Open Source Databases Linkfest:

"If you're stuck on Windows platforms, though, Dan Dees of AppSmiths recently pointed me in the direction of SAP DB, which was open-sourced in April of 2001. I've tried it, and we're absolutely going to be using it on our Windows-based projects going forward. It's very well executed, and the fact that it's the back end behind hundreds of SAP deployments around the world is a great reference, too. It's also available on Linux, and offers a web-based management interface."

didn't know that. [ via dave ]

i just noticed the mozilla calendar now has an easy installation process [ at least for windows ]. it looks like the project is coming along nicely, although it doesn't look like there is a wa to set-up shared calendars yet.

i don't know how long the formmail exploit has been around, but it seems like it could get ugly, given the popularity of the script:

"Formmail exploit is getting worse day by day. The real horror is that you may not even know if your server is exploited or not. A spammer can exploit your formmail script to flood thousands of Internet users with junk mail. The mail header will show your domain name and not even the spammer's IP address. Unfortunately, The recipient of spam will yell at you and not at the spammer. Such incidents have already been reported."

if you have formmail on your site, get the fix before people start yelling at you. [ via morelikethis ]

back in the salad days, i can remember hearing stories about the founder domino's pizza, tom monahan, and his over-the-top catholicism. well, he's outdoing himself now with a proposal to build a 250 foot jesus . why? without a hint of irony, "I Am Focusing On God, Family And Domino's Pizza" gives a few clues. [ via mefi ]

this is just plain wierd. and the number of "democratizing" technologies that it depends on is just plain beautiful.

<cheap joke>i wonder if those wacky physicists had to adjust their model for the "bill gates effect"</cheap joke>:

"Solvent socialist economies could be more at risk from corruption than liberal ones, according to a team of physicists, mathematicians and economists.

Some political systems, say the researchers, contain the seeds of 'wealth condensation'. This is the process whereby a sizeable fraction of a society's total assets end up in the hands of one super-rich individual."

whoa. the following scenario , which illustrates one possible future if public wlan's become ubiquitous, might possibly be a corporation's worst nightmare:

"Last time I was at the IETF, in Pittsburgh, Marconi was running the show and gave everyone 802.11 cards. I plugged mine into my notebook and fired up my Ethernet sniffer, which collected approximately 700+ webmail username/password pairs, over 100 POP logins, a good littering of telnet logins, a bunch of tunneled CIFS logins, and other assorted good stuff. Enough to crack into a user account at a large portion of the represented telco R&D firms. What I learned at IETF that year: the telecommunications world was still too stupid to be allowed to own wireless ethernet.

That was the IETF. This is an airport. IPSEC? Nah. It's easier to jail the occasional teenager for "sniffing" than it is to actually fix the problem."

well, i'll be virginia! there's finally a groove tome in the works. i love the last sentence of the review:

"Special Edition Using Groove gives the reader a quick overview of what Groove is capable of. This content will be comprised of screenshots and other graphics to explain the concepts. More technical readers will be able to more quickly develop applications with the Groove framework and completely understand how their new application operates "behind the scenes." Tables and other supporting materials will be included to make this book an excellent flip-to-page-X reference. Programmers planning to develop with the Groove framework will need this book to jump-start his or her application development. Those who have read articles about Groove need this book to see real life applications of the product. Those who have been frustrated with Groove's poor documentation need this book."

dotcomscoop is running a nice little interview with rusty, of k5 fame, where he discusses online communities, blogging and journalism:

"First, we're already seeing the most wired reporters discovering the power of the blog, and rapidly becoming addicted to the kind of instant feedback and massively expanded informational networks they can provide. Watching a reporter start to blog is like watching a sugar addict stumble into Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. Most of them immediately "get it" as soon as they open themselves up to the people they had always previously been talking at. I think this will continue, because I think reporters are just like that. The good ones will never pass up an opportunity to increase their reach."

someday, i'll write like this:

