Bitworking - theories of software development

Redmonk is working his way through the tome that is Cryptonomicon. This is one of my favorite books which spurred an interest in history in me and also really opened my eyes to how much of our day to day lives is still influenced by WWII. I am now reading "Atlas Shrugged" for the first time in my life. Somehow managed to dodge this book all through high school and college and now at age 35 I am glad I waited to read it. 10 years in the work force really puts a lot of this book in focus for me.

Three people, a computer and outsourced customer support. They win.

Back tracking from Sam to Phil to Reverend Jim and finally landing on Chuck Shotton's door-step to find his Extensions to RSS 0.94 for Content and Encoding Formats. I really like his suggestion of adding attributes for mime type and encoding. Example 4 is particularly mind expanding.

Ancient patent drawings online. [via BoingBoing]

Looking at those old drawings reminded me of one art form that is currently dying because of computer technology: drafting. While the majority of mechanical drafting is now done via computer there are still shops that do their designs on paper, but they're a dying breed. Don't get me wrong, CAD is obviously superior to drafting by hand, but you just can't beat the aesthetic appeal of those drawings.

There is a lot of activity these days in the Web Services world with regard to Choreography. The interesting thing is that I didn't need to consult a Choreography document the last time I ordered a book from Amazon.com.

PHP iCalendar is a php-based iCal file parser. Its based on v2.0 of the IETF spec. It displays iCal files in a nice logical, clean manner with day, week, month, and year navigation. It supports 8 languages, is fully theme-able, and has complete timezone support.[PHP iCalendar]

I have been experimenting by using the Mozilla Calendar and publishing the data to the web server so I can get to the calendar from anywhere. This looks like a neat little tool for getting to the calendar from places I don't have the Mozilla Calendar app installed. Found via Mark Pilgrim.

Sean is making good progress on porting Aggie to be a browser based application. He now has some more screenshots and an .msi.

Yeah, the RSS Validator is finally here:

This is a brand new RSS validator, built from the ground up to support all versions of RSS (but optimized for RSS 2.0). [diveintomark]

Congrats to Sam Ruby and Mark Pilgrim for their fine work on the validator, and kudos to Bill Kearney for finding hosting for it.

People are working on a new version of RSS that will be killer! Much better than RSS 2.0 (not that this is very hard). [Kevin Burton]

Hmmm, interesting that I haven't seen any mention of this new format on [rss-dev]. Let's just say I'm skeptical of the utility of yet another RDF-laden syndication format developed in the metaphorical 'smoke-filled room'.

The Vented Spleen besides having the coolest blog name ever also has some great perspective on music, software and copyright.

Serenity Through Markup is some musings on loose coupling and interoperability with respect to XML and Web Services by Uche Ogbuji.

Roger Costello has published a new tutorial, A Step-by-Step Guide to Building XML-Based Web Services. I haven't worked my way through all 136 pages so I can't give an opinion on it yet, but he has a clear and clean exposition style and I liked another of his tutorials, Building Web Services the REST Way.

As Mark points out in Push by any other name bandwidth usage by news aggregators is again a hot topic. I would like to note that Aggie works to solve this problem on two levels. On the lowest level it uses both the ETag and Last-Modified headers to only pull a feed when it has changed. Another way Aggie saves bandwidth is that it does no polling. It only tries to retrieve the feeds when you press the 'Go' button. This presents a slight delay before you get your news, but I think that is a lot better than periodic polling. Using Aggie you are always sure that your news is as up-to-date as possible and you will only be pulling the RSS feeds as often as you decide to look at the news which for the vast majority of people is less than 24 times a day.

Sorry for not posting in a week, Lynne and I and the two older boys were on vacation. We took a cruise to the Bahamas. Now we're trying to adjust to normal life again. Not eating multicourse meals for lunch and supper. No more chocolate mousse off the midnight buffet. Not being able to choose between going to a show after dinner, playing shuffle board, or going to the casino. No more steward to clean the cabin, turn down our beds and leave mints on our pillows. Sigh.

A year ago when Lynne brought up the idea of going on a cruise I was skeptical. It never seemed like my cup of tea. Now that we've had our first cruise I can't wait to go again. The best indicator that I can give of how good the cruise was: not once in the whole week did I think of work or blogging.

Sam is way too modest.

Yes, I presented using mozilla and perl. And svg for that matter. The css was lifted from here. I started organizing my thoughts as I often do in vim when it occured to me that I could apply some of what I had learned from blosxom and wikis and everything just came together on the plane ride up. The result: devcon.pl and outlet.svg. These are only meant as quick hacks. [Sam Ruby]

You have to see devcon.pl to believe it. It is a perl script that contains his entire presentation as a data section. The content is marked up in a manner similar to WikiML and the Perl script extracts the content and spits out HTML. Very cool.

Wired News has undergone a markover and is now using XHTML+CSS to style its content. I particularly like the "Text Size" selection tool in the upper right hand side of the site.

This follows just days after Microsoft redesigned it's site and went in the exact opposite direction by using Invalid, Inaccessible and Undeciperable markup. Thus order and balance is maintained in the universe. It's a ying-yang thing.

