i saw a.i. last night at the drive-in theatre. i'm going to have to give it a big thumbs down. it's conflicted, confusing and incoherent on a lot of levels. i'm agreeing with salon on this one:

"As much as his instincts are at war with Kubrick's, Spielberg is also at war with his own instincts. Something in Spielberg balks when he tries to address the darker aspects of childhood. "A.I." is as audacious and technologically breathtaking as was Spielberg's "Empire of the Sun," and emotionally it's just as muddled, just as heavy-spirited, just as off-putting. Had Spielberg ended "A.I." 20 minutes earlier, during an eerie, becalmed undersea sequence, as conflicted as the film is he might have given it the narratively satisfying shape of a tragic fairy tale. But there's a coda, set an additional 2,000 years in the future, in which Spielberg's worst heartwarming instincts take over. The coda might have worked if it acknowledged the echoes of the themes in the first part of the film. (Without giving anything away, I can say that the sequence features ample proof of David's obliviousness to anything but his own emotional needs.) But you can scarcely hear those echoes amidst the weeping Spielberg elicits for his little robot boy lost."

i'd say about the only thing that saved the movie was the fact that the drive-in allows consumption of adult beverages.

i'll admit that i may be a little too close to the medium. can you guess the seven tricks that web users don't know?

"Web developers have all sorts of browsing tricks that they have gained from years of experience, to the point where they can't even imagine not knowing them -- right-clicking to open a new browser window, for instance, or using the arrow keys to navigate a list. To Web veterans, these things are so familiar that they seem obvious. The fact that many people don't know these tricks -- and can get completely stuck as a result -- comes as a shock. This article describes seven Web site features that typical non-technical users aren't familiar with, based on data collected from the author's own usability studies."

[ via dithered ]

Programming Web Services with XML-RPC is shipping. the sample chapter covers xml-rpc in java. it looks like the book maintains a pretty balanced perspective, which is refreshing:

"On the other hand, XML-RPC is definitely not appropriate in plenty of Java application situations. Much of the Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) work already relies on RMI, and rewriting it to use XML-RPC would be a remarkable waste of time. Although a snippet of XML-RPC code might be useful as a simple bridge between an EJB-based application and code written for other environments, XML-RPC isn't designed explicitly to support the many demands of complex enterprise-scale design. Similarly, if you need to pass objects, rather than parameters, betweensystems, you should look into a more sophisticated set of tools than XML-RPC. XML-RPC lets you pass sets of parameters, not complex nested structures with associated method information, back and forth."

actually, i hadn't really been paying attention to sun's level of support for xml-based rpc mechanisms, until i read a representative's comments to the question of whether or not java programmers need soap:

"The new Java APIs that will support SOAP are JSR 67, Java API for XML Messaging (JAXM), and JSR 101, Java APIs for XML based RPC (JAX/RPC). Both of these Java APIs are generic APIs that can be used with a variety of XML messaging services(e.g., SOAP, W3C XMLP, ebXML Message Service) and XML-based RPC systems (e.g., SOAP, W3C XMLP, XML-RPC). Note that all of these XML communications systems are based on or forked from SOAP. These Java APIs will protect the Java developer from the minor differences between the various XML communications systems."

ev gives us a glimpse of one possible smart tag future:

"The reason I did it is because yesterday, I turned Smart Tags on on a page that had code snippets on it, and every instance of the word TRUE (when in all-caps as is often the case when writing code) was highlighted because it's a stock symbol . That struck me as bad. Not to mention stupid and much more confusing to the user than helpful. Linking obvious trademarks with basically only one meaning, like "American Express," I can see the argument for (I'm not saying it's a good idea), but when it happens on everyday words that have a million meanings, that's trouble. Oddly, as I look at this page now with Smart Tags on, TRUE isn't highlighted, but American Express is, so I haven't quite figured out the logic. Anyway, in general, I'm still waiting and seeing, but the threat is clear; I thought I'd do at least this one easy thing."

towards mozilla 1.0. [ via a frog in the valley ]

google's director of research discusses everything you wanted to know about web information retrieval but were afraid to ask. [ via langreiter ]

lot's of stuff going on today. i'll ignore the obvious until i've had time to let it sink in.

in other news stolen from dave - at least we know now what knownow is all about:

"KnowNow calls this intermediate step "event routing,'' capturing information from one source -- a central computer or, perhaps, a PC at the edge of a network -- and then publishing it to PCs and other devices. All of this takes place along a connection that stays open, and it's impressive stuff."

the fact that rohit is on the jabber.com board will presumably lead to an announcment soon. the possibilities for jabber.com do indeed boggle the mind:

"I think IM will provide you a way to drive your applications based on events, subscriptions, and publications in a way that hasn't been done before. Check out the KnowNow stuff and think about combining that with IM.