"As our fingers wind around the keyboard sketching our online selves--filling in the furrows, the wrinkles, the gleam, the raised eybrow as we go--that avatar we create *recreates* us in the offline world. It is a circle of creation and recreation. That is the joy in it for me--not so much the voice, the self I have created through blogging, but how that unleashed voice is transforming me, the person, the flesh and the mind."

what a strange coincidence. i'm reading denis johnson's Seek : Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond which has a short story that mentions a lion named marjan which lived in the kabul, afghanistan zoo. i thought it was timely when i read it a couple of weeks ago, even thought the book was written well before the current war.

unfortunately, it appears that marjan, a symbol of dignity to the local community, has died:

"He lost an eye to a grenade and lost weight in the deprivation of the war years, but never lost his aura of dignity. His death tore at people for whom he had come to symbolize Afghanistan's sufferings and aspirations.

"I consider myself a pretty rough guy . . . but I cried," said John Walsh, international projects director of the World Society for the Protection of Animals, which is leading an international drive to bring aid to the wrecked zoo's remaining animals."

speaking of bleeding-edge stuff, the jabber whiteboarding client coccinella is quickly racking up a bevy of features:

• Write text with any font, size, normal, bold, etc.
• Toolbar with basic drawing capabilities
• Flexible editing of each item in the canvas window
• Support for foreign language character sets, from swedish å, ä, and ö, to Chinese
• Extended functionality via plugins, see Extensions . This includes mp3's on all platforms, video, synthetic speech of written text etc.
• Full QuickTime support on Macs and Windows
• Open source with the Gnu public license.

while it installs and connects to my jabber server correctly - including loading my roster - if i try to test two clients, they will suddenly disconnect from the server.

bummer. i've been continuing to play around with the oh-so-promising mozilla -> blogger client, but depsite the fact that mike clued me in on how to set the configuration correctly, i still can't get it to work.

if anyone knows what "error! 804b0001 null" means, i'd be mighty grateful. hmmm. maybe i should try my appkey...or maybe it's because i'm running a 0.98 nightly .

in anycase, despite the problems - version two, with it's wysiwyg enhancements, looks good. i've been munging around the files in the chrome directory and it's looks like a fine foundation to build on.

Easing Web Application Development with CVS:

"Web applications, by definition, work in conjunction with a Web server to perform a variety of tasks, ranging from displaying basic customized greetings to performing complex transactions. Most complex Web applications also make use of a database to store information.

While none of the above are radically different when developing a traditional standalone application, a Web application developer might think CVS is designed for working on traditional offline applications. I know I thought like this until I realized how applicable CVS is to Web development and how useful it really is."

you heard it here first. the mozilla 0.98 branch is available for download. i've been using it for the past hour or so and it's superfine with noticeable speed enhancements, expecially in the mailer and bookmark tree rendering. very nice job.

i really enjoyed matt jones' Design methodologies in digital design, which is filled with chunky aphorisms:

"1. TRULY engage with our medium not as just designers, but ‘design engineers’.
2. Involve not only the users, but the implementers in the creation of solutions
3. Understand the business of design better – be ruthless about our ‘product’ – learn this from other product design businesses"

this is sort-of getting at what i was chewing on with my pithy "when worlds collide" comment a few days ago regarding the ongoing interaction design versus xp debate.

the mozilla blogger tool looks interesting. i installed the widget, but i can't figure out how to configure it. hi. ho.

as excuse to get my hands around xul, i've been working on a similar idea for awhile. i even got motivated enough to built a notepad application based on a tutorial from xulplanet, which doesn't appear to be online at the moment. using xul overlays provides a pretty powerful mechanism for 'ui reuse' - it's feasable to appropriate big chunks of the wysisyg composer that comes with mozilla. as with a bunch of my grand plans, it started to languish when i started having problems getting the xml-rpc interface to work correctly.

at some point i'll post a boatload of relevant links, but essential xul programming is a good place to start:

" 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."

