Saturday October 19, 2002

NBML
Interesting read, and NBML does improve readability somewhat. What would really be nice is if it reduces the size of a document (I suppose this wouldn't be too hard to figure out). Since one of XML's proposed usages is transferring information, it'd be nice to have a "compacted" version to reduce bandwidth. Since NBML removes many characters this may be the case, but then with XML you can remove pretty-printing and recoup all the extra whitespace.

Later... A quick test of the above reveals:
·NBML version: 972 bytes
·XML version: 1210 bytes
·XML compacted: 1069 bytes
So you still save bandwidth with the NBML version. Just goes to show how "heavy" all those pointy braces are. ( Oct 19 2002, 08:12:29 PM ) Technology Permalink
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web services and databases
I just finished reading James Strachan's web services and databases paper. It's a cool idea, and what I really think "W/web S/services" were created for. But...

For all the nice bullet points in the "What about databases?" section, I keep thinking "Well, for this change/implementation someone has to program the web service that will be providing the data." Am I just missing something? Granted, seperating out the data collection from the application is a good thing, but this doesn't eliminate the work. And this is the implication I get from James's paper: that implementing your app on top of a web service would get rid of work.

And what about update/insert/delete? Of course, the web service does the actual job of updating the datastore, but how do you inform it? If we're using a course-grained approach, do you want to send the whole grain back just to changing the spelling of one word? Or is the Read a course-grain and Write is fine-grained? This reminds me of some AOP-based implementation that Ricard was going on about a few weeks ago. ( Oct 19 2002, 08:12:29 PM ) Technology Permalink
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Friday October 18, 2002

HTML4 is dead
Okay, I'm quoting The Fishbowl out of context. I agree with Charles' analysis of the future (since it mirrors the past so nicely). And lots of good links. ( Oct 18 2002, 08:12:29 PM ) Technology Permalink
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Wednesday October 16, 2002

Say What?
Hmm, misread Brett Morgan's latest entry. Cracking Contraceptives doesn't sound like a good idea to me. ( Oct 16 2002, 08:20:07 PM ) News Permalink
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Tuesday October 15, 2002

And a nice time was had by all...
Well, all two of us. Turns out that Jason Carreira travels to Minnesota on business regularly, so we got together for dinner. The talk ranged from family to Roller to work to Jakarta.

Hi Pippa. ( Oct 15 2002, 09:16:41 PM ) News Permalink
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Objective-C
Anthony is considering learning Objective-C (but then, he doesn't sound serious):

I am even considering taking the drastic measures of learning Objective-C and starting to program native OS X apps! I must be losing it.

You're not losing it, Anthony. Obj-C is a good language. I don't know it well, but it was my second programming language: after Perl but before Java. As you may know, Java borrows a bit from it (and Smalltalk, and ...) but not quite enough as a former coworker has complained. But then, it does show its C roots with alloc and dealloc. Hmmm, perhaps I'll get back into it, just for kicks. ( Oct 15 2002, 08:12:29 PM ) Technology Permalink
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Friday October 11, 2002

Gel Toothpaste, yumm

I sent an e-mail to the author of the aqua-text tutorial last night asking how to scale down my text and reduce the fuzziness. Or as Lance called it, "the gel toothpaste look." ... <snip> ... Here is the old one, and the new one.[Raible]

It still looks like gel toothpaste to me. Not that this is a bad thing, just the first thing I think of when I see the graphic. ( Oct 11 2002, 08:12:29 PM ) Entertainment Permalink
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This could get fun
Grendel & Pippa (not their real names) sound like they're setting up for a real row. Perhaps this is exactly why I didn't offer to set my wife up with a blog. ( Oct 11 2002, 10:32:44 AM ) News Permalink
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