"The Conference about the Future Right before your eyes, more than 70 of the world's most promising new technologies will be unveiled for the very first time. The hottest. The newest. The best. It's a sneak peek at the future of the technology business. "
Access to all the presentation showed at Demo 07 ... :-)
The art of ranking code search results: "I am often asked the question - so how do you rank your source code results ?
While the ranking of web page results has a well understood set of heuristics and algorithms, this is somewhat unchartered territory as far as ranking source code goes. For web pages most search engines use some version of link analysis to derive a static (independent of the query) score for each page, and then apply the run-time query text against the page content, inbound link anchor text, and other heuristics to come up with a final score and ranking for their hits.
But what does it mean to rank source code files? How does one say that file A which has the word ‘test’ in it should rank higher than file B which also contains the same text?
In our earlier attempts at this we tried things like just boosting files that were named ‘test’ to the top of the list - that soon got to be ridiculous, when we started seeing the top 20 results all named ‘test’.
Another approach we tried looked at was boosting the repository - not all repositories are created equal… Well, we soon got into a state where the top results were from just one repository.
We have now settled down into something we think is more meaningful to us and our users.
The filename is taken into account, but so is the project: how active it has been, how big it is, and other project specific details. But unlike parsing web pages as just a stream of text, we do either full code parsing or some fuzzy parsing to extract meaningful syntactic elements from source code. For example, we know whether the word ‘test’ is in a comment versus it being a function call or a function definition.
So for the Krugle source code ranking recipe, we combine repository and project-level information to generate a static code file score, and then use syntactic information to boost function definitions over function calls, function calls over comment text, and so on.
In the office we still have passionate debates about what we ought to return for a general query such as ‘language:java’ - how does one rank something so generic? That, IMHO, is a user experience issue and not a ranking problem - we either need to detect these types of queries and generate alternative, meaningful results, or we need to convince our users that they shouldn’t be doing that.
Anyway, the above represents where we are after a year of work, but I’m sure it will continue to evolve. Let us know if it isn’t (or is) working for you - thanks! "
(Via Krugle Blog.)
.. I'm pretty sure, that we will see more and more of these domain-specific search engines .. Krugle is a good example for that, as the article above proves .. they use specific domain logic to improve search results, something a generic search engine just can't do ..
What a brilliant idea! Google Co-op lets you define your own search engine, you define what sites should get included in your own Google search.
"Harness the power of Google search to create a free Custom Search Engine that reflects your knowledge and interests. Specify the websites that you want searched - and integrate the search box and results into your own website."
.. and as a nice side effect for Google, it gets information filtering for free, and of course, some more revenue from their ads, shared partially with you.. just brilliant ..
..kind of hard for me .. but I have to say, this editor from Microsoft to create or edit blog posts looks pretty cool .. and it has an amazing preview mode! .. and it even works with MoveableType ..
"Welcome to alphaWorks Services: online delivery of emerging software services from IBM research and development labs."
"alphaWorks services are on-demand applications developed by various teams throughout IBM Research. The services are prototypes of emerging technologies and concepts available as online applications through any Web browser. Services are provided at no charge, along with community features such as forums and supporting content specific to each service."
.. for example: ADIEU:
"Ad Hoc Development and Integration Tool for End Users (ADIEU) is a radically simplified programming tool for development of Web services and Web applications in minutes and hours instead of days, weeks, and months."
.. sounds at least fancy .. by the way, 'ADIEU' means 'goodby' in other languages, don't exactly know if that is a good choice for a name ;-) ..
OSDI'06 Paper: BigTable: "Bigtable is a distributed storage system for managing structured data that is designed to scale to a very large size: petabytes of data across thousands of commodity servers. Many projects at Google store data in Bigtable, including web indexing, Google Earth, and Google Finance. These applications place very different demands on Bigtable, both in terms of data size (from URLs to web pages to satellite imagery) and latency requirements (from backend bulk processing to real-time data serving). Despite these varied demands, Bigtable has successfully provided a flexible, high-performance solution for all of these Google products. In this paper we describe the simple data model provided by Bigtable, which gives clients dynamic control over data layout and format, and we describe the design and implementation of Bigtable."
