alek blogs

To live and die coding ...

Live to code .. code is poetry ... nice article/documentary The JBoss Group forks:

I realize there are two types of friends in this world. Normal friends and the ones you can code with.

So we see ,,,

created Thu 5 June 2003 3:40 EST [2003/6/5 3:40 EST] permalink

Where is my meta super uber maven?

Rants can be fun especially of they touch the gist of real issue, such as Hani on maven:

(...)No doubt that road will in turn lead to yet another tool to manage maven.(...)

If you build metadata driven build tool then better you make it easy for users, trying to fix tool by adding another tool with more metadata may not help ...

created Sun 15 June 2003 1:10 EST [2003/6/15 1:10 EST] permalink

Note to myself: check your dream job before you start learning it ...

This looked pretty insightful to me (from How Vienna Escaped the Cubicle) :

(...)I had also spent some time shadowing doctors. I went to Stanford Hospital and followed doctors around on their shifts. For the most part, their work consisted of a lot of bureaucracy. The everyday life consisted of filling out forms, and then filling out other forms, and then dictating forms to other people.

I know that everybody probably gets disillusioned with their career at some point, but I got disillusioned with mine before it even started.(...)

created Wed 18 June 2003 5:10 PM EST [2003/6/18 17:10 EST] permalink

How to do two way, p2p, symmetrical web using asymmetrical pull ...

In RSS: Promise and Peril Tim Bray talks about use of RSS providing notification mechanism to track state changes of Web services such as credit card transactions, weather, traffic reports, sales tracking, ...

This is very useful but what caught my attention is that by using RSS pull mechanism (or similar approaches that are asymmetrical) we may finally achieve p2p functionality (symmetry) that long time ago was promised with ubiquitous IP address (Internet enabled toaster anyone?). This makes sense for clients behind firewalls and other NATs i.e. majority of Internet users, clients that have no public IP address (asymmetrical web ?). Now the problem is really who will pay for it: how to stream commercials in RSS?

NOTE: this is how i designed event/message notification in XEvents/XMessages, to provide maximum flexibility it is based on pulling events matching filters, and application that is pulling may maintain token to allow to recover from disconnections (similar but more powerful than ETag).

created Fri 20 June 2003 7:18 PM EST [2003/6/20 19:18 EST] permalink

Heart of Science (And Fiction)?

From interview with Michael Swanwick [cached]:

(...)Scientists often start from an intuition or an emotional preference and work outward from there. Logic is only a tool, like a chisel or a gas chromatograph, that they use in their work. Far more central to the enterprise is intellectual honesty, the ability to admit that they may possibly be wrong or, even better, that the guy with the opposing viewpoint may be making a valid contribution. I saw an auditorium full of people give John Ostrom a standing ovation after he made the introductory statement at a symposium on the early evolution of birds. It was a powerful, emotional thing to witness, and afterwards the guy next to me leaned over and said, "Did you notice who was the first one on his feet?" And he named a man whose theories were in direct conflict with Ostrom's. But he could still applaud the integrity of Ostrom's work. That was extraordinary.(...)

on appeal of dinosaurs:

(...) That's an easy one. It's because dinosaurs are (a) monsters, (b) real and (c) safely extinct. It's an unbeatable combination! My paleontologist friends hate it when I use the M-word, but let's be honest here, that's the appeal. There's a story that Kenneth Carpenter saw a Godzilla movie when he was a boy and immediately decided that he was going to devote his life to studying such creatures. Then, when his parents gently broke it to him that Godzilla was imaginary, he switched his loyalties over to dinosaurs, as the next best thing. Decades later he discovered a new species of theropod and named it Gojirasaurus. Thus keeping a better faith with his younger self than most adults do. (...)

and on advantage of science fiction:

(...)But in science fiction you've got a readership that's willing to let you sprawl. So long as you're entertaining them, they don't mind if it takes you a few extra pages to reach the end. This is why so much literary mainstream short fiction feels so much tighter than SF does. The advantage here is to SF. You can take that slack the reader has given you, those extra pages, and use them to cut a few figures, try a few things out, maybe invent something new. That's a priceless gift for the writer.(...)

all together very interesting author and writes short books so well worth checking out!

created Mon June 23, 2003 7:55 PM EST [2003/6/23 19:55 EST] permalink

Is Semantic Web for Humans Or Machines?

After somewhat long discussion with Jack Park (and lot of emails exchanged) I have come to conclusion: semantic web will work if metadata/XML/documents are easy to parse by humans and can be transformed ot from that is easy to use by machine.

I would put easy to read by humans as high priority and machine parsing ability as second requirement.

This is simply what made the difference between RSS 0.9x/2.0 and RSS 1.0 ...

created Mon June 23, 2003 8:48 PM EST [2003/6/23 20:48 EST] permalink

Future so bright I need sunglasses?

Future so bright i need sunglasses? And it is not that summer is getting hotter but I feel that there are so many possibilities and paths to follow and so much to improve that it is so mind boggling that I need sunglasses to look into future ... as if nothing since 1998 changed :-)

created Tue June 24, 2003 3:48 PM EST [2003/6/24 15:48 EST] permalink

Echo Arrives?

As soon as Echo (aka Pie) is well defined microBlog will add support for it.

created Wed June 25, 2003 9:48 PM EST [2003/6/25 21:48 EST] permalink

WSE2 younger brother of WSIF?

