Haystack

Traveldudes.org

2009-09-29T22:40:00.000-07:00

SU - Paris, the most popular tourist destination in the world | Traveldudes.org: "In Sardinia the Bed and braeakfast 'I GERANI' from 50 euro to the day to couple offers comfortable rooms with pernottamento and breakfast in villa with garden to 2 km from the sea of Posada Nu."

Baia Dei Fiori

2009-09-29T22:39:00.000-07:00

Baia Dei Fiori: "Nocera Scala, Calabria, Italy"

Lets Get Stupid!

2008-06-12T04:02:00.000-07:00

Is Google Making Us Stupid?
[Atlantic July 2007]

Maybe I’m just a worrywart. Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.”
--Nicholas Carr

I have little choice. If Carr says he is getting stupid, forgetting how to read etc., I need to take him at his word. Carr's understanding of Turing, AI, and measurement reflect the habits of someone who browses too quickly and misses quite a bit.

More thoughtful presentations of this class of problem are available. Brain Rules, for example. Naturally, Brain Rules makes use of extensive text, a DVD, and You Tube video. For those who make use of it, the net allows a much more human interaction than linear text. Words, music, video, photos. Best, the level of formality has dropped. Not so good for the elite, but fine for the rest of us.

More soon on this topic!

O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies

2008-06-08T09:46:00.000-07:00

O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies: "'ve long been a fan of WordSpy, Paul McFedries' site that features definitions and first use of new words and phrases. It's a great trendspotting tool. The words we use give surprising insight into popular consciousness. Many of them, like junk sleep, silent disco, free-range kid, or Blackberry prayer illustrate new social trends, while others like phantom load or quake lake are terms of art that have entered popular consciousness, and still others, like naked street are like deli.cio.us links to things you've never heard of, but could end up being important or useful."
say something interesting

The Weird Sisters - Olivia Judson - Evolution - Opinion - New York Times Blog

2008-06-06T09:39:00.000-07:00

"They just keep getting weirder. The “they” I’m referring to are the bdelloid rotifers — small transparent animals that live in damp places such as puddles, or patches of moss. Among evolutionists, these animals have something of a cult following, because they have a lifestyle that is not supposed to exist. As far as anyone can tell, the bdelloid rotifers are ancient asexuals: they appear to have been living entirely without sex for more than 85 million years. And each time we learn more details of their lifestyle, the wackier it becomes."

Scientists Changing Theories About Memory : NPR

2008-06-05T12:46:00.000-07:00

Scientists Changing Theories About Memory : NPR: "By looking at brain activity during the scans, scientists are concluding that earlier notions of how memory works need to be revised. The old model of memory, says Lehrer, is that the brain was like an immense filing cabinet, where knowledge was stored in a logical order. 'Now, thanks to 'tip of the tongue' research,' says Lehrer, 'they're realizing that it's not like a file cabinet at all but like a very, very messy desk, cluttered with big piles of paper, so when you misplace a word or a name, what you're trying to do is find one piece of paper amid all these billions and billions of piles of paper.'"

Interesting program, but phrases like "...earlier notions of how memory works need to be revised." are both annoying and misleading. Whose 'earlier notion'? How much earlier?

Lehrer's research, interesting as it is, is hardly the first time people noticed that a file cabinet was a poor metaphor for memory.

Slow Food in SF Labor Day 2008

2008-06-05T12:35:00.000-07:00

Taste delicious food, meet farmers, wander urban gardens, and discover the recipe for a fair and sustainable food system.

Connect Visual Studio Tools to Eclipse

2008-06-03T11:47:00.001-07:00

Teamprise : Client Suite

Teamprise is a suite of client applications for accessing Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server from outside of the Visual Studio Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Teamprise enables software development teams to use the source control, work item tracking, documents, and reporting features of Team Foundation Server from within the Eclipse IDE, and from other operating systems, including Linux and Mac OS X.

JAZZwave - About us

2008-06-02T23:11:00.000-07:00

Jazz in Auroville (South India) :: Who Knew?

JAZZwave - About us

Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School | Brain Rules |

2008-06-01T22:07:00.000-07:00

Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School | Brain Rules |
Funny videos & this guy believes in naps!

