i found metacrap on the always informative webvoice [ which incidently is where i found the taxonomies post yesterday ]. i know cory doctorow is a Smart Man and although there's a kernel of truth in much of metacrap, most of it is "trivially obvious" [ as one of my logic professors used to be fond of repeating over and over. and over. ]. after a long rant about how arbitrary most forms of metadata ultimately can be, cory concludes that, by gosh:

"Metadata can be quite useful, if taken with a sufficiently large pinch of salt. The meta-utopia will never come into being, but metadata is often a good means of making rough assumptions about the information that floats through the Internet.

"Certain kinds of implicit metadata is awfully useful, in fact. Google exploits metadata about the structure of the World Wide Web: by examining the number of links pointing at a page (and the number of links pointing at each linker), Google can derive statistics about the number of Web-authors who believe that that page is important enough to link to, and hence make extremely reliable guesses about how reputable the information on that page is.

"This sort of observational metadata is far more reliable than the stuff that human beings create for the purposes of having their documents found. It cuts through the marketing bullshit, the self-delusion, and the vocabulary collisions."

so human categorization can be capricious and filled with undertainty. this has been a well observed fact since aristotle and the scholastics decided it would be big fun to walk around and bin everything into not-so-tidy categories that people have been debating since about five minutes after they started saying that's a dog and that's a platypus

speaking of platypusses, programmers have been dealing with the problem of Encapsulation, Inheritance and the Platypus effect as well:

"A number of programmers have described their class hierarchies as being "brittle". Class hierarchies are often used to represent taxonomies. In the "real world", the term "taxonomy" refers to the system of biological classification into phyla, genus, species and so forth. In the software domain, the term is sometimes used to refer to a hierarchical categorization of a diverse set of objects. An example would be the various flavors of widgets in a moden GUI environment.

However, real object collections aren't always hierarchical."

yup. more than laziness and hubris - things are complicated. and it's certainly a craw in metadata's jaw. and yet - it moves [ with apologies to galileo ], as yahoo and dmoz prove. there is, in certain cases, value in a good ol' fashioned human intervention.

in fact, the author seems to be arguing that automated "implicit metadata" is the way to go. but who decided that there was a complicated and reliable relationship between linking and relevancy?

a warm body.

of course, cory has an agenda to convince you that things like openfolders need to be done. and that's fine. i hear openfolders is superfine and i look forward to playing with it. my only point is that this isn't the first time in the history of computing when somebody claims that we'd all be better off if humans weren't involved to muck things up because we're just too damn arbitrary and illogical.

and it won't be the last.

i'm glad robert scoble is back to sclobleizing the massess. yesterday he was riffing on http business services and the secret sauce that technologists usually overlook:

"Where do we insert humans into this process?

A Weblog. Gasp! A Weblog in a corporation? You've gotta be kidding, right? No, I'm not."

"That CEO is gonna be awfully confused in the morning looking at all those HTTP services. Even if your programmers did a killer job of making those charts look pretty (and useful!) and they made the numbers the right color, and all that stuff, the CEO is still gonna need context. Human context."

sounds like another high-profile pitch for blogging and knowledge management.

Taxonomies and Topic Maps: Categorization Steps Forward:

"The process of categorizing data need not be either expensive or overly complex. In recent correspondence on the email list xml-dev, Carol Ellerbeck, a taxonomy expert with Harvard Business School's Baker Library and formerly of Lycos, made this very point. Responding to a writer who suggested that one needed to be "king of the world" and have "an unlimited budget" to create effective taxonomies, Ellerbeck wrote, "If you 'were king of the world'...you would not need 'an unlimited budget'...just a modest one, to have experts build your taxonomy/domain vocabularies. I say this as a taxonomist who has been in the vocabulary trenches with electronic information for years. Automation is wonderful (and I would say, even essential), but start with not just humans (albeit smart humans), start with humans who have some expertise, and you will accomplish your goal faster, with fewer people, more efficiently, and have a more solid foundation to build on.""

in more positive jabber news - introducing joogle:

"Joogle is a simple Java API for querying and parsing the XML response that Google gives. It does not have any multi-threading support."

"Joogle Agent is a Jabber agent written in Java. By using the Joogle library, Joogle Agent can act as a front end to Google for search requests sent via an instant message. It uses the JabberBeans library in order to communicate with the Jabber server."

the new jabber powered logo looks nice and everything, but i'm not so sure about the lengthy usage terms:

Follow these guidelines to use the Jabber™ Powered Logo.

