, monitor speakers, etc.

$12-17K fines for file swappers

Fri, 02 May 2003 21:50:07 +0000

CNET reports that the 4 campus file swappers are to pay the RIAA $12,000-$17,000 each over the next few years. That’s quite a big drop from the $100 billion or whatever huge number it was that the RIAA was originally suing for. I’m sure that the point of this is not the money, which is piddly for this organization, but the point that the RIAA is willing to crush any of their “customers” who might be considering “sharing” their “music”.

Apple Sells 275,000 Songs in 18 Hours

Fri, 02 May 2003 20:30:02 +0000

Music industry pub Billboard says that Apple has sold 275,000 songs via its new music service. That’s a good start, but it will be interesting to see how much of that is just from curious people. I’m also curious if Billboard is going to start counting Apple’s sales in their charts.

Trivia: Duck tape was the original name

Fri, 02 May 2003 18:53:45 +0000

According to the high-quality researchers of Yahoo!, the historical name for “duct tape” was “duck tape”. The ducts, it turns out, came later.

Crazy Robins

Fri, 02 May 2003 18:18:41 +0000

For nearly three weeks, we’ve had a robin tapping on our windows. It was puzzling at first, but then I saw the Portland Audubon Society’s page on the subject… it’s just a male robin, protecting his nest during mating season from the robin he sees in the window. Robins, I guess, don’t share our ability to recognize ourselves in a mirror. This isn’t surprising given that robins don’t have mirrors.

Bus Driver’s Own Rules

Fri, 02 May 2003 18:11:57 +0000

I’m writing this as I’m riding home from work on the bus. This driver has an intriguing way of creating his own traffic rules… He turned left from the “right turn only” lane at an intersection with two left turn lanes. A few minutes later he drove around a parking lot to avoid an intersection with a traffic light. I can certainly appreciate a bus driver who wants to keep his schedule, but this is an interesting technique for doing so.

Iraqi Info Minister set to beat

Fri, 02 May 2003 15:42:41 +0000

Why didn’t I think of this? (Don’t answer that 🙂 According to Yahoo! News – Information with a Beat, some DJs are releasing a dance track that samples some of Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf’s amazing statements as the Iraqi Information Minister.

Banfield Slams War Coverage

Fri, 02 May 2003 04:47:31 +0000

AlterNet: MSNBC’s Banfield Slams War Coverage – This article does a great job highlighting the reason why free speech and free access to government information is important. How can we, as voters and the people ultimately responsible for America’s actions, make educated decisions without a total picture? Thank goodness that the Internet is still home to free speech. This very story probably would not have been broadcast in the mass media.

Camcorder/laptop combo from Sony

Thu, 01 May 2003 19:32:50 +0000

Designtechnica Reviews – Sony Vaio GT3/K First Look – wow. that’s pretty far out there…

American Idol Shocker: The Curse of Plurality Voting

Thu, 01 May 2003 15:34:19 +0000

Last night, I was as shocked as Simon Cowell when Ruben Studdard, an excellenet singer, was in the bottom two in votes. Josh Gracin, who the judges clearly had thought had the weakest performances on Tuesday’s show, was safe. In the end, Trenyce was sent home. How did this happen? American Idol suffers from the same problem that our presidential election system does.

Apple’s “Revolutionary” Music Service

Thu, 01 May 2003 03:29:09 +0000

Derek Slater, talking about Apple’s iTunes Music Store announcement made an entertaining statement: My favorite part of the release is Steve Jobs saying, “The iTunes Music Store offers the revolutionary rights to burn an unlimited number of CDs for personal use.” Funny, I don’t find that revolutionary at all, given that I’ve burning copies of CDs for the last 5 years.

Test driven development a sign of static typing’s failure?

Wed, 30 Apr 2003 23:09:00 +0000

Les Stroud raises the interesting question of whether static typing and other software engineering efforts have failed. Here is my commentary on the subject: I’m not certain if static typing came into existence for aiding software engineering or for performance reasons. Dynamic languages tend to be slower than the statically typed ones, but modern computers are fast enough that it really doesn’t matter. I would certainly hope that more tools will come along to assist in the development process.

Music industry sends IM warnings to song swappers

Wed, 30 Apr 2003 20:18:39 +0000

The music biz sent IMs to thousands of song swappers who had copyrighted songs available for download from their Grokster and Kazaa nodes. I greatly prefer the industry taking such technical steps to stop song swapping to taking legislative ones. Ultimately, I think the steps are pointless and the industry should really start giving people want they want. I don’t think free music is really what people are after… they’re after supporting the musicians by buying music at reasonable prices.

C-JDBC Java Database Clustering

Wed, 30 Apr 2003 20:11:04 +0000

On the C-JDBC – Home page, you can read more about this new open source package that is designed to bring clustering and replication to any database. Pretty nifty idea, really.

Former Iraqi Information Minister gets job offer

Tue, 29 Apr 2003 21:24:18 +0000

Yahoo! News – Ex-Iraq Info Minister Gets TV Job Offer – There you have it… Internet popularity can bring you job offers! Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf has at least one fan site due to his indefatigable belief that Iraq was and would always prevail in the conflict. According to the Yahoo! article, even Bush said: “He’s my man, he was great,” Bush enthused in an interview with NBC’s Tom Brokaw. “Somebody accused us of hiring him and putting him there.

Why I switched from Drupal to Movable Type

Tue, 29 Apr 2003 16:16:20 +0000

Drupal is a flexible, powerful program. They bill it as “Community Plumbing” and provide a whole slew of features, either built-in or as plugins. It supports many of the common weblog features and adds many uncommon ones: the ability to share authentication, the “collaborative book”, the RSS news feed reader, and on and on. My decision to switch to Movable Type is certainly not based upon lack of features in Drupal.

Apple Introduces iTunes Music Store

Tue, 29 Apr 2003 04:30:02 +0000

Slashdot | Apple Introduces iTunes Music Store, iTunes 4, new iPod – I linked to the Slashdot story, because the standard press release-derived articles don’t disclose the most important part to me: this service uses AAC files with DRM, not MP3. Sigh. I figured that would be the case, but why can’t they come to grips with the fact that I and many others will be happy to spend up to $1 a track for high-quality, no-hassle MP3 files?

Working at the right level of abstraction

Mon, 28 Apr 2003 21:51:53 +0000

Eric Sink writes about the .NET Abstraction Pile in SourceGear’s Vault product. This is a nicely written article that highlights some of the issues that programmers face every day. The issue of complexity that comes with abstraction is a large motivator for the XP rule of “Do the simplest thing that can possibly work”. Don’t add that complexity on before you actually need it. Eric’s experince with their SOS Collab product sounds exactly like the kind of problem that comes up when you try to overengineer and get the most perfect and flexible solution.

Pierre Omidyar on Blogshares

Mon, 28 Apr 2003 19:19:14 +0000

Pierre’s Web is Pierre Omidyar’s weblog. He made some interesting comments about BlogShares. Since BlogShares is a fantasy market, it doesn’t hold a whole lot of interest to me right now… but, Pierre’s opinion on this is interesting, because of his status as a founder of a huge market. His weblog is located at the site of Ginx: Nickel Exchange which is another potentially large market in the making.

Using Bluetooth to transfer photos from my phone

Mon, 28 Apr 2003 18:03:57 +0000

Sony Ericsson : Accessories : download my pictures from T68i by bluetooth @ Esato – I was wondering if there was a way to usefully use my phone’s digital camera. Apparently, with Bluetooth there is! Here’s an important part of the tip: Most of these Bluetooth Adapters use the WIDCOMM drivers/software. So to enable sending images FROM your phone TO your pc over Bluetooth, firstly MAKE SURE you have the very latest software for your adapter.

Buggy Software Liability

Mon, 28 Apr 2003 04:33:11 +0000

CNN.com – Spread of buggy software raises new questions – Apr. 27, 2003 – While I think getting into product liability lawsuits for software will likely put a major dent in the industry, I do think that better software quality is not only possible but is cheaper. Test Driven Development, combined with other solid practices, has the power to reduce the number of defects in software and prevent the defects from coming back.

Not Done Yet

Sun, 27 Apr 2003 23:40:20 +0000

By the way, the switch to MT is only the first of the changes that I’m planning. Still up: a new name (possibly new URL) and definitely some changes to the templates here.

Greenspun on Tracking the Presidential Campaign

Sun, 27 Apr 2003 23:32:29 +0000

Philip Greenspun wrote a thought provoking small article about Outlining and the presidential campaign which advocates using online weblogs and outlines to track what a presidential candidate says. There are bound to be ways to make this happen, even beyond what Greenspun suggests. In ’92, I remember disliking Clinton because he seemed to change his stance at every campaign stop. With enough communication, it will be impossible for a candidate to keep changing their platform and not get caught.

Live and Direct on Movable Type

Sun, 27 Apr 2003 23:21:25 +0000

After taking a fresh look at Movable Type the other day, I made the decision to switch over from Drupal. Drupal is still a spiffy piece of software, but I think it has different goals from what I want. So, as my blog approaches its third year, it’s been switched to its third blogging program (the first was Thatware). Hopefully, I won’t have to keep switching every year, because that’s not good for continuity in the search engines (every blogging program has a different URL layout).

Gary Hart’s Blog

Sat, 26 Apr 2003 18:33:10 +0000

Longtime Democratic presidential hopeful Gary Hart has a weblog. Politicians are generally very careful about what they say. Even so, a weblog implies greater communication with the public, and that can only be a good thing. Hopefully this is the start of a trend.

Book Review: Refactoring

Fri, 25 Apr 2003 21:35:08 +0000

I have finally gotten around to reading Martin Fowler’s Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code. In fact, I’ve also just gotten around to reading the Gang of Four Design Patterns book. These two books belong on every OO programmer’s bookshelf.

Judge Declares Morpheus and Grokster Innocent

Fri, 25 Apr 2003 21:31:40 +0000

Or, at least, the judge, Stephen Wilson, declared that they are not guilty of contributory infringement. Judge Wilson compared the case with that of Sony, which was sued over VCRs in the ’80s.

Record labels sue Napster investor

Thu, 24 Apr 2003 16:09:28 +0000

Two of the big five record labels have sued the venture capitalist that invested in Napster. Huh? The next time the record labels complain about their profits, I’ll just assume that their profits were hurt by spending too much money on lawyers. Gadzooks.

Madonna.com hacked

Thu, 24 Apr 2003 05:32:00 +0000

Personally, I don’t blame Madonna and Warner for planting decoys on the P2P networks. I find that to be a much more tasteful way to try to protect her copyrights than creating stupid laws. Additionally, I give Warner some credit for releasing the American Life single in MP3 form, even if they did charge too much ($1.50). But, someone disagreed with the decoy tactic and expressed that opinion on Madonna’s own site.

Lots to write about, even a little chance to write

Wed, 23 Apr 2003 21:48:45 +0000

My blog is about to enter a new phase. After a month at my new job, I’m getting pretty well settled in and unwound from my last job. I’m back creating software and I’m enjoying it. This is a good thing for me right now. At some point in time, I’d like to move back into management, but for now I’m content to do good things in creating software for my customers.

The joys of CSS

Wed, 23 Apr 2003 21:47:51 +0000

For the past couple of years, nearly all of the work I’ve done has been concerned with what’s going on on the server. My new group is a small one, so we have to be generalists. This has given me a chance to pick up on what is happening in browser-based user interfaces. Thankfully, things are a lot more pleasant than they were a few years back, particularly if you don’t care about compatibility with older browsers.

Java can be quick to develop

Wed, 23 Apr 2003 21:47:14 +0000

As my work has been shifting toward Java from scripting languages (Perl, Python), I’ve been thinking that a scripted layer on top of Java is a good way to write code. Java can run very fast but can be tedious to write. By scripting on top of Java, it’s pretty easy to write code at a high-level and then shift to Java wherever performance is paramount.

Who do you write for?

Wed, 23 Apr 2003 21:46:28 +0000

This is a question that many people ask webloggers (and that many webloggers probably ask themselves). It often seems that we write for some nameless, faceless audience. That, of course, is not entirely true… many of the people that read our blogs have blogs of their own. We can communicate with them through our blogs and many have independent conversations in email. So, in many cases, the audience is not nameless… we know who they are.

Book Review: Test Driven Development

Wed, 23 Apr 2003 21:40:21 +0000

Kent Beck’s Test Driven Development: By Example follows the mold of the XP books: fairly thin and $30. I’ve never read Beck’s XP book, but I’ve read a couple of the others. Those books all seem to rehash the same material. Thankfully, this book is not like that.

Bill to Repeal Presidential Term Limits

Tue, 15 Apr 2003 00:28:07 +0000

If this bill were to pass and be ratified by the states, Clinton could return for a third term. Intriguing, but it seems unlikely. This bill was introduced in January and it seems like you’re not going to get an Amendment through without at least some publicity.

Stupid Censorship, Stupid Security

Tue, 15 Apr 2003 00:19:00 +0000

Stupid Censorship, Stupid Security [Slashdot] Links to two pages summing up infringements on freedom of speech and personal freedom. The freedoms granted to us by the Bill of Rights are there for a reason, and there will always be people who want to restrict those freedoms “for the good of society” or for “security”.

Artists Doing Well on the Indies

Sat, 12 Apr 2003 23:00:26 +0000

The Christian Science Monitor shows how independent music labels are doing just fine. It makes a lot of sense to me… there are many reasons that the major labels are having trouble. Cost structure is certainly one of them… the indies do well by not spending enormous sums on random things.

Shaking our faith in Google

Fri, 11 Apr 2003 07:26:00 +0000

Shaking our faith in Google – _DaveNet: Shaking our faith in Google. [Scripting News] Dave writes about Google’s SafeSearch filters and how they can catch some pages that are not prurient in nature.

End Run Around The Labels: Pat DiNizio Offers New Way To Distrib

Thu, 10 Apr 2003 21:06:33 +0000

End Run Around The Labels: Pat DiNizio Offers New Way To Distribute Music – n/a [MTV News] Here’s someone who’s actually working on bringing the future of music forward. DiNizio is the lead singer of the Smithereens. He’s looking for 100 patrons to sponsor his music at $1,200 each. For their $1,200 the patrons get 50 copies of a few albums (so that they can pass them out to friends), plus backstage passes to a Smithereens show, plus a “living room concert” for the patron and a few friends at the venue of their choice.

Cell Phones Companies Fight Number Portability

Thu, 10 Apr 2003 20:49:00 +0000

Cell Phones Companies Fight Number Portability – n/a [Slashdot] The most interesting part of this to me is that the regulation stipulates that people can transfer wired phone numbers to their cell phone carriers. That would definitely make it more appealing to some people to get rid of their land lines.

Webcasters, RIAA propose new royalties

Fri, 04 Apr 2003 15:48:37 +0000

Webcasters, RIAA propose new royalties – The Digital Media Association and the Recording Industry Association of America agree to a proposal for royalty fees that Net radio services must pay record companies. [CNet] I still don’t understand how webcasting is different from broadcast radio. In broadcast radio, the RIAA makes nothing. The broadcasters pay to BMI who distributes the money amongst songwriters. Paying 7 cents per webcast song seems outrageous.

Alternatives for free music

Thu, 03 Apr 2003 21:56:53 +0000

News.com has an editorial with some interesting options for fixing the music business. This model involves using an ASCAP-like organization to monitor music usage and distribute revenues that come from unusual sources (like car companies and other sponsors). The author estimates that 50 million people spend an average of $250 a year on music, and that this figure seems manageable for other marketing methods. He mentions that Apple or Sony are possible companies to lead the charge, and he might be right.

Blogshares stock market for blogs

Sun, 30 Mar 2003 22:35:52 +0000

Blogshares is a nifty fantasy stock market based on blogs that uses hyperlinks as the main measure of a blog’s worth. The site is interesting, but something seems lacking since Slashdot does not appear in the top lists. I guess it’s possible that this is because most people don’t link to Slashdot. But a link from Slashdot is something of great influence and it would be nice to quantify that.

Museum of Unworkable Devices

Sun, 30 Mar 2003 05:03:20 +0000

Slashdot had a pointer to the Museum of Unworkable Devices which provides a nice, educational analysis of how unlimited energy producing devices never work.

Pre-emptive attack strategy

Fri, 21 Mar 2003 15:47:19 +0000

War has begun

Thu, 20 Mar 2003 05:56:16 +0000

I’m sad to see it. Yes, I do hope for the best for the American troops who are doing their duty as ordered. I also hope for the safety of the Iraqi civilians. And I hope that things do not go as badly as in Scott Rosenberg’s analysis. And I do hope that ego and electioneering are not the main factors taking us into war.

Jimmy Carter: Just War or a Just War?

Tue, 11 Mar 2003 20:12:22 +0000

Thank goodness for freedom of speech. In some nations, even a former leader would be unable to speak out against current foreign policy. Jimmy Carter makes some excellent arguments, and I hope that polls continue to show dwindling support for unilateral US action in Iraq. I don’t believe that the Bush administration’s foreign policy is representative of the majority view in America, and certainly is not representative of the beliefs of the rest of the world.

