ongoing by Tim Bray · Tab Sweep

In this issue: P-languages, operating systems, projecting, URIs, and online medical resources.

Web-friendly PubMed · Anyone who’s tried any online medical research knows about PubMed, which will go as deep as your search skills and subject domain expertise will allow. Historically, it’s been kind of Web-unfriendly, tough to bookmark and share good results. The NCBI Resource Locator looks like a real step forward.

PHP & WS-*, Sitting in a Tree · Check out Sanjiva Weerawarana’s PHP Web services: “a PHP script can integrate with any system over Web services at full fidelity, including security and reliability”. I will restrain my urge to editorialize, but, hey Rails Envy guys: low-hanging-fruit alert.

Things Pythonic · Bruce Eckel has been thinking about loud about Python. First, in Python 3K or Python 2.9? he’s mildly critical of some of the Python 3K design choices. The big issue, of course, is concurrency, nothing new to readers of this space.

Bruce zeroes in a couple of days later with Parallel Python, a discussion of an interesting library by Vitalii Vanovschi. It looks like a classic HPC/grid style server; my own On Grids has a whole lot of context around this kind of thing.

Video Out · Ooooh! Joey Shen’s Get your Solaris Laptop projected has screenshots from a recent NVIDIA driver, allowing you to configure your outboard screen (or projector). While this is admittedly only almost as good as what OS X had five years ago, it’s a whole lot better than I’ve seen on any Solaris or GNU/Linux box before. (I assume that if it’s available for Solaris, it’s there for GNU/Linux too?) I’ve been saying for a while now that one of the things that keeps me from migrating off OS X is that the outboard display Has To Just Work. Maybe we’re getting there.

While We’re On The Subject... · of Solaris, that is, the center of the Solaris Universe will be in Santa Cruz a month from now at the OpenSolaris Summit. Is this where Indiana gets its real kick-start?

Oh, and if Indiana is gonna fly, it totally has to get the package management right, at the very least come up to the high standard set by Debian. It’s being worked on here: pkg(1): a no scripting zone.

URI Wrangling · You know, Uniform Resource Identifiers are at the core of the Web, and have been around for fifteen years now; you’d think popular programming languages would have nailed the APIs down. Oddly, this has long been a weak spot for Java; I note there’s a new UriBuilder class coming along; see Paul Sandoz’s Building URIs.