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

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

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

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

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

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

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