Scientific Pricing

Wed, 05 Mar 2003 20:28:57 +0000

FastCompany has a fascinating article about pricing. Pricing doesn’t seem like a horribly interesting topic, until you try to set prices yourself. Back when I was running Byproducts.com, I went through a couple of different pricing models. The second model was definitely far more profitable than the first (which was a simple “cost-plus” model), but it was still not a scientifically produced model like the ones in the FastCompany article.

CSM on new innovations in musical instruments

Fri, 28 Feb 2003 21:51:05 +0000

The Christian Science Monitor has an article about new musical instruments and how instruments have changed over the recent decades.

SDBA Revolution IM App Framework

Mon, 24 Feb 2003 20:17:18 +0000

Just spotted on Freshmeat: SDBA Revolution, a framework for making IM apps just like you would make web apps.

Three More Views on the Music Biz

Mon, 24 Feb 2003 20:13:36 +0000

It seems like an appropriate time to be looking at the music business, with the annual attention-grabbing Grammy awards. I haven’t watched the whole show (but my ReplayTV did), so I don’t know yet if the new NARAS president made comments similar to those made last year. There’s no question in my mind that the music industry will have to come up with new models.

Maybe China is one place to look for new music industry models. Though it’s sad to think of corporate sponsorship as being the way to get quality music made, apparently there are ways to make it work. Robbie Williams’ new contract is cited as an example of the new style contracts making it to the West. Moby has famously made a small cottage industry out of marketing his songs for use in commercial areas.

NYTimes on the Death of the CD

Sun, 23 Feb 2003 07:33:58 +0000

There seems to be an ever-increasing number of articles on the sorry state of the music industry today. For example, the NY Times says that CDs may be reaching the twilight of their market. It has this interesting quote as well:

Most analysts and industry executives agree that selling music online is the future. But they say it will take at least two years for companies to devise a business plan for it that makes financial sense.

DjVu document format

Sun, 23 Feb 2003 05:53:32 +0000

In a week, I’ll be starting a new job with JSTOR. This should be a fun move and a fun job. When starting a new job, it’s always interesting to take a look at the technologies in their area and wonder “do they use that?” or “have they tried this?”. I’ve had a few thoughts along those lines. I just saw a mention of the DjVu format (which has a free implementation).

Java GUIs

Sun, 09 Feb 2003 21:31:46 +0000

Through some strange turn, I suddenly found myself reading about Java GUI programming. I’ve been considering writing a small, fun program and debating about doing it in Java or Python. Python has some advantages: smaller memory footprint and runtime size, faster development time, more fun :), wxPython provides native look and feel. Java has some advantages over Python: huge collections of libraries that are fairly well structured, Eclipse IDE, GCJ to compile to native executable (apparently not for Windows yet). It’s that last one that’s the kicker. Generally, I’m a fan of native widgets, because I want my programs to look like Windows programs if they’re running under Windows. Swing does this to an extent, but SWT/JFace actually uses native widgets, just like wxPython. GCJ cannot compile Swing apps yet, but you can compile SWT apps using GCJ.

Not making good use of the blog

Fri, 07 Feb 2003 17:28:52 +0000

My last entry was October 30th. That’s most unfortunate, because there are all sorts of interesting things that have happened in the world and interesting things that I’ve found online. Just the other day, I found a fairly cool piece of software, but now I have no idea what it was called. And, it wouldn’t be easy to figure out search terms to locate this particular program. Had I just blogged it, I would’ve been able to find it trivially.

Network Computing Picked ANS As Editors Choice

Thu, 31 Oct 2002 04:23:52 +0000

From December 1994 to March 1999, I worked for ANS Communications (which was independent, then part of AOL, then part of WorldCom while I was there). I just received a link to a Network Computing review of ISPs that picked ANS as Editor’s Choice and talked about how great the ANS NOC was. I’ve got very fond memories of working in that NOC, and it’s great to see how people in the outside world perceived it.

Lost in Translation

Mon, 28 Oct 2002 15:31:03 +0000

Someone has gone and put together a site that uses online translators to mangle your text. The Tower of Babel lives on!

Open Source Applications Foundation

Tue, 22 Oct 2002 03:53:17 +0000

Mitch Kapor has formed the Open Source Applications Foundation to build quality apps in the open source paradigm. I know I’ll have more to write on that one later.

Create Your Own Bush Speech

Tue, 22 Oct 2002 03:51:32 +0000

Some clever person has created a spiffy flash interactive gizmo to create custom George W. Bush speech.

Back to Blogging

Tue, 22 Oct 2002 03:49:57 +0000

After a busy few months, I think I’m ready to get back to blogging. I’ll probably be back on the bus again soon, so that will give me some good blogwriting time.

The Memory Hole – Documents That People Want To Disappear

Fri, 09 Aug 2002 01:09:08 +0000

Yahoo!’s pick of the day today is The Memory Hole, a site that publishes documents that provide information that people would rather was not publicly exposed. This is exactly the kind of information that is important to have public in a free society.

The Impending Doom of Net Radio

Mon, 15 Jul 2002 04:28:16 +0000

Newsweek’s Steven Levy talks about the record industry killing Net radio. I hope that some day our culture will recover from all of the damage this handful of companies is causing.

The Low Carb Diets

Mon, 15 Jul 2002 04:23:01 +0000

The NY Times presents an excellent 8 page article on low fat not being all it’s cracked up to be. Personally, I don’t have a weight or cholesterol problem at this point in my life, so I haven’t been worried about dieting. But I have been living with the indoctrination that a low-fat diet is the right kind of diet for a long time…

Janis Ian on Music Downloading

Sun, 07 Jul 2002 21:21:14 +0000

Though I’m not familiar with her music, I find Janis Ian’s article about music downloading very interesting. Reading an artists take on this is interesting, because the record companies claim to be trying to protect the interests of artists. Janis doesn’t think so, and I’m sure there are numerous others who agree with her.

Music Industry Finally Giving In

Wed, 03 Jul 2002 03:13:19 +0000

The NYTimes reports a bit more broadly on the news that the record companies are releasing more music for download. Again, I say to them: “Try MP3, you’ll like it!”

Salon on Payola

Fri, 28 Jun 2002 04:35:00 +0000

Here’s a great pair of links from a couple days back. Salon has done some reporting on the current state of payola in the music business. Technically, what they’re doing right now is not payola, because that would be illegal. But it amounts to the same thing and it’s one part of the reason that music is priced so outrageously. Also of note is a comment in the slashdot thread, where someone pointed out how natural payola is and how those “greedy record companies” don’t really make much money because 90% of albums fail.

Two weeks is too long

Fri, 28 Jun 2002 04:31:26 +0000

It’s been two weeks since my last blog entry. Why? I’ve been working like crazy. Generally, I’m not a fan of that. But, we’re finishing up a major project at work, and starting to transition to Extreme Programming (XP). I’m really excited about the changes we’re making, and I think our customers will be well-served by what we’re doing. XP seems like a great way to develop software, because it seems that you’re almost guaranteed to succeed if you follow it.

Music Industry Almost But Not Quite Giving In

Thu, 13 Jun 2002 07:44:06 +0000

According to this article, two of the major labels (Sony and Universal) are planning to offer downloaded singles for $0.99. The article says that in addition to the price cut, the major breakthrough is that these songs can be burned to CD. To which I say: almost but not quite. I want MP3 files, not Liquid Audio files. Sure, I can burn the Liquid files to CD and then rip them into MP3 format, but that means using lossy compression twice on the music, thus sacrificing sound quality.

A Year Ago: Smart Tags

Wed, 12 Jun 2002 05:40:25 +0000

As a regular reader of Scripting News, I find Dave Winer’s habit of looking back at previous writing to be quite interesting. That’s one of the cool things about blogs. It’s a space to keep your personal view of history. A year ago, techies were talking about Microsoft’s Smart Tags. Smart Tags got killed off in that incarnation, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they show up again.

Imminent Death of the Music Biz Predicted

Wed, 12 Jun 2002 04:48:00 +0000

This great article talks about the current state of the music business with the historical perspective of the book business as a basis for comparison: Where before you’d be happy only at gold and platinum levels, soon you’ll be grateful if you have a release that sells 30,000 or 40,000 units — that will be your bread and butter. It may sadden some to see the glamour days of the music

News Aggregator Roundup

Mon, 03 Jun 2002 04:43:32 +0000

Jon Udell does a nice roundup of news aggregators. Handy resource.

ClearChannel’s Place In Radio

Sat, 01 Jun 2002 07:14:19 +0000

The Washington Post has an article focused on Washington region of ClearChannel, the massive radio/concert/billboard company. It provides a good insight into how ClearChannel works and why everything you hear sounds the same. Here in Detroit, we still have 89X modern rock out of Windsor and 96.3 WDVD which plays mainstream music, but is not focused on current Top 40.

Universal Releases MP3 Track

Tue, 28 May 2002 05:43:33 +0000

I consider this to be a big deal: Vivendi Universal and Maverick Records have released a new Meshell Ndegeocello remix for sale online. What’s unique about this is that the new song is $0.99 and in MP3 format. The price is probably slightly higher than where it should be, but the fact that they released it in MP3 shows that they’re paying a little bit of attention to what people want.

John Robb on the New Economy

Mon, 20 May 2002 01:03:01 +0000

John Robb, COO of Userland, wrote a good essay on what he thinks the shape of the New Economy is. I agree with what he says: the New Economy is indeed new, and it empowers individuals. One thing that I wonder, though: when the New Economy is no longer new, will corporations and corporate profits be the name of the game again?

Compulsory Licensing For Music Considered

Sun, 19 May 2002 01:13:24 +0000

News.com reports that some large tech companies are supporting Kazaa in trying to pursuade Congress to adopt compulsory licenses for music, which would make file trading legal (and no longer free). Though I usually prefer to let the free market decide things, the government may need to intervene to ensure that consumer’s rights are protected.

Napster Implodes

Wed, 15 May 2002 17:05:48 +0000

CNN and others are reporting on the resignation of Napster leadership. This includes the CEO, Konrad Hilbers, and Shawn Fanning, the original author of the software and founder of the company. I do hope that Fanning and Napster are remembered for the revolution they’ve caused, and I hope that Fanning gets another shot at driving change in the entertainment business.

The Record Industry Sees MusicNet’s Problems

Tue, 07 May 2002 23:18:05 +0000

MSNBC has a good review of how MusicNet got to where it is and points out that many major label execs recognize that the service is not what consumers want. They do plan to change the service, but will they be willing to change the service to offer unprotected formats?

Free Software in Peru

Sun, 05 May 2002 18:34:26 +0000

Peru has a bill that is proposing using only free software for the government. Microsoft did not approve and wrote a letter to the Peruvian government. A Congressman replied with rebuttals to all of Microsoft’s points. Reading this letter, you can see that he’s really thought about this stuff. You’ll note that the primary reason he argues for free software is not cost: it’s availability of information to the public and national security.

Top Ten New Copyright Crimes

Sun, 05 May 2002 17:27:43 +0000

LawMeme brings us the Top Ten New Copyright Crimes as a means of mocking Turner Broadcasting’s Jamie Kellner who stated that skipping commercials is theft. This article is also nice, because the author highlights some choice quotes from Kellner. It also has that great Heinlein quote that’s been floating around a lot lately. Heinlein said that there is nothing in law that states that just because something has been making money is guaranteed to continue.

Gary Robinson’s Three Steps to Freedom

Wed, 01 May 2002 04:23:00 +0000

Gary Robinson, the head of Emergent Music has an article on his blog about the Three Steps To Freedom. His opinion on this definitely counts, because EM might very well be the future of music. I’m going to chime in with my thoughts here and copy them over to EM’s forum as well.

Gateway in the Music Biz?

Mon, 29 Apr 2002 22:17:00 +0000

Computer maker Gateway is reportedly trying the music business on for size. I’m all for this… here’s a multi-billion dollar company looking to get into music with no legacy to deal with, which leaves it open for trying all sorts of business models.

RIAA Wants More Taxpayer Money to Combat Piracy

Fri, 26 Apr 2002 20:48:10 +0000

C|Net has a story about RIAA testimony in front of Congress, in which they ask for more money to be applied to catching pirates. From earlier writing of mine, you can see that I don’t think much of how the RIAA is handling their monopoly in the face of new technology. However, they do own the copyrights and the law should be upheld until it is changed. I would like to see an alternate music industry build up that is more consumer friendly.

Emergent Music

Wed, 24 Apr 2002 04:10:43 +0000

Just traced a link to Emergent Music, which is a really spiffy collaborative filtering site for finding new music. This is the future, folks. There’s a lot more value there than what we get from the Majors. I hope Emergent Music and something I’m working on get along well.

Making a Difference in Digital Freedom

Tue, 23 Apr 2002 07:47:12 +0000

SFGate has a great article that describes how to stop laws like the DMCA, etc. from getting passed henceforth. The suggestion: rather than donate small sums to prop up congresspeople that do a good thing, donate large sums to make examples of small numbers of congressfolk, by supporting their opponents and getting them out of office. I wonder when Senator Disney, er, Hollings is up for re-election?

Napster is Done, Get Over It

Mon, 22 Apr 2002 17:04:34 +0000

As media conglomerates go, Bertelsmann is among the most savvy. They invested in AOL and partnered in AOL Europe before AOL’s biggest explosion of growth (and then cashed in at a good time). They invested in Napster when it was still hot, an investment that has not borne fruit but does show that they think about the future instead of just trying to protect their current revenue model. Now, the NY Times reports that Bertelsmann may be interested in buying all of Napster, claiming that a for-pay Napster service could still be the most successful.

Dataplay: a product without a market

Sun, 21 Apr 2002 18:08:59 +0000

CNN talks about the new Dataplay media format, which is a 1-inch disc housed in a small plastic cartridge. The advantage of Dataplay is that it is considerably smaller than a 5-inch CD. The disadvantages are: the discs hold a total of 500MB when using both sides (compared to 650MB on one side of a CD), the music is stored in a compressed format so it is not of as high quality as a CD, the music has copy controls so you can’t rip it and play it on your computer, you have to get all new players for them (which, of course, cost $300 since they’re new technology) and the price of prerecorded music on Dataplay is the same as prerecorded CDs.

Silicon Valley vs. Hollywood

Sat, 20 Apr 2002 22:10:56 +0000

Business 2.0 has an article that sums up the battle between tech companies and media companies. Though the tech companies undoubtedly have their own interests at heart, thank God someone is on the same side as the consumers.

The Artists Formerly Known As Fans

Sat, 20 Apr 2002 01:30:30 +0000

C|Net talks about fan remixes of music and fans who combine multiple songs into one. I’ve heard a couple of these and they can be nifty…

Google Answers information exchange

Sat, 20 Apr 2002 01:18:32 +0000

Years ago, I thought that an information exchange would be a powerful tool. People ask questions, other people supply answers… Google now has a beta of such a service People state how much they’re willing to pay for answers to their questions, and the Researcher that answers gets 75% of the money. (Google takes $0.50 listing fee plus the other 25%). I’m really happy to see the Google folks taking novel, user-friendly approaches to generating revenue. No pop-up, gigantic Flash ads.

How Adam Curry creates his radio show

Sat, 20 Apr 2002 01:06:53 +0000

Adam Curry, most famous for his run as an MTV veejay a few years back, described how he prepares his radio program. He lives in The Netherlands and has a weekly show on a popular station. The only songs that get played are ones he can get through Morpheus. On the one hand, the record labels get nothing from him downloading the songs that way. On the other, the songwriters do get royalties because he downloads them with the express purpose of playing them on the radio.

LongBets

Thu, 18 Apr 2002 23:51:42 +0000

Longbets.com is a novel site that allows people to bet on happenings a few years or a few decades away. The amount of the bet goes to the charity of the winner’s choice. A number of industry visionaries have placed the first few bets.

DubyaSpeak

Thu, 18 Apr 2002 16:32:18 +0000

I had been a fan of the “Bush Is Dumb” page that I had found previously on Google. Now, someone else has kept this idea going with DubyaSpeak.com, a nice file of various George W. Bush quotes. Bush does have a unique sense for the English language.

Slashdot’s Music Roundup

Tue, 16 Apr 2002 21:33:26 +0000

Slashdot gave a double dose of music goodness today, including a bunch of links to separate music stories. Especially interesting is the mention of Wilco, who released their new album on the Net (for free!) six months in advance of the CD’s release.

Soundbuzz.com Offering Music At Rs. 10 Per Song

Tue, 16 Apr 2002 21:27:06 +0000

An Indian company is offering music for download at Rs. 10 per song, which is about 20 cents. Something to understand is that 20 cents is more to them than it is to us. However, if the major labels were to offer ddownloads for $1 a song, you’d probably still get a lot of takers. That is assuming (probably wrongly) that they are offering the music in listener friendly formats.

Andreeson: Copy Protection Won’t Work

Thu, 11 Apr 2002 20:04:13 +0000

Netscape co-founder (currently at Loudcloud) spoke to the National Association of Broadcasters about how copy protection won’t work for digital media. I’d be curious to know how the NAB received these words, but I believe they are absolutely true and that the truth of it will come out within a few years.

