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Permanent link to archive for Tuesday, December 04, 2001. Tuesday, December 04, 2001

Good morning Segway users! 

BTW, Verisighhhn doesn't like our centralized WhoIs tool. So I ported it to Radio. It works. Heh. 

The third candidate for best-named-blog of 2001. And I like the name of this blog for some reason. 

Brandon Watson: "Can you get some discussion going on the gone.scr mail that is running around the Internet. We don't know what it does over here since no one opened it, but it would be good to know." 

Josh Lucas: "Jericho is a Java-based weblogging tool which interfaces with the Blogger and Manila XML-RPC interface." 

Happy Birthday to EditThisPage.Com! It's 2 today. 

New acronym. DWHP == Desktop Website Home Page. 

BTW, I'm starting to assemble the Thanks To list for Radio 7.1. At the top of the list will be a surprise, perhaps. A hearty thank you to Cobalt for showing me that browser-based user interfaces are optimized for user convenience. How's that for a string of smarmy buzzwords! 

BTW, I finally was able to stump Dictionary.Com in the following bit. They don't have kvell. But they do have smarmy

Everyone's kvelling over Linus's email about software evolution. Hey he's right. It's a restatement of the We Make Shitty Software philosophy. And Doug Engelbart's philosophy of bootstrapping

Before the Sept 11 attack I got a review copy of Steve Lohr's book about programming history. It sat on the night table until last night when I read a couple of chapters and skimmed the rest. Lohr is a reporter for the NY Times. The book is more popular watered-down lies about the history of software. I read the chapter on Unix. The Unix developers were my heroes when I was in grad school at UW-Madison in the mid-late 70s. I took their philosophy with me to CP/M, then the Apple II, then the IBM PC, then Macintosh, then the Web. Along the road I met many others who had adopted the lightweight do-it-then-use-it attitude of Unix. Lohr says that their philosophy resurfaced in the "open source movement" in the 90s. What a bunch of hooey. I hope that lie doesn't stick. Unix was far more influential. 

Hey it turns out that the ICANN blog has been running for almost a year. I found it through weblogs.com which is turning into the meeting place for blogging excellence on the Internet. Couldn't be more pleased. The proprietor, Bret Fausett, wants to create a non-profit to manage a new Top-Level Domain called .blog. I don't really like the idea of new TLD's, but if there were going to be any new ones, this is the one I'd go for. (I don't like them because new land grabs are a waste of energy. We're just starting to get back to work after the mania.) Much more important is the idea that you can blog something like ICANN. This is how we make the Internet work. Commit your time to improving something you care about. 

Patrick Logan: Dynamic Languages

Another good example of passion in the blogging world is Kevin Werbach's campaign for open spectrum. It's great to see him get evangelical. I'm going to write something about open spectrum myself. It's an interesting idea. I didn't know about it until I read Kevin's piece

Note to Glenn Fleishman, we are getting close. Very soon. Sorry for the outage. 7.1 runs native on Mac OS X. 

Progress report on my cold. My nose is running like an open faucet. My spirits are very high, in a good mood. Sneezing and wheezing. Whatever. 

RMI, give it up already 

Got a note from someone at IBM saying they had done performance testing on wire protocols and found that RMI was 1000 times faster than SOAP. Of course this is meaningless. You have to measure performance in the context of deployed apps and their scaling profile. How much of your time is spent serializing and deserializing RPC's? As you approach a scaling wall, optimize.

The problem with RMI is that it only gets you to Java. If that's where you want to go today, go for it. Our servers run zero percent Java. If Sun really had the answer, they should have blasted RMI toolkits into every development environment known to man. But they didn't do it. C'est la vie, and quit bitching about it.

Isn't it funny that way back then Sun was telling the rest of us to get out of the box. The subtext was "get into ours." Heh. BTW, this was the bond that tied us to MS when we did the initial work on SOAP in 1998. We all hated what Sun was trying to do to developers. It's a different world now.

Of course MS's pitch to developers today, lame as it is, is almost equivalent to Sun's old pitch. Moral of the story, the bad guys won inside MS. For now.

     

Last update: Tuesday, December 04, 2001 at 5:46 PM Eastern.

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