Tommy Williams comes to the rescue and points to two Windows utilities Macro ToolsWorks and AutoIt:

I use a combo of two tools: one to set up hotkeys and bind them to specific apps, or classes of apps, and another that can send clicks and keypresses to specific windows, along with the ability to wait for them to be active, or go away, or whatever. [Tommy Williams]

Thanks Tommy, I'll give them a spin tomorrow.

Shelly Powers: The Parable of the Languages.

Is XML just a syntax or is there an underlying data model to it?

It took me years to realise how deep and important the divide is between wanting an SDK and wanting to know the underlying protocol. Too much of our biz can only see one of these realities. I grew up with networked minicomputers and (mostly) Unix, and maybe that's why, in the final analysis, I always want to see the bits on the wire, because in the final analysis, given any programmable device, I can work with them.

XML is of course the ultimate expression of that philosophy; it can do a reasonably good job of offering a bits-on-the-wire view of just about anything.

During the heydey of client-server I was repeatedly baffled and frustrated by the mind-set, in particular evidence chez Apple and Microsoft, that the only expression of computing reality was a big hairy complicated API with an associated big hairy complicated (and often expensive) SDK. This is not just a Unix-vs-PC thing - the X window system is one of the most extreme examples of the big, hairy, complicated, API (the rumor that they ever actually fully documented the wire protocol is false).

...

Our profession needs to grow up a bit and actually arrive at a consensus as to when each of these approaches is appropriate, teach it in college, and so on.

[Tim Bray on xml-dev]

Mark has previously done his own attempts at a "Good Easy". Neat to see how 'personal' the process of customization is.

I used to use Cygwin but I have recently switched to GNU utilities for Win32. A collection of common GNU utilities ported to native Win32. I haven't found it lacking in any tools yet. I switched away from Cygwin when I started to get weird interactions between it, emacs, and shelling out to non-Cygwin executables.

In Mozilla I have the Mouse Gestures package installed.

Mouse movements in combination with a click-hold and optionally a modifier that execute some browser functions. You press mouse button (plus modifier, if you have configured it like this), draw a gesture and release mouse button. This gesture is recognized and appropriate action is triggered. [Mouse Gestures ]

So I press and hold my right mouse button, then moving the mouse in a pre-defined pattern activates a function. For example, moving down and then to the right closes a tab. Starting on a link and moving down opens the link in a new tab. Moving up and to the left brings up the next tab (much easier than the keyboard Ctrl-PgUp). The neat part is that all the action is controlled through a JavaScript file that you can edit, adding your own gestures or changing which functions are called. I edited mine to more closely match the mouse gestures in Opera, the first browser to support the feature.

And finally, one of the first things I do on a new system is tweak the registry to turn on command-line completion.

As for a calendar and contacts, my lovely wife Lynne takes care of all that. All scheduling in the Gregorio household goes through her as she is the master calendar keeper. A job I do not relish and that I much appreciate her handling.

Trying to re-create the "Good Easy" on a Windows machine is going to be my next pet project. I like the idea of getting back to text file/non-proprietary formats as much as possible. It makes sense to try to not to ignore the GUI, or to ignore the command-line text environment, but to use them together, one amplifying the other.

The first thing I did was to create shortcuts for all my frequently used applications and put them, and only them, on my desktop. Then I created a short-cut key for each one, Ctrl-Alt-M for mozilla, Ctrl-Alt-Z for SourceSafe, Ctrl-Alt-S for WinCVS, etc. I then changed the names of all the icons to be just the single letter of their shortcut, just to give me a reminder of what key they are bound to.

Now I lucked out with Mozilla since it stores all the mail and calendar data in text. It was just a matter of creating a single directory that I will consistenly store all my data in, point Mozalla to that directory to strore all my data, and then create a shortcut to that folder, which I bound to Ctrl-Alt-D. (Of course I also bound Alt-D in emacs to that directory to make life consistent.) I am already starting to get benefits, and I am only partially done. For example, I can now search all my mail archives from within emacs in a couple of keystrokes. Yes, I am doing a lot of work just to re-create the concept of a unix HOME directory on Windows, so all you OS X and unix folk can just move along, nothing new to see here...

One piece I am missing for now is a universal spell checker. Also, I don't know of any apps out there to for binding a hot-key to a running application, but it shouldn't be too hard to write one if I'm forced to do it myself.

Found: A nice presentation on REST, including a comparison to SOAP.

It looks like some ripples from all the activity around RSS have reached the W3C. Interesting to note: The number of RDF people not directly involved in RSS 1.0 that think RDF in RSS is either not a good idea or think that it could be easily handled via transformation. Of course the conversation just started so we'll have to wait and see where this leads.

Edd Dumbill wrote an article a little less than a year ago that has some very sage advice on adopting standards: The Selfish Tag

Simon St. Laurent pointed out that he wrote an article entitled Making Web Services Part of the Web that is a bit more abstract but comes to the same conclusions as I do in The Well-Formed Web. It's interesting to note that he wrote his article as a response to Web Services and mine was a response to the Semantic Web but we both ended up at the same destination.

I almost fell for the Semantic Web, then I discovered the Well-Formed Web. More...

Looks like my idea of adding namespaced elements to 0.91 feeds won't work. The inclusion of the DTD would cause any included namespaced elements to cause the feed to become invalid XML. Rats.