RIAA Fines Company $1M for MP3s On A Server

Thu, 11 Apr 2002 16:26:52 +0000

The RIAA is now taking on the role that the Business Software Alliance (BSA) has for software. It has fined a company $1 million for having MP3 files on a server that employees were sharing.

Does It Work?

Mon, 08 Apr 2002 16:19:58 +0000

A Texas TV station has put their Does It Work? series of articles online describing their experiences with various “As Seen On TV” products. All of the usual suspects, Oxi Clean, Epil Stop, etc. are there with test results.

Microsoft Preps Content Protection Technology

Sat, 06 Apr 2002 18:59:48 +0000

Microsoft is looking to protect audio files on portable players. Nobody learned anything from the software copy protection era of the late 80s. People don’t want that crap, as the market will likely show in a few years.

Celine Dion’s New CD crashes computers

Thu, 04 Apr 2002 07:34:03 +0000

The Hollywood Reporter writes about copy protection on Celine Dion’s new CD which can cause computers to crash. To Sony’s credit, the CD is apparently clearly labeled as not working in computers. I’m really not sure what they think they’re accomplishing with this, other than cheesing off a lot of customers.

Eisner on Intellectual Property and the Net

Fri, 29 Mar 2002 04:30:48 +0000

OK, I’ll admit it. I had an idea of what Disney’s Michael Eisner would say in the Financial Times even before reading the article, and I figured I wouldn’t agree. It turns out that I only mostly don’t agree.

When Elephants Dance

Wed, 27 Mar 2002 03:01:17 +0000

I would be remiss if I didn’t point to this excellent essay by Michael Fraase. He does one of the best jobs I’ve seen of providing an up-to-the-minute recount of where digital rights currently stands. He also mentions the new DigitalConsumer.org which has a very similar set of rules to something I’m involved in.

Stephen’s Guide to Fallacies

Tue, 26 Mar 2002 00:54:25 +0000

Just like design patterns in software, Stephen’s Guide To Fallacies is a set of design patterns for poor arguments. These are things you see all the time.

My Oscar View

Mon, 25 Mar 2002 16:19:49 +0000

I’m sure that thousands of bloggers will be chiming in on the Oscars. 2001 was an interesting year in movies, and you could tell because so many Oscar categories had several viable candidates. I had been predicting a Best Picture win for Fellowship of the Ring (currently #3 on the IMDB 250), with a Best DIrector win for Ron Howard (A Beautiful Mind).

Interaction Design Patterns

Sat, 23 Mar 2002 17:36:40 +0000

Design patterns have become pretty commonplace in software development, and now someone has itemized a set of interaction patterns. These are all things we’ve seen around the net, of course, which is why they’re patterns. It’s nice to see them enumerated with examples, though.

NYTimes: The Future pf Music

Tue, 19 Mar 2002 04:45:42 +0000

NYTimes Magazine features an article describing the future of music. This author envisions a world in which you don’t pay for copies of music. We’ve got a long way to go before we get to the point where that idea is readily accepted.

Norwegian Cruise Line is a great thing

Tue, 19 Mar 2002 01:41:11 +0000

We just got back from a 7-day Western Caribbean cruise on Norwegian Cruise Line. NCL is great, the cruise was wonderful and we had a great time on the ship and during our shore excursions. Highly recommended, if you’re looking to see a bunch of islands.

Why Napster is Right

Fri, 08 Mar 2002 05:02:26 +0000

I can’t believe I haven’t seen this article before. Michele Boldrin and UCLA Economics Professor David Levine wrote Why Napster Is Right which goes in to the economics of why intellectual property laws should go away in this age of dirt cheap distribution. I’ve generally been of the opinion that copyright laws are a good thing, but should have a much shorter lifespan than they currently do. This article is making me rethink whether copyright really is a good idea in the current age… Everything I’m interested in professionally (software, music, writing) is all based around intellectual property.

Fox News on the SSSCA

Thu, 07 Mar 2002 23:16:10 +0000

Let’s hope some version of this Fox News story makes it on TV. The article blasts Senator Hollings for his blatant siding with the entertainment industries and against consumers. The SSSCA as a bill does not make any sense for anyone other than content holders. (And don’t forget that, according to the Constitution, copyright is there for the public good!)

Pressplay Reviewed on oreillynet

Thu, 07 Mar 2002 20:08:35 +0000

As I expected, this review of PressPlay over at O’Reilly was not positive. The lack of “ownership” of the music was one of the big criticisms. People are willing to rent some things, but for most things people want to buy it and use it as they like for as long as they want.

Looking Grim at the Grammys

Tue, 05 Mar 2002 07:37:09 +0000

Somehow, I missed Newsweek’s Looking Grim at the Grammys article. The article highlights how grim things look for the music business right now, using the Album of the Year winner “O Brother Where Art Thou” as a counter balance to the pop fluff on the radio. Purely commercial offerings don’t have as much sway with people who are musicians themselves, which is why O Brother and India.Arie made an impact on the Grammys despite the lack of radio play.

The Customer Is Always Wrong

Tue, 05 Mar 2002 02:53:07 +0000

Newsweek’s Steven Levy writes about the SSSCA hearings in the Senate, and how some would have you believe that millions of online song swappers are criminals. Technically, that’s true… but if enough registered voters decide that they’re fed up with the way current copyright laws are written and enforced, the laws can be changed.

The Dream of Self-Made CDs

Mon, 04 Mar 2002 01:04:26 +0000

The NY Times reports on the increase in people recording their own CDs. This article indirectly highlights one big thing that the major labels do: filtering and promotion. The advent of inexpensive, high quality multitrack recording and Internet-based distribution has dramatically reduced the cost of entry into “professional” music.

More Music Coverage Coming

Mon, 04 Mar 2002 00:58:34 +0000

Since I started this blog last June, I’ve been mostly covering technology and software. Lately, a few things have been coming together in my mind and I think there will start being more coverage of music here. Which is not to say I’ll be neglecting technology… Technology is a big part of my day.

Short-Sighted NARAS Speech

Thu, 28 Feb 2002 17:30:50 +0000

At the Grammy Awards, the NARAS President gave his annual speech. Rather than issuing a call to artists and labels to try to meet the demands for consumers for online music, he lashed out at online song swapping. I agree that it’s illegal and that artists see basically nothing from the current crop of online music systems (including the major label systems, from what the press reports). Rather than whining about it on national TV, they should be taking some risks and trying new business models that just may be what consumers want.

Grammy Roundup

Thu, 28 Feb 2002 17:25:59 +0000

Yes, Alicia Keys won 5 awards, O Brother Where Art Thou won album of the year, but I think U2 was the big winner. For one, they won the coveted Record of the Year award. Bigger than that, I think, is that U2 was nominated multiple times for three different songs: Elevation, Walk On and Stuck In A Moment You Can’t Get Out Of. Add to this the fact that they won three Grammys last year for Beautiful Day, and you’ve got 4 Grammy-nominated songs on a single album.

Miserable Melodies

Wed, 27 Feb 2002 15:56:52 +0000

Who can live without a site devoted to Miserable Melodies. Timeless anticlassics, just waiting to make you hurl. Listening to this will make you think more highly of tonight’s Grammy nominees. Update: As pointed out in the comments, this site has moved on sometime over the five years since I posted this.

The Future of Music from A Whole Lotta Nothing

Tue, 26 Feb 2002 07:56:59 +0000

A Whole Lotta Nothing has an article about The Future of Music. In the article, Matthew Haughey writes about how MP3s are what people want and use, but the record companies still insist on pitching products that people don’t want, at prices people are not willing to pay. I think he’s right about how an enterprising artist or set of artists will eventually break away and make a good living selling MP3s of their music… but it will take a bit of a mental shift on the part of consumers, because they’re used to getting their MP3s for free from Napster, Morpheus and MP3.

The Segway Auction Continues

Sat, 23 Feb 2002 18:27:53 +0000

Earlier this week, it was announced that Amazon.com is running an auction of the first three Segway transporters. When I looked at the time, they were each going for around $13,000. Now, they range from $86,000-$150,000. I’m not sure why there is such a large range. That’s a pretty staggering figure, and will be good for Dean Kamen’s FIRST charity. The auction still has a few weeks to go, so we’ll see where the bidding goes.

Bush Wants To Drill Alaska

Sat, 23 Feb 2002 07:39:15 +0000

Bush repeated his call to drill for oil in Alaska, in order to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. To which I say: why not reduce our dependence on oil, period? He said that drilling in Alaska will create jobs… putting money into alternative energy sources can also create jobs. I guess we can’t expect anything else from someone who’s grown up with oil and whose campaign was significantly assisted by oil and big energy money.

Recording Industry Ordered To Prove Ownership

Sat, 23 Feb 2002 07:17:38 +0000

In an interesting turn in the Napster case, Judge Patel has ordered the record companies to prove their ownership of the music copyrights. Napster has accused the RIAA’s members of anticompetitive behavior, saying that they would not license the music to online delivery services other than their own. Judge Patel is taking this charge seriously, and this could lead to a pretty significant ruling down the road…

Forbes Asks If Albums Will Survive

Fri, 22 Feb 2002 07:19:55 +0000

Not surprisingly, this Forbes article has people on both sides of the fence as to whether albums – collections of songs – will be replaced by single songs in the digital age. In my opinion, the majority of albums that are released are merely collections of single songs. Yes, that collection of songs does reflect where the artist was at one point in time. But, timestamped singles would do the same thing.

The Deadly Follies of Stick Figure Warning-Man

Wed, 20 Feb 2002 15:51:00 +0000

Cap’n Wacky brings us The Deadly Follies ofn Stick Figure Warning-Man, a first person account of what a lousy job it is to have to pose for those signs. Most amusing.

Software vs. Media in a Single Company

Wed, 20 Feb 2002 04:21:09 +0000

This week’s Download.com dispatch mentioned how Opera has a “Refuse pop-up windows” option. This popped-up a thought in my head: would Microsoft add such a feature to IE? Would AOL allow such a feature in their software?

The Circle P2P Transfer, IM and News

Tue, 19 Feb 2002 04:23:10 +0000

The Circle is a promising-sounding peer-to-peer decentralized content application. I haven’t been able to try it yet, so I’m not sure how far along it is. But, with file transfer, instant messaging and news, it sounds quite interesting. Possibly even the first implementation of a blognet that has been created.

Ev’s PayPal Tribulations

Mon, 18 Feb 2002 17:25:57 +0000

Evan Williams of Pyra talks about his recent problems with PayPal. I haven’t yet used my PayPal account for anything, but what he’s describing can be a huge issue for any business trying to use PayPal as their payment system. This is foolish behavior that PP will have to correct quickly if they want to survive. (BTW, this was #3 on DayPop, so people have taken notice.)

Bush Gaffes Continue

Mon, 18 Feb 2002 17:13:41 +0000

Bush seemed to say a lot of silly things while he was compaigning, but it didn’t stop there… Speaking in Japan, Bush talked about “the devaluation issue”. Asian markets are very sensitive to the price of the yen, so talk of devaluation makes people nervous. What Bush had meant was “deflation”. Sure, anyone can make these mistakes… it’s just the frequency and severity that differs.

Four Songs to the Penny for Artists

Mon, 18 Feb 2002 17:10:47 +0000

The NY Times is reporting on the miniscule size of artist payments on PressPlay and MusicNet. All along, the labels have been saying that Napster was bad because the artists don’t get compensated. This article quotes that an artist would get $0.0023 per song downloaded. That doesn’t sound like compensation to me.

Judge Orders Microsoft To Release Source To States

Sat, 16 Feb 2002 16:31:02 +0000

The nine states suing Microsoft for anti-trust charges will have access to the Windows source (including the recent XP embedded), because the states claim that they need the source in order to prove that Microsoft could provide versions of Windows without Internet Explorer. That should be interesting… it doesn’t seem like an easy task to go through millions of lines of code (probably with no documentation, unless that was a specified requirement).

WorldCom Cuts Free Long Distance For Employees

Sat, 16 Feb 2002 03:48:28 +0000

WorldCom has decided that geeting rid of the free coffee isn’t enough… No more $25 credit for employees’ long distance bills. Gack.

PayPal Hits The Street

Sat, 16 Feb 2002 00:00:42 +0000

PayPal went public today, raising $70 million for themselves and watching their stock climb 54%. Their closing price of over $20 a share gives them a market cap of over $1 billion. This is a company with no profits and $100 million a year in sales. Let’s hear it for irrational exuberance! Just wait until PayPal starts getting regulated.

CmdrTaco Happily Ever After

Thu, 14 Feb 2002 17:08:49 +0000

This shows how big a part /. is of Commander Taco (Rob Malda)’s life. He propoesd to his girlfriend online, on Valentine’s Day. Wow. I bet this will easily be number one on Blogdex…

Unhappily Ebbers After – No Coffee For WorldCom

Thu, 14 Feb 2002 03:42:14 +0000

Having worked at a small company that was acquired by WorldCom, I know a number of people who still work there. I had heard before about WorldCom cutting off the coffee supply to the employees, and I’m happy to see that the press has picked up on this, too. WCOM claims they will save $4-6 million a year by not supplying free coffee. How short-sighted are these people? $4M from a $30 BILLION a year company?

PayPal Going Public, without Louisiana

Tue, 12 Feb 2002 20:10:09 +0000

La. asks PayPal to halt service in state – Days after a lawsuit delays its IPO, the online payments company gets more bad news as Louisiana asks the company to cease service until the state licenses it. [CNet] It will be interesting to see how PayPal’s IPO does. This is the first “dotcomish” IPO I’ve seen in a long time.

Lessig’s Creative Commons

Mon, 11 Feb 2002 07:49:04 +0000

Lessig Proposes “Creative Commons” – n/a [Slashdot] Lawrence Lessig has been talking about this for a while, and now he’s actually creating (in conjunction with some other universities) licenses to match. His intention is to have licenses that allow things to easily move into the public domain when they are no longer earning money for their creators. Given that current copyright terms are so long, this is a good thing.

Arch Distributed Version Control

Wed, 06 Feb 2002 22:50:55 +0000

Slashdot has a post today about the Arch revision control system. This system allows branches to be on completely separate servers from the main trunk, allowing for distributed development without requiring “patch”.

Studios Racing to Stop DVD Copying

Mon, 04 Feb 2002 16:32:12 +0000

C|Net is reporting about studios trying to head off a bunch of DVD copying. It seems that someone has written software that makes DVD copying relatively easy. Couple this with falling DVD burner prices, and you’ve got a stupid, scared industry. I say “stupid” because they are failing to learn from the past.

Snow, ice and a cold. Oh my!

Mon, 04 Feb 2002 16:26:13 +0000

Wednesday, we got several inches of snow. Wednesday night, my wife and I both had sore throats. Thursday, we had ice and more snow… and the cold has been lingering. That’s why I’ve been a bit out of it… Ugh.

Project Management with Bug Tracking Software

Mon, 28 Jan 2002 16:52:00 +0000

In the beginning, there was software. And it wasn’t good. The users kept calling with reports of bugs in the software. There were so many of these reports, that the developers decided to make a program to track the bugs. This helped to make sure that every bug would be fixed.

Mono Drops the GPL

Mon, 28 Jan 2002 07:20:06 +0000

Ximian changes open-source license – The Linux company makes a philosophical shift in a key open-source software project that now will be governed by a less restrictive license. [CNet] Mono has movied to a license adopted from XFree86, which allows use in commercial software. The primary reason for the shift is that Intel and HP have software to contribute and would not contribute it unless the license was changed. I think this is a good change, because Mono will be able to benefit from cooperative development like that.

Refactoring vs. Rewriting

Fri, 25 Jan 2002 20:58:11 +0000

Joel Spolsky has written another article about not rewriting your code. He harps on this a lot, but makes good points. This particular article provides an excellent, concrete example of why rewriting can be a bad idea…

Rediscovering PythonCard

Fri, 25 Jan 2002 16:26:01 +0000

Last night, I rediscovered PythonCard. I had read about it a few weeks back, and was not particularly interested. But, I just saw that there is a PythonCard-based program called textRouter, which is designed to be a simple weblog posting program. textRouter itself looks interesting (particularly since Drupal supports the Blogger API).

Phony Science Hits the Media

Thu, 24 Jan 2002 20:42:29 +0000

A couple weeks back, everyone was writing breathlessly about compressing random data. (Not gonna happen…) Today, they’re writing about free energy… News Media Scammed by ‘Free Energy’ Hoax – n/a [Slashdot] One interesting side bit: Slashdot managed to get themselves mentioned in CNN for exposing the hoax.

Lesbian Couples can have own baby

Thu, 24 Jan 2002 20:38:19 +0000

“No sperm necessary Lesbian couples ‘could have own baby’ “ – n/a [Daypop] Unlike artificial insemination, this technology would actually combine the genes of the two women in producing the child.

VX2: Scary Spyware

Wed, 23 Jan 2002 07:50:22 +0000

POE News has an account of the discovery of some evil spyware. The program, called VX2, appears to track all web activity, including form submissions. It’s hard to imagine scarier spyware… Apparently, this came with AudioGalaxy but is no longer included. Be careful when you install “free” software, because it may come with something like VX2.

