"This is an informal tutorial guide for the perplexed developer trying to implement a Jabber client from scratch. Two weeks ago that developer was me; now, after many experiments and confused e-mails to jdev, I'm dropping pearls of my great wisdom to help you out. You're welcome!"

"The TIBET™ IDE is a complete interactive development environment constructed using TIBET™ itself. In this fashion, the TIBET™ IDE is the JavaScript equivalent of the Smalltalk environment -- a development environment built using itself."

"Elegant software design is all about putting together simple things in simple ways which have unpredictable - and endlessly complex - uses. The main tool in a software architect's kitbag is abstraction. Occam's razor. The best software designers sometimes take this to extremes (see [4], and Ray's comment "Groove, in essence, distributes *method calls* as opposed to data" in [5]). These are the astronauts. Their "absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures" are really more like new building blocks, new elements. Alone these elements are pretty useless. But they're powerful.

Now, I'm not an astronaut; I don't even like heights. But I love synthesis: pick up two or three things and smush them together to make something new. My sort of software design - applications and systems architectures - almost never involves creating anything completely new, or anything down-to-the-metal. But when you get to put together other people's building blocks, it's very easy to make smart things happen. Applications which change the way a company does business. These are Agora's stock-in-trade."

"If personalization that works truly has broken through, it's possible to imagine a future in which obscure bands do get more time in the sun. Because personalized music recommendation technology in combination with file-trading services like Napster or Gnutella could be an amazingly potent brew. Get the recommendation, listen to the tune via Napster, then click a button and buy the CD. Finally, we may be at the verge of escaping the industry-imposed domination of pop pablum, a world in which the only albums you know to buy are the bland Top 40 hits churned out by your local radio station. Speaking optimistically, personalization may turn out to be not just a cheap buzzword that helps Web sites lure that V.C. cash, but the best thing to happen to indie bands and music fans since, well, the Net."

"Napster is now the same thing for me. I log on to Napster and I get to peek inside people's hard drives, people I don't even know but I get to go and see what music they listen to. I would find the very obvious Dozen Champion Performers and let me tell you I have many of them myself but then I get to see what else they listen to and I would discover their music. The magic of discovery takes over and I get to listen to something I have never heard before. Wow. what a wonderful feeling. The person I downloaded music from becomes my instant friend. I feel connected. I get to be inspired and moved by it.

Napster for me is a shared space of conversation for discovery of muisc. It's not a vehicle to get free muisc. It's not an amplification system for Dozen Champion Performer Model. It appears this way but I ask you to dig deeper."

"The purpose of the Web services workshop is to gather the community interested in XML-based Web service solutions and standardization of components thereof, which includes both solution providers and users of this technology. The goal of the workshop is to advise the W3C about which further actions (Activity Proposals, Working Groups, etc.) should be taken with regard to Web services."

"In the Blogger-Trellix deal, we got first-hand personal essays from the two people who made the deal. Mark my words, this is a new artform. I expect to see a lot more of this in the future."

"The bottom line is that I think it was unfair of you to consider us Architecture Astronauts. It is true that we do not solve the problem that Napster was trying to solve, but I think we have been successful at solving the problem that we set out to solve. Also, to be fair, we have managed to ship a product (and even sell it to people) unlike some of the Architecture Astronauts that you are thinking of."

"Anyway, now we're talking about architecture. Let's talk about features. The applets you ship with are all spiffy but not ultra-compelling, because you can often get the same functionality elsewhere. And it's the applets that are going to sell Groove, not the architecture...So... yes, you shipped a product, and sold it to people, it's great, I believe you. But if you want it to be The Next Great Thing it has to be more than architecture, it has to enable things that people really need."

"This is not an exercise in comparative performance benchmarking, nor is it my intention to suggest that any one module is inherently more useful than another. Choosing the right XML module for your project depends largely upon the nature of the project and your past experience. Different interfaces lend themselves to different kinds of tasks and to different kinds of people. My only goal is to offer working examples of the various interfaces by defining two simple tasks, and then showing how to achieve the same net result using each of the selected modules."

"But many kinds of value are created within networks. While many kinds of value grow proportionally to network size and some grow proportionally to the square of network size, I've discovered that some network structures create total value that can scale even faster than that. Networks that support the construction of communicating groups create value that scales exponentially with network size, i.e. much more rapidly than Metcalfe's square law. I will call such networks Group-Forming Networks, or GFNs."

"These uber-cool devices operate in the deregulated 2.4-GHz band (just like high-end cordless phones). They work best with direct line of sight, but will operate through walls, windows, ceilings, and just about anything not made of metal. And they not only work as advertised, they work well.

Of course, you've got to get them installed first, which is unnecessarily quirky (and in some cases, outright frustrating). But fear not, we'll brave the dark forces of product re-branding and misguided Microsoft plug-and-pray together!

First, I'll tell you what equipment you need: a gateway and a wireless LAN card. Next, I'll explain how to install the drivers for the card. Then I'll focus in on installation on different platforms: Windows, Mac, and Linux. Finally, I'll talk a bit about security and encryption."

"Even if the user is connected, it might not always be appropriate to send messages. The user might be away from the computer for an extended period (even though the workstation is on and the Jabber client connected) or might simply not want to be interrupted (although as we've already discussed, on a Jabber client that supports them, arrival of "normal" type messages can be fairly unobtrusive).

As it stands, our script will send notifications whether the recipient wants them or not. It turns out that we can address this and the other flavors of insensitivity at the same time."