Colorado Yurt Company - Yurts, yurt info, photos of yurts

2008-06-01T22:05:00.000-07:00

Colorado Yurt Company - Yurts, yurt info, photos of yurts
about 15 grand for 30' diameter & strong enough for winter.

Michelle Kaufmann Designs

2008-06-01T21:09:00.000-07:00

Michelle Kaufmann Designs
Interesting and exciting pre-fab (more or less) prefab housing.
Michelle's blog has an interesting sustainability comparison of typical Menlo Park house and the Breeze house she designed in conjunction with Sunset magazine.

Mobile Internet - O'Reilly Radar

2008-05-27T19:41:00.000-07:00

Mobile Internet - O'Reilly Radar
Good stuff on optimizations for mobile platforms

Can Asus repeat eee sucess on the desktop?

2008-01-06T13:31:00.001-08:00

Asus released the Eee, an amazing solid state mobile computer in October. The 4G (4 gigs of solid state storage is jumping off the shelves and the 8G is in even more demand.

The P22 looks like it may rule on the desktop.

The ASUS Nova P22: The Powerful, Portable Dual Core Mini-Desktop PC
The ASUS Nova P22 is diminutive in footprint but powerful in performance. Designed for space-conscious users who demand ultra-quiet operations, the Nova requires only 122 cubic inches of space and incorporates a robust Intel Core 2 Duo processor that is cooled passively and actively by a heat dissipation module, heat pipes and fans. Supporting the 802.11n wireless standard, the Nova’s high 300 Mbps transmission rate allows users to easily download a 30-minute HD video in just 44 seconds! Completing the ensemble, a pair of built-in speakers housed at the front of the Nova offers convenient high quality audio output. For home theater configurations, the Nova also supports 5.1 speaker configurations with Dolby® Digital Live or DTS® connect technology. Additionally, the Nova accommodates nearly any environment with ease, thanks to its flexible horizontal/vertical placement, slot-loading drive and its sleek exterior. The Nova P22 will be available through ASUS authorized dealers in North America in late January at an introductory MSRP of $799 USD.

Asus Eee :: Solid state, Mobile computing

2007-12-03T13:32:00.000-08:00

Sure there is a lot of hype, but the Eee G4/8 from Asus is an amazing machine at ~$400. The "8G" means 8 gigs of solid state storage -- i.e. no hard drive. It weighs about 2 lb so its a wonderful travel machine that can do real work.

But how to find one -- especially the black edition.

The ASUS Eee PC is once again in the limelight. This time, it has been billed as America’s most wanted Christmas gift among notebooks products. Several large American shopping websites have started investigating what the average American would want as a Christmas gift in lieu of the fast approaching Christmas buying season; and the result from the American Amazon shopping website and CNET based on 14th of November unanimously places the ASUS Eee PC at the top spot on the wish list.
Irresistible Popularity
So overwhelming is the Eee PC’s popularity in America that all the units were snapped up – creating a lack of stock; and stores were inundated with orders for the Christmas season as soon as it was put on the shelves. Long queues were noted on launch day as people flocked to put their

Tables in Haystack

2007-08-24T15:42:00.001-07:00

adobe contribute,publishing,blog,tools

empty table
	thanks	to
		Contribute

Expermenting with Adope Contribute today.

Zurfer, the location-based photo browser from Yahoo! Research Berkeley

2007-08-09T01:11:00.000-07:00

Zurfer, the location-based photo browser from Yahoo! Research Berkeley
The hits just keep on coming...
Yahoo's Berkeley research group has a research prototype supported by Nokia's S60 devices and Motorola's Razr Vx3 -- possibly others. I had no idea how many phones are S60 devices.

See what's around you

Zurfer shows you photos taken around you, and exposes interesting 'local highlights'.
Follow your contacts

Get the latest photos from your Flickr friends, and follow recent comments on your photos.
Take your photos with you

Access your entire Flickr photo collection and your favorites when-
ever & wherever you need them.
'Flickr inside'

Customize Zurfer to use the power of Flickr; get interesting photos; and search for any topic.