How The Internet Wayback Machine Works

Wed, 23 Jan 2002 03:59:15 +0000

O’Reilly has an interview with the head of the Internet Wayback Machine (which can be found at archive.org. They’ve got a 100TB database that serves up 200 requests using a network of cheap PCs with IDE hard drives. They’re planning to release P2, their Perl-based parallel data searching software.

Amazon Profit, KMart Bankruptcy

Tue, 22 Jan 2002 21:57:36 +0000

Two shocking bits of business news today: Amazon.com posted a $5 million net profit, on an impressive $1.1 billion in sales, and 105 year-old KMart went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Maybe I don’t understand the issues enough, but KMart’s market cap is currently $450 million. They have $17 billion in assets and $11 billion in liabilities. Doesn’t that mean that they company should be worth $6 billion? Sounds like a buying opportunity, particularly if they’re going to come out of the bankruptcy.

Continued Enron shredding

Tue, 22 Jan 2002 07:23:59 +0000

After a couple of days blogging hiatus (visiting with my parents), I return to find this: Enron accused of new shredding – n/a [CNN Top News]. Yes, indeedy… these people are still shredding documents. It’s bad enough to run a multibillion dollar con, but to actually continue to do things the same way after you’ve been caught takes some gall.

Kent Beck and Alan Cooper Debate Development Strategy

Thu, 17 Jan 2002 20:27:55 +0000

Here’s an interesting interview/debate with Kent Beck of Extreme Programming fame, and Alan Cooper of Interaction Design fame. There are some fundamental differences between their strategies. I have a feeling that each strategy works well under certain circumstances.

Wallace and Grommit Return This Fall

Thu, 17 Jan 2002 20:03:43 +0000

Wallace and Grommit are going to be back this fall in a series of 12 one minute shorts available on the Net.

The End of Harry Potter

Thu, 17 Jan 2002 16:05:00 +0000

New here? This post gets a fair bit of search engine traffic. I just wanted to note that it was written in 2002. It’s obviously outrageously wrong. Who cares? I was just having some fun. Read on…

J.K. Rowling told reporters that she has already written the final chapter of book 7 of Harry Potter. The chapter tells of what happens to the main characters after graduation. This is doubtless going to be one of the most sought after documents on the Net, and there will be many fake variations that surface. I thought I would make a pre-emptive strike and release my version of the last chapter of Harry Potter. Feel free to post a link to your own Potter final chapters.

Garden of Spam

Wed, 16 Jan 2002 18:15:21 +0000

The Garden of Spam lists a number of amusing spam messages that one particularly lucky guy has collected. There’s even a great bit from a guy seeking the help of time travelers or nice aliens.

Bad Patents

Wed, 16 Jan 2002 17:50:22 +0000

Scientific American brings us an article about stupid patents. If you thought One Click was a stupid patent, how about “3D Pie Charts” and “Training with Manuals”? I hope the people who won these patents didn’t make any money off of them.

Crony Capitalism in the USA

Wed, 16 Jan 2002 07:59:00 +0000

The NY Times has an editorial about “crony capitalism”… the basic premise is that there are people and companies making millions (if not billions) not on the basis of good products and marketing, but on the basis of political connections. Enron is just one (huge) example.

Surreal Dream Comics from Slow Wave

Tue, 15 Jan 2002 16:26:08 +0000

Slow Wave is a weekly comic drawn by Jesse Reklaw. Each comic is based on a dream, often submitted by readers. It’s a neat, visual look into the surreal world of people’s dreams.

The Ultimate Bad Movie Review Site

Tue, 15 Jan 2002 16:13:00 +0000

In general, I like movies that I watch to be good. However, The Smithee Awards has given me an appreciation for just how fun a bad movie can be. Bad Movies.org serves up reviews of a bunch of bad movies, including photos, sounds and sometimes movie clips. Check out Star Crash for an example of how entertainingly bad a movie can be.

Woohoo! Opt Out of Popups

Mon, 14 Jan 2002 07:34:30 +0000

#2 on Blogdex today is a page with links to opt out of popup ads from many of the large advertisers. What a great thing.

Is It Advertising or Is It News?

Mon, 14 Jan 2002 07:25:44 +0000

One question that comes up more and more (particularly as media companies are consolidating and joining with tech companies): where do you draw the line between news and advertising? C|Net’s got an article about TimeCanada breaking Apple’s embargo on news of the new iMac. The part of the article that I find more interesting than the embargo breaking itself is where they talk about the Time story about the new iMac.

Microsoft Civil Suit Settlement Rejected

Sat, 12 Jan 2002 07:03:00 +0000

Reuters reports that the civil suit settlement proposed by Microsoft has been rejected. Thank goodness… you’ll recall that the settlement MS proposed was that they would donate software to schools (thereby helping them improve their foothold in schools, where Apple has a traditional lead, which doesn’t sound like much of a settlement for wrongdoing).

Copy Protected CDs Are Not Real CDs

Fri, 11 Jan 2002 21:45:00 +0000

Philips, the holder of many of the patents on CDs, reportedly said that copy protected CDs do not adhere to the CD-DA standard and therefore cannot bear the CD logo. They also plan for their coming CD recorder devices to include features to correct errors in CDs (essentially making the copy protection useless). If Philips owned a record company (which I don’t think they do at this point), they might think differently.

Losing the FOIA

Thu, 10 Jan 2002 21:34:16 +0000

Here is an article lamenting the loss of the Freedom of Information Act. I agree with what’s said here. The Constitution is the foundation for a nation that does not trust the government. Our government has purposefully limited powers, and things like the FOIA allow us to ensure that people are not abusing the powers they have been granted.

Man Crashes Twice in Purgatory

Thu, 10 Jan 2002 18:34:54 +0000

Sightseeing pilot survives two crashes – PURGATORY, Colorado (CNN) –A sightseeing plane pilot survived two crashes in the snowy Colorado … [CNN US] This is remarkable. The guy’s sightseeing plane crashes, and then the rescue helicopter he was in crashed. All this in a place called Purgatory.

The American Music Award Winners 2002

Thu, 10 Jan 2002 16:44:42 +0000

I only watched snippets of the AMAs. There weren’t any runaway winners. Alicia Keys, Destiny’s Child, Aaliyah and Tim McGraw each won two awards. The AMAs are voted on by a survey of 20,000 record buyers, so it’s not surprising that they match up well with sales. The Grammys, which are picked by industry people, can vary considerably from sales (take Steely Dan’s win last year, for example). The Grammys are Feb 27.

The Future of Music Policy

Thu, 10 Jan 2002 16:32:24 +0000

The NY Times has a summary of this year’s Future of Music Policy conference. There are still many issues to be weighed, and no one has yet figured out a viable model. I recently finished reading the book Hit Men, which covers the music industry through 1990. The comment that Congress is looking into payola yet again shows that things have not changed.

Microsoft Rigged Poll

Wed, 09 Jan 2002 22:14:00 +0000

ZDNet UK reports that Microsoft has rigged an online poll. Actually, what it’s really saying is that Microsoft sent an internal email urging people to vote, and some people tried to vote many times. The poll was asking what technology people would use to implement web services. Most people had been saying Java, until the microsoft.com domain weighed in.

Stephen Hawking Celebrates His 60th

Wed, 09 Jan 2002 20:22:56 +0000

BBC News | SCI/TECH | Hawking celebrates own brief history – n/a [Daypop] We just bought the Universe in a Nutshell, and it looks like a great book. Hawking has a great writing style.

Spammer Trying to Sue

Wed, 09 Jan 2002 17:54:38 +0000

Wow. Here’s a fun page describing an exchange with a spammer who threatened to sue the people that complained about him. Amazing. Cluefulness is not necessarily a natural trait of human beings.

GM Shows Off Fuel Cell Car

Tue, 08 Jan 2002 20:27:58 +0000

At the Detroit Auto Show, GM has announced their new Autonomy chassis which uses hydrogen fuel cells, has a 20 year lifespan and can accept different bodies on top. Fuel cell technology would be great, because it burns clean and would eliminate the need for oil.

Vaporware 2001

Tue, 08 Jan 2002 17:20:00 +0000

Vaporware 2001 – from Wired News is their annual list of announced but possibly never shipping products. Duke Nukem Forever was #1, having been announced in 1997 and even making the list last year.

Limited Liability for Corporations

Tue, 08 Jan 2002 16:45:38 +0000

The Ten Worst Corporations of 2001 lists foul deeds of a number of large companies. I agree with the article in that companies are not always ethical in their pursuit of the bigger bottom line, and that many of the things listed are unethical, if not illegal. I strongly disagree with their proposed solution of making shareholders liable for the corporations’ actions. Read on to see why.

Mono C# Compiler Self Hosts

Fri, 04 Jan 2002 07:53:00 +0000

Mono C# Compiler Compiles Itself – n/a [Slashdot] This is a big step for Mono. This is the first non-Microsoft C# compiler. This will give the Mono project a boost.

How Islam Lost Its Way

Wed, 02 Jan 2002 18:57:54 +0000

A Pakistani writes about how Islam lost its way and makes suggestions for Muslims and the US. The article provides interesting historical context.

The Seven Wonders of the Web

Mon, 31 Dec 2001 02:58:43 +0000

The Guardian brings us The Seven Wonders of the Web which goes from Google to Blogger. Fairly decent choices, in my opinion.

Eric Sink on the Failure of Open Source

Sat, 29 Dec 2001 21:33:32 +0000

Eric Sink has written about the failure of open source. He says that as a concept, you can’t throw it out, because there is a lot of good quality open source. But, as a business model, it hasn’t worked. He calls open source the lowest margin of software businesses, and low margin businesses are indeed quite difficult.

Pair Programming Experiences

Fri, 28 Dec 2001 23:12:28 +0000

I posted a message on Joel’s discussion area about pair programming. A good bit of discussion that followed. Of course, there are no real “answers”, because every environment is different and you really just need to figure out what works for you.

The Year in Internet Law

Fri, 28 Dec 2001 16:48:20 +0000

The Year in Internet Law – _NY Times: The Year in Internet Law [Scripting News] As you can see from this article, most of the significant cases this year did not turn out well for Internet citizens. We’ll see what we get in 2002 as some of these things are appealed.

$9.99 CDs Are Coming

Fri, 28 Dec 2001 16:23:47 +0000

CD prices set to take a plunge – Whether it’s piracy, a receding economy or simply supply and demand, sluggish CD sales will probably result in lower prices in the near future. [ZDNet] The article quotes an analyst predicting that CD prices may permanently drop to $9.99. After years of selling CDs at higher prices than cassettes (because CDs are “new technology”), perhaps we’ll start seeing a bit better value. As long as I can continue to rip CDs to put on our server at home, $9.99 is not too bad a price. I’d really rather just by individual songs in MP3 format at $1 or less.

Is this headline half-empty or half-full?

Thu, 27 Dec 2001 22:23:00 +0000

Here are two articles that have essentially the same content and refer to the same research report: Dot-com failures up from last year and Dot.com failures easing. The headlines paint different pictures. This is why it’s always good to be able to see some unfiltered data and make up your own mind.

CNN’s 20 Bits of Coming Technology

Wed, 26 Dec 2001 07:56:57 +0000

CNN’s tech folks have come up with a list of 20 coming technologies that will impact PCs. Some of these are several years out, but they’re talking about affordable 400GB hard drives in 2003, new display technologies, and annoying websites that are controlled by voice.

Celebrating Japanese Engrish

Wed, 26 Dec 2001 07:40:18 +0000

Someone has set up a site to celebrate Japanese Engrish. I haven’t scoured the site yet, but the “Pocari Sweat Refreshment Water” and “Pumpkin Poo” show the kind of high-caliber site that this is.

Two Bad Years In A Row

Tue, 25 Dec 2001 20:19:36 +0000

Wall St.: From bad to worse [CNN Money] The article talks about the market losing value two years in a row for the first time since the ’70s. Hopefully, next year we won’t be looking back at three losing years for the first time since ’41. (One thing that’s always worth remembering: if you invest for the long term, these kinds of drops won’t cause a problem.)

Google Zeitgeist 2001

Sun, 23 Dec 2001 20:24:52 +0000

Google has an interesting page showing what people were searching for in 2001. Unfortunately, the link doesn’t look like a permalink. They really should archive it, because it’s interesting. I noticed that they didn’t have an overall Top Queries list, they just had top gainers and top decliners. I find it interesting that the top woman was a 20 year old pop singer (Britney Spears), and the top man was a guy who died more than 300 years ago (Nostradamus).

Employment Searches on the Net

Sun, 23 Dec 2001 20:16:00 +0000

Why Net searches for jobs are so popular – Wharton looks at the ways that employers and recruiters can tap the best talent during tight economic times. [CNet] – This is one reason I’m at CareerSite. There is still a tremendous amount of untapped potential in online employment services.

Giuliani is Time’s Person of the Year

Sun, 23 Dec 2001 20:06:10 +0000

Rudy Giuliani was definitely a figure that emerged from the chaos of 911 to show himself to be the kind of leader one wants during crisis. Time has named him Person of the Year for 2001.

Fellowship of the Ring was excellent

Sat, 22 Dec 2001 22:36:11 +0000

We saw Fellowship of the Ring on Thursday night. One warning: a 10:15 showing finished up at 1:30, so be prepared. I’ll leave my commentary on it short, simple and spoiler free: it was an excellent movie. If you’re at all into fantasy, this is as good as it gets. Expect nominations for Best Picture and Best Director Oscars (in addition to the expected Best Visual Effects).

Office move

Sat, 22 Dec 2001 22:34:11 +0000

Yesterday was CareerSite’s office move, so I missed out on a day of blogging. The move was a lot of work (I’m still a little sore), even with 6 professional movers and 3 trucks (moving only two blocks!). The new building is very nice. I’ll probably be offline on Monday as well. I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m back up by Wednesday though.

Can Fellowship Best Harry Potter?

Thu, 20 Dec 2001 23:26:15 +0000

Entertainment Weekly asks if Fellowship of the Ring can beat Harry Potter’s box office. Since Potter will take in $300 million, there’s no certainty that FOTR can beat that. The thing I don’t buy in this article is the quote: “Fantasy is box office poison,” he says, citing such duds as ”Dungeons & Dragons,” ”Dragonheart,” and ”The 13th Warrior.” Why must people always do this? Fantasy is not box office poison.

The World’s Funniest Joke

Thu, 20 Dec 2001 16:51:03 +0000

Yahoo! is reporting the selection of the World’s Funniest Joke. 100,000 people from 70 countries voted on Laugh Lab. Read the joke itself below.

Famed fictional detective Sherlock Holmes and his gruff assistant Doctor Watson pitch their tent while on a camping expedition, but in the middle of the night Holmes nudges Watson awake and questions him.

IBM Factors 15 to 3 and 5

Thu, 20 Dec 2001 16:38:01 +0000

IBM takes quantum leap – Big Blue researchers say they have used a newly developed computer to perform ‘the most complex quantum computation to date.’ It’s a step forward. [ZDNet] It’s funny that the most complex quantum computation was factoring 15 into 3 and 5, but you’ve got to start somewhere. It’s actually a bit frightening that they’re using factoring as their test case for these computers, because that means that the first large scale quantum computer they make will be able to break all encryption in use today.

One Ring to Rule the Dome

Thu, 20 Dec 2001 16:33:25 +0000

The MIT Great Dome was hacked to include The One Ring. The text running around the ring is Elvish and is the same inscription that’s in the Lord of the Rings.

Musicians Set Up Anti-RIAA Concerts

Thu, 20 Dec 2001 16:20:30 +0000

The Sacramento Bee has an article about musicians raising money to battle the record companies. Some big names are set to perform: Elton John, No Doubt, The Eagles, Sheryl Crow, Dixie Chicks, Stevie Nicks. Dexter Holland of The Offspring said “It’s about time for artists to take control of their work and how it is presented to our fans”. Very good.

Fellowship of the Rings

Thu, 20 Dec 2001 05:10:47 +0000

Well, the big movie is out… You’ve probably read the other reviews (which are all way up there). Now you can read mine.

Will Big Music blame their failure on lack of demand?

Wed, 19 Dec 2001 20:43:58 +0000

Six months from now, when the music industry has signed up their first 100 subscribers to their new online services, will they say “there is no demand for paid online music”? I’ll be keeping my eye out for such a quote. The services that are opening up right now, RealOne, PressPlay and AOL MusicNet, are doomed to fail because their usage schemes are insane. I would be willing to pay $10/month to download 100 MP3s.

Universal to Copy Protect All CDs

Tue, 18 Dec 2001 22:33:01 +0000

By mid-2002, Universal will be copy protecting all of their CDs. These discs supposedly will play fine in standard CD players, but will not work in other devices such as PCs and Sony PS2s. I have zero doubt that people will work around this (though that might be a violation of the DMCA). I rip all of my CDs for personal use at home on our server and in my Nomad Jukebox, and I won’t support record labels that want to remove that capability.