1. You agree to promote Jabber by providing quality Jabber information, technologies, or protocols. You agree not to use the Logo in connection with any statements or materials that are in poor taste or in violation of any applicable laws or government regulations.

2. You agree to use only the official graphic in accordance with this agreement and will not alter the official Logo in any way, including its size, proportions, colors or elements, or otherwise change its appearance. The Logo must appear by itself; it may not be combined with any other graphic or textual elements and may not be used as an element of any other logo or mark.

3. You agree to link the Logo only to the Jabber Powered home page and will not link to other pages on your web site or to a third party web site.

4. You agree to insure the Logo is not a predominant feature on a web site. This means (at minimum) that it must appear smaller than your web page title and organization logo.

5. You agree to use the following legend in an attribution page accessible from the page where the Logo appears: "Jabber Powered is a trademark of Jabber, Inc. and its use is licensed through the Jabber Foundation."

6. You acknowledge that the Jabber Powered trademark is licensed through the Jabber Foundation and that Jabber.com, Inc. is the sole owner of the trademark. You agree not to adopt, use, or register any logo confusingly similar to the Jabber Powered Logo.

7. You understand that Jabber, Inc. disclaims any warranties that may be express or implied by law regarding the logo, including warranties against infringement. You agree to use the logo at your own risk and agree to indemnify Jabber, Inc. and the Jabber Foundation against any claims or liability that may arise from your use of the Logo.

i think somebody has been talking to one lawyer too many.

who says those wacky behaviorists weren't on to something after all. .

it only takes one encounter with an earwig crawling up your leg while you're drying off in the shower for you to associate "drying off in the shower" with "something crawling up my leg", no matter how many times you say to yourself, "there's no earwig today. there is no earwig today." it's true - go ahead, try it.

and i'm not even overly bothered by earwigs, even though i hear it's true that they can indeed find a cozy place to nest in your ear:

"Britta Frey, from Berlin, had been kept awake by a scratching noise, but couldn't work out from where it came.

Doctors washed out her ear and the live earwig appeared. Her hearing hasn't been damaged."

"She said: "Every time I turned round it seemed to be coming from somewhere else. It was really creepy. I went back to bed but could not sleep a wink because of the scratching."

don't mind me. just tossing more stuff into the annotated bookmark bin.

Architectural Style:

"To summarize, then, it seems that XSLT may be a victim of its own success and could be in danger of being pressed into service in areas where it simply isn't a good fit. Luckily there is a rapidly growing body of experience which is beginning to show exactly where XSLT should and shouldn't be used. Developers are wise to draw on this experience, particularly if they want to avoid the 'large scale rewrites' forecasted by Sean McGrath. The message about using the right tool for the job may be an old one, but it's obviously one that can't be stressed too often."

i was going to post an interesting backlog of 802.11 articles, but it appears that most of them have turned up on slashdot, but that's not going to stop me from throwing them in the annotated bookmark bin.

cringely illustrates how to roll your own dsl which is where my eyes were drawn to the following drool inducing blurb:

"Linksys has come out with a firmware upgrade for its WAP 11 Wireless Access point that allows two of them to function as Ethernet-to-Ethernet bridges. The firmware is free on the Linksys Website . The firmware also allows use of Ethernet MAC address access lists to restrict connections to a list that is uploaded into flash ROM. That way it is much harder for people to just cruise down your street with a notebook computer, surfing on your bandwidth and stealing your files.

"The street price of these Linksys boxes is now down around $250, which is half the price of the next cheapest bridge, from SMC."

hmmmm. whets the appetite. i had to look no further than Bridging 802.11 Networks with Linksys to increase the drool, which was inspired by an excellent thread on the Bay Area Wireless User Group's (BAWUG). one post in particular illustrates the kind of throughput and range you might be able to expect with a little tweaking:

"I have two 4-mile paths using WAP11's and they are both running flawlessly. Throughput is at least 2 Mbps.

I am using Andrew 24 dBi parabolic antennas on one path and Cal-Amp 21 dBi parabolic antennas on the other. Performance seems to be about the same."

"The Andrew antennas are available from Tessco, Inc. ph: 800-508-5444 Andrew 2.4 GHz parabolic antennas SKU# 40735. Cost about $85 each."

bummed because you just bought a netgear access point? there's at least anectdotal evidence that the software upgrade will work on other systems:

"I've just used the Linksys firmware to upgrade my netgear me102 access point and used the Linksys SMNP utility to configure it.