"The May issue of Scientific American features an article outlining the Semantic Web, Tim Berners-Lee's latest drum to beat (see the W3C papers on it here.) The article explains:

The Semantic Web will bring structure to the meaningful content of Web pages, creating an environment where software agents roaming from page to page can readily carry out sophisticated tasks for users.

This is one of those Extremely Noble and massively complex endeavors wherein academics, removed from the real world, attempt to solve a problem nobody has. (I fear MIT's Oxygen project will suffer a similar fate.) The only reason the Semantic Web gets any press is that Tim Berners-Lee, the "Father of the Web," is working on it.

History has shown us that technology inventors often haven't the faintest clue about the device's actual use. Did folks line up to hear what Philo T Farnsworth had to say about television?

Hypertext creators tend to have Extremely Noble intents for their technology. Douglas Engelbart was obsessed with "augmenting" intellect, and the first development of the WWW was definitely along those lines (for academics to compare notes). And the Semantic Web is no different. From the SciAm article:

If properly designed, the Semantic Web can assist the evolution of human knowledge as a whole.

Problem being, no one, apart from some self-appointed Bringers Of Fire, wants their intellect augmented, nor really cares about the "evolution of human knowledge." The Web, this extremely exciting hypertext platform, serves other human needs and desires--primarily to communicate, also for sexual release (porn!), and for finding information of personal relevance (what's the weather where I'm traveling? how can I do my job better? where's my favorite band playing?)."

"Conversations provide a comfortable medium in which knowledge flows in both directions, and where contributors share an inherent context through their subjects and relationships. In addition to old forms of conversations--direct interaction and communication over the phone and in person--conversations are becoming an increasingly important part of the networked world. Witness the popularity of email, chat, and instant messaging, which enable users to increase the range and scope of their conversations to reach those that they may not have before.

Still, little attention has been paid in recent years to the popular Internet channels that most naturally support conversations."

""ActiveState's release of the first application built on Mozilla is a watershed event for the open source movement," said Tim O'Reilly, Founder & CEO of O'Reilly & Associates. "It demonstrates that there's more to Mozilla than the next generation Netscape browser. More importantly, it provides the web-enabled IDE that makes cross-platform development with open source languages like Perl and Python accessible to more than the hacker elite.""

" Semantic Web researchers, in contrast, accept that paradoxes and unanswerable questions are a price that must be paid to achieve versatility. We make the language for the rules as expressive as needed to allow the Web to reason as widely as desired. This philosophy is similar to that of the conventional Web: early in the Web's development, detractors pointed out that it could never be a well-organized library; without a central database and tree structure, one would never be sure of finding everything. They were right. But the expressive power of the system made vast amounts of information available, and search engines (which would have seemed quite impractical a decade ago) now produce remarkably complete indices of a lot of the material out there. The challenge of the Semantic Web, therefore, is to provide a language that expresses both data and rules for reasoning about the data and that allows rules from any existing knowledge-representation system to be exported onto the Web."

"Recently, the phrase Semantic Web has been popping up more and more. Unfortunately, there are no really good non-technical explanations of what it is. This is a first draft attempt at breaking the Semantic Web down into it's component parts and describing each in summary. Be forewarned that the explanation is detailed and covers many of the facets of the Semantic Web."

"Many communication and social networks have power-law link distributions, containing a few nodes which have a very high degree and many with low degree. The high connectivity nodes play the important role of hubs in communication and networking, a fact which can be exploited when designing efficient search algorithms. We introduce a number of local search strategies which utilize high degree nodes in power-law graphs and which have costs which scale sub-linearly with the size of the graph. We also demonstrate the utility of these strategies on the Gnutella peer-to-peer network."

"Looking back over the last six years, it is hard to imagine networked computing without the Web. The reason why the Web succeeded where earlier hypertext schemes failed can be traced to a couple of basic factors: simplicity and ubiquity. From a service provider's (e.g. an e-shop) point of view, if they can set up a web site they can join the global community. From a client's point of view, if you can type, you can access services. From a service API point of view, the majority of the web's work is done by 3 methods (GET, POST, and PUT) and a simple markup language. The web services movement is about the fact that the advantages of the Web as a platform apply not only to information but to services."

"In order to get distributed computing kicked off, it's going to look something similar to the XML protocol stack. [See Figure 1, XMLFund's XML "protocol stack" (http://xmlfund.com/roadmap/ ).] But the good news on the stack is that Microsoft, IBM, and Cisco Systems are all talking about it, and they fundamentally agree that's not where they're going to make money. They're going to make money adding value to that stack, in either professional services in terms of applications or value-added networking."

"Now I should add that open source is not for everything in software. We have a very large and successful software business, and we're going to retain that. But open source is great for infrastructure code. The reason is that to make open source work, there has to be an overlap between the people who care about the software and the people who make the software better."

"Heard today that Microsoft is recruiting some folks I know to help them think about how to deal with the "threat" of open source. This is so sad, and such a dumb move by a company that prides itself on smarts.

Some of the best work Microsoft has done is open source. The @#$%&* Net , which they profess to love, is full of open source stuff. It's not a threat. It's a building method. It's also necessary for building common infrastructure in and around the Net. There is a huge opportunity for Microsoft to participate in that work, which is not the exclusive job of the open source movement."

"In this article the Perl module XML::XSLT is introduced. It shows some of the capabilities of the W3C's XSLT standard and how it can be used to help you manage and publish XML documents to the web."

"In this article I will review the main Perl XML modules, from the venerable XML::Parser to DOM, XQL, XSLT, XPath implementations and more. I'll give the main characteristics of each module and, as much as possible, examples of how to use them."