Dan Bricklin on the Segway

Tue, 18 Dec 2001 20:07:57 +0000

More Segway commentary. This one is from Dan Bricklin, who hasn’t had a chance to ride it. I think his points are very valid. No one knows at this point if the Segway will actually alter the way cities are planned, but it does seem likely that the Segway’s release will make people think about new ways to approach transportation.

The Catapult Watch

Tue, 18 Dec 2001 20:04:54 +0000

I just added Blogdex and Daypop to my news feeds. I’m glad I did! If I hadn’t, I would’ve probably never foundThe Catapult Watch. It’s a relatively classy looking steel watch with a catapult for shooting BBs. Gadzooks. All that for just $59.

The Scripting News Awards

Tue, 18 Dec 2001 16:45:55 +0000

Dave Winer has caused a stir with his first Scripting News Awards. Cam sees them as a big ego stroke for Dave, and doesn’t particularly care for the fact that he’s been nominated. My opinion: sure, Dave’s got an ego. But, the awards page says “These are my favorite weblogs.” Dave’s got a lot of readers and wanted to recognize the blogs that are most important to him.

Is spam killing email?

Tue, 18 Dec 2001 05:20:07 +0000

Arts & Farces has a great article about spam including references to all sorts of anti-spam viewpoints and info. I agree that spam is a huge problem facing the Net and email, and I also agree that the junk fax provision of the law should be extended to junk email. $500 per violation would make spammers think twice. By the way, SpamAssassin is the best tool I’ve seen for flagging spam.

The danger of ASPs revealed

Tue, 18 Dec 2001 05:08:16 +0000

PhotoPoint goes dark, draws concern – The online photo site has been unavailable for days, wreaking havoc with thousands of customers who store pictures on the popular site. [CNet] The article talks about people using PhotoPoint to store eBay auction pictures and pictures for unrelated sites.

Looking back at the millenium change

Mon, 17 Dec 2001 23:36:00 +0000

Dave Winer writes. _Two years ago we were contemplating a new millennium. “It’s like a graduation, but on a global scale. There’s never been anything like it. It’s never happened before, and in our lives it will never happen again. If you screw it up you won’t get another chance. So play it safe and assume everyone means well, and let it go at that.” [Scripting News] I didn’t expect that things would go poorly on January 1, 2000.

Publicly Available Database Software

Mon, 17 Dec 2001 03:30:07 +0000

The ACM has a list of free database software. There are a number of interesting looking projects in there.

Back Up and Better Than Ever

Mon, 17 Dec 2001 00:22:18 +0000

I just installed a snapshot of the current drupal cvs and added my patches to it. It’s looking good. Now I can hopefully get my patches installed in drupal so that I don’t need to do that again :). It looks like there’s lots of new stuff going on in this version of drupal, and I’ll finally be back online with Weblogs.com.

Yahoo! bids for HotJobs

Thu, 13 Dec 2001 16:46:31 +0000

Now that I’m with CareerSite, I’m definitely interested in reading about things like a Yahoo! bid for HotJobs. Earlier, the company that owns Monster.com entered into a merger agreement for HotJobs.

Good films

Thu, 13 Dec 2001 16:39:50 +0000

Last night, we saw Amelie. It was a great movie! Excellent writing, characters, direction… There’s a reason that it’s #21 on the IMDB Top 250. Two other movies that I saw over the past few weeks that were excellent: Monsters, Inc. and Harry Potter (both of which are in the IMDB 250 as well).

Is your son a hacker?

Thu, 13 Dec 2001 05:30:18 +0000

Adequacy has a post with some tips on determining if your son is a hacker. This is hilarious reading. I have a hard time determining if it’s serious. (The fact that the original author followed it up in the comments below leads me to believe that it may actually be. I’m not sure whether that makes it funnier or scary.)

Dave Winer Rides the Segway

Wed, 12 Dec 2001 04:53:40 +0000

Dave Winer wrote a nice, first person (non-Segway-marketeer) description of riding a Segway. I’m glad that riding a Segway is as fun as it sounds.

New job, new people, new fun

Wed, 12 Dec 2001 04:52:21 +0000

Today was my second day at CareerSite. As usual, when starting in a new place there are a lot of new faces and names to remember. I’ve never been very good at that, but I’ve been doing mostly okay. CareerSite is still a small company (30 or so people) and has a lot of the fun and challenging aspects you find in a company that size. The potential is fabulous.

New Definition of 24/7

Sun, 09 Dec 2001 18:48:23 +0000

The venerable New York Times is reporting on the new definition of 24 hour days, now appearing at certain large corporations around the country. Now that’s progress! (Reminds me of the SNL sketch of a few months back in which they said that Bush works “24 hours a week, 7 months a year”).

I Support The U.S.

Fri, 07 Dec 2001 07:46:52 +0000

Dave Winer linked to an article about the Reichstag and how Hitler had said that the suspension of rights was not permanent. We know how things went after that.

I support the U.S. and the ideals of America, but that is a much bigger thing than Bush or Ashcroft. The Constitution and Bill of Rights are designed to provide freedom to American individuals and explicitly restrict the capabilities of the government.

Gibson Plans Ethernet Guitars

Thu, 06 Dec 2001 17:47:32 +0000

This slashdot posting has a link and discussion about Gibson’s new MAGIC protocol. Gibson plans to license it royalty-free. Basically, this runs audio across Ethernet, and defines some higher level protocols for identifying devices, etc. I have a lot of cables in my studio, and if that could be replaced by a couple of Ethernet buses, that would be very cool.

MusicNet Goes Live

Wed, 05 Dec 2001 20:11:54 +0000

c|net reports that MusicNet has gone live in the form of RealNetworks’ RealOne Music. At a cost of $9.95 a month, you can download 100 songs. You can’t put those songs on a portable player, however. If you stop subscribing to the service, the songs go away. In my opinion, that is not the future of music… People like their collections of CDs and books, because they can go back to them whenever they want.

Segway Responses

Wed, 05 Dec 2001 20:04:08 +0000

Responses to the announcement of Segway are all over the place. Dave Winer wants one, and says that $3,000 isn’t too much. Slashdot readers, on the other hand, seemed to think $3,000 was too high. Other people have complained about the 60lb weight of the consumer model. My take: the weight prevents people from hauling Segway onto buses and such, which may limit its adoption.

It’s Here!

Mon, 03 Dec 2001 18:04:13 +0000

The big news today is that Dean Kamen has announced the long-discussed IT, aka Ginger. The product is called Segway, and it is a scooter-like device. Time has a five page article about it. What makes the Segway interesting is that you ride it standing up and it uses gyros and software-controlled motors to maintain balance and figure out where you want to go.

Wow. Crazy weeks.

Mon, 03 Dec 2001 18:00:21 +0000

This has been a crazy few weeks. Lots of time spent with family and friends (which is nice). Lots of time spent at work over the past few days… but now, I’ve got a week off. After deciding that I prefer working at a company that is not built around custom work, I’ve left Web Elite. Next week, I start at CareerSite, which has great potential and a great offering already.

Proposed Microsoft Civil Suit Settlement

Wed, 21 Nov 2001 16:22:45 +0000

C|Net reports on a proposed Microsoft civil suit settlement that involves giving a bunch of free software to schools. You’ve gotta be kidding. I think the Red Hat CEO summed it up well:

“While we applaud Microsoft for raising the idea of helping poorer schools as part of the penalty phase of their conviction for monopolistic practices, we do not think that the remedy should be a mechanism by which Microsoft can further extend its monopoly,” Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik said in a statement.

In Depth Comparison of Java and C#

Tue, 20 Nov 2001 16:56:16 +0000

Dare Obasanjo wrote a comparison of C# and Java with many good examples and lots of detail. As a Java programmer, this makes for pretty interesting reading to see some of the design choices made in C#.

Unison File Synchronizer

Tue, 20 Nov 2001 15:52:18 +0000

Unison is like a bidirectional rsync. Just what I need!

Crazy Days

Tue, 20 Nov 2001 15:51:30 +0000

I haven’t had a chance to put much up here the past few days, because I was finishing up the process of negotiating for a new job and my wife and I have been helping some friends. It’ll probably still be busy the week after Thanksgiving, but more writing will come.

Self-Referential Aptitude Test

Tue, 13 Nov 2001 16:22:07 +0000

From the famous FoRK list comes a link to the Self-Referential Aptitude Test. Gadzooks.

Three Pakistanis Killed In Protests

Fri, 09 Nov 2001 16:04:00 +0000

Some sad news this morning: “Pakistani police killed three people Friday when they opened fire on pro-Taliban protesters in a nationwide crackdown on a general strike called by Islamic parties against government support for the war on Afghanistan.” I wonder if people in Pakistan are allowed to protest peacefully? Theoretically, that is one thing we are guaranteed in this country.

Microsoft To Change Image

Thu, 08 Nov 2001 22:54:45 +0000

The Seattle Times has an article with highlights from Microsoft’s shareholders meeting. “Changes were prompted largely because Ballmer and the company were taken aback by the reaction of the industry and even Microsoft employees to the [anti-trust] lawsuit, in which courts found the company to be a manipulative bully with computer makers and competitors.” Taken aback? Once you start competing with contracts instead of products, you’re no longer in the software business…

Hillary Rosen at the P2P Conference

Thu, 08 Nov 2001 16:46:45 +0000

The Recording Industry’s (RIAA) Hillary Rosen spoke at O’Reilly’s P2P Conference in Washington. One interesting comment she made was that “This is an industry of advances, not royalties.” Perhaps that’s part of the problem… I certainly agree that artists need some money up front in order to be able to record, but giving out large advances is part of what makes albums so expensive. (Did they really spend $30 million on Michael Jackson’s new album? Is MJ’s contract with Sony really worth $1 billion? How much of Whitney Houston’s $100 million does she see up front?) I think royalties make a lot of sense and provide incentives for an artist to be creative in promoting their work.

Dave’s Search Bar

Tue, 06 Nov 2001 07:26:37 +0000

Dave Bau has created a fabulous search toolbar. This thing sits on your taskbar and gives you the quickest way possible to do Google searches, phone book lookups, stock quotes. And it’s a calculator tool. All they need to add now is email 🙂

Google Is So L337

Mon, 05 Nov 2001 17:06:46 +0000

My favorite search engine (and yours, probably) has translated their interface into just about every language. This includes hacker, Swedish Chef, and Elmer Fudd. Go Google!

The Work Nickname Generator and Nameboy

Fri, 02 Nov 2001 20:29:22 +0000

In the useless name generator category, there is the Work Nickname Generator, which tells you what your coworkers call you behind your back. In the useful name generator category, there is Nameboy, which will help you find an available name for your new site. Update (2/16/05): it looks like the Work Nickname Generator no longer exists. Nameboy, on the other hand, is still around and as useful as ever.

The Lighter Side Of CPAN

Fri, 02 Nov 2001 16:19:36 +0000

Perl.com brings us a fun article about some of the less useful, but more entertaining CPAN modules that are available.

BlogNet

Fri, 02 Nov 2001 16:17:29 +0000

I’m going to try to hunt down and blog the things that I’ve missed over the past couple of weeks. How else can I remember them, if I don’t put them here?

One bit is that I announced the BlogNet Meta-Project. The purpose of the project is to get blogs talking directly to readers, and to have the readership share the load so that the blogs can truly scale.

Sleepycat’s Profitable Open Source

Fri, 02 Nov 2001 07:52:29 +0000

An interview on Winterspeak shows how Sleepycat software can make money on an open source product. They use the same model as Trolltech: release a programming library under a GPL-like license, and charge businesses that would like to redistribute the code with their proprietary products. It’s a good model for that type of software.

Back online

Fri, 02 Nov 2001 05:37:47 +0000

Yes, I realize that the current look of the site is a bit strange, but after a week and a half without a blog, I was dying to get the site back up. So, here it is… now powered by Drupal, which will allow me to do more cool things and will produce decent RSS. So, thanks for sticking with me and coming back to read.

Another Call For Blogging As KM

Fri, 19 Oct 2001 17:00:52 +0000

Amy Wohl writes about Blogs in Knowledge Management. This article acknowledges that there may be people that are not willing to just share all of their knowledge. Sharing of knowledge is important in a successful organization today, and should be strongly encouraged. I think the more success people have reading weblogs, the more they’ll want to write.

Dave Winer Wins Wired’s Tech Renegade

Fri, 19 Oct 2001 16:46:00 +0000

Congratulations to Dave Winer for winning at Wired’s Rave Awards. He won the top honor of Tech Renegade, an award which went to Shawn Fanning last year. Dave won for his work on and in support of SOAP, which is a much deserved award. As “web services” become more pronounced, we’ll all have Dave to thank for getting it started.

Amusing Obit For The Cue Cat

Wed, 17 Oct 2001 18:40:31 +0000

D Magazine has this article about the failed Cue Cat. Most amusing. I actually installed my Cue Cat (but not the spyware software), and use it to illuminate a rose encased in glass that sits on my desk. It looks quite nice.

Nifty Project Management Tool

Wed, 17 Oct 2001 17:16:06 +0000

I just found dotmarketing’s nifty project management tool. It’s version 0.2, but has a nice polish to it. It’s written in PHP.

Dave’s Desire to Reinstate Napster

Wed, 17 Oct 2001 16:46:53 +0000

Dave Winer says the following about the music industry wanting to delete files on people’s computers: “What they’re doing is pathetic, not evil. The evil is within me, for wanting to strike at them for their sad state. Much better approach. Make a pledge to not buy any music until they reinstate Napster, in all its glory. I’m good at keeping those kinds of pledges. So that’s what I’ll do. I hope you join me. Cut off their air supply. No industry has ever deserved it more.”

Open Letter to Muslims From a Muslim

Wed, 17 Oct 2001 16:35:10 +0000

There are all sorts of opinions floating around. This one, from Muqtedar Khan of Adrian College is interesting because it is by a Muslim. I’m certain that there are many Muslims who disagree with him. I think he’s right that bad things can happen anywhere in the world and people can choose to read meaning into those things and lay blame where they choose.

Two Bits of Music Industry News

Tue, 16 Oct 2001 17:45:07 +0000

I didn’t get around to these yesterday. First, the music biz wants to hack your computer. And, they wanted the USA (Anti-Terrorism) Act to protect this activity. Plus, the recording industry is under investigation for possible collusion and anti-competitive activity regarding the contracts of their MusicNet and Press Play services.

Autonomic Computing

Tue, 16 Oct 2001 07:20:18 +0000

An interesting manifesto about Autonomic Computing comes from Paul Horn, VP of IBM Research. The concept is that we need to start programming computers to handle complexity in systems automatically, similar to how our heartbeat and breathing are managed automatically.

This is definitely still research territory, but it makes sense. One interesting aspect of this manifesto is that the author calls for an end to proprietary systems, saying that customers deserve better. That seems to be the exact opposite of what Microsoft tends to do in practice… we’ll see if IBM continues to support open systems in practice.

Hijackers Did Not Know They Were Going To Die

Mon, 15 Oct 2001 16:58:50 +0000

The FBI has concluded that 11 of the hijackers did not know they were going to their deaths. Granted, there is no way to know this for sure, because the first hand witnesses are dead. But, the information at hand does seem to point to the terrorists following a “need to know” policy of information dissemination.

Anthrax Information

Mon, 15 Oct 2001 16:52:38 +0000

Tim Paustian at the University of Wisconsin has an informational page about Anthrax. This page dispels many of the myths that are floating about concerning the disease.

The LA Times on Blogging

Mon, 15 Oct 2001 16:36:32 +0000

The LA Times has an article about the popularity of blogging (more than 250,000 served!)

Make A Shorter Link

Mon, 15 Oct 2001 16:23:10 +0000

Here’s a neato, small app: Make A Shorter Link. So many resources out there have such long URLs. This app can take one of those long URLs and make a nice, small one out of it.

Anti-Terrorism Bill Targets Online Gambling

Fri, 12 Oct 2001 22:49:18 +0000

It’s common practice in Congress to attach potentially unpopular legislation to a “guaranteed to pass” bill. This isn’t a case of that… According to this Wired article, the FBI has linked online gambling with fund raising for the terrorists. Therefore, a bill in the House would give credit card companies the burden of watching out for online gamblers.

Blogs for Knowledge Management

Fri, 12 Oct 2001 20:05:15 +0000

There is an interesting look at blogs as a way to transfer knowledge within companies. The discussion of tacit knowledge seems true to me. I stumbled down that path via the K-Log mailing list. The notion of a K-Log is the idea of using a weblog for knowledge management.

Microsoft Invests in Groove

Wed, 10 Oct 2001 16:37:34 +0000

Microsoft has invested in Groove. This means that Groove will only become a cross-platform tool if it suits Microsoft’s wishes and if .NET gets ported elsewhere.

RIAA Did Not Forget Their Place

Wed, 10 Oct 2001 16:26:29 +0000

The Register has retracted Monday’s story about the RIAA calling for tougher laws. Everything in the original article, including the quotes, was a hoax. The attitudes portrayed in that message seemed close enough to reality that many people (including myself) were taken in. The quotes said the things that many of us believe that the RIAA members feel.

