Archive: February 27, 2002
Whoa! There are books on weblogs coming out!
We've Got Blog: How Weblogs are Changing Our Culture
The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog.
Both books are scheduled to out in June, and both books have Rebecca Blood's name all over them. Awesome.
Oh yeah, I should also mention Running Weblogs With Slash, published by O'Reilly.
Of course, Weblog Madness beat me to all of this  Good site.
Google Loves Blogs: "Weblogs are perfect for Google: frequently updated websites crammed chockfull of tasty links. It's no wonder that Google loves Weblogs so much."
Link via Dane Carlson. Also, read his followup to the article.
Excellent! EditPlus 2.11 has been released. Well, it's not actually on the website yet, but it should be soon.
Yay! I downloaded it and I'm using it. Nice improvements. Anyone who uses any other text editor for Windows, download EditPlus and use it instead (and pay for it, it's not expensive).
Neat tip about opening mime attachments with Winzip.
Names as historical accidents
As I was thinking of breaking my weblog code in order to rename some database fields whose names were annoying me (incremental development is key), I realized that it doesn't matter. They can stay that way forever. There's nothing wrong with things having weird or inconsistent names, as long as it doesn't interfere with the growth or maintenance of the system.
For instance, because of Mozilla's genesis as Netscape Navigator, many of its class names are prefixed with "ns". It shows it's history. Nothing wrong with that. I remember something similar about the Arsdigita system, although I don't seem to have blogged where I read it.
Cool, I have to remember this name for the programmer's "zone": "intense coding trance mode (ICTM™)"
The Other Keith™ recommends "hack mode" instead, courtesy of the Jargon file.
"Some aspects of hacker etiquette will appear quite odd to an observer unaware of the high value placed on hack mode. For example, if someone appears at your door, it is perfectly okay to hold up a hand (without turning one's eyes away from the screen) to avoid being interrupted. One may read, type, and interact with the computer for quite some time before further acknowledging the other's presence (of course, he or she is reciprocally free to leave without a word)."
Check it out... a blog all about web hosting, Web Hosting Strategies. Check out his post on free traffic analyzers and free web hosting.
You know, being way down in Google's popularity rankings can ... naaah, nevermind.
Finally, someone says about what I've been wanting to say to those absurd Xerox ads claiming that 'everyone can get published' because of their technology.
"I've been calling bullshit on this one for years, and I'll keep calling it. Folks, good editing isn't cheap. Neither is good layout. And certainly neither is good marketing. Just because you can write a book and publish it a single copy at a time doesn't mean that you can do without editing, layout, and marketing. In fact, even if you go for e-book format and never print it at all, you still can't do without any of those things, and the professionals in these fields are worth every penny they're paid (and frequently, more). Just because you don't have books stacked in a warehouse doesn't mean that publishing a book doesn't cost money."
Never linked to this when I read it, but Mark just linked to it so I figured I'll put it here in case I ever want to go back. I still think Backup Brain is one of the most appropriate names for a weblog.
Via the Daily Python-URL, "Erann Gat: How I lost my faith ["I saw, pretty much for the first time in my life, people being as productive and more in other languages as I was in Lisp. What's more, once I got knocked off my high horse /.../ and actually bothered to really study some of these other languges I found myself suddenly becoming more productive in other languages than I was in Lisp. For example, my language of choice for doing Web development now is Python."]"
You asshole, you scared the crap out of me! You should have warned me before giving a link to Kikia! I have a big monitor, and my browser window was large. That thing was about life size!!
Oh, and scroll down... the inner workings of a man's mind... food, sex, and video games
Good luck with the switch, Dwight.
Via the Daily Python-URL, IBM developerWorks: XML Matters: Intro to PYX, by David Mertz.
XML is a fairly simple format. ... Nonetheless, there are still enough rules in the XML grammar that a carefully debugged parser is needed to process XML documents -- and every parser imposes its own particular programming style. An alternative is to make XML even simpler. The open-source PYX format is a purely line-oriented format for representing XML documents that allows for much easier processing of XML document contents with common text tools like grep,sed, awk, wc, and the usual UNIX collection.
The PYX format is a line-oriented representation of XML documents that is derived from the SGML ESIS format. PYX is not actually XML, but it is able to represent all the information within an XML document in a manner that is easier to handle using familiar text processing tools. Moreover, PYX documents can be transformed back into XML as needed. PYX documents are approximately the same size as the corresponding XML versions (sometimes a little larger, sometimes a little smaller), so storage and transmission considerations differ little between XML and PYX.
Drop.org: "Looks like kerneltrap.org, a drupal site, got slashdotted today. At the end of the day, it's still standing."
"... KernelTrap is my site - and I am quite in Awe of Drupal at the moment! There was no indication whatsoever that I was under a heavy load while being linked from Slashdot. All said, this was a mild hit for Slashdot, it happening on Saturday - but has quite impressed upon me that Drupal is a massive improvement over PHP-Nuke, which I used before."
Dave Winer: "Until reading this ZDNet article interviewing Don Box, it had not occurred to me that HTTP isn't everything we could want it to be. No sarcasm. People are jumping all over this story, but sheez, he makes some good points."
Good article, and very to the point.
"We have to do something to make it (HTTP) less important," said Box. "If we rely on HTTP we will melt the Internet. We at least have to raise the level of abstraction, so that we have an industry-wide way to do long-running requests--I need a way to send a request to a server and not the get result for five days."
"Another problem with HTTP, said Box, is that it is asymmetric. "Only one entity can initiate an exchange over HTTP, the other entity is passive, and can only respond. For peer-to-peer applications this is not really suitable," he said. The reason that peer-to-peer applications do work today, said Box, is that programmers create hacks to get around the limitations of the protocol, and this is not good. "It's all hackery, it's all ad-hoc and none of it is interoperable," he added.
I especially like this analogy: "Box likes to think of HTTP as the "cockroach of the Internet" because "after the holocaust it will be the only protocol left standing."", as well as his open attitude: ""Microsoft has some ideas (on how to break the independence on HTTP), IBM has some ideas, and others have ideas. We'll see," he said. But, he added, "if one vendor does it on their own, it will simply not be worth the trouble.""
The Christian Science Monitor: Darwin or Design?. "Intelligent design offers a critique of evolution which shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. Analysis that seeks cause only in matter can't explain all the turns of life on earth. On the other hand, the proponents of design will run into unintelligent outcomes like genetic dead-ends and disease. Science teachers should be free to bring up these contrasting approaches and probe the controversy they generate." excellent!
Dan Bricklin: Observations From a Weblogger. "I've learned that there is more to understand about the world of blogging than is obvious to those watching from the outside. This shouldn't be surprising, since many human endeavors may appear less than they are from the outside"
Why Read Literature? "Based on Jean-Paul Sartre's "Why Write?" from What is Literature?"
|
Wednesday, February 27, 2002
Permalink
Girls, please don't get breast implants
Wow, After all this time, thecomments on this page continue togrow. It wa...
Ajeet: Aug 25, 2:36am