[ mozilla blog via dave via matthew thomas ]

in how the wayback machine works, brewster kahle makes a simple but powerful observation:

"So if all books are 20 TBs, and 20 TBs are $80,000, that's the Library of Congress. Then something big has changed. All music? It's tiny. It looks like there're only one million records that have been produced over the last century. That's tiny. All movies? All theatrical releases have been estimated at 100,000, and most of those from India. If you take all the rest of ephemeral films, that's on the order of a couple hundred thousand. It's just not that big. It allows you to start thinking about the whole thing."

i can remember reading the following quote from nick denton's e.mail from the valley in someone's blog, but i can't remember who said it first:

"One of San Francisco’s leading web designers had been reading The Victorian Internet, a history of the telegraph. "The heyday of the telegrapher as a highly paid, highly skilled information worker was over; telegraphers' brief tenure as members of an elite community with mastery over a miraculous, cutting-edge technology had come to an end. As the twentieth century dawned, the telegraph's inventors had died, its community had crumbled, and its golden age had ended." As he commented, boy, that sounds familiar."

for the first time in a long time google isn't any help. hmmmm.

update:tara from research buzz quickly solved the mystery by pointing out that jason was the likely originator.

not that it's of interest to anybody but a select group of family and friends, but i've made a small effort to start putting more pictures up in the photo section .

don't miss the new shots of our wild and crazy camping trip to hayward, wisconsin - home of the world-famous musky museum (a.k.a. the mocassin bar) and fishing hall of fame .

photosig is filled with some great pictures and advice, which is nice for very amateurish photographers, such as myself. it's all the more fun to catch the funny critical commentary:

"I don't have any problems with pictures of breasts, but I think that if you're going to shoot breasts, you should be honest about it and not try to pass them off as portraits. This photo could only be tackier if you'd sprayed the model with cold water first or asked her to stand on her head so her breasts fell out of her shirt and obscured her face. Even if you accept that it's okay to ask the model to bend over so you can get a look at her cleavage, the fact remains that breasts just don't look very attractive when they're hanging down like udders."

[ via anil ]

so take that mr. pedestal sink! haha! you may have won a few skirmishes, but looks who's the laughing now, mr. pedestal sink. sure, it may have taken me 16 trips to the home despot, one trip to ace hardware and more plumber's putty than i care to contemplate, but who's not leaking now.

i will not have my manhood mocked by porcelain. i say, give me a wrench and enough time and i will conquer all plumbing tasks.

bwahahahahaha!

diveintomark cracks open a can of strong reality:

"We are on the event horizon now. The end is certain, but it has not arrived. Life has gone, but death has not yet come. We spent two long years praying for life. Please join us now as we pray for death."

thanks for having the courage to share in what is, no doubt, a tremendously difficult time.

it's a little short on any new details, but E Pluribus Unum still makes a nice friday evening read:

"Commercial wireless Internet service is, for the most part, still a market in search of a business plan. However, non-profit wireless community networks are springing up all over the place -- and there're good reasons for that."

the ojr's let slip the blogs of war takes a few good swings at the warblog phenomenon:

"Shine on, you crazy bloggers! Someday the rest of us will hold our manhoods cheap that we did not blog with you this day. But as long as courage lives and liberty endures, every American will be proud to have you out there, blogging for an audience of none."

ouch.

Enron and the Gramms:

" How long will it take? How many decades and how many scandals have to come and go before we catch on? We're human. We're self-interested. And when left to our own devices, some of us will do the wrong thing.