RIAA Forgets Their Place

Mon, 08 Oct 2001 16:34:12 +0000

The Register brings us an article about the RIAA’s desire for tougher laws. It’s written in The Register’s typical, biased style… but the quotes in the article speak for themselves. We’ll leave the last, chilling word to Sony Music Entertainment’s Steve Heckler: “Once consumers can no longer get free music, they will have to buy the music in the formats we choose to put out.” My comment to Steve Heckler: consumers don’t have to buy anything.

The Disaster Schmuck

Fri, 05 Oct 2001 16:06:31 +0000

RIAA Sues MusicCity, KaZaA, Grokster

Thu, 04 Oct 2001 16:42:55 +0000

Not surprisingly, the RIAA has sued the three companies using the FastTrack p2p network. Hopefully, the FastTrack protocol is open enough that people will be able to make new bootstrap servers. (FastTrack is a self-organizing network, but it does need a bootstrap node.)

Forking the Web

Thu, 04 Oct 2001 16:27:53 +0000

Wireless Neighborhood Network

Wed, 03 Oct 2001 07:12:56 +0000

Byte has a very interesting article by Moshe Bar who set up a wireless free Internet service in his area. It’s a good read about the technology and issues. At the beginning of the article, he talks about how the Open Source business model is failing. I have to agree with what he says, but the fact that the open source “business model” is failing does not mean that open source is failing.

Economics and the Independent Developers

Mon, 01 Oct 2001 16:31:16 +0000

Dave Winer writes that “The economics of software favor small independent developers, patents change that.” While I’m certainly against software patents (and very, very opposed to patents being allowed in W3C standards), I’m not sure that I agree with the economics favoring small developers.

SiteMesh Software to Combine Apps

Wed, 26 Sep 2001 20:45:57 +0000

I had found this Java app earlier, but I hadn’t linked to it. Then I couldn’t remember what it was called… It’s SiteMesh from Open Symphony. It’s an open source app designed to integrate content from multiple sources all with common look and feel and navigation.

Global Electronic Fish

Tue, 25 Sep 2001 20:49:52 +0000

DALiWorld offers Java-based electronic fish that can swim from computer to computer.

30 Still Feels Young

Tue, 25 Sep 2001 16:27:25 +0000

Today, I’m 30 years old. And you know what? I still feel young! My hope is that when I’m 60 (God willing), I’ll still feel like this on the inside, even if the outside is a bit less hardy.

Why Liberty Suffers in Wartime

Tue, 25 Sep 2001 16:24:55 +0000

Wired takes a look at the suffering of liberty during wartime. Even if it has been done in the past, it is still scary. This puts a lot of faith in the people of the government to repeal these laws once wartime is over.

Monty Python and the Holy Lego

Mon, 24 Sep 2001 01:25:58 +0000

And now for something completely different… a Lego version of the Camelot scene from Holy Grail. Gadzooks.

Search for Intelligent Life on the Internet

Sun, 23 Sep 2001 21:31:10 +0000

The NY Times is talking about hoaxes and semitruths spreading on the Net in the wake of the disaster.

Tamim Ansary on Afghanistan

Sun, 23 Sep 2001 21:14:29 +0000

Dave Winer posted thoughts on the coming war from a writer from Afghanistan. This is important stuff to consider, and Ansary’s comments are in line with what others have said about the state of Afghanistan today. Let’s hope that “calmer heads prevail” at the most important times.

100 Questions and Answers About Arab-Americans

Tue, 18 Sep 2001 17:09:28 +0000

The Detroit Free Press offers a Journalist’s Guide to Arab-Americans. This type of document seems like a good way to get even-handed reporting. It offers to-the-point information about Arab Americans to help people recognize who they are (and they’re not all the same!).

China Joins WTO

Tue, 18 Sep 2001 16:34:00 +0000

China has added 1.2 billion people to the World Trade Organization. This should significantly open markets between China and the other WTO members.

Songs Become Tributes

Tue, 18 Sep 2001 16:24:53 +0000

Falwell Apologizes

Sun, 16 Sep 2001 16:21:06 +0000

Jerry Falwell apologized for implying that gays and lesbians were the cause of Tuesday’s attack. He said that blame lies solely with the terrorists. But, he also said that perhaps, as indicated in the Bible, God’s protection has been lifted from America because of the “secularization”. In the same article, Robertson is quoted as saying that the Supreme Court took away the Bible from school children.

Anti-Hatred Poster

Sun, 16 Sep 2001 16:01:57 +0000

This poster is a good way to send the message around… we can’t afford to hate our friends.

A Little Less Writing For Now

Sat, 15 Sep 2001 02:06:03 +0000

For the time being, I’ve got a bunch of other projects going. Typically, I do a bunch of writing on the bus to and from work. For now, I’ll probably be doing more reading on the bus. I’ll continue to post links, thoughts and (with a little less regularity) Features.

Falwell Nonsense

Sat, 15 Sep 2001 02:03:41 +0000

The Washington Post has an article about Jerry Falwell’s comments concerning Tuesday. Falwell said that the US got what it deserved because of liberals, gays, abortionists, etc. He also said, “When a nation deserts God and expels God from the culture … the result is not good.” Wrong. America hasn’t deserted God. I know plenty of Americans that are big fans of God (and of being good, kind human beings).

21st Century War

Thu, 13 Sep 2001 16:41:01 +0000

Jon Carrol Welcome to the 21st Century: “There will be pressure to suspend our freedoms, to allow the government to invade our privacy and control our speech as part of the glossy new war. If terrorists force America to give up its freedoms, then they will have won.” Good article. He also talks about how in this war, we don’t know who we’re fighting.

Maintaining Balance

Thu, 13 Sep 2001 16:13:00 +0000

There is an article about American Muslims going on the defensive. I do hope that people maintain perspective through this. Someone on CNN made the point that “there are 1 billion Muslims in the world, and we’re not at war with them”. There is a small radical faction that we need to be concerned about, and we should think no differently of our Muslim and Arab friends today than we did at the beginning of the week.

John Perry Barlow Message

Wed, 12 Sep 2001 16:23:09 +0000

In the link to Dave’s site below, you’ll see a quote from a message posted by John Perry Barlow likening the events of ⁹⁄₁₁ to the Nazi takeover of the German government. “Within a few hours, we will see beginning the most vigorous efforts to end what remains of freedom in America. Those of who are willing to sacrifice a little – largely illusory – safety in order to maintain our faith in the original ideals of America will have to fight for those ideals just as vigorously.”

The View of Terror from the Next Day

Wed, 12 Sep 2001 16:18:58 +0000

Yesterday’s terrorist attacks were a huge atrocity. My heartfelt condolences to everyone who lost a loved one, and my wishes for a speedy recovery to everyone who was injured. I pray that US retaliation is done with proper forethought to ensure that the correct perpetrators are identified.

Dave Winer provided good coverage of the events, with a variety of views.

Why the SSSCA must be stopped

Tue, 11 Sep 2001 16:19:04 +0000

Do you want to pay more and get less?

ObDisclaimer: I have not read the text of the SSSCA and am going on the basis of the articles posted about it.

The SSSCA, in a nutshell, aims to ensure that copy protection devices are built-in to all sorts of products that can work with digital media. These devices need to be certified by the Department of Commerce, and any attempts to remove or disable them would be a violation of the law.

Stop This Bill!

Mon, 10 Sep 2001 17:01:34 +0000

Wired has an article about the Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA). This sounds like an absolutely atrocious bill. Jessica Litman from Wayne State University said, “Forgetting all the reasons why this is bad copyright policy and bad information policy, it’s terrible science policy.” Amen.

Load – a free web app load tester

Mon, 10 Sep 2001 16:22:55 +0000

A quick look at the features of Load makes it look like a promising test app. It’s designed for testing web apps and SOAP services.

Saving Money While Protecting the Environment

Mon, 10 Sep 2001 05:01:00 +0000

This NY Times article about companies saving money while protecting the environment is great to see. Generally, environmentally friendly policies are thought of as more expensive. (Nevermind the fact that we all need to live on this planet and people should be reasonable about these things.) But, it’s great to see that companies can realize monetary and karmic benefits at the same time.

Learn Java through Robocode!

Mon, 10 Sep 2001 04:56:46 +0000

I already know Java, but Robocode sounds like fun. Build battle tanks that operate through Java code. Seems like many kinds of learning can be improved via games.

O’Reilly Mega-Blog

Sat, 08 Sep 2001 18:03:54 +0000

O’Reilly has combined their blogs into one weblog. Looks like another good source of brainfood.

Timely article about teaching practical law

Sat, 08 Sep 2001 03:13:39 +0000

c|net has an article today about how many workers who have lost their jobs recently are running into trouble with non-compete agreements that they have signed. Particularly when jobs were plentiful, they may have thought twice about signing such an agreement had they really thought about the ramifications.

The Software Commons Revisited

Fri, 07 Sep 2001 16:39:33 +0000

It turns out that The Software Commons is more compelling than I had first thought.

The Software Commons Revisited

When I wrote The Software Commons article, I was focusing on Open Source on the desktop computers in offices. However, I had been looking at it as a direct replacement for Microsoft Windows and Office. Some recent articles have made me realize that the financial advantages of using Linux are even larger than I had been thinking.

Teaching Practical Law In High School

Fri, 07 Sep 2001 16:34:39 +0000

The musicians arguing about their record contracts in California could probably have used a little bit of practical law in school.

California’s state government is holding hearings regarding multi-year contracts of musicians. The musicians (Courtney Love, Don Henley and Leann Rimes) argued that their contracts are impossible to fulfill and trap them for much of their careers. The music industry is arguing that 90% of their artists fail, so they rely on the ones that become stars to make up for all of the failures. That seems like a pretty messy business model to me, but I think that is the truth. That is also why the artists always feel like they’re getting screwed. Love’s famous Salon article talks about how little successful musicians get, and that’s largely because of how much record companies spend on marketing and subsidizing the failures.

DOJ Halts Attempt To Break Microsoft Up

Thu, 06 Sep 2001 20:17:00 +0000

Wired news, among others, reports that the DOJ is no longer seeking the breakup of Microsoft. Bush undoubtedly had a hand in this. They talk about imposing severe regulations on MS, but it seems like we’ve been down that road before. This step certainly won’t make MS fear the government any more than they had before (which is to say “very little”).

Destined To Become Quaint

Thu, 06 Sep 2001 04:56:03 +0000

This quote, “Given the historic price-performance trajectories for storage, in a few years at least some high-end appliances will house hundreds, if not thousands, of books simultaneously, and certainly laptops with software book readers will house thousands or tens of thousands of books at once.”, from The Future of the Book article mentioned yesterday, is destined to become quaint.

SVG and SMIL Become Recommended by W3C

Thu, 06 Sep 2001 04:05:10 +0000

c|net reports that SVG and SMIL, XML-based standards for vector graphics and multimedia synchronization, have become recommended standards. Vector graphics and SMIL’s multimedia features will probably do some good things, but since they are XML based they are likely to be quite a bit more verbose than Flash files.

Good Vibe-rations

Wed, 05 Sep 2001 16:31:45 +0000

It’s great to be rational, but sometimes we fill in the gaps. The notion of “vibes” is one gap that we often fill in.

Good vibe-rations

People who know me know that I am generally quite a rational person. I really enjoyed Carl Sagan’s Demon Haunted World, a book-length essay on skeptical thought. Demon Haunted World encourages people to not accept something if the proof isn’t there (and certainly not if the facts work against it!). To my mind, there are many areas in which humans have very little solid knowledge and may not gain any significant knowledge during our lifetimes: God, life after death, pyschic powers. I think the latter is one place where we have the most chance of gaining new knowledge during our lifetimes. In the absence of facts, and with little hope of proving things soon, people fill in the knowledge gap with “beliefs”.

Ximian’s Volunteer Army

Wed, 05 Sep 2001 07:39:25 +0000

Ximian’s Volunteer ‘Army’ Fights Microsoft on Open Source Code: During the half-hour conference, which took place earlier this year, he [de Icaza] ran though this math with Fox: At a retail price of $209 for Windows and $440 for Office, it could cost the country as much as $3.25 billion just for license fees. “Our country needs that money for many other things,” de Icaza said he told Fox. He said Fox seemed to be surprised by the cost analysis, but he made no promises. I’d imagine Microsoft would give a discount for 58 million licenses, but you can bet those licenses would probably still cost Mexico $1 billion. De Icaza’s target of relatively poor, developing nations as a new stronghold for Open Source is a good plan. The more people that use it and improve it, the better it gets… and then the wealthier nations and businesses won’t be able to afford to ignore it.

What did plants ever do to you?

Wed, 05 Sep 2001 04:12:05 +0000

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) announced that they have cancelled a shark-themed ad campaign in favor of vegetarianism. I guess the idea is to scare people into vegetarianism. People definitely share a huge amount of empathy with other people, and that is good for our societies and our way of life. Beyond empathy with other people, many people seem to value animal life above plant life…

Battle to Define the Book in the Digital World

Wed, 05 Sep 2001 03:54:52 +0000

First Monday has an article about the book of the digial age. It’s a fairly long article that discusses the book as intellectual property. It looks quite interesting, and I hope to get to it tomorrow.

HP To Buy Compaq

Tue, 04 Sep 2001 16:58:13 +0000

In a $25 billion deal, HP is buying Compaq. The new company, with about $87 billion a year in revenue, will be about the size of IBM and will retake the lead in PC sales. Dell had recently overtaken Compaq as the #1 PC maker.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire Wins the Hugo

Tue, 04 Sep 2001 16:18:12 +0000

Congrats to JK Rowling on winning the Hugo award for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. I read the four Harry Potter books that are out last year, and I really enjoyed them. Very entertaining reading, and Goblet of Fire (the 4th book) was easily my favorite.

Follow Up To The Best Buy Article

Sun, 02 Sep 2001 21:35:11 +0000

Two weeks ago, I wrote about how it took me 40 minutes to pick up an order from Best Buy. I just wanted to post a follow-up saying that the only response I received to my message to customer service was the canned “we’re sorry for the inconvenience and have forwarded your message on to the appropriate people”. I guess that’s ok with me if they do, in fact, forward the message on and something happens.

Revised Look

Sun, 02 Sep 2001 07:16:36 +0000

I’ve updated the look here a bit to be more like how I want to use the site… This isn’t slashdot, so I didn’t really want it to work like slashdot. You’ll see that articles are now grouped by date, and I’ve moved the Features and Brainfood links to the left.

Engineer’s Perspective on VCs

Sat, 01 Sep 2001 22:32:15 +0000

IEEE Spectrum has the engineer’s perspective on VCs. Clearly, not all VCs are as described here. However, in anything you do, it’s good to be aware of what motivates the people you’re dealing with. VCs are compensated (and motivated) to have good returns for their venture funds. Gee whiz technology doesn’t mean much to them, unless it will lead to financial rewards for the fund.

The Shakespeare Programming Language

Sat, 01 Sep 2001 22:14:21 +0000

The Shakespeare Programming Language is entirely too funny. It does make for much more creative programming, though.

Modern Day Patronage

Fri, 31 Aug 2001 15:50:26 +0000

I’ve seen other articles talk about patronage, and maybe it’s time for some more experiments.

Before the Internet, MP3, ebooks and DivX ;-), intellectual property had a natural scarcity: it was distributed in some physical form. As long as the publisher made sure that people weren’t distributing counterfeit copies of their goods, there wasn’t much to worry about. Today, that physical protection is quickly disappearing. Napster provided a new means for people to get and distribute music. Movies are not far behind. And, as soon as book readers start to have some features that are more appealing than a traditional book, ebooks will catch on and you’ll start seeing books circulating more on line.

Allchin on Windows XP

Thu, 30 Aug 2001 16:41:00 +0000

CNET has an interview with Jim Allchin, Microsoft’s VP in charge of Windows XP. To some extent, Allchin’s comments make sense. It’s Microsoft’s job to try to build products with features that people will want. However, he skirted the issue of Microsoft’s monopoly position. I don’t think there’s any real question that Microsoft can destroy competition through Windows, and I don’t trust that kind of control in their hands.

Gender Balance In High Tech

Thu, 30 Aug 2001 16:17:51 +0000

Dave Winer’s thread about gender in high tech continues with this DaveNet piece. Thought provoking reading (as is often the case with Dave). He comments that men are the artists and women are the infrastructure… which could be true, because that historically seems to have been the case. But, now that women are really being given freedom to pursue traditionally male interests, perhaps we’ll see more women on the “artist” side of things.

The Ultimate Cubicle

Wed, 29 Aug 2001 17:55:24 +0000

CNN reports on the ultimate cubicle, designed by Scott Adams and IDEO. Astroturf or persian rug tiles, snap on hammock, boss monitor, happy flower and wastebasket… this is the ultimate!

Governments Choosing Open Source

Wed, 29 Aug 2001 17:47:48 +0000

ZDNet reports that governments are increasingly choosing open source software. This is certainly one way for the Software Commons to pick up. The more organizations that start choosing open source for their baseline software, the more momentum that builds for other organizations to make the switch.

The CLR Changes Languages Subtly

Wed, 29 Aug 2001 16:16:36 +0000

Adam Vandenberg talks about how the Common Language Runtime changes languages. This is a good point. One of the things I like about Jython is that it is Python, runtime libraries and all.