(...)Ok, so let's start to talk about the product: It is about SOAP Services. Actually, they still call it Web Services but in fact, it has nothing to do with the web at all. It is only about SOAP anymore - and it is only about SOAP as a framing format anymore. Frankly, I think that this is a very good thing: using HTTP in your mission critical applications might not be the best idea. Wouldn't it be way cooler if you could just take an XML document, wrap it in a SOAP envelope and send it over whatever reliable protocol you like? While still using all WS-* and GXA specifications?

this desription of WSE2 sounds like what WSIF except that WSIF has support for industry standards such as CORBA/IIOP and does not require to send SOAP envlopes.

However the problem with WSIF that it is only client side ...

created Wed June 25, 2003 10:20 PM EST [2003/6/25 22:20 EST] permalink

StoryBlog: tool to prototype merging blogs and story telling.

After even more emails exchanged with Jack Park (who is strong proponent of XML Topic Maps) we plan to get microBlog extended.

The aim is to explore some emerging ideas on how to use Topic Maps to facilitate merging multiple blog RSS feeds into stories.

So we call it StoryBlog. We start simply: first see what we can get by adding <dc:subject> as described in RSS To Topic Maps and go from there ...

UPDATE: StoryBlog project is now created on java.net and waiting approval.

created Fri June 27, 2003 7:10 PM EST [2003/6/27 19:10 EST] permalink

Myth of US Vacations?

Russell Beattie takes a good look on vacation in US and Europe:

(...) Now, the opposite of this concept is true as well - imagine how harsh it is for someone to go from Europe to the U.S. My wife doesn't really understand yet what a 24/7 society like the U.S. is like. She talks about future vacations when we're living in the U.S. and I shake my head softly. "I doubt we'll have much," I say. Even if we do have vacations, they'll never coincide. And undoubtedly something "important" will be happening at work and we'll have to spend half our vacation calling back to voicemail or checking emails. The fact is that vacations are always just short breaks, not true downtime. By the time you're just forgetting about work, it's time to go back.(...)

It seems that the only loophole may be when you stay at university and have three months of vacation (not counting Christmas). The rumor has it that it is even better in Australia ...

created Sat June 28, 2003 2:10 PM EST [2003/6/28 14:10 EST] permalink

Pyramids: returning magic to computing.

Finally magic of computing restored - nobody can doubt that computer requires special secret skills to run machine that looks like pyramid and glows blue in dark ....

created Sat June 28, 2003 3:31 PM EST [2003/6/28 15:31 EST] permalink

Beyond J2EE and Jini is ... ?

Talip Ozturk writes about J2EE and Jini and what is relationship between them:

(...)They are not truely competing technologies rather complementary technologies. if you are writing a J2EE server, you can use Jini's dynamic, self healing features. if a Jini service needs to persist data in a way that entity beans does, then the Jini service can make use of a J2EE server to do that. if you are writing JMS implementation, you might want to leverage Jini JavaSpaces technology. JNDI might internally be interfacing with Jini Lookup Service to gain some dynamic behaviour.(...)

I think that distributed computing is changing with advent of Web Services and in particular Grids. The feature may be something like distributed container that is dynamically created from available services (similar to Jini but on Internet scale) that guaranteed to have all required resources such as performance, bandwidth, transactions etc. as described in SLA, QoS, ... (in this respect it is meeting and superseding requirements of J2EE).

Anyway only future can really tell and some technologies seem to stay longer (or shorter) than predicted.

created Sat June 28, 2003 4:40 PM EST [2003/6/28 16:40 EST] permalink

Google And Zen

Google regarded as a nature force that is unpredictable and requires very special attitude:

(...)Others have a more a Zen-like approach to doing well in Google. "You can't control Google," says a search engine marketer who goes by the name martinibuster on Webmaster World. "Anything you do to control Google, the more you try to manipulate it, the more it will backfire on you. It's counterintuitive, but it's when you let go -- when you don't try to control Google -- then your results get better."(...)

(...)For good reason, Google doesn't talk about its ranking algorithms; if folks knew what Google was doing, the search engine would be easy to trick. But in the absence of information from the company, rumors, theories and groundless speculation run free. On the Web, Google has taken on the aura of a god -- enigmatic, arbitrary, worthy of our fear and our love. Everyone's watching it for signs of anger and of embrace; we know that whatever it does will affect us profoundly, and so people watch it, and they worry.

read more at salon.com titled The Google backlash.

created Sat June 28, 2003 5:12 PM EST [2003/6/28 17:12 EST] permalink

On writing scientific theses ...

It is interesting idea to just put all elements of typical scientific paper as shown in this good spoof of scientific theses [local copy]

Results can be quite intriguing - for example let take a look on related works section:

"Many researchers have attempted to solve such philosophical debates but have been proven unsuccessful. An attempt to determine why the chicken crossed the road showed inconclusive data and resulted in the loss of all test subjects due to traffic fatalities (Hoyman 2001, Larsen 1987)."

Now only if all scientific papers were that short (and funny!) ...

created Mon June 30, 2003 5:13 PM EST [2003/6/30 17:13 EST] permalink

This blog is about:
XML, Java, and everything else (or nothing ..)

Find more about
blog author

Blogroll:
Sam Ruby
Russell Beattie
Diego Doval
Joel on Software
and some (almost) harmless entertainment: The BileBlog

Projects::
MicroLogger
Xydra
WSIF
XmlPull API
XPP3/MXP1
XSOAP
XMessages

RSS
0.92 [validate]
2.0 [validate]

Filter Entries:
Life
Java
XML
Computing
Web Services