In fact I think it should work on any PRISIM chip based 802.11b access point.

One thing I noticed though. After upgrading the firmware I had to unplug the ME102 and plug it back in brfore I could access it again."

me thinks that my search for an access point has ended.

hmm - what rss output format to choose? 0.90, 0.91, 0.92 or 1.0?

cool. looks like it's working. i'm liking xmlrpc::lite over the frontier modules, although i can't seem to figure out how to set the debug flag to echo the request/response information.

testing. testing. testing. this post is via a custom xmlrpc::lite client that i'm developing.

perhaps i'm risking engaging in a form of blognosing, but i'm going to say it anyway.

i like oreilly.

i like oreilly because they have people like simone paddock and sara winge who will go out of their way to give you a hand if your dogs eat your copy of programming web services with xml-rpc.

thanks. the dogs promised not to eat the new copy as long as i keep up with the walking schedule.

in other oreilly news near and dear to my heart. nathan torkington has started a bioinformatics weblog and there's also a new bioinformatics discussion list. it all looks like very good stuff if you're into that sort of thing.

So That Was A Bright Idea Then... should serve as a warning. if you have the prerequisites in place to take advantage of wapblogger and you have a penchant for inebriation - well, my friends, you might just find yourself deciding it's a good idea to proclaim to the world at 3:28a.m.:

"tonight i had many a blowjob, you are now thinking alas the young lad has got himself a wench. No i cry to you, i have eyes for only one, and thout shall only be known as Charlotte of the Merrion household. The blowjob is behold the ideal cocktail of the chicago rock cafe, a shot of kahula topped with whipped cream and drunk with the hands behind the back. This adds to the style drinking such a shot a does the job superbly."

hmmm. there's an interesting blurb in peter saint-andre's jabbercon report:

"Part of what makes interoperability a reality in Jabber is the existence of a modular architecture in which developers can create their own server modules. That task has just been made much easier by the release of the Jabber External Component Libraries (JECL). These libraries, developed at Jabber, Inc. mainly by Dave "DizzyD" Smith, provide a strong foundation for external component development in C++ by giving programmers consistent methods for handling socket connections to Jabber servers, managing threads pools, and manipulating XML data structures. You can find these libraries at jabber.tigris.com, the new home for code that is open-sourced by Jabber, Inc. A win32 port of these libraries will likely emerge at that site, as will language bindings or re-writes for other languages such as Python and Java."

and yet, when i try to follow the link to jabber.tigris.com - it's nowhere to be found. hopefully, it'll come up soon.

o.k. why do i keep getting a error message that insists that the new blogger.getRecentPosts method doesn't exist?

Nope. It's not possible for my seat to get any narrower and still have me fit in. I guess that only makes sense if you know i'm on a plane heading for montreal. Still bummed about missing jabbercon. Hi. Ho.

The Great Rewiring

"Peer-to-peer is the more kind of philosophical question; Web services right now is a more technological set of questions. But I think the two can actually inform one another quite a bit. It's plain to anybody looking at the peer-to-peer movement that one of the things it's critically lacking is an agreed-upon set of infrastructure and data standards. This is what Web services is trying to create, obviously, at its core. It seems likelier to me that peer- to-peer will converge on standards pioneered by the Web services people, rather than on standards arising directly out of the peer-to-peer world."

great. just great. while i was at work today, one or both of the dogs ate my copy of Programming Web Services with XML-RPC. with two cow hoofs, two big ass bones and a variety of other chewables laying around, i'm guessing that they are trying to send me a message. something along the lines of, "this is just a warning. take us for more walks. screw that damn computer." i interrogated both of them, but neither would snitch on the other, despite the attempted bribes of peanut butter.

i had the opportunity to go to jabbercon, but i passed it up because i just got back from boston and have to be in montreal the day after the conference and too much travel makes me, um, grumpy. i'm already starting to regret the decision. hopefully, there will be lots of real-time reporting. sniff.

airsnort

"AirSnort is a wireless LAN (WLAN) tool which recovers encryption keys. AirSnort operates by passively monitoring transmissions, computing the encryption key when enough packets have been gathered."

"AirSnort requires approximately 100M-1GB of data to be gathered. Once enough packets have been gathered, AirSnort can guess the encryption password in under a second."