.. extremely interesting paper .. it provides insight about Googles technology .. just read it! ..
"Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud / EC2 is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers."
"...Amazon EC2 allows you to set up and configure everything about your instances from your operating system up to your applications. An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is simply a packaged-up environment that includes all the necessary bits to set up and boot your instance."
.. I know, again Amazon, but they are doing quite fancy stuff .. I definitely have to check this out, the whole concept of deployable "AMI"s sounds pretty interesting .. technical documents can be found here ..
Monetizing Web 2.0: "I've often complained that the business model of most companies publishing Web 2.0 APIs — even Google — is generally, 'Let's put it out there, we'll figure out how to make money from it later on.' The exception is Amazon Web Services. All its API services are designed from the outset to make money."
.. I probably repeat myself .. but I just like that business model just better than some fancy advertisement based model or some everything is free thinking .. but unfortunately that doesn't necessarily mean, that it will be successful ..
Multi-Touch Interaction Research: "While touch sensing is commonplace for single points of contact, multi-touch sensing enables a user to interact with a system with more than one finger at a time, as in chording and bi-manual operations. Such sensing devices are inherently also able to accommodate multiple users simultaneously, which is especially useful for larger interaction scenarios such as interactive walls and tabletops"
.. definitely the UI everyone of us wants to get, everyone is dreaming of .. additional to the video on the research page above, check the video from a presentation from Jeff Han at the recent TEDTalks conference .. unbelieveable cool ..
Google challenges SourceForge in open source project hosting: "Google announced today at OSCON, the O’Reilly open source conference, that it has launched an open source project hosting site that will rival SourceForge.net. The service has been given the unglamorous name Google Code Project Hosting."
.. once again, I would say, nice try Google, but it just doesn't look finished, it definitely doesn't look like a competitor to SourceForge .. the article additionally mentions some other project hosting site named DejaVu ..
(Via Techcrunch.)
Paying For Web Services -- Easier Than You Think?: "Amazon's new S3 service is available on a pay-as-you-go basis. This is commonly called utility computing; it is totally analogous to the way in which you pay for the water, electricity, and natural gas that you use in your home."
.. interesting post .. it just shows one of the most important assets of Amazon: the technology, including processes, they accumulate in the huge space of Web Services .. the book store, just a cool test-case for their technology ..
"Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.
Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers."
.. that is a pretty cool thing .. a platform for innovation .. you can store up to 5 GByte per object .. it even offers Bit-Torrent access .. pay as you go .. offered by Amazon Digital Services ..
MoMB, "The Museum of Modern Betas" the perfect place to get an overview of all the new web-based applications. Cool!
Congrats to Writely: "Congrats to the team who made Writely for getting acquired by Google. They built it in .NET. It used to be uncool to startup a company with Microsoft technologies, but I’ve seen more and more .NET stuff being done in the Valley. Who’s next?"
(Via Scobleizer - Microsoft Geek Blogger.)
.. who have thought .. and it proves that .NET doesn't necessarily mean IE-only ;-) ..
Google Pages Released: "Although there has been no official announcement yet Google have released the long awaited and long-rumored Google Pages (which has nothing to do with cloning Larry Page). Pages allows users to create a webpage using an AJAX interface that removes a lot of the ‘pain’ associated with creating pages with HTML and other desktop design applications. If you have some time on your hands and would like to try this out, then head over to http://pages.google.com to signup. If you have an existing Google account (they snuck that on us, didn’t they) then getting a pages account is very simple.
Once you are in the application you are presented with a WYSIWYG interface displaying your page and some editing controls. The interface in terms of what they have done with client-side Javascript is impressive, and what Google has done in terms of putting up simple pages is cool but overall it is an underwhelming gimmick that may have some potential if they focus. Google Pages allows you to upload files, create many pages that you can link up, and select from a smorgasbord of templates. The website which you can then push out to publish can then be found at username.googlepages.com..."
(Via TechCrunch.)
.. they just have too much money to play around .. guys at Google get focused again! .. do what you can do best ..
