Slashdot points to this ZDNET article: Microsoft Guru: Stamp Out HTTP. Interesting: the “guru” in question is Don Box, co-author of SOAP and founder of DevelopMentor. He joined MS last month. I wonder what some of the other people with input into SOAP think?
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Dave, meet Blogdex… and MS Research
Dave wants a tool that can show you how connected two weblogs are to each other, and indicates what the traffic looks like between them. I think he’s right that the second is impossible for a centralized search engine… but what about a distributed referral collection app?
As for the first, the Netscan project at Microsoft Research does something similar for newsgroups by tracing cross-postings and provides visualization. Blogdex traces links from blog to blog. It should be possible to apply the visualization and connectability capabilities from Netscan to the data that Blogdex collects.
If someone does this, I want credit on the thesis. 🙂
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Cease-and-desist meets organized resistance
CNET: Site reads Web surfers their rights. This sounds a bit like the “Your Rights On-Line” section of Slashdot writ large:
ChillingEffects.org serves as an educational hub where Internet surfers can learn about their legal rights related to cease-and-desists letters….
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and law school clinics at Stanford University, Harvard University, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of San Francisco said they created the Web site as part of a project called Chilling Effects, referring to the way legal threats can freeze out free expression. The coalition said the project aims to provide basic legal information about ongoing issues related to copyright, trademark and domain names, defamation, anonymous speech, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
BOFH: SQL For Retards
SQL for Retards. Hysterical. You can only imagine how often I dreamed of this conversation:
“But I’m not responsible for the which of the volumes he puts his tablespace on.”
“Uh?” The Boss responds, reverting to subhuman IQ as a defence.
“OK, an analogy. Let’s say I was the building owner and I rent you 30 offices.”
“Right.”
“And you have 30 staff.”
“Yes.”
“And you put them all in one office because then you won’t have to go all around the floor to see what people are up to.”
“Yyyess?”
“And then you complain to me about the air-conditioning because that one office is stinking hot, humid and smelly.”
Nice Boston weekend
I just noticed–though I managed to blog every day this weekend, I didn’t write much about anything going on with me. This is called either “healthy” or “avoidance,” depending on your perspective.
Well, Lisa got a lateral move within her employer that puts her in a more geographically independent job, which frees us up for our move when I graduate. We celebrated with a dinner with friends on Friday night preceded by the customary tasting at the Wine Bottega in the North End. In the middle of dinner, my friend Bransby got a phone call with a job offer–so we had a double celebration.
Saturday we went to Lala Rokh, a Persian restaurant in the middle of Beacon Hill. I haven’t spent much time on Beacon Hill; after the bustle of the North End its silence was either refreshing or tomblike (see, there’s that perspective thing again!). The restaurant was great–I’ve had kebabs and such before, but the inventiveness with ingredients turned everything up a notch.
On Sunday I worked all day when I wasn’t blogging. I’m having some thoughts about the dynamics of that. After I finish my system dynamics homework (or before, if present practice of procrastination continues), I’ll post the causal loop diagram that explains most of my blogging recently.
CSS from both sides of the fence
I’ve tried to stay out of the blogwar over using CSS vs. tables for web site design that has been brewing at Scripting News and other places, but I think it’s time to jump in. I’ll be working on a CSS-based redesign of this site over the next few weeks. I’ve noticed how slowly this page renders in Netscape 4.x (because of all the nested tables), and hopefully moving to CSS will either make things easier or convince the 4.x readers to move to more modern browsers (hi, Dad!).
Two quick resources to get started: Microsoft’s CSS node in the MSDN library, and Apple’s series on CSS in its developers’ site.
Don’t know how I missed this: permalinks in Manila
Frontier News: New Manila feature: permanent links for News Items. I always wondered how I could get people linking to a particular item on my page. Now it’s under the # symbol after each item. Thanks, guys.
GAO vs. White House over Enron: Bets, folks?
My wife: “This should be very interesting. Someone’s career is probably over.”
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, was named Walker v. Cheney. Walker is David M. Walker, the U.S. Comptroller General and head of the General Accounting Office of Congress. Cheney is Richard B. Cheney, the vice president and head of the administration’s energy task force, the focus of the litigation.
Johnny Cash and NIN
New York Times, Johnny Cash: an American Original Returns. According to the article, Cash is recording his fourth album:
“The songs are coming from every direction,” Mr. Cash said of his forthcoming album. “I’ve written two or three new ones, and I recorded a Sting song called `I Hung My Head.’ I’ve recorded a Marty Robbins song called `Big Iron.’ I’m recording `The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,’ that Roberta Flack song. And I’m recording `Hurt’ by Nine Inch Nails.”
Th-That’s All, Folks
Chuck Jones died yesterday of congestive heart failure. He was 89. I had been feeling kind of out of sorts all day today but just now realized why.
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Manila.sitePref: Undocumented Feature
Mac racks? Research customers says please
Wired: Mac Cluster’s Last Stand?
“If Apple were to offer a scalable, high-density hardware solution, I would push hard for a platform switch,” said Patrick Gavin of the University of California at Santa Cruz Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering . “The PowerPC architecture is vastly superior to anything else out there in terms of power consumption versus processing power.”
It make sense that this point would come. Apple under the second coming of Steve Jobs has had a laserlike focus on the consumer and pro graphics markets. But they have other customer segments too. If nothing else, the reception that the guy demoing Mathematica at MacWorld got might convince them to pay attention to these genomics researchers. Then there’s the big BLAST story….
“On the Grid” gets a new meaning
CNET: “Grid computing luring mainstream backers.” There’s something appealing about this: if a guy with solar panels in California can put energy back on the grid and get credit for it, why can’t we develop some generic, organized way to share spare CPU cycles? A draft paper by IBM and Globus describes how this may mesh with web services.
Of course, Lisa told me about grid computing in September, but I’m just now picking up on it. <Insert wry joke about husbands not listening to wives here.>
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Oliver’s Cross-Posting Manila Plug-In
Check this out: Oliver’s crossPost Plug-In. “This simple Plug-In installs XML-RPC handlers to post news items to a Manila site and retrieve a department list of that site.” My question: how does this compare to calling newsItem.create in the standard Manila API?
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Thank you, Sarah Hughes
I have never appreciated skating until tonight’s long program performance by Sarah Hughes. In fact, I’ve never felt compelled to link to Sports Illustrated until tonight’s long program performance by Sarah Hughes. What a spectacular performance. I’ve not seen a better artistic statement about the joy of life.
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