[ via hack the planet ]

sweet jesus. me and the mall don't get along. and don't even get me started on ikea, where I witnessed some sort of mass consumerism feeding frenzy. it was ugly with masses displaying symptoms including glazed eyes, increased aggressiveness and inability to operate a cart in a civilized manner. so i decided that blogging via wap is as good a way as any to chew up time while kris searches for that perfect duvet cover.

somehow i missed the announcement that covad is filing for chapter 11. my isp, speakeasy, is putting a good face on it, but i'm not exactly filled with an overwhelming sense confidence that i'll be able to rely on my dsl connection in the future. don't you just love the dynamics of markets dominated by monopolists?

This is a test. I'm posting from my phone via waplogger!

wow. practical css layout is packed with useful tricks and tips for table-less design:

"So now we have a bunch of nested DIVs. How is this any better than the nested TABLEs they replace? The answer lies in the way the tag was intended to be used. DIVs imply a logical, or structural grouping. Even when they are nested they remain structural markup. In our example we grouped images with their captions (first level), and then grouped these image/caption pairs with similar image/caption pairs (second level). These are both examples of structural grouping that is handled quite well by the DIV tag.

However, TABLEs imply a relationship between column and/or row headers, and the data in the TABLE cells. When we use them for layout, we lose the structural semantics of a TABLE. And we are back to using HTML for layout. Nesting TABLEs only compounds the problem."

nice. google has upgraded the web:

"Quietly, without much fanfare, Google is upgrading the Web.

They're indexing lots of weblogs, including Scripting News, every day."

this has interesting consequences for tools like atomz. awhile back, i used google's domain restrict feature to provide site search capabilities, but i removed it because the lag between indexing made atomz more useful. i guess i'll have to revisit that decision now. all-in-all a great move by google that will certainly stave off potential competition.

amy wohl has written an interesting piece on blogging and knowledge management:

"One of the tough tasks in KM is getting expertise located in an organization (that is, figuring out who has it on a subject by subject basis). Tougher still is validating its credibility with other members of the organization. Toughest of all is getting the experts to agree to share their expertise with others, except as part of their regular job. Employees who have spent a career lifetime enhancing their value because they "know" something others don't are logically reluctant to give away their valuable expertise and, in that process, loose some or all of their value."

"But what if the two - blogging and KM - got together? That is, what if we took the technology that allows Bloggers to quickly annotate their journeys through the web with information about the whys and wherefores with a KM system that allowed their organizational colleagues to use the weblogs as a source of expertise?"

interesting thought, expecially in light of the release of the blogger api [not to discount the applicability of manila or greymatter, of course].

the irony is that i think i have posted another article on blogging and lightweight knowledge management, but i can't seem to find it in the archives.

[ update thanks to mike from larkfarm for pointing out that the article i couldn't find was grassroots km through blogging, which i had, in fact, posted previously but couldn't find - now that's distributed knowledge management in action. ]

following-up on his excellent piece, the new methodology, martin fowler continues to dish well-balanced commentary on that great ponderable - Is Design Dead?

" For many that come briefly into contact with Extreme Programming, it seems that XP calls for the death of software design. Not just is much design activity ridiculed as "Big Up Front Design", but such design techniques as the UML, flexible frameworks, and even patterns are de-emphasized or downright ignored. In fact XP involves a lot of design, but does it in a different way than established software processes. XP has rejuvenated the notion of evolutionary design with practices that allow evolution to become a viable design strategy. It also provides new challenges and skills as designers need to learn how to do a simple design, how to use refactoring to keep a design clean, and how to use patterns in an evolutionary style."

[ via cam ]

before i worked for a enormous corporation like motorola, i had no idea how true the following statement in How Big Blue fell for Linux can be:

"The story of how IBM made friends with free software hackers, from the early days when it dipped its toes into the Apache Project to its current headfirst plunge into Linux, is not the story of a carefully executed strategy. It is instead a tale of contingency, luck, a few committed engineers and a few canny executives. Its twists and turns hinge on the results of combating agendas, political maneuvering and software ambition. At its most mundane, it is a story that hints at how the battle for dominance over new software markets will be waged over the next few years. At its most metaphysical, it is a story that illuminates the contradictions inherent in the very concept of a "corporation."

It's all too easy to see a company like IBM, or Sun, or even Microsoft, in the terms of the legal fiction that is represented by the word "corporation," to anthropomorphize it as a "body" and give it attributes -- evil, good, brilliant, stupid, spunky, lumbering. But the modern corporation is far too fragmented and balkanized to personify in such simple, unitary terms."

