Two brilliant quotes from Alan Kay in 2003: OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. It can be done in Smalltalk and in LISP. There are possibly other systems in which this is possible, but I'm not aware of them. And But just to show how stubbornly an idea can hang on, all through the seventies and eighties, there were many people who tried to get by with "

Steve Yegge has succeeded in generating a lot of traffic by obtusely trying to predict The Next Big Language. It's disappointing to see that most people have fallen for the trick, which was not to actually predict which language will be next, but to actually frame the debate: implying that there is always one big language winner. Let me be the first to call BS. Again. I guess for me the next big language will be the one integrating in an easy way parallelization.

Mark Nottingham nails the take-away for pipes: To my eye, the difference — and the power — in Pipes is that the data model isn’t an XML Infoset All that mixing and matching and no XML Schema as far as the eye can see...

If you don't have enough Lisp in your life, and if you're running Metacity (if you're running a stock install of Ubuntu with Gnome that means you), then you can run Devil's Pie [Good docs.]. (if (is (application_name) "Terminal") (begin (maximize) (undecorate) ) ) Easier: (if (is (application_name) "Terminal") (fullscreen)) Posted by Mark on 2007-02-09 Mark, That's similar, but not exactly the same, since (maximize)(undecorate) will leave the top and bottom panels visible.

It looks like Google Trends hasn't been updated since sometime in mid-November. Did someone forget to press "Go" or has the project been abandoned? I hope it's not the latter as I found the site useful.

John Panzer: Software development is a knowledge acquisition activity, not a manufacturing activity. I frequently get asked why I write my own frameworks, my own blogging software, my own blogging client, even my own presentation software. That's the answer: knowledge acquisition. Yeah, I'm with you. Frequently the activity of development is more worthwhile than the end result and also I tend to try to do a very quick first iteration on a design/implementation to extract lessons for the second and later iterations.

Jeff Cutsinger: I have a (mostly) working install of 1812. Wow, color me impressed. Imagine what would happen if 1812 actually had documentation. I would love to hear about the experience. I guess this is an 1812 question, so not exactly offtopic: Why is this entry timestamped 2007-02-04T22:21:27.713835-05:00? That's about twenty minutes from now... Posted by Sam Ruby on 2007-02-04 joe@joe-laptop:~$ date Sun Feb 4 22:32:33 EST 2007 joe@joe-laptop:~$ b Last login: Sun Feb 4 22:25:24 2007 from 72.

The APP Test Client now has its own project page, and a new version is now available. There have been updates to support the latest version of the APP and some more features to help in debugging your APP server, such as the "Export..." button which writes a diagnostics.txt file with the contents of the diagnostics window. The biggest feature of this release is the availibility of a Windows executable.

The call for papers for CASCON 2007 has begun. I really enjoyed the 2006 conference and hope I get a chance to attend again this year.

Larry O'Brien: Give it a REST: Do problems about types and semantics arise with REST and POX? Of course they do. But, and this is the point that is skipped over by the WS-* salesmen, the same problems arise with WS-*. The very point of a service-oriented architecture is that you’re cleaving a very complex domain into a set of subdomains with different responsibilities; the complexity of negotiating what travels across the borders between those domains is an essential, not accidental, characteristic.

Current number of people with internet access: 1,000,000,000 Median number of employees in a Fortune 10 company: 300,000 The ratio is roughly 3000:1. Three orders of magnitude. Just like when you move from the realm of the atom up to the scale of a cell the rules of the road are different. I'm not claiming the difference in scale between internet and intranet is the same as that from atom to cell; there are about 10^14 atoms in a cell, what I am pointing out is that when you move between systems with three orders of magnitude difference in size, the rules are going to change.

I will be going to ETech this year. For the first time I'm travelling to ETech as an IBM employee, and so unlike my last job I won't need to take the time off and pay my own way there. That means I won't be just parachuting in for my presentation and then leaving the next day - I'll be there all four days. This year I won't be speaking, but there will be a face-to-face APP Interop event at the conference.

Bernie Thompson has just announced the availability of Feedsparks, a Google Gadget that plots your FeedBurner stats using Sparklines.

Good news from Matt: So last night I checked everything in for the main Atom feed, which means anything that uses our feed API in WP can now produce Atom 1.0 Excellent. Posted by Geof F. Morris on 2007-01-27

I was helping Reilly, my first grader, build a Space Alien from items around the house; a school assignment due tomorrow. As a final touch we were gluing a rubber band to his head to form a mouth. "Make him smiling." "Why?" "Because he's happy." "Why is he happy?" "Because he just finished sucking someones brains out of their head." "You and I are so ending up in the school counselor's office.

At the behest of Aristotle I've added a comments feed. Thanks! Posted by Aristotle Pagaltzis on 2007-01-24

From the Google Testing Blog: We're unveiling the public release of "Testing on the Toilet": one of Google's little secrets that has helped us to inspire our developers to write well-tested code. And the first one is TotT: Better Stubbing in Python.

Milestones when valid Atom was supposed to be supported by WordPress: milestone: 1.6 set on 7/21/05 milestone: 2.1 set on 11/10/05 milestone: 2.0 set on 11/18/05 milestone: 2.1 set on 11/18/05 milestone: 2.0 set on 12/08/05 milestone: 2.1 set on 12/12/05 milestone: 2.2 set on 11/29/06 Did I mention that WordPress 2.1 shipped yesterday? To add support for Atom 1.0 you will have to follow the directions here. Frustrating. Posted by Geof F.

Joel reviews Dreaming in Code. Now, it would be shockingly presumptuous of me to try to guess what happened on the Chandler team, and why it’s taken them millions of dollars and several years to get to where they are now, which is, they have a pretty buggy and incomplete calendar application that’s not very impressive compared to the 58 me-too Web 2.0 calendars that came out last year, each of which was developed by two college kids in their spare time, one of whom really mostly just drew mascots.

I've been reading The Chubby Lock Service for Loosely-Coupled Distributed Systems by Mike Burrows. It describes Chubby, which is used at Google by both GFS and BigTable. Out of the whole fascinating paper I think Section 4, "Use, surprises and design errors" was far and away the best part. Some example quotes: Chubby’s C++ client library is 7000 lines (comparable with the server), and the client protocol is delicate. To maintain the library in Java would require care and expense, while an implementation without caching would burden the Chubby servers.