ETech 2008 CFP is Open

2007-08-09T00:56:00.000-07:00

ETech 2008 CFP is Open
The Call For Participation for the 2008 edition of the Emerging Technology Conference (AKA ETech) is open. We are going to be expanding the scope of ETech this year. We're going to look beyond the web to manufacturing, biotech, large-scale systems, sensor networks, alternate reality games, visualizations, robotics, policy, human enhancement and clean tech. The CFP closes on September 17th so submit soon! The conference will be held in San Diego from March 3-6, 2008.

A few topics

Energy
Abundant and Ubiquitous Comuting
From Virtual to Physical
Visualization
From Physical to Virtual

Yahoo! Pipes: Deconstructing a Pipe

2007-08-08T16:08:00.000-07:00

Yahoo! Pipes: Deconstructing a Pipe
Pipes and filters for the net.

3D Models from 2-d photos

2007-08-08T10:24:00.000-07:00

Its not the online world, its the world online
-- EveryScape tag line.

3d, 2d, photos, who cares? Architecture, travel, geography, culture are about to change. Google earth is so 2006. If you teach yoga, take pictures for a newspaper, are a photo journalist, or are Italian, checkout EveryScape before reading further.

Companies like Advanced Scientific Concepts (high end) and EveryScape (low end) are changing the rules. Checkout the Advanced Scientific Concepts LADAR system on youtube.

HyperMedia V2.0
EveryScape supports HyperMedia. Not my kind of demo, but check it out.

Becoming a ScapeArtist
All this does not quite make sense, unless you realize that EveryScape is signing up people at several levels of commitment and expertese to shoot the world.

Graffiti Artist
Amateur Artist
Master Artist
Commercial Artist

A Graffiti Artist doesn’t require any special training or skills — just that you are interested in sharing the pride, passion and knowledge you have for your world.

You’ll need to be an experienced Web user and spend a couple of minutes reading and accepting the rules and regulations for adding content. Once you’ve done that, you’ll be able to embed links and content like Web sites, photos, videos, reviews and commentary into scapes. You’ll also be responsible for reporting and removing inappropriate content and ensuring the accuracy of content.

As a Graffiti Artist, it’s up to you to represent your world.

As an Amateur Artist, you will need the passion, pride and local knowledge of a graffiti artist combined with panoramic photography experience. We’ll provide online training resources to help you turn your panoramic art work into the immersive 3D images you see in scaped locales.

After completing the online training and accepting the rules and regulations for posting content, you’ll be able to post panoramic photos that are geo-tagged to locations or on map screenshots. You can also embed links and additional content including Web sites, photos, video reviews and commentary.

Required equipment: Point and shoot digital camera; IPIX Starter Kit; IPIX Interactive Studio Essentials Pack (minimum)

Master Artists share the same passion, pride and local knowledge with our other artists. Because of the increased expectations that go along with being a Master Artist, you must have panoramic photography experience and an understanding of photographic principles like composition, lighting, staging, etc., and more sophisticated equipment.

We’ll provide the same training that Amateur Artists get as well as additional training and information regarding where to take photos and expectations for quality. Once you accept the rules and regulations for posting content, you’ll be able to do everything that an Amateur Artist can do and earn money for your high-quality, relevant work.
Required equipment: Digital SLR; Fisheye lens; PeaceRiver camera head.

Commercial Artists are where the rubber meets the road — literally. As a Commercial Artist, you will travel the highways, byways, avenues, alleys and side streets of locales acquiring GPS-tagged panoramic photos. With this critical work, you are creating the canvas that all other artists will work on.

After 2-3 days of training in the use of the EveryScape car-mounted photography rig, image acquisition and logistical coordination, you’ll be ready to roll. Because of significant time investment, equipment requirements and expectations for quality and consistency, Commercial Artists are compensated for their efforts. And loved by all.

Required equipment: EveryScape car mounted photography rig; access to a car.

Zero :: Zero complexity. Zero overhead. Zero obstacles

2007-08-07T14:42:00.000-07:00

IBM's Zero is out in the open, so to speak. Full stack. Groovy/php scripting. Native Java. Dojo integration. Oh, yes, there is Ivy, Json and MySQL too.
I'm feeling RESTful all ready.

Of course, Atom & RSS are baked right in.

NING :: A toolkit for creating social networks

2007-08-07T08:28:00.001-07:00

Want your own version of FaceBook targeted at kayakers or yoga instructors?
Checkout Ning.
Many interesting things for developers about the API.