""I think many people don't realize how much the social dynamics inside of large companies [such as IBM] resemble that of the open-source community," says Vepstas. "It's just that within large corporations the cooperation and the bickering are hidden from public view. The Linux/390 guys within IBM were stepping on all sorts of land mines internally.""

i've been contemplating whipping together a jabber interface to blogger for awhile. of course, the job was made much easier with the release of the blogger api . and now, amidst the blooming of clients, we see the beginnings of what instant messaging and blogging could look like. heck, there could even be a grant available:

"Say, anyone doing anything with Blogger? I just checked out flogger.jabber.org. Most cool! I know we've been looking at LiveJournal integration too. The Blogger guys sent me email last week about their interest. They just released an API at http://plant.blogger.com/api/ and have setup a development interest group at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bloggerDev. Their back-end is a SQL Server though. Let me know if you're interested. Possible Jabber Grant opportunity!"

jogger is neat, but it really only scratches the surface. the new blogger "recently updated" rss feed scraches a little more since it'd be easy together a "presence sensitive" updated blog notifier. but this is still just "hello world" type stuff. looks like i've got to get to work on putting some of my ideas together since the bar is getting raised. quickly.

i've been thinking about exploring xul for awhile to see what its strengths and weaknesses are. maybe it's time to order essential xul programming :

"A revolutionary new technology for the rapidly expanding world of e-commerce, XUL (XML User Interface Language) is an XML-based user interface language that gives Web developers control over all aspects of the Web interface. Featuring two tutorials on programming with XUL, this book shows developers how to use basic XUL elements to build a sample interface for an e-commerce site, then goes on to explore more sophisticated applications by creating an information portal inside an application. Readers will find expert tips and advice on how to get started writing XUL code as well as how to extend it into Java and other non-Netscape interfaces."

nope. there's no doubt about it. nobody is going to mistake me for the athletic type. i used to be more active. camping, hiking, and canoeing were all pursuits that i pursued with some regularity. but times have changed. the canoe sits hanging in garage. moving to the midwest doesn't exactly provide one with the types of hikes as the northwest or the northeast. spare time is squandered on house projects and other hobbies. and that's how the sedentary lifestyle begins to take its toll.

but this weekend, kris and i bought bicycles. nothing fancy. just some low-end trek hybrids. we've been going for rides and it's big fun. you won't see me entering into any long-distance events any time soon, but it feels superfine after a long day at work to jump on the bike and work through all the daily stresses and strains. the odd thing is that i really can't believe it didn't occur to us to get bikes sooner. so, if you notice fewer posts as summer stretches into fall, you can be happy knowing it's because i'm out getting a little fresh air.

the blogger api has some new methods:

"blogger.newPost: Makes a new post to a designated blog. Optionally, will publish the blog after making the post.

blogger.editPost: Edits a given post. Optionally, will publish the blog after making the edit.

blogger.getUsersBlogs: Returns information on all the blogs a given user is a member of.

blogger.getTemplate: Returns the main or archive index template of a given blog.

blogger.setTemplate: Edits the main or archive index template of a given blog."

i do believe dave is correct:

" We work with competitors to empower users and other developers, and make it easy for users who want to, to become developers. That's the philosophy of the Internet, and it's always been the philosophy of serious developers, even those who work at BigCo's. Sometimes leadership makes us take the low road, through patents or other lock-in strategies, but imho that's when they are leading through fear, not power. It's always right to be compatible, and it's even better to plan for it, to design for it, commit to it."

"So thank you to Blogger for having the courage to be one of the first to open its Web app to scripting through open interfaces. A bright future awaits us. I'm sure of it."

and aaron provides the proof with a nearly instantaneous update to blogger.pm:

"A quick and dirty implementation of the Blogger API.

The external interfaces should not change, but if you shouldn't be relying on the stuff in the black box. I am adding methods as they are published to the Blogger API. Once it reaches a stage that approximates finality, I will sit down and give some proper thought as to how the code should be handled internally.

For example, it would be nice to have the main blogger object spawn "post" objects, complete with their own methods, but it's still a bit soon to be worrying about that sort of thing.

Comments, suggestions and bug fixes are welcome."