"Offering VMware Server for free will bring VMware's proven virtualization technology to a wider audience, allowing companies to achieve the benefits of virtualization, such as cost reductions and flexible server provisioning."
.. right on! ..
JotSpot-Powered Video Clip Sharing Service: "Mandalan Media recently launched the beta of strmz.com (pronounced 'streams'), a JotSpot-powered video clip-sharing destination. Strmz.com features up-to-the minute videos from major media outlets such as NBC, HBO, and Comedy Central, along with popular video blogs and top-rated content from video upload services like Google Video."
(Via JotBlog.)
.. interesting Video portal .. definitely much nicer UI than Google Video .. have to check if I can integrate the RSS feeds with iTunes ..
Behind the magic curtain: "Next week Steve Jobs of Apple will grab media attention with another simple-looking stage show. Mike Evangelist tells the insider secrets of his gruelling preparation "
.. Steve's preparation - a prefect preparation for his show this coming week ..
Are you a Minipreneur?: "According to Trendwatching.com, a minipreneur is a consumer-turned-entrepreneur, taking advantage of resources that were, just a short time ago, available only to large multinational organizations, including cheap hardware and software, access to global design, production, and manufacturing skills, payment systems, online marketplaces, and more."
(Via Amazon Web Services Blog.)
Jon Udell: Predictions for 2006: "Although punditry seems to require year-end assessments and predictions, I usually resist the urge. But this year I came up with an angle."
.. contains some interesting numbers, like time between "first mention" and "acquisition" of some Web 2.0 services ..
Google offers a new search, a music search. Just enter an artist name and Google delivers albums including tracks, lyrics (too bad, those sites will need some good lawyers, thanks to Google search), direct link into the iTunes music store and other information of the artist.
I gave it a try and searched for "Madonna". Everything looked reasonable until I clicked on the "Latest News" link on the artist's result page .. e voila, same problem as with Froogle-Local and some Google Map services, the results are just bad. The first entries point to art pages including the "Munch art theft" .. Madonna an art thief?
Of course an obvious shortcoming of Google, all the "linkage" between those different areas is based on a pure software solution, no human-involved; a potential lethal weakness for Google, and the World Wide Web in general.
Thanks to Google we already get flooded by tons of miss-leading aggregation and "review" sites; sites that obviously try to use Google's "logic" for their own purposes ... Google kills the World Wide Web??
Yahoo and JSON: "JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data format based on the object notation of the JavaScript language. It does not require JavaScript to read or write; it is easy to parse by any language and libraries and tools exist in many languages to handle JSON. Many of the Yahoo! Web Services provide JSON as an alternate output format to XML."
.. don't know where to put this .. it reminds me a lot of good old "Anythings" .. therefor it could be an interesting alternative to XML ..
"Verosee extends Skype to provide free workspaces that synchronize files and chats. This eradicates the inherent disorganization of trading email attachments and exchanging portable media. Verosee enables teams to have contextual awareness of each other's activities bringing convergence and continuity to the project life cycle. As a result, teams become more effective before, during, and after project meetings."
.. sounds very interesting .. can't install it right now, because of firewall issues :-( ..
"FolderShare is a service that allows you to securely keep files synchronized between your devices, share files with friends or colleagues, and remotely download your files from any web browser."
.. Microsoft just bought this company .. and they are offering the service now for free, including 2GB space .. works with PC and Mac :-) .. but can we trust Microsoft ..
buzztracker: "World News, Mapped", a nice visualization of locations of current news reports .. cool .. finally everyone can see where the city of Amman is .. but I don't really know what that disabled link "tomorrow" should be for ;-)
Sun Grid: "Sun is changing the very nature of utility computing with the new Sun Grid utility offerings, enabling you to purchase computing and storage power as you need it, without the long-term lifecycle costs related to capital, management, depreciation, and floor space. Sun Grid radically simplifies the way you select, acquire, and use next generation IT infrastructure. "
.. sounds boring at first .. but it's not .. Sun is up to something .. check the reference guide and the press releases ..