Amazon Flexible Payment Service (FPS)

2007-08-03T09:50:00.000-07:00

Amazon introduced a public beta of FPS today.

Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS) is the first payments service designed from the ground up specifically for developers. The set of web services APIs allows the movement of money between any two entities, humans or computers. It is built on top of Amazon's reliable and scalable payment infrastructure.

Two features (of many) that are appealing

capacity to bundle many micro payments into a monthly payment
ability to develop applications that serve as middlemen.

For example a website featuring kayaking instructional videos could charge 1 cent per view and get payment at the end of each month for 35 cents.

Because of the ability to server as a middleman, a portal site could handle transactions for a variety of customers using the portal -- perhaps sites with kayaking, snowboarding, and yoga videos.

Sanyo VPC-E1 Underwater Camcorder

2007-07-28T17:36:00.001-07:00

I've been looking for the right video camera. Quite a challenge since I'd like professional quality the size and price of a pin.
For many people, the Flip may be the bee's knees, but I'd like to study some underwater issues -- duck dives, kayak rolls, trout, hatches.
I just ordered this Sanyo VPC-E1 in blue. As far as I can see, its only competition is the same model in white.
Other approaches to inexpensive youtube quality video + some underwater capactity all depend upon underwater housing. Not for me. We shall see.

next generation reading

2007-07-28T15:19:00.000-07:00

Next generation of humans, that is.
Andrew Savikas of O'Reilly gave some of his blog space to two summer interns. Read all about their approach to teenage reading.

Flip Video

2007-07-24T22:59:00.000-07:00

Here is a sample of Flip Video snatched off the web. Flip Video camera :: 30-60 minutes of decent video and almost decent sound. Ask me: "Is it easy to use?" I'll tell you no lie: "Yes".

Flip Video is so cheap, you can (and should) give one to your friends, kayak instructors, yoga-mates, and all the children you can find.

Adobe AIR and Rich Internet Applications

2007-07-23T09:21:00.001-07:00

Rich Internet Applications (RIA) have been a long time comming, but tools are emerging which will make them affordable for a wide range of developers.

Adobe's AIR is one foundation, a complex suite of tools from Google is another.

With proper use, the two are compatable.

open source portals

2007-07-23T08:55:00.000-07:00

Manageability maintains a list of open source portals written in Java. I'm looking for a similar list for

Ruby that extends beyond Ruby on Rails
Adobe's platform

Web Trends 2007 v 2.0

2007-07-21T20:23:00.000-07:00

Japan's Information Architects has published a subway-style map of the 200 most successful websites on the web, ordered by category, proximity, success, popularity and perspective.

The map is dense; it requires attention; it is likely to be useful to anyone who is "...exploring, defining and explaining the Internet strategy and positioning."

Its worthwhile to examine the IA home page as well as the map since the homepage includes, discussion, feedback, etc.

Nutch

2007-07-11T12:46:00.000-07:00

Nutch is an open source Java implementation of a search engine. It provides all of the tools you need to run your own search engine. But why would anyone want to run their own search engine? After all, there's always Google. There are at least three reasons.

Transparency. Nutch is open source, so anyone can see how the ranking algorithms work. With commercial search engines, the precise details of the algorithms are secret so you can never know why a particular search result is ranked as it is. Furthermore, some search engines allow rankings to be based on payments, rather than on the relevance of the site's contents. Nutch is a good fit for academic and government organizations, where the perception of fairness of rankings may be more important.
Understanding. We don't have the source code to Google, so Nutch is probably the best we have. It's interesting to see how a large search engine works. Nutch has been built using ideas from academia and industry: for instance, core parts of Nutch are currently being re-implemented to use the Map Reduce distributed processing model, which emerged from Google Labs last year. And Nutch is attractive for researchers who want to try out new search algorithms, since it is so easy to extend.
Extensibility. Don't like the way other search engines display their results? Write your own search engine--using Nutch! Nutch is very flexible: it can be customized and incorporated into your application. For developers, Nutch is a great platform for adding search to heterogeneous collections of information, and being able to customize the search interface, or extend the out-of-the-box functionality through the plugin mechanism. For example, you can integrate it into your site to add a search capability.

