Status-Q

"Does distributed computing have to be any harder than this? I don't think so."

No, it doesn't have to be, in many cases. I've just been making my first real use of XML-RPC, and it was perfectly adequate for my needs, trivial to install (at least for Python) and to debug. It's also very easy to learn, especially if you understand XML; the entire spec is just a couple of pages, written in a very laid-back Dave Winer-ish 'this bit isn't defined, it's application/implementation-dependent' style which would probably make writers of most other technical specifications begrudge it the name.

The big question, then, is what the other systems like SOAP, Java RMI, and more particularly CORBA, give you that make them worth the steeper learning curve, the installation hassles, and the devotion of large areas of bookshelf to 'real' specifications.

Well, you get performance, for one thing. It would be hard to define a less efficient method of sending certain types of data around than encoding them as a structured text document and using a general purpose parser to decode them at the other end. But unless speed is an absolute requirement for you, other factors are likely to be more important. Ever written a shell script, a Perl program, a Java application when you could have used C? Precisely. Developer time is more expensive than processing power.

But with many of these other systems you also get a raft of services that XML-RPC doesn't try to provide. Callback mechanisms, interface discovery, security, naming services, to mention a few. You also get a more thoroughly-defined agreement between server and client as to what the nature of the interaction is going to be. All these things add complexity, which is what makes other RPC systems more difficult to learn, but it's complexity you may have to implement yourself if you're building substantial mission-critical systems based on XML-RPC.

So the XML-RPC premise is that most distributed systems aren't like that. That the required interactions are typically simple things and don't need the complexity that something like CORBA can bring to your development. That the relatively slow speed of the internet or of user interaction makes the speed of the RPC system irrelevant. For the sort of stuff I'm doing, this is usually true, which is good because it means I can spend less time worrying about the plumbing.

So, should you use XML-RPC? I guess the answer is 'application/implementation-dependent'...

My trusty old Palm V died recently, and I'm trying to switch to a Compaq iPAQ as an experiment. You can read about my experiences in "How I survived the move from Palm to Windows CE"!

Microsoft want me to change my name. I tried to create a Hotmail account, and I kept getting an error: "Last Name contains reserved or ineligible word. Please select another."

At CNET there's a comparison of Windows 2000 vs Mac OS X which comes out in favour of OS X. I'm a bit dubious about the higher OS X score for hardware compatibility, but it's pleasing none the less. I currently use 3 machines on a regular basis. One runs Win2K, one runs Linux, and one runs Mac OS X. They all have their pros and cons, but if I could keep just one, I think it would be the Mac. I find myself pining for it when I'm using the others and, for all its current limitations, the reverse is seldom true.

In the News section of his site, Jakob Nielsen says that .NET could finally kill off Netscape (and, he even suggests, Apache) because it will be the only standard for micropayments. "The choice is easy: Use Bill's solution and you get a sustainable business model for your website. Use anything else ... and you will go out of business for lack of a revenue stream. " I've always called these small payments micro-billing. I didn't realise I was making a pun.

Internet-connected coffee pots are useful after all! The i-Pot keeps an eye on elderly relatives by monitoring their tea-drinking!

Sending an SMS message this morning, I was struck by how the enforced brevity lent it a certain similarity to the good old telegram.

SMS messages are limited to 160 characters and, typically entered on a keyboard which is far from optimal, would probably be short anyway. With some service providers they are also ridiculously expensive - I pay about 12p (18c) to send a few words. Despite this, one can usually say enough to get one's meaning across and the convenience makes it worth while.

This made me wonder: Would the world be a better place if email weren't, as it is now, effectively free of charge? If we had to pay a couple of cents per word per recipient for every email, it might encourage us to be more succinct, and it would also greatly reduce spam. I suspect the result would be a better quality of life for all :-)

Somewhere, yesterday, I read something to the effect that:

If a picture is worth a thousand words, how come nobody's yet painted a picture which says that?

While I was in the shower in my usual semi-concious state this morning, all sorts of developments of this idea started popping into my head. Like:

• Maybe pictures have a kind of minimum efficient transfer unit size, and are only useful for concepts of a thousand words or more.
• Maybe pictures are just not good for meta-information?
• Is a video programme worth a thousand audio programmes? I think not. Does this disprove the rule?
• Is the ease of depicting a concept pictorially inversely proportional to the number of words needed to describe it?

Of course, some might argue that any good picture is not only worth a thousand words, but implicitly conveys the subtext that a picture is worth a thousand words, and hence nobody needs to spell it out explicitly!

Mmm. Time for bed...

The Trojan Room Coffee Pot is still getting attention. Here are some of the recent articles about its planned shutdown:

* Front page of London Times * Front page of Washington Post * The Guardian * Wired

Update, 2017: Many of these links are no longer live, but you can find updated links and various other bits of media coverage on my Coffee Pot page. Thanks to Narendra Meena for help in updating these.

A recent survey says that less

than half of US college students are now taking hifi systems to college with

There's a Wired News Radio interview discussing some of the implications.