One application I'm working on that combines these two is a data monitoring application for our network operations center which monitors 37 million transactions a day, 60 POPs on five continents, and each transaction contains about a dozen data points. There isn't anything out of the box that will do what we want. We don't want to invest a year in building a custom HP Openview. We have to do it in a way that won't kill our data warehouses. We need to monitor the health of the software producing the data, the data itself, the data movement, every point in between, and have the ability to drill into a single transaction. While monitoring a single transaction isn't expensive, producing a meaningful top level view is _very_ expensive. If I have a way to monitor the data as it is arriving and incrementally include it rather than running huge queries against the database or against the data held in memory, I have a much more efficient and scalable system. This is what the combination of KnowNow's technology and Jabber is going to do for us. KnowNow's technology give us interface tools and a way to route the data to the appropriate user and Jabber gives us the ability to build more sophisticated rules and trigger other events based on arriving data."

langreiter gets bonus points for the most concise summary of the javascript microserver: "A web server. Written in JavaScript. Running in your browser."

Ten JSP technology books compared:

"Back in September 2000, Java guru (and book author) John Zukowski reviewed six of the early JSP technology books to hit the shelves. Now, he revisits the review with 10 new offerings -- fresh volumes that explore JSP development -- all to ask the question, "Are the original favorites still the best way to learn JSP or do the new guides deliver a better lesson?""

i suppose this could qualify as beating the proverbial dead horse, but beat away i shall. a list apart has a nice write-up on the whole smart tag fiasco:

"The Microsoft employee on the Decentralization list likens smart tags to walking around a store with the owner of a competing store?whom you invited along?whispering in your ear. The trouble with that analogy is that if you've invited someone along to whisper in your ear, you know the information they whisper is coming from them, not from the owner of the store you're in. With smart tags, the source of the information is unclear. In fact, it isn't even clear that the user has invited this particular person to whisper in their ear. A more accurate analogy would be if the competing store owner went around and placed official-looking labels on every package detailing how much cheaper or better the products in their competing store were before you arrived. Once you get to the store, how are you to know it wasn't the owner of the store you are in who placed the labels on the packages? "

generation xml:

"Things go in waves. I'm not going to tell you there will never be a day when we don't move code around. Get a standard enough operating system and programming model across everywhere, and move the code to the data rather than moving the data to the code?it's well known that will work for certain kinds of problems. But, right now, what the industry really needs?and it's been moving towards and every major company I've spoken to cares about?is a model where you can wire things together in this loosely coupled, very flexible, very performant manner. And the real truth is performance ends up being not how linearly efficient are the bits of the message as much as how well can I run multithreaded applications across clusters of machines that are running off of queues so that I can load balance and dynamically redistribute what I'm doing?and that's where a lot of the effort's gone."

the mozilla team has started the 0.92 branch, which should be focused primarily on bug squashing and performance enhancement [as opposed to creaping featurism].

it appears that netscape is taking more of an active role in bug triaging and stability issues in preparation for an upcoming release:

"This is an important milestone to Mozilla.org and some vendors so we will be focusing on stability, leaks and major usability issues."

"We will be taking only very low risk, very high yield patches for this branch and we intend to release quickly. Also, we expect that Netscape will be doing some kind of release off of the 0.9.2 branch. After the Mozilla release of 0.9.2 Netscape will continue making fixes on the 0.9.2 branch."

while netscape has always provided much personpower for the project it has a history of just slapping some brand on top of builds and calling it a release. i wonder if the newfound interest in stability has anything to do with recent, um, squabbles:

"If war now looks inevitable, it is also unfortunate. A clash between AOL and Microsoft would be bad for consumers, because it could leave them having to grapple with competing standards. PC users want to see the two companies developing common technical rules and competing on implementation, rather than each trying to dominate the standard for online music, instant messaging and so on. Sadly, that looks less likely than ever."

google's got images, but don't expect miracles:

"If people know the name of the picture or of the video, then, yes, we can find it. But if people just say, "There was this video of a woman on the beach running into the water," that's hard. The image-understanding technology is not so far [along] yet."

i could see something like rdfpic being useful for google - except for the little problem that nobody is exactly beating a path to the whole embedding-semantics-in-images way of thinking.

lou rosenfeld [co-wrote the oreilly information architecture book amongst other things] has started a blog.

in a coincidence that probably doesn't mean much, i just noticed the other day that i posted a quote from lou on my second day of blogging. i still get a kick out of it.

