All my blog posts and articles
Yesterday I was interviewed about BlogBridge by ClientJava.com, a very useful Web site for us Java desktop developers. Check it out.. In the comment section I was asked to elaborate on my provocative statements about Java Web Start. Here’s what I said.
You might think it’s a bad idea for me to complain about Java Web Start. Well the truth is that I really like it and so am really frustrated by it’s failures. In my own small way I am hoping to wake up someone at Sun to see the importance of this little bit of technology to their grand Java strategy. In my interview with ClientJava I again made some pointed comments about Java Web Start, and in the comment thread some annonymous person (coward) asked me to elaborate. Here is what I said.
“Why has WebStart been such a disappointment? I’ve written about this in my blog, hereand here. Basi...
Someone just pointed me to this item on Mike Zellers blog, under the title, “best explanation of election i can think of….” Just having taken a short Photoshop course and wanting to test my newly found chops, here’s a little something I cooked up:
Disclaimer: I don’t know Mike Zellers and his photograph is most likely totally legitimate. Not that my fake would fool anyone.
There’s an amusing new blog I came across: “Gapingvoid”,by Hugh Macleod. He’s a cartoonist, and his postings often have a quickly sketched amusing drawing. I caught today’s postingwith this quote on it:
***‘ “I can’t take this shit anymore!” He said, mistakenly’ *
Amusing**.
From “Waiting for Godot”:
**ESTRAGON: I can’t go on like this. VLADIMIR: That’s what you think.
More amusing.**
I never was a fan of Tommy Thomson – what a name! I am no expert on terrorism, but it seems to me that saying this in his goodbye speechcan’t be a very good idea: “For the life of me, I cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply because it is so easy to do,” Thompson said as announced his departure before department employees. “We are importing a lot of food from the Middle East, and it would be easy to tamper with that.”
For the life of me, I can’t understand why he’d let himself be quoting saying that!
Seems like a dredged up some “old” (you know who you are) Improv fans with my earlier posting, so I thought an additional comment or two might be in order. First off, lest it be misunderstood, in no way do I feel anything but totally proud about Imrpov as a concept and a product. I hope it is not inconsistent to feel that way, and yet agree that for a variety of reason it was not successful, as a product.
The concept of an alternative (not replacement) for a spreadsheet for real financial modeling is, I think, quite sound. (Yes, I can do page layout in Microsoft Word, but if that’s my purpose, PageMaker is better. You could make an analogous poin...
* “Scientists at the RAND Corporation have created this model to illustrate how a “home computer” could look like in the year 2004. However the needed technology will not be economically feasible for the average home. Also the scientists readily admit that the computer will require not yet invented technology to actually work, but 50 years from now scientific progress is expected to solve these problem.
With teletype interface and the Fortran language, the computer will be easy to use” *
[From 1954 Popular Mechanics Magazine, from Peter Grossman]
...
Adam Bosworth’s speech Adam Bosworth’s an interesting guy, and very smart, and has been deeply involved in web services and many related technologies for years. He really knows this stuff. And it’s interesting, because one of the key Web Services technologies is SOAP, a loosely coupled, “webbish” way of doing remote procedure calls.
[Aside #1: If you feel your eyelids getting heavy around now, I appologize for not labeling this entry as “GEEK” but I thought it was border line]
...
It’s been a while. Which is why my heart beat just a little faster when I read a reference to Improv (not altogether flattering) in the Adam Bossworth pieceI just wrote about, where he said:
*** Consider the spreadsheet**. It is a protean, sloppy, plastic, flexible medium that is, ironically, the despair of all accountants and auditors because it is virtually impossible to reliably understand a truly complex and rich spreadsheet.
Lotus corporation (now IBM), filled with Harvard MBA’s and PhD’s in CS from MIT, built Improv. Improv set out “to fix all this”. It was an auditors dream. It provided rarified heights of abstraction, for...
Here are two interesting bits that look at all the aggregators and have some interesting comments about capabilities and futures.
Waiting for Aggie by Jack Vinson
I just came across a good summary on one of our favorite topics from KM Magazine. It was written by Bill Ives of Portals and KM fame: “Blogs are both a technology and a way of communicating. On the one hand, they are nothing more than simple Web sites, often published in the form of a journal, that provide original content, links to other relevant content, simple editing features, comment capability, archiving, search, and security options. This ease of use provides a vehicle for the writer’s unedited personal voice, which is considered a defining aspect of blogs. While many uses beyond personal journalism have emerged, the individual voice remains a central characteristic, even in the corporate setting.”