Some perspective is needed. Unchecked deregulation is an express route to chaos and tragedy. Where the public interest is involved, a certain amount of oversight — effective oversight — is essential."

the sigia list is discussing the Extreme Programming vs. Interaction Design article that i linked to yesterday. there are a bunch of great posts which serve as useful moderating voices in the face of an irrational exuberance for extreme programming tactics. this response is a good case in point:

"It always seems like these guys are trying to defend the software practices of Kafka Software, Inc. I doubt, for example, that anyone at Microsoft or Adobe or Macromedia (or LucasArts or iD or Valve) would ever seriously propose programming first then designing. Maybe that's why those companies are so successful and companies like Netscape can't get rid of 7 year old software bugs. XP is a survival strategy for working within a wild beast. I think the statement that Interaction Design and XP can work together is like saying that recipes and napkins can work together: Napkins are useful for messy dishes, but you cant cook without a recipe."

that said, i think it's important to remember that xp does have something to offer and that good things can happen when worlds collide :

"A Web-centric system that’ driven by traditional programmers will quickly come to the point where those developers must come to grips with the details of the user experience, thus leading them outside their comfort zone (the realm of Java programming, for example) and into the issues of color theory, balance, and form. In the absence of specialized help, this will often lead the team to craft a beautiful, elegant product with the user appeal of a dead fish.

Similarly, a Web-centric system that’s driven by traditional graphic designers will quickly come to the point where those designers must give some life to their pretty pages, thus leading them outside of their comfort zone and into classic programming. In the absence of specialized help, this will often lead to systems with a beautiful presentation that, unfortunately, breaks every time a user clicks their mouse.

Culturally, it’s a challenge to mix these two disparate skill sets."

ohmygod! Extreme Programming vs. Interaction Design is so much fun it should be illegal:

"Kent Beck is known as the father of "extreme programming ," a process created to help developers design and build software that effectively meets user expectations. Alan Cooper is the prime proponent of interaction design , a process with similar goals but different methodology. We brought these two visionaries together to compare philosophies, looking for points of consensus—and points of irreconcilable difference."

[ via christina ]

the new iPhoto applescripts demonstrate why i think things are looking good for apple:

"Make Audio Card: Combine the power of AppleScript, iPhoto, iTunes and QuickTime to create audio cards. Select a track in iTunes, then drag a single image from the iPhoto window onto this droplet. The two elements, the MP3 audio file and iPhoto image, will be combined in the QuickTime Player to produce a movie. Double-click the droplet to set preferences for the card width."

on monday, january 14th at 3:56a.m. eastern standard time, i witnessed a miracle. my sister-in-law and her partner were kind enough to invite me and my wife to participate in the home-birth of their baby girl, ruby scott griffin salmi. it was truly an amazing, awe-inspiring, beyond words experience.

somewhat to my surprise, i discovered that it took about 5 minutes to get past the obvious, superficial aspects of watching a nude woman going through what is typically considered an intensely personal exerience. any uncomfortable feelings soon gave way to very natural emotions of family, bonding and community that i haven't felt in some time. i'm tremendously grateful for gina and diane for being gracious enough to make us part of the birth of their daughter.

experiencing a birth is really, truly beyond words and is something that can instantly alter your perspective on what is important in the world. amazing.

i'm just plain giddy at the thought of three smarty pants - dan bricklin, bob frankston and david reed - getting together to blog. you can see the initial results at satn.org:

"This is a web site for commentary, essays, etc., from David P. Reed, Bob Frankston, and some of their friends. It was initially set up and maintained by Dan Bricklin.

Topics covered include: Internet, computing, telecommunications, protocols, governmental policy, history, innovation, and reliability."

not much there now, but me thinks this will become a regular read. [ via hugh ]

why is it that i continue to attempt to delude myself into believing that i can start and finish a plumbing job in anything approximating a reasonable about time?

since i work in a software organization that subscribes to the capability maturity model , i'm always interested in exploring how to balance the demands from the various stakeholders involved in software development.

that's why i was happy to see peter initiate a great thread on the "politics of design":

"The politics of technology design are examined in the context of software design where there has been an emphasis on “user participation” as a solution to poor software design. However, in examining the realpolitik of design, our research shows that the process must be situated in an organizational and market context. Thus, traditional concepts of user participation tend to be limited and need to be expanded to incorporate a broader organizational model of how technology and work are structured. ."

coincidently, christina links to a complimentary perspective that details the role of project management in design :