Nutch installations typically operate at one of three scales: local filesystem, intranet, or whole web. All three have different characteristics. For instance, crawling a local filesystem is reliable compared to the other two, since network errors don't occur and caching copies of the page content is unnecessary (and actually a waste of disk space). Whole-web crawling lies at the other extreme. Crawling billions of pages creates a whole host of engineering problems to be solved: which pages do we start with? How do we partition the work between a set of crawlers? How often do we re-crawl? How do we cope with broken links, unresponsive sites, and unintelligible or duplicate content? There is another set of challenges to solve to deliver scalable search--how do we cope with hundreds of concurrent queries on such a large dataset? Building a whole-web search engine is a major investment. In " Building Nutch: Open Source Search," authors Mike Cafarella and Doug Cutting (the prime movers behind Nutch) conclude that:

... a complete system might cost anywhere between $800 per month for two-search-per-second performance over 100 million pages, to $30,000 per month for 50-page-per-second performance over 1 billion pages.

This series of two articles shows you how to use Nutch at the more modest intranet scale (note that you may see this term being used to cover sites that are actually on the public internet--the point is the size of the crawl being undertaken, which ranges from a single site to tens, or possibly hundreds, of sites). This first article concentrates on crawling: the architecture of the Nutch crawler, how to run a crawl, and understanding what it generates. The second looks at searching, and shows you how to run the Nutch search application, ways to customize it, and considerations for running a real-world system.

--thanks to java.net & Tom White for the summary

Safari :: to the rescue

2006-12-11T07:38:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I subscribed to Oreilly's Safari Bookshelf. Today I used it for the first time & I'm already happy. I just happened to notice that David Progue's "Missing Manual..." series has a volume on switching to the mac.
I can't tell if I'm getting the smallest ibook, the big power mac or something in between, but I'm finally, after 22 or so years, making the switch.
Enough of that, the point is because I have Safari, checking out the book is simple with no marginal cost.
Plus, I'm saving a tree.

system76

2006-11-18T10:59:00.000-08:00

thanks to O'Reilly Radar I know where to get hardware...System76, dedicated linux.

ajax support in eclipse

2006-11-09T02:20:00.000-08:00

The Ajax Tools Framework (ATF) is improving Ajax support in eclipse.

A few flash demos are available.
There is a little traffic on Planet Eclipse.

javascript and eclipse

2006-10-30T02:37:00.000-08:00

People are beginning to change their minds.

Scripting Java :: JavaScript

2006-10-20T06:29:00.000-07:00

Interaction between the JVM based object system and another object system has many possible uses. For example

end users in many industries are already familiar with JavaScript and can use it to extend behavior of Java objects w/o learning Java, the constraints of Java, etc.
Java developers may use it for exploratory programming
Ajax is a special case
WebMonkey at eclipse appears to be stalled, but its intent was to allow much faster development of user interfaces in eclipse by going from JavaScript to to the RCP plugins
An entire JavaScript development environment has been built using this idea.
BIRT, a reporting framework for eclipse, provides java/javascript integration.

Rhino
EclipseMonkey
Aptana
BIRT

.

Java, Groovy, and (J) Ruby

2006-09-18T09:10:00.000-07:00

So, you want to learn few scripting and dynamically typed language(s) for the Java platform? The following will get a Java programmer started with Groovy and (J)Ruby. It is said that you can write Fortran in any language! While you still have to learn language specific idioms, naming, coding conventions/styles etc., the table below would help you with "quick start". To re-iterate: you need to pick up language specific idioms as Reg Braithwaite notes in his comment below.

I wrote simple script samples and tried the same with command line wrappers of jrunscript. If you CVS checked out script engines from scripting.dev.java.net, these scripts are in bin directories of respective script engine directories. I used Groovy 1.0 JSR 06 and JRuby 0.9.0 versions respectively.

A. Sundararajan's Weblog

NetBeans is paying a lot more attention to dynamic languages than eclipse foundation

eclipse plugin hangups

2006-08-05T09:36:00.000-07:00

Nothing serious. A couple nits and some weirdness. Pretty much all user error.

