I know that there are people who read this weblog that have real talent when it comes to graphic design. I was wondering if anyone was interested in doing me the favor of creating an icon for this site (and a favicon to match if you’re ambitious). It needs to be 32 x 32, and if you’re interested in taking up the challenge, I can provide any additional info you need for creative inspiration. Send email if you want to take this on. ...
Busted. How big has the Java blogging community become? I read a discussion board post yesterday where someone referred to Java bloggers as “freerollers,” presumably because many of them use the free Roller hosting service at freeroller.net.
I flogged Kenneth M Pollack’s book before the war. Here’s what he has to say in the aftermath.
Here’s a chart that tries to plot webloggers that most influence the media. I find the positioning of some of the webloggers pretty bizarre. The ones that stand out most are Lileks and the Daily Kos.
John Udell says: I like to imagine new OS system services. Yesterday, it struck me that a rules engine, logger, and debugger would be an appropriate bundle of stuff to generalize as a standard system service. This would indeed be pretty cool. Basically you’d have what amounts to a scripting language (hopefully a very simple and straightforward one) built right into the operating system, and applications that took advantage of it would simply have hooks into the scripting engine. I’m not enough of an AppleScript user to know whether this is basically what AppleScript is. I know that back in the days when I used a Mac, you could extend and integrate applications easily with AppleScript. I haven’t seen anything like it since on Windows or Unix. Would it be easy for an email client on the Mac to let users write filtering scripts using AppleScript, and is this the sort of model Udell is talking about? In any case, I’m very interested in anything that makes it easier to program and makes it easier for people to understand the practical reasons why one would want to program. ...
Tim Bray has some great potential applications for RSS and then goes on to explain some of its barriers to adoption. I would love it if I could get an RSS feed of transactions on my back account. A lot of the stuff that you could use RSS for could also be accomplished with email, but the feel of RSS and email are completely different. RSS items just feel more transient to me, and RSS aggregators treat them as being more transient than email messages. For whatever reason, I allow email to pile up in my in box. I try to keep only interesting items that I intend to file or items that I have not yet replied to but inevitably lots of other stuff ends up getting saved there as well. Then there’s the fact that I never empty my trash – my work mailbox has thousands of items in the deleted folder. My RSS reader is blissfully clean of old stuff, just the way I like it. So even though some people may think that RSS is redundant (and I assure you that it’s a complaint you’ll hear when you talk about new applications for it), the manner of usage is just as important as the basic technical specification for how the protocol or data format works. ...
A quick search of my archive will reveal that I’ve nursed a long time fascination with ArsDigita. Phil Greenspun popped onto my radar screen all the way back in 1995 when I read his online travelogue “Travels with Samantha.” Anyway, yet another ArsDigita insider, Michael Yoon, has posted his version of the events as they transpired. His point seems to basically be that it’s not as though the venture capitalists that wound up ruining the company swooped down from a branch sticking out of the side of a cliff and carried the company away in their talons, but rather that ArsDigita invited them in, accepted their terms, and got stuck with the consequences. Seems fair enough to me. Oh, and I hope that I never exhibit any signs of oblivious sacred cow syndrome. Ouch. ...
Keep the flame of browser innovation burning. Kick a few bucks to mozdev.org.
All I have to say about Rob Enderle’s hit and run piece on Linux is that if that’s the best anti-Linux propaganda that can be mustered, things are going pretty well. His most forceful argument seems to be that a platform with such belligerent advocates is not appropriate for enterprise usage. To me, that’s just silly, but maybe I don’t understand the enterprise. If I deal with with IBM, HP, or Dell, who cares what the nitwits on Slashdot are griping about today? The second issue he brings up is the fear of legal liability due to intellectual property issues surrounding Linux. If that worries you, then you should go with a vendor that will indemnify you from those issues. The third issue is that there’s not a lot of prepackaged software for Linux and you need developers to make it do what you want. Even if that’s true (and it is to a certain extent), then any good IT person will figure out what software packages they need and then figure out what platform is appropriate for them. Where I work we’ve been running production Oracle instances on Linux for well over a year with no issues at all, along with lots of other applications. ...
One of the questions that I often wonder about is how maintaining a public persona (for example, by publishing your thoughts on certain topics on a public Web site for five years or so) affects one’s ability to get a job. In the glory years, my perspective was that if somebody didn’t like what I had to say on this site, they’d be better off not hiring me. That’s the luxury that a seller’s market for software development skills affords. Now that the job market sucks, I wonder whether I can afford to be so brazen. If someone does find this site troublesome, though, chances are they would be better off not hiring me, because I really don’t have any interest in shutting it down. In any case, Dave Johnson has an interesting post about the role that developing Roller had in his finding a new job. I would think that developing a popular open source software package would give you a huge leg up in the job market, and would be seen as a nice advantage by all but the most cretinous employers. ...