"Amazon Mechanical Turk provides a web services API for computers to integrate Artificial Artificial Intelligence directly into their processing by making requests of humans. Developers use the Amazon Mechanical Turk web services API to submit tasks to the Amazon Mechanical Turk web site, approve completed tasks, and incorporate the answers into their software applications. To the application, the transaction looks very much like any remote procedure call - the application sends the request, and the service returns the results. In reality, a network of humans fuels this Artificial Artificial Intelligence by coming to the web site, searching for and completing tasks, and receiving payment for their work."
.. interesting .. but what da heck is this .. think, think ..
"OOPSLA again, lots of conference and all sorts of ideas. It's impossible to do a proper write-up of this conference - there's too much for any one human to attend, let alone take in. So these are scattered thoughts"
.. a great summary with a lot of interesting links .. thanks to Martin Fowler!..
Continuum: "The Maven Project has posted the first beta of Continuum, a "continuous intergration server for building Java based projects". Continuum supports projects based on Ant, Maven 1, and Maven 2. It exposes web and XML_RPC interfaces, and provides e-mail notification of build failures."
(Via Cafe au Lait.)
..that sounds interesting..
Google's RSS feed reader: "This would have been much bigger news a year ago, but Google finally has a Bloglines-like, MyYahoo-like RSS reader. It was introduced today at Web 2.0. You can get to it here."
(Via SiliconBeat.)
.. no comment for now, have to test it first .. update: fancy reader, lot of DHTML .. another update: very cool PodCast integration, including MP3 player ..
Writeboard: "Write a business letter, copy for your website, a marketing brochure, or a product description, or a weblog post, or a song, or a poem, or an idea, or an essay, or a book chapter, or whatever else you might normally write in your email program, text editor, or word processor."
.. another interesting example from the 37signals people .. still like their ideas, but not the fact that all the information gets just stored on their servers, no local replication ..
Find-A-Human: "Hit zero twice, after menu choices play"
.. cool .. a list of customer service numbers of different large companies and specific tips how to get a human answering your phone call ..
"Called Synapse, the Apache-sponsored project aims to define code for a distributed web services intermediary, to handle connectivity, transformation and routing of messages as they flow between service providers and consumers. This functionality is a core part of enterprise service bus and web services management products. If vendors decide to support the Synapse code, it will become easier for customers to migrate between platforms or to mix-and-match functionality from best-of-breed suppliers."
.. interesting .. let's see if the time is right ..
"Skype API for Mac has currently Cocoa, Carbon and AppleScript interfaces. Cocoa and Carbon interfaces are implemented in Skype.framework. The recommended way to use the Skype framework is to include it in your application as an embedded framework. Copy it into your application bundle and link it to your application."
Yahoo! to release Shopping API: "By tim From Jeff McManus in email: ' Just wanted to drop you a quick note to let you know that this morning Yahoo is releasing a new product for developers/web site owners, the Yahoo! Shopping API. The idea is to let folks use Web services calls to pull data from our comparison shopping database to republish on their Web sites or within software applications. More info will be posted soon on the Y! Search blog (http://www.ysearchblog.com/) and the Yahoo! Developer Network blog (http://developer.yahoo.net/blog). The main product page containing documentation and other resources will be located at http://developer.yahoo.net/shopping/. This should all be available on the site by 10:30AM Pacific this morning.' "
(Via O'Reilly Radar.)
"With EverNote you can easily store and quickly access typed and handwritten memos, webpage excerpts, emails, phone messages, addresses, passwords, brainstorms, sketches, documents and more!"
.. sounds promising .. lets give it a try .. Windows only :-( .. and there is something else they are missing .. some important thing .. but still a good try :-) ..
Gmail - Plus-addressing: "Gmail also supports 'plus-addressing' of emails. Messages can be sent to addresses in the form: gmail.user+extratext@gmail.com where extratext can be any string. Plus-addressing allows users to sign up for different services with different aliases and then easily filter all e-mails from those services. The string appended to the e-mail address may not be longer than six characters."
.. that is a cool feature, especially together with Gmail-filters .. it sounds like other email server support that too ..
Joel on Software - Hitting the High Notes:
"And in fact the conventional wisdom in the world of copycat business journalists and large companies who rely on overpaid management consultants to think for them, chew their food, etc., seems to be that the most important thing is reducing the cost of programmers.