I had a devil of a time getting access to some classes (CoreException) that should not have been a problem. Problem cleared up when I deleted the trailing empty line of .classpath. Help!
Used Clayberg/Rubel to get some easy testing of a View. Cool. Remember to make sure the View is visable (probably a new accessor) from the source code and from the plugin manifest. Clearly that should be easy to remember.

Clayberg and Rubel deserve a metal.

How to set up Eclipse

2006-07-31T08:06:00.000-07:00

How to set up Eclipse
Interesting page layout and concept. Really it covers ant, apache, svn, and junit as a package before installing eclipse.

I have not attempted to follow it, but the concept alone is valuable. The page is divided into three columns:
--summary & download
--installation tips
--background
Very cool.

So Big and Healthy Grandpa Wouldn’t Even Know You - New York Times

2006-07-30T22:14:00.000-07:00

So Big and Healthy Grandpa Wouldn’t Even Know You - New York Times: "By GINA KOLATA

Valentin Keller enlisted in an all-German unit of the Union Army in Hamilton, Ohio, in 1862. He was 26, a small, slender man, 5 feet 4 inches tall, who had just become a naturalized citizen. He listed his occupation as tailor.

A year later, Keller was honorably discharged, sick and broken. He had a lung ailment and was so crippled from arthritis in his hips that he could barely walk.

His pension record tells of his suffering. “His rheumatism is so that he is unable to walk without the aid of crutches and then only with great pain,” it says. His lungs and his joints never got better, and Keller never worked again.

He died at age 41 of “dropsy,” which probably meant that he had congestive heart failure, a condition not associated with his time in the Army. His 39-year-old wife, Otilia, died a month before him of what her death certificate said was “exhaustion.”

People of Valentin Keller’s era, like those before and after them, expected to develop chronic diseases by their 40’s or 50’s. Keller’s descendants had lung problems, they had heart problems, they had liver problems. They died in their 50’s or 60’s.

Now, though, life has changed. The family’s baby boomers are reaching middle age and beyond and are doing fine.

“I feel good,” says Keller’s great-great-great-grandson Craig Keller. At 45, Mr. Keller says he has no health problems, nor does his 45-year-old wife, Sandy.

"
Full of amazing information -- especially that on the civil war generation and the 1918 influenza survivors.

'Sitefinder' Mobile Phone Base Station Database

2006-07-30T09:14:00.000-07:00

'Sitefinder' Mobile Phone Base Station Database
Do we have anything like this in the US?

MIT researchers watch brain in action - MIT News Office

2006-07-29T14:13:00.000-07:00

MIT researchers watch brain in action - MIT News Office:
"...an unprecedented look into how genes shape the brain in response to the environment. Their work is reported in the July 28 issue of Cell.

'This work represents a technological breakthrough,' said first author Kuan Hong Wang, a research scientist at the Picower Institute who will launch his own laboratory at the National Institute of Mental Health in the fall. 'This is the first study that demonstrates the ability to directly visualize the molecular activity of individual neurons in the brain of live animals at a single-cell resolution, and to observe the changes in the activity in the same neurons in response to the changes of the environment on a daily basis for a week.'"

Gianni Milanesi’s Weblog � AjaxWp - An AJAX enhancement for WordPress blogs

2006-07-29T14:05:00.000-07:00

Gianni Milanesi’s Weblog � AjaxWp - An AJAX enhancement for WordPress blogs: "AjaxWp is a lightweight JavaScript enhancement that adds AJAX functionality to WordPress blogs speeding up load times, increasing the responsiveness of the user interface and giving the blog an overall cooler look.

Out of the box AjaxWp requires minimal configuration and no additional markup, other than the script inclusions in the header file and a support PHP file. This allows AjaxWp to degrade gracefully and leave the blog fully functional even for users with JavaScript disabled."

MagicDraw 11.5 Delivers UML 2 EMF Model ...