SILC [ Secure Internet Live Conferencing ] sounds like it could be mighty handy for a number situations:

"SILC (Secure Internet Live Conferencing) is a protocol which provides secure conferencing services in the Internet over insecure channel. SILC superficially resembles IRC, although they are very different internally. They both provide conferencing services and have almost same set of commands. Other than that, they are nothing alike. The SILC is secure and the network model is entirely different compared to IRC."

"SILC is much more than just about `encrypting the traffic'. That is easy enough to do with IRC and SSL hybrids, but even then the entire network cannot be secured, only part of it. SILC provides security services, such as sending private messages entirely secure; no one can see the message except you and the real receiver of the message. SILC also provides same functionality for channels; no one except those clients joined to the channel may see the messages destined to the channel. Communication between client and server is also secured with session keys and all commands, authentication data (such as passwords etc.) and other traffic is entirely secured. The entire network, and all parts of it, is secured. We are not aware of any other conferencing protocol providing same features at the present time."

i think a jabber transport could be fun.

Java & XML, 2nd Edition: Chapter 12: SOAP:

"In this chapter, I explain what SOAP is, and why it is such an important part of where the web development paradigm is moving. That will help you get the fundamentals down, and prepare you for actually working with a SOAP toolkit. From there, I briefly run over the SOAP projects currently available, and then delve into the Apache implementation. This chapter is not meant to be the complete picture on SOAP; the next chapter, Chapter 13, fills in lots of gaps. Take this as the first part of a miniseries; many of your questions at the end of this chapter will be answered in the next. "

Perl for the Web:

"Perl for the Web is a book I wrote that was published by New Riders in August 2001. It provides tools and strategies to improve the performance of existing Web applications in Perl. It also provides principles and ideas that help Web programmers create an extensible framework for future growth.

The full text of the book is offered right here. The chapters are stored in an XML form and published to HTML and WML using the techniques from Chapters 16 and 17."

[via jy's weblog]

more evidence that the fact that i was born with a birthweight around 2 pounds isn't doing me any intellectual favors:

"Babies who are a little bigger at birth have a marked advantage in terms of intelligence later in childhood, a study suggests."

"Other studies have clearly shown that being underweight at birth seems to correspond with poorer mental development."

"Although not proven, it is suspected that the relationship between IQ and birthweight may be due the nutrition available to the foetus during early pregnancy, a time vital to neurodevelopment. "

add that to the fact that i'm left-handed and therefore supposedly more susceptible to death by unnatural causes and the future is so bright, i gotta wear shades.

o.k. i finally got the application working:

dial 1.800.555.tell
after the intro advert either:

say "extensions" followed by "three-two-five-two-three" or

type "1 32523"

depending on free time over the weekend, there could be lots more fun stuff soon.

hmmm. scratch that previous post. for some reason the main tellme number isn't updating with the new content. if i dial the developer's number [ 1.800.555.VXML ], everything is fine, but that won't work for the masses because you'd need my developer ID and pin. bummer. maybe it'll update in a little bit. try again in the morning.

via the wonders of tellme and the previous post on using perl to create voiceML applications i've whipped together a little something, something.

dial 1.800.555.tell
after the intro advert, type 1 32523

now you can get the latest slashdot news headlines, the latest perl modules uploaded to cpan and a funny little quote from homer simpson. anytime. anywhere.

more to come later.

Creating VoiceXML Applications With Perl :

"VoiceXML is an XML-based language used to create Web content and services that can be accessed over the phone. Not just those nifty WAP-enabled "Web phones", mind you, but the plain old clunky home models that you might use to order a pizza or talk to your Aunt Mable. While HTML presumes a graphical user interface to access information, VoiceXML presumes an audio interface where speech and keypad tones take the place of the screen, keyboard, and mouse. This month we will look at a few samples that demonstrate how to create dynamic voice applications using VoiceXML, Perl, and CGI."

hey! it looks like eric costello has been secretly updating his site. the top-level url still gives no hint to the secret activity.

what a surprise. i'm linking to aaron. again. now he's gone and thrown together blogger.pm which is a "quick and dirty implementation" of the blogger api.

hmmm. what's up with whitebeam. it sounds useful:

"Whitebeam is an Open Source project which provides a complete rapid development environment for Web applications allowing sophisticated, robust and secure applications to be built using only XML and JavaScript.