In some other industries, cheap is more important than good. Wal*Mart grew to be the biggest corporation on Earth by selling cheap products, not good products. If Wal*Mart tried to sell high quality goods, their costs would go up and their whole cheap advantage would be lost. For example if they tried to sell a tube sock that can withstand the unusual rigors of, say, being washed in a washing machine, they'd have to use all kinds of expensive components, like, say, cotton, and the cost for every single sock would go up.
So, why isn't there room in the software industry for a low cost provider, someone who uses the cheapest programmers available? (Remind me to ask Quark how that whole fire-everybody-and-hire-low-cost-replacements plan is working.)
Here's why: duplication of software is free. That means that the cost of programmers is spread out over all the copies of the software you sell. With software, you can improve quality without adding to the incremental cost of each unit sold.
Essentially, design adds value faster than it adds cost.
Or, roughly speaking, if you try to skimp on programmers, you'll make crappy software, and you won't even save that much money."
.. of course I like that article from Joel :-) ..
plazes.beta: "Plazes is the first global location-aware interaction and geo-information system, connecting you with the people and Plazes in your area and all over the world. It is the navigation system for your social life and it's absolutely free."
..interesting, have to check it out .. don't yet know what to think about it .. at least the design of the site looks cool :-) ..
AlwaysOn Network: "AO2005: The Innovation Summit, Stanford University Palo Alto, CA" .. offers a live-cast and video-archive of previous session .. cool .. if you want to know what the big thing, or probably the one after that, will be ..
Marrying Maps to Data for a New Web Service - New York Times: "In 1991, David Gelernter, a computer scientist at Yale, proposed using software to create a computer simulation of the physical world, making it possible to map everything from traffic flow and building layouts to sales and currency data on a computer screen.
Mr. Gelernter's idea came a step closer to reality in the last few weeks when both Google and Yahoo published documentation making it significantly easier for programmers to link virtually any kind of Internet data to Web-based maps and, in Google's case, satellite imagery.".. the whole map/web-services frenzy got picked up by the New York Times .. an interesting statement from Mr. O'Reilly made in this article: "It's a classic example of this thesis that hackers show us the shape of the future." .. how right he is :-) ..
.. by the way .. the geeks even have a web-site: Google Earth Hacks ..
NASA real-time coverage: "For the STS-114 mission, NASA has signed partnership agreements with Akamai and Yahoo! to provide webcasting of NASA Television well beyond the agency's normal capacity. "
.. cool! .. the NASA site offers a lot of additional infos to the Space Shuttle flight ..
Free SkypeOut Days: "At Skype, we don’t believe you should have to pay for calls. That’s why Skype-to-Skype calls will always be free. But even we have to charge a little bit for SkypeOut calls (our service for calling landlines and mobile phones). That’s where Free SkypeOut Days come in.
On Free SkypeOut Days you’ll be able to redeem 10 minutes of credit for SkypeOut calls and it won’t cost you a thing.
We wish every day could be a Free SkypeOut Day, but that would make us bankrupt. So our accountant says we can have 4 of them this month.
When one is approaching, we’ll let you know through our website and on Share.Skype.com. We’re planning to have those days every week in July, so keep checking back for details. And when you spot one, spread the word."
.. so keep checking your account page and the blogs out there ..
Gmaps Pedometer: "This is a little hack that uses Google's superb mapping application to help record distances traveled during a running or walking workout."
..simple but brilliant..
.. don't know if that will fly ..
HonorTags, as proposed by Dan Gillmor, should help readers find content they can trust, and help journalists, bloggers, podcasters and other creators build that trust within their communities. As a creator, you can tag the postings on your own blog or other site to indicate your intentions.
John Battelle's Searchblog: "One of the most oft-asked questions in search is 'what's next.' Yahoo hopes that My Web 2.0 is an answer"
.. the coolest toy I haven't seen for a long, long time .. I want to have one!! .. check the video .. just incredible ..
The Hydro-Foam is a remote control electric airplane/speedboat/race-car powered by a brushless motor and lithium-polymer batteries.
