XML in Oxford · That’s the XML Summer School in September at St. Edmund. I can’t make it, in part because my wife is co-ordinating which means I do child-care. I’ve been to these and they’re totally great, intense and interactive and focused; then you get to go drinking around Oxford in the evening. If you’re within reach and work with XML and want to upgrade yourself, I totally recommend it.
Slow REST · We’re working on a fairly substantial revision of the Sun Cloud API, motivated by this problem: In a RESTful context, how do you handle state-changing operations (POST, PUT, DELETE) which have substantial and unpredictable latency? ...[22 comments]
Junepix 1: Car-Free · I was editing some pictures (which I organize per-month) and realized that there were a ton in the June folder that I’d been meaning to run, and now it’s not June. So let’s populate the first few days of July with some of ’em. First, musical faces of Car-Free Vancouver Day ...
“Hello World” for Open Data · Recently, Vancouver’s City Council passed an “Open Data, Open Source” motion. I was too busy at the time to pay much attention, which I’ve regretted. Now I’ve started poking around a bit, and turned up an interesting person and an outstanding example ...[4 comments]
Is This Spam? · I still moderate all the comments here, but the setup is idiosyncratic enough that hardly any spam gets through. Today, I’m pondering one particular comment, wondering whether to approve ...[21 comments]
Test-Driven Heresy · I’ve been thinking about test-driven development a lot lately, observing myself veering between TDD virtue and occasional lapses into sin. Here’s my thesis: As a profession, we do a lot more software maintenance than we do greenfield development. And it’s at the maintenance end where TDD really pays off. I’m starting to see lapses from the TDD credo as more and more forgivable the closer you are to the beginning of a project. And conversely, entirely abhorrent while in maintenance mode ...[26 comments]
Kindle Yourself · The publication you are currently reading is now also an Amazon.com product. This means that for $1.99 a month you can read it on your Kindle in black & white ...[9 comments]
The Internet’s Payload · The tree’s branches are real but only there to support the leaves. The sizzle is enticing but the steak is why you sit down. The eye candy is cool, but the Web is really about words, and mostly written words at that ...[17 comments]
Royal Sunset Again · Yes, I run pictures of this one particular plant’s blossoms all the time. I can’t help myself, particularly when the sun goes to work adding drama ...
Tokina SL-400 f5.6 · What happened was, over at the cottage I recently failed to get decent pictures of both a hummingbird about 20 feet away and an interesting boat maybe 500m out. I concluded that I needed a bigger lens. I checked out the prices of modern really-big Pentax telephotos (zoom and prime) and they made me shudder, given the very-occasional-use context. So I went hunting on eBay, and this is what I came up with ...[2 comments]
Erik Naggum, R.I.P. · Erik was a flamer’s flamer, back in the golden days of Usenet. He was reflexively averse to the mainstream; a proponent of SGML before descriptive markup was fashionable, he peeled away from the community when XML hit the big time, vanishing in a puff of pungent sulfurous smoke. I think he’s left an important lesson behind him ...[9 comments]
NetBeans 6.7 · Who knows how many more chances I’ll have to talk about Sun tech that I like? In the five years I’ve been here I’ve been pleased by OpenSolaris and Fishworks and HotSpot and GlassFish and others, but NetBeans is #1 in my heart. I just downloaded 6.7 RC3 a couple of days ago to try to fix a problem (it didn’t, but the problem was amusing) and it’s really good stuff. Generally nice, and with one absolutely life-changing new feature ...[6 comments]
Gryphon Rose · The rose is a Mme. Alfred Carrière, the gryphon is just a garden ornament ...[1 comment]
If Your Job’s Just a Job · Well then, you’ll probably really love The 4-Hour Workweek, a 2007 book by Timothy Ferriss. On the other hand, if you love your job and wish you could do more of it, there’s not much here for you but a few handy email-management hints ...[16 comments]
Phone Keys · The issue is whether hardware keyboards on mobile phones are a good idea, and there’s a charming little prognosticate-off in progress. In this corner: John Gruber, who’s almost always right, saying (and I quote) “Normal people aren’t planning to do much typing on their new smartphone, and they’re probably right.” In the other corner, lots of people. Well, and me too ...[20 comments]