"In summary, I think one key to success is to enable a very small set of folks to drive the design thinking. I would much rather have one product designer that has medium proficiency in information design, visual design, and interaction design, than three individuals each contributing only those independent perspectives. You want a small number of people to be able to go and iterate quickly, trying out lots of ideas without hoops, bureaucracy or design by committee, but balanced by input or contributions from all of the disciplines you need."

to round out this incomplete "thought", it's instructive to compare the above perspective with that presented in a new book from luminary ed yourdon [ who, apparently just started a blog ] which has the hyperbolic title, managing high-intensity internet projects . despite the title, he does articulate a pragmatic approach to developing "internet projects" which attempts to balance many of the conflicting tensions. unfortunately, the book relegates usability issues to a small paragraph in the chapter on testing that ends with the obvious recommendation that it's in everyone's best interest to start testing as soon as possible, rather than waiting for when the coding activity has been completed. nice thought, but skimpy the details.

hi. ho.

so, regular readers might notice that i'm fond of using an introductory so. i've never given a lot of thought as to why, where or when the affectation began, but david weinberger has an interesting theory :

"So — and, by the way, this is the proper use of "so", indicating a conclusion is about to be drawn — I speak with some authority when I ask why "so" has spread so quickly among the computing class. Could it be that the shortened attention spans, the need to have hyperlinked escape routes out of every paragraph, the fracturing of knowledge and story into bytes and sound bytes — could all this be taking its toll, so that we resort to a false connectivity, the equivalent of starting a conversation by saying "Well, anyway"? Or is the "so" playing a different role, announcing that what follows is going to take at least a few sentences, a way of holding off interruptions, exactly equivalent to our children's use of a rising inflection ... at the end of sentences ... to let us know ... that they're not done ..., they're not ready to relinquish the floor..., heaven forbid someone else should get a word in .... Or is it both: a false sense of logical connectedness and a brazen land grab of our attention?"

so - you go.

despite some indications that jabber.com might have to tweak their business model a bit, they still decided to release the source to a few components, including JECL:

"Jabber External Component Libraries (JECL), a set of programming interfaces for building Jabber server applications. JECL 1.0 provides a programming interface to build applications that take advantage of Jabber's extensible XML messaging platform. Examples are directory services and collaborative applications."

and there's the new book from peter - the chatbot chapter is online:

"In this article, we take a look at bots, those programs-with-character that hang around in chat channels and amuse, help, and generally make the day a little more pleasant for those people who talk to them. We'll take a close look at ChatBot, beloved of the participants in the Jabber Developer's room "jdev", which is hosted on conference.jabber.org."

that reminds me. i should update pixie so she can impress you with her loquacious wittiness.

great. just what i need. as dan gillmor points out, the new google newspage could become a big timesucker:

"Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, explained it to me yesterday. The spiders check a slew of news Web sites every hour, look for stories about similar topics and then rank them for importance in that specific time span."

cool.

well, the catholic altar boy in me sure likes the sound of prosperity through punishment:

"Cooperation can flourish if the public-spirited majority can punish freeloaders, say Swiss economists. People will pay to punish - suggesting that their notions of fairness outweigh selfish considerations. The work may help explain why people cooperate in society."

Man in the white suit:

"For all the promise and opportunity of these new technologies, we should be wary of pitfalls along the way to the new pervasive paradise. At the end of the movie, the white suit disintegrates due to a flaw in the formula. As our hero stands before a dissipating mob of workers and employers clad only in his underwear, he checks his notes and appears to discover an error in his calculations. With a knowing "I see!" the man in the white suit walks away toward the future with a spring in his step."

in contrast to a recent prediction of interoperability coming to im, those of us running a jabber server still have to contend with being blacklisted:

"This past Sunday, AOL blacklisted my public Jabber server, Theoretic.com , making it only the third Jabber server to be blocked from accessing the AIM and ICQ networks, after the two "official" public Jabber servers of Jabber.ORG and Jabber.COM.