I’ll forgive Bill for not mentioning BlogBridge🙂
Have you seen this map before? Yes? Actually it’s the map of states where the Cosi Restaurantchain has stores. I don’t know what it means, but I thought it must mean something. Amusing.
(from a private mailing list I am on)
[Note to those who don’t obsessively follow US Politics and culture: the map above looks a lot like the map showing U.S. states where the Democratic candidate for president won in blue and where the Republican candidate for president won in red. However the map actually shows where a certain sandwhich restaurant chain has stores. The relation between the two is a mystery to me too.]
My answer to the question: “What is a Blog”, which I get asked often, goes something like this: “A blog is a just a web site with articles or notes that get posted there, generally by a single person. There’s nothing especially new or complex about the technology of blogs. What’s new and compelling is the blogging phenomenon: For whatever reason, individuals with unique and important points of view are choosing to publish those in blogs.”
Actually the point of this post is to point you this great and I would almost say moving account by Kevin Sites, keeper of ...
Hey, sorry if you aren’t a BlogBridge user yet, but I just can’t resist some news here. First of all, we’ve released a new Alpha, just today.You can get it here. The way we work it is that if after a week or so of use there are no show stopped bugs, we will promote the Alpha to a Beta. The general release model is described here.
This new version has a ton of new feature stuff, plus major stability and performance improvements. I dare say, we are getting close to having a Release 1.0 product. Here are some highlights:
The BlogBridge Service gets a major new capability, which i...
This is pretty cool: BlogBridge was picked up by Sun’s monthly ‘Swing Sightings’online column where they periodically highlight cool application that, I guess, are good examples of what can be done with Java on the desktop. Thanks!
There’s this little island in the Caribean called Curacao. I happen to know a lot about it because that’s where I was born and grew up. Now I live in the United States, but continue to keep up with what’s going on in there. This is from an article about an Open Source Conferencethat happened, where else? Yes, right there in Curacao.
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When I agreed to speak at this island’s first-ever free/open source conference last Wednesday, I was warned that Linux and open source were not well-known here. This was not true, but most of Curacao’s Linux and open source software users thought they were alone…
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If you haven’t heard about Wikipedia, you should check it out. It’s a grass roots encyclopedia. It has a huge number of articles, contributed in general by anyone who feels like writing an article, presumably because they know something about it. Here’s the Wikipedia definition of Wikipedia. It’s quite an amazing thing, amazing because of how it has grown, how it was built, who built it and what it was built on.
One often mentioned question is how accurate is Wikipedia anyway?. It’s an important question in that Wikipedia is developing quite a reputation, not only among Technorati, but also among civ...
In response to a query from Andrew Watt and Danny Ayers about what they called next-generation infromation aggregators, I wrote this, and I thought I’d share it here too. Dear Andrew and Danny,
Still in early beta, but certainly not secret is BlogBridge, www.blogbridge.com, an app I’ve been working on, that I’ve been describing as a next generation blog aggregator.
In fact I am moving away from the term ‘blog’ as being too limited, and I think embracing the term ‘feed’. Why? Because I kind of suspect that one of the early values of something like BlogBridge to people outside the hard-core blog fanatics (I am one) will be as an alternative way to email to receive notifications (like from UP...
I was lucky enough to meet and spend some time with **Ward Cunningham **at OOPSLAthis year. I also heard him present in a big hall. If you are a Wikifan then you know that Ward is the one who invented the concept. What seems to be a little less well known is how the idea evolved, where it came from. I am sure it’s written up somewhere. but I thought I’d write down my own idiosynchratic understanding of the story.
Ward was involved in the early days of the Design Patternsmovement, which seems t...
I was working out, listening an IT Conversationsinterview with Joel Spolsky. It was interesting and passed the time. It’s wonderful that Doug Kaye interviewed Joel Spolsky, and it’s wonderful that Joel was fun to listen to, it was wonderful that this MP3 was available on the internet, and that I had iPodder to automatically download it to me iPod, and of course, my iPod is wonderful.
But I realized this: I had been doing this “by hand”before Podcasting or iPodder existed. The far bigger deal then and now ...