"The Whitebeam architecture integrates two popular and robust Open Source platforms - Apache and Mozilla's SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine - with it's own powerful XML environment and security architecture."

suspiciously, google doesn't turn up much and the web developer newsgroup is silent. might still give a try though. [via dangerousmeta]

one of the nice things about working for motorola is the fact that i get toys. toys like my new, java-enabled i85s and access to enough developer resources to get myself into as much trouble as possible. but, as we all know, the problem with phones as multi-modal information appliances is that pesky interface. it's just so...cumbersome. so it comes as a great relief that we can all use the newly released phone keyboard:

"Trying to overcome one of the bigger obstacles preventing consumer acceptance of the wireless Net, Motorola MOT said Monday that it has released what it claims is the first foldable keyboard for Net-ready mobile phones.

Besides standard keyboard functions, the keyboard also enables users to perform phone-related tasks such as adjusting volume, activating the speaker phone and turning off the phone, the company said. The full-sized keyboard folds into a package that measures 5 inches by 3.5 inches by .75 inches."

priced at $100, i'm sure it'll be on all the christmas wishlists this year.

must...make...aaron...stop - otherwise i'll be forced to put up a "link of the day" dedicated solely to him. this time, he's gone and thrown together jabberdict:

"Jabberdict is a Perl script that logs on to a Jabber server and hangs around waiting to define words to people."

"Jabberdict queries a Dict server with the body of incoming messages and returns the results to the sender."

sweet jesus! blogger's got the beginnings of an xml-rpc interface:

"blogger.newPost makes a new post to a designated blog. Optionally, will publish the blog after making the post. On success, it returns the unique ID of the new post (usually a seven-digit number at this time). On error, it will return some error message."

gadzooks! let the fun begin.

do you wait in anticipation for the next issue of d-lib magazine?

do you wax philosophical about xml and semantic transparency?

if i say ontology - do you fire back, "specification of a conceptualization! sir!" ?

do you put the "antic" in semantic web?

if you do this and much more, then maybe you're interested in Professional XML Meta Data, which i just stumbled upon at my local bookstore:

"Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Why Meta Data? Why XML?
Chapter 2 XML Schemas
Chapter 3 XML Linking and Querying
Chapter 4 RDF Model and Syntax
Chapter 5 RDF Schema
Chapter 6 Parsing RDF
Chapter 7 Topic Maps and XTM
Chapter 8 Meaning Definition Language
Chapter 9 Meta Data Architectures
Chapter 10 Processing Techniques for Meta Data
Chapter 11 Further Topic Map/RDF Developments
Chapter 12 Exposing Relational Databases
Chapter 13 Data Validation and Mining with Schematron
Chapter 14 Process Descriptions
Chapter 15 Inferencing Systems
Chapter 16 Advanced Meta Data Use Cases
Appendices
Appendix A Glossary
Appendix B Useful Resources
Index"

freaked about the 802.11 security flaw? no? maybe you should be:

"A new report dashes any remaining illusions that 802.11-based (Wi-Fi) wireless local-area networks are in any way secure. The paper, written by three of the world's foremost cryptographers, describes a devastating attack on the RC4 cipher, on which the WLAN wired-equivalent privacy (WEP) encryption scheme is based."

"The passive network attack takes advantage of several weaknesses in the key-scheduling algorithm of RC4 and allows almost anyone with a WLAN-enabled laptop and some readily available "promiscuous" network software to retrieve a network's key - thereby gaining full user access - in less than 15 minutes."

although serious, before everyone throws out the baby with the bathwater, maybe we should all review the steps outlined on the Securing your Wireless Network:

" If your wireless LAN is located in a single family home, then you are probably more at risk from intruders coming in via your Internet connection than from folks gaining access to your LAN over the air. But if your LAN has some means of wireless connectivity, you've added another way to access your LAN that doesn't require getting past your router's firewall and doesn't even require physical access!"

"Actually, there's a lot you can do to secure your wireless LAN. Most of these tips apply to 802.11b based LANs, since they're the most prevalent. But some tips are just good network security practice and can help no matter how you build your LAN."

from the "all you had to do was ask" department.

first come the request from Sjoerd:

"I wish someone would make a webservice (XML-RPC or SOAP) that can send a message to a ICQ, MSN, AOL or Yahoo messenger user. I'm sure that service will be very popular. Maybe someone with Jabber knowledge can make this?"

which prompts aaron to whip up a jabber SOAP handler:

"Send a message via your Jabber account. Valid arguments are :

=item I Your IM usernme.

=item I Your IM password.

=item I Full IM address of the person y