""As a friend of ours once said, information architecture is similar to chronic fatigue syndrome. We often don't know what's wrong or how to fix it, so we endure.""

well, whadya know. blogger has a new spellchecker. it workz grate. maybe sooner or later we'll get the blogger equivalent of 'clippy'.

i was doing my best to not post them here, because they are already, um, adequately posted, but i just can't resist juxtaposing Triumph of the Weblogs and A million DJs, one musician. if you can match the quote with the link then you'll get nothing, >absolutely free< with a no money back guarantee:

"If Web Logging (or "'blogging") is the New Journalism then scavenging must be the New Cuisine. This format for writing on the web, which some are calling the "Ground Zero of the personal Webcasting revolution", is drowning in noise because the armchair reporters - for whom the blogging tools were invented - have no idea what to use their 'blogs for or what direction they should be going in. A representative 'blog is confused, disorganized and maddeningly tiring to read. Much like a personal web site from 1996, so what's new and why should we care? Least the utopian talk of web logs changing the world and the face of journalism have you expecting more than they can deliver, there could be a useful purpose for them - given some discipline."

c'mon no peaking at the links...

"In the beginning, there were the voices: people expressing themselves, communicating with one another, offering their perspectives on the world and sharing their passions. By lowering the barriers to publishing, the Web can make those voices, whether representing individuals or their organizations, more powerful than ever before. But that requires the right tools, metaphors and platforms.

Through a gradual process of evolution and technology development, the voices have finally found a native online form through which to express themselves: a new kind of Website called the Weblog."

if you're into multivariate probabalistic systems - and who isn't, really - then you'll enjoy A Brief Introduction to Graphical Models and Bayesian Networks :

"Graphical models are a marriage between probability theory and graph theory. They provide a natural tool for dealing with two problems that occur throughout applied mathematics and engineering -- uncertainty and complexity -- and in particular they are playing an increasingly important role in the design and analysis of machine learning algorithms. Fundamental to the idea of a graphical model is the notion of modularity -- a complex system is built by combining simpler parts. Probability theory provides the glue whereby the parts are combined, ensuring that the system as a whole is consistent, and providing ways to interface models to data. The graph theoretic side of graphical models provides both an intuitively appealing interface by which humans can model highly-interacting sets of variables as well as a data structure that lends itself naturally to the design of efficient general-purpose algorithms."

[ via langreiter ]

more good stuff from dan bricklin - A Taxonomy of Computer Systems and Different Topologies: Standalone to P2P :

"We all know that P2P relates to some sort of topographical difference in using computers and networks compared to what was common in the near past. What we struggle with is "what is that difference?" What I think is that people want to think that there is one new topology and that's what's happening. I think we're confused because all sorts of things, each of which has merit, claim to be "Peer-to-Peer", yet they all are different in many fundamental ways. They all use multiple PCs, which we think of as "Peers", connected by the Internet "to" something, so they each can lay claim to that moniker.

Let me propose some taxonomy that describes the topologies and roles of computers in a network, and then let's examine the taxonomy of various systems, such as Napster, Instant Messaging, and Groove, in light of that taxonomy."

who cares if wap is on the ropes. motivated by that same tendency which drove me to take latin in college, i've gone and set up the mobile edition of snowdeal.org. you can check it out in the yospace emulator. not much going on, except some links to my favorite sites for killing time when i'm sitting on the tarmac at o'hare airport. more to come later.

ever since i started using blogger, i've wanted to change the format of the autogenerated archive links. well, my laziness and hubris has finally paid in spades, since i stumbled on a solution - thanks to Phil Ringnalda for supporting my bad habits.

i don't know what kind of rock i've been living under, but i have never heard of alicebot which looks like eliza on steroids:

"A.L.I.C.E. (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity) is an award-winning open source natural language artificial intelligence chat robot. The software used to create A.L.I.C.E. is available as free open source Alicebot and AIML software."

alice gets it smarts via the artificial intelligence markup language, which looks easy to extend. i'd bet it wouldn't be too hard too translate opencyc to aiml predicates. hmmm.

alice plus jabber could be a barrel of fun. [ alice via taylor ]

whooohooo! thanks lawrence and dave:

"Last Friday, I decided to delay closing the site until I could lay out my exact situation and brainstorm with some readers different scenarios to keep the site going. Well out of that discussion, I am happy to announce a week later that I've decided to join the team at UserLand Software and to also continue my work on Tomalak's Realm. "

Business Opportunities for PHP in the Wireless Market:

"The benefits of PHP as a server-side, cross-platform HTML scripting language are generally acknowledged.