"A while ago (actually, any post I've done is now 'a while ago...') I wrote about Sabermetrics for Startups. I wondered if there was data you could collect in an interview process that would allow you to more accurately determine if someone, particularly an engineer, would be successful in your company.
I don't think I have all the answers, but over the last few months, I've honed in on three questions that I believe have a correlation with three key skills.
I'm not talking about technical skills. There are a lot more people far better than me to judge whether or not someone is technically qualified as a great coder.
I am talking about the intangibles. In particular, I'm talking about three key intangibles -- communicating, tinkering and passion for coding. In my experience, these things make a huge difference in someone being a great contributor to your startup.
So, here are the questions. They're simple and they aren't pass/fail. But, I think certain answers are more correlated with success. So, pretend you're in the hot seat, bright lights, uncomfortable chair... you get the idea. Here goes
1. Do you have a blog?
It was Joel Spolsky who wrote a great piece about great engineers being defined not only by their h4x0r skillz, but by their ability to communicate. Here's what the man himself had to say
The difference between a tolerable programmer and a great programmer is not how many programming languages they know, and it's not whether they prefer Python or Java. It's whether they can communicate their ideas.By persuading other people, they get leverage. By writing clear comments and technical specs, they let other programmers understand their code, which means other programmers can use and work with their code instead of rewriting it. Absent this, their code is worthless.
If someone has a blog, you know that they are starting to make communications and writing part of a basic set of habits. You know they value those habits enough to make time for them. A public blog improves the odds that the person sitting across from you (who has great coding skills) can also effectively advocate their ideas both inside and outside the company.
2. What's your home page?
Great engineers make their own homepages. When they hit the 'home' icon on their browsers, you're not likely to see My Yahoo or Amazon. They're disatisfied with their other choices out there and they take matters into their own hands (usually just a large list of links of favorite places to go, laid out 'just right'). My friend, Marc Hedlund put it this way, 'Jedi Knights make their own lightsabers and great engineers make their own homepages.' How true.
I think the trait indicated by making your own home pages is that the person is a 'tinkerer'. Tinkerers are great inside companies. They're curious. They're often not quite satisfied with the status quo and doing things the way others do. They're the ones that aren't often satisfied with the way your company is doing something. But, rather than complaining or asking, they go ahead and just fix the problem.
It's hard to know if the person sitting across from you is a tinkerer, but if they make their own home page, it's more likely that they are.
3. Do you contribute to an open source project?
One thing you're looking for in a great engineer is a person who is passionate about coding. Passionate doesn't mean all-consumed-and-working-24-7, but it does mean curious, deeply interested and committed. Besides the obvious benefits of being able to review someone's open source code for quality, design patters and architecture decisions, contributing to an open source project has a strong correlation to the person being passionate about code. They're less likely to just be about code-for-cash (not that there is anything wrong about that, it's just not usually right for a very small startup). That intangible, code-as-passion, can make a huge difference to a startup.
So, that's what I think. It's only been a few months of thought. If you've got other ideas, I'm all ears."
(Via Bnoopy.)
Screenshots of the next version of Lotus Notes, code-named "Hannover" .. pretty cool looking and all built based on the Eclipse/SWT platform
.. what a geek .. the ueber-use-case for AppleScripts .. it integrates iTunes, SMS, Skype and your cellphone in the ultimate way .. :-)
What DittyBot does:
You send a text message from your mobile phone to your POP email account. Your text message should contain the keywords of a song title (and possibly an artist name) that you want to hear. DittyBot finds that email (he checks Mail every 45 seconds) and copies the song name into a text file. The song name is then copied into iTunes and a playlist is created from your search. Next, DittyBot loads Skype (the internet telephony app) and begins calling your mobile phone. Your mobile phone rings and when you pick it up, you should hear your song start playing in all its compressed glory. DittyBot will play your selection to you over your phone until you hang up. Mind you, this all should happen within 1 minute of sending your song request (depending on the speed of your POP server). Sometimes it’s even quicker!