Craig Burton on VA Linux and Hybrid Models

Tue, 28 Aug 2001 17:43:57 +0000

Craig Burton comments on VA Linux’s move to sell software. I think he’s on the mark here. (As if you hadn’t guessed from reading The Software Commons). I’ve never been a believer in Free Software. I’ve generally thought of the Open Source folks as being a bit more pragmatic.

Greenspun on .NET

Tue, 28 Aug 2001 17:33:24 +0000

Philip Greenspun responded to a request for information about what technology to learn. His response was Microsoft .NET. After a bit of push back from Dave Winer, he qualified that he is a very big fan of the unification of languages allowed by .NET. I disagreed with his assessment of Java, however. My response follows…

My Microsoft Remedy

Tue, 28 Aug 2001 16:30:49 +0000

Microsoft has been found guilty, even in the Court of Appeals, of abusing its Windows monopoly. I say, “let the punishment fit the crime.”

We’ve seen all sorts of remedies proposed for the Microsoft case: splitting up Microsoft into multiple, equal companies, splitting Internet Explorer into a separate company, separating Windows from Office (which was Judge Jackson’s choice). Microsoft is guilty of using their monopoly power in Windows to establish otherwise separate products. They have used their position to squeeze other competitors out of business.

Desktop Networks on the Cheap

Mon, 27 Aug 2001 00:34:59 +0000

An excellent first part of an article at Linuxworld about giving desktop computer users at the office what they need at a low cost. I mean a really low cost. There are some real merits to what’s presented in this article, I’m just not sure how many people are ready to move that far away from Windows.

High-Tech Bus Upgrades

Sat, 25 Aug 2001 16:42:34 +0000

Business 2.0 has an article about improvements being made to bus systems to make them more efficient and appealing to commuters. I ride the bus in to work every day, and I love it! Rather than dead time stuck in a car and then figuring out where to park (and coughing up the money for parking!), I just ride the bus. It’s comfortable, I can do what I want, it’s on time and the schedule is not bad.

Brazil Breaks Patent on AIDS Drug

Thu, 23 Aug 2001 23:52:43 +0000

In a sign that governments are indeed more powerful than corporations, Brazil is going to break a patent on an HIV drug. Brazil’s health ministry gives free HIV treatment and currently spends 28 percent of its total budget on this one drug. Though the article didn’t present the details, it looks like Brazil is going to pay something to the drug maker (under a compulsory license).

Fingered By The Movie Cops

Thu, 23 Aug 2001 23:47:44 +0000

Salon has an article about a couple who lost their Internet access because of the DMCA. The article talks about how they were judged as guilty before they had a chance to defend themselves… but, of course, the whole “innocent until proven guilty” bit is criminal law. A company can choose to terminate service for any reason…

MP3.com Sued For “Viral” Copyright Infringement

Thu, 23 Aug 2001 23:35:57 +0000

It appears that some songwriters’ groups have lost their collective minds and sued MP3.com viral infringement. They claim that people downloaded music from MP3.com’s locker service and then put it on Napster where other people downloaded it illegal. The only thing that makes this different from suing Musicland or Tower Records is that the songwriters didn’t give MP3.com permmission to put the songs online.

XML-RPC Over Jabber

Thu, 23 Aug 2001 16:23:36 +0000

Dave Winer, Jeremie and others at Jabbercon worked out Jabber-RPC, which is basically XML-RPC over Jabber. This is useful, because XML-RPC previously didn’t have a way to get around NAT, and Jabber didn’t previously have a way to contact services via XML-RPC. Interoperability rules!

Microsoft : FSF :: Republicans : Democrats

Mon, 20 Aug 2001 16:51:18 +0000

The parallel I’m drawing is less about the participants and more about the people caught in the center. Thank goodness the software business is not a two party system.

Microsoft : FSF :: Republicans : Democrats

The parallel I’m drawing is less about the participants and more about the people caught in the center. Thank goodness the software business is not a two party system.

The traditional view of Republicans is that they are business-oriented, conservative when it comes to individual liberties, are in favor of a strong defense infrastructure, but want to keep taxes low. The traditional view of Democrats is that they are more oriented towards people, wanting more social programs and liberal individual liberties, and that they are willing to pay a little more in taxes in order to see their social programs enacted. I’m sure there will be people out there who may disagree with these characterizations, but bear with me because that’s not the main point.

40 Minutes To Pick Up An Order at Best Buy

Mon, 20 Aug 2001 01:38:38 +0000

I just spent 40 minutes at Best Buy to pick up a CD that I had already paid for via bestbuy.com. I thought I was getting a good deal, until all of that time evaportated. It’s an infringement of my flerbage!

I just sent the following to Best Buy’s customer service:

Why does it take 40 minutes to pick up an online order?

I received a card in the mail with a digital coupon and decided to try the web site. I ordered a CD. When I went to pick it up (from the Ann Arbor, MI store), the person at the front told me to go to Media to pick up my order. I asked someone in Media, and he asked someone else who said I should go to customer service.

ESR On The Debate Between O’Reilly and FSF

Sat, 18 Aug 2001 20:51:36 +0000

Apparently, Tim O’Reilly and two notables from the FSF (Kuhn and Stallman) have been debating the issue of “software freedom”. The FSF has the stated belief that software freedom means that they have a right to have the source code to software and to give copies of that software to people they wish. O’Reilly believes that a software developer is free to release software under whatever license makes sense for them.

Copyright Craziness

Sat, 18 Aug 2001 04:28:37 +0000

The Washington Post had an editorial regarding Eric Eldred’s case against copyright term length extensions. Unfortunately, the Court of Appeals ruled that Congress has the power to extend copyrights, though the Court did acknowledge that Congress cannot make copyrights permanent.

Mob Software

Thu, 16 Aug 2001 05:20:31 +0000

Slashdot mentioned this rather long, interesting piece about Mob Software. This article was written by Dick Gabriel, who is apparently a well-known programmer going way back. This article was originally from the OOSPLA 2000 conference, and the discussion mentioned another article

(Agent-Oriented Software Engineering) that looks interesting.

Will Open Source Lose the Battle for the Web?

Wed, 15 Aug 2001 17:22:29 +0000

An excellent article at Linux Today talks about Open Source losing to Microsoft.NET. He talks about how Apache hasn’t really added anything revolutionary and isn’t heading in the direction of web services. Mono and DotGNU are basically just chasing Microsoft’s taillights. He said that J2EE is what we (as in Open Source folks) should embrace.

August Incubator

Wed, 15 Aug 2001 17:18:51 +0000

This is where I work on this month’s features.

Jxta Tutorial at IBM

Tue, 14 Aug 2001 20:31:30 +0000

IBM Developerworks has a Jxta Tutorial. I’ve only just started reading it, and it’s interesting to see that Jxta is not supposed to be dependent on Java…

The Cluetrain Manifesto Is Now Online

Mon, 13 Aug 2001 16:31:35 +0000

The full text of the Cluetrain Manifesto is online now. I’ve been too lazy to check it out before, but I’m sure I will now.

First Rule of Usability? Don’t Listen To Users

Mon, 13 Aug 2001 16:24:55 +0000

Jakob Nielsen says: “To discover which designs work best, watch users as they attempt to perform tasks with the user interface. This method is so simple that many people overlook it, assuming that there must be something more to usability testing.” Another interesting article from Jakob. Of course, when you’re doing custom design and software it can sometimes be difficult to not listen to your users, since they’re paying for the work.

ATMs and the Blue Screen of Death

Sun, 12 Aug 2001 18:36:20 +0000

The Industry Standard reports that ATMs may get smarter. “Smarter” is defined in this article as using fancy new software that runs under NT instead of the aging OS/2. Is it me, or does NT seem to be the wrong choice for a device like an ATM? It’s quite beefy and was not known for its stability. Windows 2000 is much better in terms of stability, but I still think Linux is a better choice for a special purpose device like an ATM.

Vote with your dollars…

Sun, 12 Aug 2001 00:52:21 +0000

and buy with your conscience. Quit complaining about the actions of megacorpations, because it’s really easy to do something about it.

(note: this article was originally written in June. I had basically finished it with the second draft in July, but I never got around to fixing up the links. So, now it’s all set!)

Many Americans feel powerless next to the enormity of the government. It’s important to remember that the government is simply a bunch of people that we chose to represent our interests when making policy. Recent history has shown us how much difference an individual can make: a Senator from a small state single handedly changed the balance of power in the Senate. The Presidential election was as close to a tie as it can get, making it the kind of election in which the votes of each person add up to a significant difference.

Super Volcanoes

Wed, 08 Aug 2001 16:36:24 +0000

Super Volcanoes: Satellites Eye Deadly Hot Spots: _“The eruption of pent-up energy will cover half the United States in ash, in some places up to 3 feet (1 meter) deep. Earth will be plunged into a perpetual winter that would last years. Some plant and animal species will disappear forever.

Even humans could be pushed to the edge of extinction.

Patent Badness – McAfee and Those Redmond Guys

Tue, 07 Aug 2001 07:21:00 +0000

Two articles on Slashdot talk about more patent foulness. The Ghost of Patents Present: McAfee patents the ASP business model, and the Ghost of Patents Future: Microsoft is rumored to have patents for key parts of .NET that could affect Mono and SAMBA.

Web Elite Announces Phabric To Developers

Tue, 07 Aug 2001 07:11:38 +0000

Today, I sent out an announcement to zope-dev and jython-dev regarding Web Elite’s phabric open source project. We’re using Jython to get Zope running on Java. We’ve been working on it for a little while now, but some recent discussions on jython-dev prompted us to announce the project before it’s done.

Online Music Bill Takes Aim At Big Labels

Fri, 03 Aug 2001 20:31:52 +0000

The Standard: Online Music Bill Takes Aim at Big Labels: “Record companies that license songs to other online music vendors would have to make the same music tracks available to all competing services under a bill proposed in Congress Friday by Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va., and Rep. Chris Cannon, R-Utah.” Yes, it won’t pass. But, it’s a great idea.

Structural Approach to IP Issues

Fri, 03 Aug 2001 20:18:43 +0000

Ars Technica: Intellectual Property and the Good Society – Page 1 – (⁸⁄₂₀₀₁): “These people (myself included) on the one hand acknowledge the many benefits that IP law has yielded in the modern economy, but on the other hand worry about the ever-encroaching technological and legal threats to our personal freedoms by large, moneyed corporations wielding bands of lawyers.” A nicely written and researched article about intellectual property “rights” and the dangers that current proposed treaties and legislation pose.

Dave Winer On Microsoft Patents

Fri, 03 Aug 2001 16:50:24 +0000

Scripting News: “Microsoft files and gets lots of patents. Last week for the first time they said they will use patents to limit competition. That means if you produce software that uses some technique that Microsoft has patented, they’ll either make you take the feature out or send you a bill.” Dave likens software to speech and feels that such moves by Microsoft limit his First Amendment rights. Read on for my comments.

Teoma to Rival Google?

Wed, 01 Aug 2001 17:01:43 +0000

Teoma is a new search engine that uses technology similar to Google’s to provide relevant searches. Additionally, it combines human-chosen (directory-like) search results.

Curl Tries To Bridge The Gap Between HTML and Java

Wed, 01 Aug 2001 16:24:35 +0000

The Standard: Get With The Program: _“Curl addresses a core problem of the Net: It’s a programming muddle. Basic Web pages are coded in HTML. Interactivity on a Web page – such as forms that visitors fill in or a shopping cart – demands a quantum leap in programming ability, to JavaScript or the equivalent. To create richer content, such as animation, requires Flash or a truly complex language such as Java or C .

TopText, SmartTags Evil Younger Brother

Wed, 01 Aug 2001 07:30:00 +0000

SmartTags are already indirectly infiltrating PCs, and not because of Microsoft. People who installed KaZaA on their systems will start seeing yellow links on pages… Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters: “this is because a cunning piece of software called TopText was automatically installed on your computer along with KaZaA.” Ack. If those links are all essentially ads, this does no good for the consumer and is worse than SmartTags.

Why I Agree With Tasini

Tue, 31 Jul 2001 17:08:26 +0000

In New York Times v. Tasini, freelance writer Jonathan Tasini sued because the NY Times published an article of his online without his permission. I agree with the Supreme Court and with Anupam Chander’s article on the issue, in which Chander states that the case may have an impact for Napster.

In all of the talk about Napster, it has seemed like musicians are pretty powerless in the music industry. That is true, because musicians sign away their copyrights when they sign up with a major label. However, writers are a different story. They often retain their copyrights and just give a license to a publisher for a specific use.

Project Censored

Tue, 31 Jul 2001 07:23:00 +0000

Noam Chomsky writes ProjectCensored.org: “They fall in a domain in which corporate-state interests are rather different from those of the public. That such stories would tend to be downplayed, reshaped, and obscured â014″censored,” in the terminology of the projectâ014is only to be expected on the basis of even the most rudimentary inspection of the institutional structure of the media and their place in the broader society.” Project Censored looks like a very valuable resource for people who are willing to consider issues that the mass media may not be willing to publicize.

Analysis of Music City Morpheus (FastTrack) P2P Technology

Tue, 31 Jul 2001 04:54:29 +0000

Morpheus is a decentralized Napster clone that works better than Napster itself. It is based on the FastTrack P2P engine. Gnutella, the other major fully distributed network, is quite slow because every node acts as a server and ends up proxying many requests. FastTrack uses SuperNodes to handle the “central server” function. Also very cool is that FastTrack will download from multiple peers simultaneously for added speed.

What Ximian is Trying To Accomplish With Mono

Mon, 30 Jul 2001 07:46:20 +0000

Joe Barr writes: What Ximian’s trying to accomplish with Mono, July 27, 2001: “Is Mono a good idea or a disaster? I think it is a worthwhile endeavor, that choice is good, and that we need a free alternative to .NET.” I agree with this. There are some powerful ideas in .NET, and having an open source version is quite important.

Jail Time in the Digital Age (Copyright Law Gone Bad)

Mon, 30 Jul 2001 07:40:14 +0000

Lawrence Lessig, one of the most active and visible people working to protect American citizen’s rights to content wrote this article: Jail Time in the Digital Age: “Thus when the D.M.C.A. protects technology that in turn protects copyrighted material, it often protects much more broadly than copyright law does. It makes criminal what copyright law would forgive.” The article makes a very valid point about how the DMCA gives content makers more rights than they should be allowed.

Reptile Peer-to-Peer XML Syndication System

Sun, 29 Jul 2001 05:16:04 +0000

Reptile is a new project from openprivacy that allows you to read a bunch of syndicated content and publish your own syndicated links. Looks interesting at first blush, but I need to look a bit more to see if there’s more to it than a headline viewer.

IBM Technical FAQ for Linux

Sun, 29 Jul 2001 05:08:58 +0000

IBM has a 50 page document that is a FAQ designed for new Linux users. This could be a big assistance for someone moving from Windows.

List of Known Spyware (Privacy-Challenged Software)

Sat, 28 Jul 2001 01:08:29 +0000

Someone has put together the excellent List of known Spyware. This is software that potentially sends information back to its makers. A good thing to be aware of…

Microsoft’s Mundie Speaks At Open Source Con

Thu, 26 Jul 2001 23:55:31 +0000

SiliconValley.com – Dan Gillmor’s eJournal: “We’re not against the GPL, Mundie said today. All Microsoft wants is for people to understand the issues, and then make informed choices.” Gillmor’s coverage of this is pretty interesting. Maybe the open source advocates will learn a thing or two about taking a reasonable, balanced approach to debate.

Bonds for Open Source Software

Wed, 25 Jul 2001 23:30:00 +0000

Slashdot had a mention of a paper describing a system for bonds for open source software. This seems like a viable way to get open source software made. (Not necessarily the only way, mind you.) I’m at a commercial company that is currently working on a to-be-announced open source project… and I fully believe that this undertaking will be a successful one for us.

Chilling Effects Can Help With Your Cease And Desist

Tue, 24 Jul 2001 03:12:23 +0000

Chilling Effects, sponsored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and The Berkman Center, is a clearinghouse for Cease and Desist letters. This is a great idea! For net folk who receive a C&D, they can help you determine if the C&D has any real legal basis.

Kyoto Treaty on Greenhouse Gases Passes, Without US

Mon, 23 Jul 2001 16:31:00 +0000

CNN.com – Deal reached at climate talks – July 23, 2001: “The 1997 treaty aims to reduce global carbon dioxide emissions by 5.2 percent of 1990 levels by 2012.” It’s sad that the US couldn’t come to agreement on this. We probably emit less CO2 per car than a developing nation would, but I’m sure the US emits tons of greenhouse gases.

Talking Moose’s Marketing Manifesto

Mon, 23 Jul 2001 16:17:31 +0000

Talking Moose : MoosePoop: Moose’s Marketing Manifesto: “I will only evangelize a product that I both believe in and understand.” The world would be a better place if everyone followed these rules…

Marketingspeak Avoidance

Sun, 22 Jul 2001 18:11:00 +0000

Brent Ashley talks about revising his website to more accurately portray what he does. Something I wonder: Does marketingspeak work on anyone? If not, why do people still do it? I have a real respect for salespeople and their relationship building skills (at least those of successful, professional salespeople). I’m just not sure how marketing fluff fits in.