2006-07-29T07:25:00.000-07:00

MagicDraw 11.5 Delivers UML 2 EMF Model ...: "Addressing the customers' need to use UML 2 models in major MDA tools or the exchange with other modeling tools based on Eclipse, MagicDraw 11.5 adds the export of its model to EMF based UML 2 XMI. It allows interchange of UML 2 models with most popular MDA tools such as AndroMDA, OpenArchitectureWare, Mia-Generation, Mia-Transformations and others for further manipulation and transformation. With the new version, No Magic continues to support its commitment of MagicDraw being the modeling tool of choice in the world of Model Driven Architecture. "

The n Habits of Highly Defective Windows Applications

2006-07-25T13:26:00.000-07:00

The n Habits of Highly Defective Windows Applications

Web 2.0 Technologies: GZoom - a better Google Maps Zoom control

2006-07-25T08:29:00.000-07:00

Web 2.0 Technologies: GZoom - a better Google Maps Zoom control

Google Web Toolkit get GUI / RPC IDE

2006-07-18T22:40:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Ed Burnett, we know it will be out tomorrow.
Evidently it integrates with the eclipse Web Tools as well. Looks like it hides most of the nasty stuff and allows one to work at an object level w/o worrying about distribution, etc.

JS-Sorcerer 2.0 Released

2006-07-15T08:08:00.000-07:00

I saw an early version at OOPSLA 2005

JS-Sorcerer™ helps you create interactive applications by quickly locating JavaScript problems and translating your standard programs to run in all popular browsers.
JS-Sorcerer can be used as a plugin to the Eclipse IDE or via a command-line interface.

Wonder how/if it works with GWT.

Google Mini + docs == Domain Library

2006-04-19T18:37:00.000-07:00

Google servers have been around for some time & the mini is a low cost version that handles modest numbers of documents (50-300k). More advanced aversions like Google OneBox support tight integration with middleware from the big players (Cognos, Oracle, Salesforce.com, SAS, etc.).

Combine the Mini (~$4,000) or Google OneBox (~$30,000) with an open source CMS and get a domain specific site for almost nothing.

I can think of organizations that would spend $30,000 just deciding which $4,000 box to buy before they spent $500,000 on a proprietary CMS!

Google Calendar & Stuff

2006-04-16T09:10:00.000-07:00

Google has released their long-awaited calendar. It can be used as part of a larger offering, as outlined below.

Here is a simplified view of how I plan on using the calendar:

Blaine's Calendar :: for my use
Blaine's Work Calendar :: for exposing work issues for to co-workers
Blaine's Recration Calendar :: shared with people I want to co-plan biking, flicks, dinner, etc.
Work Calendar :: shared by all co-workers

I like Google Talk, but find that it often confuses people because I use multiple machines & it can look like I'm available when I'm not (or don't want to be) unless I spend a lot of time managing my Google Talk visibility.

The Google anouncement (critical text):
This special beta test lets you give Gmail, Google's webmail service, to every user at your domain. Gmail for your domain is hosted by Google, so there's no hardware or software for you to install or maintain.

Gmail - 2 gigabytes of storage and search tools that help your users find information fast. Instant messaging from right inside their accounts.
Google Talk - Users can call or send instant messages to their contacts for free – anytime, anywhere in the world.
Google Calendar (coming soon) - Users can organize their schedules and share events and calendars with others. Learn more
Control Panel - Easily manage user accounts, aliases, mailing lists, and chat settings.

Editing this post was a real pain because neither blooger nor gmail (both owned by google) can handle html properly. Cutting and pasting between them is an exercise for the foolish. [If you ar foolish, as I am, try pasting to plain text then copying again to the gmail or blogger target.]

Ultra-fast release cycles @ myspace

2006-04-10T09:52:00.000-07:00

Getting frequency of release cycles right is hard.
Tension between the OSS pressure for frequent releases and IT department's desire for releases once or twice a year is an issue for companies like Red Hat and JBoss. (RH just purchased the latter.)
The mylar project at eclipse is headed in a different direction. They are inspired by things like the myspace model, in which a two week cycle is considered long.
My take:
Anyone who wants to be adopted by the under 30 set, better figure out myspace. A combination of ajax applications (not pages) and eclipse desktop clients with automatic updates allows a balance between IT and user needs.

Red Hat buys JBoss

2006-04-10T09:46:00.000-07:00

Free software company worth $420 million.
Red Hat, a company which sells and supports a branded version of Linux, with close partnerships with companies like Oracle and IBM, announced its decision to buy JBoss, another OSS company with a world class application server. JBoss development is facilitated with an eclipse based IDE. Ed Burnett published a rough transcript of the announcement, which has interesting comments on OSS in general.