Io is small prototype-based programming language. The ideas in Io are mostly inspired by Smalltalk (all values are objects), Self, NewtonScript and Act1 (prototype-based differential inheritance, actors and futures for concurrency), LISP (code is a runtime inspectable/modifiable tree) and Lua (small, embeddable).
..interesting.. I always liked prototype-based languages
Video of Steve Jobs speech: In his Commencement address, Apple and Pixar CEO Steve Jobs urged Stanford graduates to follow their hearts. A pancreatic cancer survivor, he told the Class of '05, 'Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking.'
A tribute to one of Silicon Valley's most influential and forgotten researchers at Xerox Parc event: "The tributes to Mr Engelbart went on and on, long after the allotted time for the event, with many stories told publicly for the first time. It was priceless material for future archaeologists exploring this fascinating spot on earth."
.. I like appliances ..
Socialtext -- Enterprise Social Software: "The Socialtext Appliance provides all of the capabilities of the Socialtext Workspace in a hardware appliance designed for minimum administration and maximum security."
Based on technology from MTG, the Freesound Project looks like an intriguing source for podcasters and others:
The Freesound Project aims to create a huge collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings, bleeps, … released under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus License. The Freesound Project provides new and interesting ways of accessing these samples, allowing users to
* browse the sounds in new ways using keywords, a ‘sounds-like’ type of browsing and more
* up and download sounds to and from the database, under the same creative commons license
* interact with fellow sound-artists!We also aim to create an open database of sounds that can also be used for scientific research. Many audio research institutions have trouble finding correctly licensed audio to test their algorithms. Many have voiced this problem, but so far there hasn’t been a solution.
(Via Blogarithms.)
usnews.com: Bill Gates' House: "You are your own tour guide inside the Gates estate. Simply click on the active areas of the image or use the text links below to navigate"
Haystack: "Haystack is a tool designed to let individuals manage all their information in ways that make the most sense to them. By removing arbitrary barriers created by applications that handle only certain information 'types' and that record only a fixed set of relationships defined by the developer, we aim to let users define whichever arrangements of, connections between, and views of information they find most effective. Such personalization of information management will dramatically improve everyone's ability to find what they need when they need it."
AWS Java DAO Integration Project:
There's a new AWS Integration project on sourceforge.net. Here are the goals:
The AWS Integration project provides a Java DAO layer to client applications making the Amazon Web Services (AWS) even easier to use, especially for J2EE developers.
Using the integration API, you don't have to work with the web services directly, or even through the Axis generated API, you access the Amazon data seamlessly using simple DAO and JavaBeans.
Qualified developers are invited to join the project and to contribute code. They are planning to cover ECS and AWIS.
(Via Amazon Web Services Blog.)
..other people seem to have similar "feelings" about Ajax..
Alex Bosworth's Weblog: Ajax Mistakes: "Ajax is an awesome technology that is driving a new generation of web apps, from maps.google.com to colr.org to backpackit.com. But Ajax is also a dangerous technology for web developers, its power introduces a huge amount of UI problems as well as server side state problems and server load problems. "
(Via Alex Bosworth's Weblog.)
UI Patterns and Techniques: Introduction: "If you've done any Web or UI design, or even thought about it much, you should say, 'Oh, right, I know what that is' to most of these patterns. But a few of them might be new to you, and some of the familiar ones may not be part of your usual design repertoire."
..check the screencast, pretty impressive, but I'm still not convinced that AJAX is the next major UI-technology..
AJAX encapsulation with TIBCO General Interface: " With all the recent AJAX buzz, there's renewed interest in toolkits that can abstract away the inherent nastiness of that style of development. TIBCO's General Interface is one such toolkit, and today's 8-minute screencast excerpts highlights from a demo shown to me yesterday by Kevin Hakman. He's a founder of General Interface, which TIBCO acquired last fall. ..."
(Via Jon's Radio.)
Tools for dynamic languages: "I met Paul Kedrosky for the first time last week and we had a great conversation. We share a connection through ActiveState: Paul was a member of the board of directors and I was on the technical advisory board. (We've both since resigned those positions.) It occurred to us that, ironically, the original mission of ActiveState -- to create professional tools for open source programming languages -- may now be more relevant than ever. ..."