Do Writers Believe In Shorter Copyright Terms?

Sun, 22 Jul 2001 17:20:11 +0000

I’ve seen quite a bit of discussion about how copyright terms are just too long. The original copyright term length was 14 years. Currently, the term length is up to the author’s life plus 90 years! Change begins with the actions of a few, and writers are possibly in the best position to do something about it.

The idea with the original copyright law is that creators of intellectual works should be given exclusive rights “for a limited time” so that they can earn some money on their creations. This is a very logical, and noble goal. But, the “limited time” part of the Constitution was left up to Congress. Technically, the current term length of life+90 is a limited time. But, there’s really no reason to believe that it won’t be extended again in another 10 years.

Metering and Accouning for Web Services

Thu, 19 Jul 2001 17:02:59 +0000

IBM has produced an article with ideas on how to meter web services. This is will certainly be an important piece of software of the future.

Good Software Takes 10 Years

Wed, 18 Jul 2001 16:27:31 +0000

Joel on Software – Good Software Takes Ten Years. Get Used To It.: “When you release 1.0, you might want to actually keep it kind of quiet. Let the early adopters find it. If you market it and promote it too heavily, when people see what you’ve actually done, they will be underwhelmed.” Another nicely written article from Joel.

Web Collage

Tue, 17 Jul 2001 21:09:08 +0000

Jamie Zawinski brings us the Web Collage. Random terms are entered into search engines, and pictures from the located pages are put into the collage and rotated periodically.

Crazy Law: Software Download Patent and DMCA Arrest

Tue, 17 Jul 2001 07:01:00 +0000

Two bits of crazy law taking place in the US: a court ruled that a patent on software downloading is valid. In other news, a software developer was arrested in Las Vegas for his program that defeats the security of Acrobat files and for a talk he gave on the subject.

A Study of Why Open Source/Free Software Can Be Better

Sun, 15 Jul 2001 17:46:40 +0000

Look At The Numbers says this open source proponent. This article is useful if for nothing else than the links and citations to many studies that show the benefits of open source. Many good points are raised, and this article is a good one for arguing the case. It seems much heavier on data in favor of Linux as a server OS than as a client OS.

Micropayments via ISPs in Europe

Fri, 13 Jul 2001 23:03:52 +0000

Slashdot | Macropayments: ISPs pay Content Providers for Access: “They report that the swedish company (Tric AB) will “act as a third party between ISP’s and content-suppliers with the intent to let the content-suppliers get a share of the access-income. It will act as a clearinghouse where the income from the ISP’s is distributed to different content-suppliers in relation to size and traffic”.” This kind of move will make net access like cable access…

Death in the Family

Thu, 12 Jul 2001 15:58:54 +0000

I haven’t published anything over the past couple of weeks due to a death in the family. My father-in-law passed away suddenly on June 23rd. He was a very good man and will be missed by many.

Microsoft To Dominate Through Authentication

Thu, 21 Jun 2001 17:26:46 +0000

MS masters NC mind-set: “But what many are missing is the more dangerous threat behind this closed part of Microsoft’s so-called new open-standards approach to network computing. If Microsoft controls the management of user data and user authentication, it controls the flow of the services others can provide.” This article makes Passport sound a lot more

Moral Rights for Content Creators

Mon, 18 Jun 2001 17:01:58 +0000

Smart Tags and the Microsoft Problem Revisited: _“Moral rights are a package of intellectual property rights granted to the original creator of a work, and include:

The right of integrity;
- The right of attribution;
  - The right of disclosure;
    - The right to withdraw or retract;
      - The right to reply to criticism.
      “ Michael Fraase says in his article that these rights are actually written into law in many countries.

Microsoft to Change Smart Tags Feature

Sun, 17 Jun 2001 17:30:26 +0000

Yahoo! Groups : decentralization: _“Because of the — and there’s no better word for it, we’re shocked —

uproar, the following changes are going to be made:

smart tags off by default (they were on by default to exercise the code,

get Watson crashes)

the user-overrides-authored-meta-tag option removed
no recognizers shipping in box. So until you do have a recognizer

Evergreen Analysis of Platinum Albums

Sun, 17 Jun 2001 05:21:46 +0000

Here’s an interesting bit: the Evergreen Albums. It’s an analysis that takes time and platinum albums into account. I haven’t read the full analysis yet, but when I do, I’ll probably add some commentary here.

Micropayments and Music

Sun, 17 Jun 2001 04:05:21 +0000

The Comic Reader brings us Coins of the Realm Part 2, an excellent comic strip style essay on the advantages of micropayments for musicians. (I wouldn’t say for the music industry, because a lot of industry middlemen would lose out.

Unisys Apologizes for the Invention of the Computer

Fri, 15 Jun 2001 23:27:00 +0000

Unisys Apologizes for Creating Unintended Consequences of the Computer Age: “Unisys Corporation today issued a public apology for the many human inconveniences resulting from its invention of UNIVAC I, the world’s first commercial computer, introduced on June 14, 1951.” This press release, which mentions things like not being able to do more than 5 minutes of work before being interrupted by an emailed joke, is an amusing way for Unisys to highlight the fact that 50 years ago they fired up the UNIVAC I.

Another Case for Open Source

Thu, 14 Jun 2001 18:53:56 +0000

News: Beware of wolves in agnostic’s clothing: _“Consider the cost difference between producing useful software, and producing profitable retail software. To produce software, you need to develop the software, document it, and distribute it. In contrast, to make profitable software, add on these services: marketing, commercial distribution and retail channel development, package design and manufacture, sales, business development, advertising, public relations, and so on.

Microsoft Free Fridays

Thu, 14 Jun 2001 16:18:08 +0000

Dave Winer is proposing Microsoft-Free Fridays as a response to Microsoft’s attempts to leverage their monopoly to increase their control over the Net/Web. It’s an interesting idea. His plan is to not allow access to his site using IE on Fridays. One blog, Unicast has already implemented this, and is talking about going so far as to not allow Windows users.

Shortcuts, Godzilla Meat, Slow Updates

Wed, 13 Jun 2001 16:41:08 +0000

The “Shortcuts” topic will be for multiple quick things that come up over a day or two. I could’ve called them “Quickies”, but then this site would be just a little too much like Slashdot without the discussions.

CNN brings us a fun little article about a Japanese company offering Godzilla meat. It’s really corned beef, but who’ll know? It probably should have been something that “tastes like chicken”.

The Harm of Censorship

Wed, 13 Jun 2001 07:59:00 +0000

Salon.com Books | The morality police: “Cloaking themselves in concern for the welfare of children, censors have managed to successfully paint the people who oppose them as willing corruptors of children.” A lucid argument in defense of free speech that also takes the interesting perspective that minors are not all innocent and are also that there’s no proof that they’re harmed by the media.

MS Smart Tags Described

Tue, 12 Jun 2001 07:25:00 +0000

Today, we find an amusing and descriptive take on why Smart Tags are a bad idea. ZDNet: Interactive Week: Microsoft Tries To Get Smart: “What’s gotten people like Winer and others (link to photo of protestors burning the flag) riled is concern that Microsoft (link to Microsoft stock chart showing how well company is performing) might, because of its OS monopoly (link to article by anti-trust expert detailing why Microsoft is not a monopoly) be able to force its technology down the throats of unsuspecting, uninformed or apathetic users (link to photo of lemmings) who might not realize the implications of the technology (link to Microsoft XP order info page).

There Will Be A Choice In Browsers

Sun, 10 Jun 2001 18:21:25 +0000

In response to the news that Microsoft’s SmartTags feature will allow them to manipulate web pages, Eric Norlin responded: Topica Email List Directory: _“Don’t think you can “just use Netscape” either. They’re owned by

AOL/Time Warner, and they just announced that Netscape intends to

June Incubator

Sat, 09 Jun 2001 17:55:23 +0000

The Incubators are where I’ll post drafts of larger articles while they are works in progress… anyone can provide comments and feedback conveniently before the article goes live for real. Articles started in June will appear here.

Java’s Widening Gulf

Sat, 09 Jun 2001 03:17:57 +0000

Commentary: Java’s widening gulf – Tech News – CNET.com: “We interpret the message from JavaOne as follows: Users should not expect 100 percent compatibility among different Java vendors’ platforms, any more than they should expect that from different versions of Unix. And the gulf between different Java solutions will widen.” This is absolutely the worst way to try to defeat Microsoft.

Computer Embarrassment and Abuse

Sat, 09 Jun 2001 03:11:09 +0000

Novatech Online Search Results: “I got so angry with my laptop that I just threw it across the room, when it refused to come out of the suspended mode. The funny thing was when I calmed down and picked up the laptop it was out of the suspended mode, but my hi-fi, which it hit, has never worked since.” So, those of you who attack your poor, innocent little computers aren’t alone.

New Brainfood: The Register (check out that Java Toaster!)

Fri, 08 Jun 2001 03:18:44 +0000

I’ve added The Register” to the Brainfood box, because they regularly have interesting articles and a fun perspective. Check out this article (with pictures!) of a Java-based toaster!

MIT To Make Coursework Available on the Web

Fri, 08 Jun 2001 01:29:00 +0000

MIT to make nearly all course materials available free on the World Wide Web: “MIT President Charles M. Vest has announced that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will make the materials for nearly all its courses freely available on the Internet over the next ten years.” This is a bold step, and a great thing for a public institution. This can lead to some exciting improvements in higher education available to everyone.

Microsoft’s New Browser Adds Links To Pages

Thu, 07 Jun 2001 16:56:18 +0000

New Windows XP Feature Can Re-Edit Others’ Sites: “In effect, Microsoft will be able, through the browser, to re-edit anybody’s site, without the owner’s knowledge or permission, in a way that tempts users to leave and go to a Microsoft-chosen site — whether or not that site offers better information.” This does seem like a scary abuse of the browser.

Genetically Created Analog Circuits

Thu, 07 Jun 2001 16:50:00 +0000

New Scientist Planet Science: CREATURES FROM PRIMORDIAL: “Even though the circuit consists of only a small number of basic components, the researcher, Adrian Thompson, does not know how it works. He can’t ask the designer because there wasn’t one. Instead, the circuit evolved from a “primordial soup” of silicon components guided by the principles of genetic variation and survival of the fittest.” Wow! This kind of technology could completely alter the landscape of computing.

Open Platform for Music and Culture Recommendations

Thu, 07 Jun 2001 07:43:00 +0000

Slashdot | Beyond Napster, a Free Culture: “But what’s needed to leverage cool-tracking into a free (speech and beer) culture is an open system that will integrate with existing communities on the internet.” This article presents a cool concept in collaborative filtering. I’d love to see this made into software… and quick before the media behemoths can do something about it.

Changes in Distribution Technology of Music

Wed, 06 Jun 2001 20:31:30 +0000

Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters: “And to understand what influence our music technology can have, it helps to know what influences it has had.” A very interesting article. I’ll be curious to see tomorrow’s installment that covers Napster, etc.

Solarbuzz provides solar energy info

Wed, 06 Jun 2001 16:18:00 +0000

Yahoo featured a site called Solarbuzz today. Looks like a site chock full of great information about solar power. Good stuff for anyone interested in clean energy or additional energy, as in the case of California. Solar Cost and Price Trends: “In 2001, a residential solar system costs about $8,000 per kWp installed.”

Ann Arbor Art Fair is coming

Wed, 06 Jun 2001 07:37:00 +0000

Yahoo – 2001 Ann Arbor Art Fairs: A New Face on an Old Favorite: _“Come see for yourself from Wednesday, July 18 to Saturday, the 21st when the Fairs will once again turn the streets of Ann Arbor into a living, moving, vibrant art installation.

The largest of the three Fairs, the Ann Arbor Summer Art Fair, will also have the most dramatic changes.

Why Indepedent Music Is Never Mainstream

Tue, 05 Jun 2001 20:49:46 +0000

Great articles on Slashdot and Salon regarding the major labels paying radio stations to play their music.

Napster users have often questioned why a CD costs $16. Courtney Love told the story of how that $16 is certainly not going to the artists. The profits of the major labels, while significant, are not so high as to imply that they are getting all of that $16. Here are the parts of the cost that seem to exist, though I’m not sure how much each one makes up:

The Only Article You Need To Read…

Tue, 05 Jun 2001 17:35:36 +0000

If you’re curious what a typical weblog article/discussion is like, this article on kuro5hin is the only one you need to read.

Microsoft’s Mundie to Speak at Open Source Conference

Tue, 05 Jun 2001 05:48:27 +0000

In a case that is decidedly not one of preaching to the choir, Microsoft’s Craig Mundie is going to be speaking at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention. That should make for an interesting session, and I hope it’s going to be webcast.

Useless Patents That Impede Progress

Tue, 05 Jun 2001 05:21:04 +0000

Brent Ashley has posted some thoughts about patents and The Software Commons on his blog, following the news that NetObjects has a patent on WYSIWYG HTML editing. A few thoughts follow…

NetObjects is likely to go after large companies with large bank accounts and vast hordes of lawyers (eg, Microsoft) to try and collect on their new patents. Microsoft won’t just settle such a suit, because they have too much invested in WYSIWYG HTML (MS Word and FrontPage come to mind). They’d be a lot more likely to just buy NetObjects. The least costly solution, however, would be to dig up some prior art… and odds are that it exists.

Sun Defending Their Java Investment

Tue, 05 Jun 2001 04:18:48 +0000

Yahoo – Sun defends Java platform investment: “The company says it makes money by building services and hardware systems around Java, which it manages in a semi-open process.” I’m certain that Sun has generated business as a result of Java. It has been good for them both in terms of marketing, and in terms of providing technology that enabled developers to use their systems.

The Doomsday Algorithm

Tue, 05 Jun 2001 04:06:46 +0000

The Doomsday Algorithm is a neat diversion (or party trick, depending on your frame of mind). It helps you figure out the day of week based on the date for any month and any year. Clearly, this was created by someone (Conway) who likes finding patterns in things.

The Rise of Corporate Global Power

Mon, 04 Jun 2001 17:00:00 +0000

[Top 200: The Rise of Corporate Global Power][1]: “Of the 100 largest economies in the world, 51 are corporations; only 49 are countries (based on a comparison of corporate sales and country GDPs).” This is important stuff to be aware of. In a way, every dollar you spend is a vote. If you don’t approve of how a company operates, you should vote for another company whose ideals are more like yours.

The Fake Reviewer

Mon, 04 Jun 2001 16:36:46 +0000

From MSNBC: The Reviewer Who Wasn’t There: “The studio plastered Manning’s raves over at least four different movie advertisements, including ‘Hollow Man’ and ‘Vertical Limit.’ But Manning’s own life story should be called ‘Charade,’ because he doesn’t exist.” Amazing. The article makes the point that studios regularly manage to get the quotes they want.

Why Would You Care What I Write?

Sun, 03 Jun 2001 23:52:40 +0000

If you’re curious about the goal of this site, check out this article.

Why would you care what I write? For the same reasons you would care what anyone writes: you find the topic interesting, or the opinions resonate or dissonate with you. My purpose with this site is not to build some gigantic audience that I can “monetize”. My goal is to have a place where I can keep a journal of things that are interesting to me and thoughts that come to me along the way. Perhaps some of those thoughts will be interesting to others and we’ll get some discussion going… but given my real goal for this site, I’m basically guaranteed to succeed.

JavaScript Remote Scripting

Sun, 03 Jun 2001 20:29:15 +0000

Brent Ashley has created a cool package called JavaScript Remote Scripting (JSRS). This package lets you retrieve additional information from the server without having to load a new page. His Select Box demo shows how such a thing can be useful.

The Software Commons

Sun, 03 Jun 2001 04:28:00 +0000

The open source software revolution is just heating up. Though some would portray it as a destroyer of intellectual property, the truth is that it is a chance for companies to work together to save billions of dollars and retain the intellectual property that is truly important to them.

The Software Commons

Where Is Open Source Taking Us?

Though the GNU project has existed since 1984, the notion of thousands of developers collaborating remotely on software projects was inconceivable before the Internet came along. The rules of business haven’t changed; companies still need to turn a profit. The rules of software, however, have changed. This article explores how open source software is creating a “software commons” that will significantly alter the landscape of the software industry.

The music revolution might still be digitized

Sat, 02 Jun 2001 18:49:00 +0000

From Salon: The music revolution will not be digitized. “The power, then, is consolidated squarely back in the hands of the same record industry executives that held the reins before.” There are still some groups that have the power to change things, though…

So far, the music publishing organizations haven’t completely signed off on many of the models that the major labels are trying to build. The music publishers represent most of the songwriters, and without their permission none of the major label services can take off.

Welcome!

Sat, 02 Jun 2001 01:51:31 +0000

Welcome to WeWriteOnline, a site where I (and others) can write online. The site is divided into streams of thought: The Techstream is about technology The Funstream is about entertainment, games, etc. The Lifestream is about (yep), life!