EclipseCon 2006 :: 21 March Schedule

2006-03-22T07:43:00.000-08:00

One cool thing about eclipseCon is the quality of the web documentation -- I especially like the capacity of anyone to post their own recommended track and the ability to see flexible color coding of recommendations. [If this is not obvious, be sure to scroll to the bottom of the page. I wish I had published my own track.
Here is what I'm looking at today:
Stein's keynote
Pollock's Your Action is My Command -- commands are new to 3.2
Franklin's Redoing Undo -- looks like it will have some material on headless eclipse -- I'm always interested in headless + Franklin is a Smalltalker. That never hurts.
Ward's keynote
Elder's Common Navigator Framework --- looks like its the best way to approach navigation
Merks' XML Binding --- I'd like to understand DOM vs EMF better.
I'll also attend the short talks in the Theater as they are more RCP oriented and
Instantiations demo of their new RCP tool at 8 pm.

Thus spake Joel

2006-03-21T09:28:00.000-08:00

Joel Spolsky has not been my favorite writer; I almost skipped this morning's keynote type talk. Fortunately I did not. If nothing else, his characterization of K. R. was worth the trip:

He is so stupid he could not empty a boot full of piss if the instructions were printed on the heel.

Joel presented his magic formula for successful software:

Make people happy
Think about emotions
Obsess over aesthetics.

Always focused on the popular image of his audience, there were plenty of references, verbal and visual, to people, generally not of the same gender as the majority of the audience, wearing not all that many clothes.

Fortunately, his motivation for his three principles really was well done and informative. I now know I need to study the design of the Poupidou Center, a guy named Rapaile, and the principles of misattribution.

Who is K.R.?

FolderShare Syncs Files

2006-03-15T07:10:00.000-08:00

Microsoft purchased a few months ago. Pretty cool.

Open Source at Eclipse: Callisto M5 and the Callisto Great Bugs Contest

2006-03-11T14:29:00.000-08:00

Open Source at Eclipse: Callisto M5 and the Callisto Great Bugs Contest
While the plug-in archiecture of eclipse allows interoperation, or at least co-existence, between diverse tools and applications, tools are often based on different eclipse releases and conflicts are common. The Callisto project will bring several of the major projects into alignment and allow tools based on them to have a firm foundation which exploits recent progress. Callisto will be released with eclipse 3.2 which will appear in June 2006. [Major releases of eclipse appear each June.]
Projects based upon some combination of BIRT (OO Report Writer), Data Tools Platform, Eclipse Modeling Framework, Graphical Editor Framework, Graphical Modeling Framework, Eclipse Test and Performance Tools Platform, the Visual Editor or even the C/C++ IDE should probably start building on the current (M5) release of eclipse 3.2. There will be a few rough spots, but by the end of July a great deal of stability in the core components will exist.

Selenium IDE

2006-02-16T18:09:00.000-08:00

Complete IDE for building Selenium tests. Don't use Selenium? Hope you are not building web pages.

Netgear RangeMax

2005-12-15T18:46:00.000-08:00

Oddities of setting up the the base station drove me nuts.
But, speed.
I get 500 mbs most of the time.
There may be better stuff, but this sure beats 802.11b/g.
The cost is about twice as much as 11g, but I'm getting almost the effective throughput of some 1gig networks!

For example, my wireless connection at home is about twice as fast as my wired connection at work.

Loosely coupled books on Radar

2005-12-13T23:17:00.000-08:00

The clever crowd at O'Reilly Radar shows how they keep their book list up to date with Backpack, the Amazon Web Services, and unchanged day-to-day notes on books.
The result: syndicated book lists from big guns at O'Reilly.

xamp eclipse web tools

2005-09-26T05:02:00.000-07:00

xampp is the way to go to get php, mysql, and apache going quickly & with them eclipse web tools serves up content with ease. XAMP rather than LAMP i.e. these packages have the core stack configured to work as a stack on the Windows monster.
Several packages include more -- Tomcat, Cocoon, etc.
Ruby?
RoR?

What is a report?

2005-02-19T07:16:00.000-08:00

I guess that is a pretty broad term, lets ignore reports from the fireing of guns, annual reports from Enron, and reports of poor manners sent to the principal 's office.