"This story takes everyone from reasoning out my own options to ending up understanding my solution is easy, but the cures for the greater symptoms are much more difficult to obtain, and asks how prodigy projects can hope to face corporate titans and forces of nature."

what in the world has happened to chris langreiter? it doesn't look good.

please sir, may i have another.

sweet lord. sometimes there is nothing - and i do mean nothing - quiet as painful as a 9 hour meeting with a group that is attemtping to find direction by consensus.

sometimes you just needs to act.

all that and it makes a great ihat, too. kewl.

althought it doesn't really live-up to the hype that i had created in my own mind, that doesn't mean apple isn't onto something.

the best news is that the original imac is only $799, which is priced right for the education market.

in fire and motion, joel does a masterful job of tying together seemingly simple things into a nice, solid essay on plugging-away in a competitive field:

"I remembered this for a long time. I noticed how almost every kind of military strategy, from air force dogfights to large scale naval maneuvers, is based on the idea of Fire and Motion. It took me another fifteen years to realize that the principle of Fire and Motion is how you get things done in life. You have to move forward a little bit, every day. It doesn't matter if your code is lame and buggy and nobody wants it. If you are moving forward, writing code and fixing bugs constantly, time is on your side. Watch out when your competition fires at you. Do they just want to force you to keep busy reacting to their volleys, so you can't move forward?"

A Two-Pound UNIX Workstation On the Cheap

" Sometimes it's important to do something just to see if you can; indeed, the search for that lone datum is all that separates it from the completely meaningless gesture.

It is because of my quest for dubious knowledge that I come to you today from a keyboard so tiny that I could probably type faster on it with chopsticks than with my fingers. But hey, it works."

[ via dangerousmeta ]

cam writes a list of things he learned in 2001 which contains a really simple lesson:

"No matter how good your idea may sound, chances are someone else has already thought of it. Accept this as a kind of self-compliment."

for whatever reason, i had this lesson burned-in at birth and it always amazes me how many people will assume that a perfectly good idea is a bad idea if someone else has thought of it. strange really - the world is a big place and it's just a conceit to believe that your idea is a new idea. a conceit which is much less difficult to propagate now that google is around.

this lesson is really a rule, with a corollary relevant to programmers:

"It’s been said by other people, but it’s worth repeating: the best programmers these days know how to use the Web to solve problems.

I’m not talking about just knowing how to find things on MSDN online or Apple’s developer site . As often as not, the problem I need to solve hasn’t been addressed there—but somebody, somewhere has run across the same thing and found a solution."

on npr's all things considered i heard a story about to-do lists that mentioned a long-standing personal to-do that apparently is pretty common - start and actually finish ten books which i've purchased but haven't read.

first up is Seek : Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond.

alan reiter engages in a little out-of-the-box thinking for wireless data and brings up the hot topic integrating cellular with 802.11 . as he points out boingo got some cash from sprintpcs , voicestream is itching to purchase mobilestar and now ntt communications is rolling out its own network of hotspots:

"NTT Communications plans to launch in April 2002 an Internet access service in Tokyo based on a network of wireless LAN hotspots in restaurants, hotels and other facilities."

"The move is further evidence of a growing interest by carriers and other big service providers to use 802.11-based wireless LAN technology to create wireless connections to their network services. It is possible that such wireless LAN access points would become the next generation of 'pay phones' for wireless data users."

if you loved loved thinking in java and are into python then you might be happy to know that bruce in working on thinking in python.

o.k. maybe just one more look back - fray: a year in stories :

"In the next few pages you'll read 12 stories from 12 authors about 2001. I asked them each to tell a story from a month that somehow represented the year for them. Their stories fall all over the spectrum from hope to despair. From home and away, they redefined normal, changed priorities, made choices, and found resolve.

These stories paint a complicated, truthful, intimate portrait of 2001. And, of course, you're invited to add your story to the mix, too."

[ via cam ]