However, PHP's advantages for developing wireless applications are less well known. PHP is a great tool to generate Wireless Markup Language (WML) for the WAP protocol, and cHTML (a subset of HTML) for i-Mode."

i didn't see this around, so i guess i'll post it here. if any one care, netscape released netscape 6.1 beta 1, which is based on mozilla 0.91.

i haven't thought much about marv minsky since i read the society of the mind way back in the day; however, It's 2001. Where Is HAL? led me to this nice picture which does what nice pictures are supposed to do - sum up a thousand words.

who knew that san diego was actually cool, cloudy and dreary this time of year? not me.

hmmm. blogger is acting strange and giving me a "error 500: HTTP post too long" if my posts are, umm, too long. strange.

Microsoft Tries To Get Smart illustrates the obvious concerns that people are having with smart tags:

"What's gotten people like Winer and others (link to photo of protestors burning the flag) riled is concern that Microsoft (link to Microsoft stock chart showing how well company is performing) might, because of its OS monopoly (link to article by anti-trust expert detailing why Microsoft is not a monopoly) be able to force its technology down the throats of unsuspecting, uninformed or apathetic users (link to photo of lemmings) who might not realize the implications of the technology (link to Microsoft XP order info page)."

i don't know. this whole smart tag thing, juxtaposed with the demise of suck and feed has me a little less optimistic that things are going to turn out o.k.

i'm going west young man, going west and will be in la jolla for the next couple of days. posts may be sporadic. or maybe not. hi. ho.

if you work in a software shop you've undoubtably encountered a development process of one sort or another. currently lightweight methods like the horribly titled, extreme programming, are all the rage. The New Methodology gives a pretty balanced overview of xp and its ilk:

"In the past few years there's been a rapidly growing interest in agile (aka "lightweight") methodologies. Alternatively characterized as an antidote to bureaucracy or a license to hack they've stirred up interest all over the software landscape. In this essay I explore the reasons for agile methods, focusing not so much on their weight but on their adaptive nature and their people-first orientation. I also give a summary and references to the processes in this school and consider the factors that should influence your choice of whether to go down this newly trodden path."

while i'm the last one to line up for documentation, i think as usual it's a matter of not going to one extreme [no pun intended] over another as the good folks in Applying an Architecture-Centric, Iterative Development Process point out.

if there only were a little more time in the day. opencola has posted a swarmcast developer guide:

This document details the Swarmcast Core Library external API through which Swarmcast resource transfers can be initiated and monitored. This is a Java API and is thus intended to be called from Java applications. Those wishing to control Swarmcast transfers from non-Java code will either need to use the Java Invocation API, develop CORBA (or similar) wrappers, or communicate with a Swarmcast node through the XML messaging language none of which are covered here. After reading this document a developer should be able to:

1. Bring a Swarmcast node into existence.
2. Cause a node to join an existing mesh.
3. Begin a new mesh around a node.
4. Download the resource made available by a mesh.

[ via hack the planet ]

while the IM gorillas attempt to create walled gardens, jabber gets a bit more traction in wireless and voice markets:

"The open source IM project Jabber has inked a partnership with voice web outfit Nuance."

"The deal looks like a fairly straightforward reciprocal technology exchange: Nuance anoints Jabber as the preferred IM service for its voice customers, including Sprint PCS, and Jabber gets Nuance's voice technology. "

"Jabber is gathering an impressive momentum, and as it's open source, is a whole deal cheaper and easier to integrate than its proprietary IM rivals."

being fresh on the heels of jabber's deal with france telecom, you can begin to see how the wireless network operators feel about getting boxed in by m$ or aol.

i think the 0.91 release is forthcoming, if the buglist is any indication. and finally the ie favorites bug is put to rest. hopefully there isn't a regression any time soon.

this is not a post.

it's all about juxtaposition. or quoting out of context.

netscape and aol/time-warner, part two:

"Netscape is nowhere, since Netscape no longer exists. There is no longer a company called Netscape. It ceased to exist in 1999, when AOL bought it. The Netscape "brand" is still being used by AOL/Time-Warner, but there is no ``Netscape'' any more. Just AOL/Time-Warner and the many names under which it does business. That's important to remember, because whatever nostalgia you might have for Netscape-the-company, it is no more."

