Wednesday October 23, 2002

Wild Animal Kingdom
I came downstairs to check my email, and move laundry into the dryer, when I heard something in the exhaust tube (one of those flexible ones). Disconnected the tube and out came a young possum! We are now waiting on Animal Control to find out what we should do with it. ( Oct 23 2002, 11:41:15 PM ) News Permalink
Trackback: http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/trackback/lance/Weblog/wild_animal_kingdom_br

File Upload get appreciated
Matt says " BTW, I used the file-upload feature of roller for the first time with this post - worked very slick".
Thanks! :-) ( Oct 23 2002, 08:12:29 PM ) Roller Permalink
Trackback: http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/trackback/lance/Weblog/file_upload_get_appreciated_br

Best Password Practices
Charles comes through again with some good stuff. This time, its about the give-and-takes in designing a user authentication system. ( Oct 23 2002, 08:12:29 PM ) Technology Permalink
Trackback: http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/trackback/lance/Weblog/best_password_practices_br

Bye bye Brainopolis
Because it costs too darned much, I've had to drop my iDSL. Until I can get things ironed out Brainopolis will cease to be available on or about 10/23/2002, since I was self-hosted. I'll try to get it back 'on the net' as soon as I can. ( Oct 23 2002, 08:12:29 PM ) News Permalink
Trackback: http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/trackback/lance/Weblog/bye_bye_brainopolis_br

Tuesday October 22, 2002

Tempory Address
Until I can get around to moving my DNS, you may be able to find my site at http://brainopolis.dnsalias.com, so my blog should be at http://brainopolis.dnsalias.com/roller/page/lance. I don't know how long it takes DynDNS.org to propogate any DNS changes necessary, but I can't see it from my other account yet (I can see it "locally"). ( Oct 22 2002, 07:26:03 PM ) News Permalink
Trackback: http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/trackback/lance/Weblog/tempory_address_br

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
Trackback: http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/trackback/lance/Weblog/nbml_br

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
Trackback: http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/trackback/lance/Weblog/web_services_and_databases_br

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
Trackback: http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/trackback/lance/Weblog/html4_is_dead_br