(Via Jon's Radio.)
How to be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary:
"To be a good programmer is difficult and noble. The hardest part of making real a collective vision of a software project is dealing with one's coworkers and customers. Writing computer programs is important and takes great intelligence and skill. But it is really child's play compared to everything else that a good programmer must do to make a software system that succeeds for both the customer and myriad colleagues for whom she is partially responsible."
..that's the way to do it..
Backpack becomes a web service:
Backpack is not just for you to love, but for machines too. The brand new Backpack API makes it possible for other programs to easily talk to your backpack. That opens the door to Dashboard widgets, weblog integration, command-line tools, and much more.
We’ve created a forum to go with the API, too. Let us know of your creations and share them if you can. The API is not all finalized, so hold off with the nuclear reactor integration for a couple of weeks. But have fun experimenting today.
If you’re working with Ruby, have a look at this sample wrapper for the API.
(Via Backpack Weblog.)
Ruby on Rails: "Rails is a full-stack, open-source web framework in Ruby for writing real-world applications with joy and less code than most frameworks spend doing XML sit-ups"
Downloaded and am reading (only to page 27 so far) the first public draft of the Fortress language spec when LtU posted info about it. Very nice looking stuff. Very Scala like as well.
I'm looking forward to seeing where Sun goes with this. I really like what I see in the spec!
(Via Waste of Time.)
I've met a lot of companies working on web services APIs while I've been working on Where 2.0. These companies want to reach programmers like me, the ones who will play with something, build a cool app or two, then promote it within their company if they like it. They want to know how to make their service attractive to these Internet programmers.
I always tell them, 'Make it useful and easy.' All too often the company is so tied up in its existing business that its idea of an 'open API' is 10 hits/day, strictly non-commercial use, SOAP-only, with fax-in paperwork only downloadable with the latest version of IE on Windows. They're looking at the API purely from the point of view of the provider. But if you want me to use this API, you'd better start thinking about it from my side: I want something that's easy to start using and that will scale with the coolness of the apps I build.
(Via O'Reilly Radar.)
Effective desktop applications:
Some months ago I wrote an article in Spanish called Aplicaciones de escritorio eficientes, that could be translated as Effective Desktop Applications. I wrote this article because this is a very important topic forgotten by the common biliography. It's very easy to found information about EJB best practices, Servlet/JSP/JSF best practices, persistence best practices, web services bestpractices, interoperability best practices, but what about the desktop?
Even it seems that Sun is planning with Mustang some type of swing blueprints - correct me if I'm wrong, I think I have read this somewhere just today. That would be a great thing!
Well, in this article I talk about different best practices I found during my last +5 years of Swing programming and =2 years of SWT programming. I planned to translate it to English, but it's very very difficult to find some time to translate -my English isn't specially good, so I need a lot of time :-). But today I decided to post here the best practices summary. You can contribute and if people is interested, we could talk about some point in a different weblog entry.
So here we go:
I think that to work developing healthcare systems has helped me a lot to understand the great importancy of the items above. For example, when a cardiologist is doing some operation, and has to check some information on the patient clinical history, the last thing he want to do is waiting some minutes for that information to be downloaded. So in this job, you're encouraged to do very responsive UIs; to lazy and eager load data in a smartly way; to offer the possibility of offline working - imagine, that you're being operated, and suddenly the network adapter goes down, etc.
Well, do you have any other suggestion to this list? Do you like to talk about any special item?
(Via Martin Perez's Weblog.)
Use Java 1.5 on 10.3: "I am desperately waiting for Java 1.5. But I dont want to switch to Tiger. So I downloaded the new Java 1.5 from Apple's Developer Site. Unfortunately, the installer wouldn't proceed, because my current OS version is below 10..."
(Via macosxhints.)
Strategic Weaknesses of Folksonomies:
There has been some talk about technorati and del.icio.us and the issue of tag spam. But any system whether Wiki or tagging or other, that is open will suffer from the same basic strategic weakness...there are potential solutions though...
What are the contributing factors that allow spam to happen?
(Via Get Real.)