Netscape: Browsing Past Its Past

"AOL Time Warner is remaking its pioneering Netscape software business into an Internet media hub brimming with Time Warner artists and publications, aimed at office workers and Web purists not already using AOL services.

"The browser is a crown jewel. However, six months from now, you won't consider Netscape to be a browser company," said Jim Bankoff, Netscape's president, referring to its early role in creating the first popular tool for surfing the Web."

mefi is all over the the story with the usual platitudes. i could go on a rant, but it's probably not worth it. the "browser wars" were over a long time ago, well before aol bought netscape. mozilla is not a browser. it's an application platform. you don't like that? think it's too pie-in-the-sky? fine. use another browser. maybe even one built on the mozilla codebase. or not. in any case, the browser wars are over and there are bigger fish to fry:

"As we move from an Internet of hundreds of millions of computers to an Internet of tens of billions of things that embed computers, he urged us to think ahead to an Internet that consists of billions of things.

The Sun CTO pushed us to consider this future beyond web services and even beyond Jini. He reminded us that the Internet is bigger than the Web, and suggested we look for new applications that are different in the way that instant messaging was. "The most interesting clients," Papadopoulis said, "are the ones you no longer control.""

although i happen to use mozilla, i'm not evangelizing for the power of open source as an end in-and-of-itself. the software world is more complicated than that. it's big enough for open and closed. papadopoulis is right. he can make money and the most interesting clients are the ones you no longer control.

having worked in the food service industry, i can testify that this behavior is more common than you ever really wanted to know:

"Testifying in the trial of Scott B. Savino, who is charged with sickening a customer by spraying a sandwich with oven cleaner, Daniel P. Musson said he and Savino frequently laced sandwiches with cleaning products or spit on and "skated" on frozen meat patties that were thrown to the kitchen floor before being flame-broiled."

of course, i would ever think of such a thing. combine this knowledge with the stuff my wife would divulge about her experiences while she was food inspector and you've got a recipe for indigestion. [ via lgf ]

i'm feeling the need to expand my thoughts regarding the end of tomalak.

i've been reading tomalak for something like two years...every...single...day and the effect of the announcement is analogous to waking up and finding out that npr has decided that it has better things to do. i suppose that's indicative of the power of the medium. i appreciate the hard work that lawrence puts into the site and it will be sadly missed.

it should be readily apparent that the other sections of my site are modelled after tomalak's realm. the site was an early and powerful influence on my understanding of the power of independent publishing. hi. ho.

sweet jesus! it looks like tomalak is going off the air. what a supreme drag.

yup. i finally got around to a redesign. i primarily wanted to get rid of all those tables within tables within tables and move towards a more standards compliant format. hopefully i was successful. i haven't fully tested it in all browsers, but it should look adequate in all 4.0 and above clients. let me know if you notice any odd behaviors.

Tangled Web Services actually gives a relatively coherent account of what is the oldest game in the technology platform part of town:

"So the question still remains—what is the programming model for Web services? With their answers, vendors have an opportunity to change their relative competitive position. Interestingly, the majority of the Web services initiatives either don’t have explicit development models or have only weak models based on currently available development tools. And this is where users will have to worry about getting stuck."

[ via cam ]

if you use jabber you might be interested to know that jabber watcher went live today. it's an information service that provides instant notifications on topics of interest from venues such as slashdot, freshmeat and moreover.

before it went live there was an interesting discussion on the scalability of "agent"-like services that live on your roster [ analogous to active buddy ] and subscription-like information services such as jabber watcher. i think the general consensus was that the jabber server wouldn't scale so well with "agent"-like services that live in your roster because of the way that presence is determined:

"I talked about this with a few Jabber.com developers this morning and we all agree that the best approach is probably for bots to be services rather than clients. The downside is that they have to deal with their own rosters and presence, but the upside is that they can have total control over how they do that."

i'm sure you could still send presence sensitive notifications, although i don't know if jabber watcher supports this since i haven't had time to play with it yet.

wondering about that doubleclick url redirect phenomenon that was irritating me? sheepishly, i must admit that i too quickly blamed doubleclick. in fact it appears that it was a regression that showed up in the mozilla builds and is now gone in the latest builds. live by the builds and die by the builds.