Ahh, nostalgia! You can find some very elderly versions of Netscape still available for download on
Netscape’s FTP server. Still have a Windows 3.1 machine? No problem! Just grab a copy of Netscape 2 or 3.
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August 12th, 2001
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August 12th, 2001
Today’s Sunday Telegraph has an interview with Gore Vidal. Does he think there’s immortality in books?
“I would doubt it now. Do you see anybody reading anything in the near future? The book is almost irrelevant. Poetry has the best chance. Fiction, I’m not so sure. I see the essay as probably the last necessary form of prose. I can imagine Montaigne outlasting Shakespeare, who will have become too difficult.”
Weblog entries must be amongst the most transient of writings.
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August 12th, 2001
The auction of the Trojan Room Coffee Pot has closed on eBay with a bid of over £3000, which will apparently go towards purchasing a new coffee machine in the new Computer Lab. The coffee should be a bit better now.
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August 11th, 2001
I’ve just come back from a fabulous holiday in Austria, where I was woken each morning by cowbells, as the cows from the farm where we were staying meandered down the road to their green and pleasant pastures. Hiking in the mountains, we would sometimes come across large numbers munching away, and it would sound like a wind-chime factory.
It’s a wonderful thing that nobody has yet replaced these bells with electronic beepers, or even silent radio beacons. This is a fabulously appropriate technology, a location system which uses no electricity, is rugged and weatherproof, and actually enhances the environment in which it is installed.
So here’s a challenge to mobile phone manufacturers: Can you produce a phone which, as well as being small, light etc, has a ringtone which does its job of alerting the user, while actually being pleasant to listen to? By ‘pleasant’ I mean actually pleasing, rather than ‘not annoying’. You could use that built-in microphone to choose an appropriate volume level, too. Oh, and I’d like mine to play extracts from The Sound of Music, please.
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July 29th, 2001
Seditious thought for the day: Is the phrase ‘Strike while the iron is hot’ really a call for industrial action amongst housewives?
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July 28th, 2001
Tom Bradford’s ‘The Future of XML‘ is a timely warning. Perhaps the motto for the W3C should be one of my favourite quotes, taken from Antoine de Saint-Exupery:
You know you have reached perfection in design, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to be taken away.
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July 26th, 2001
There is a quote from Byte at the top of the XML-RPC home page:
“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’…
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July 8th, 2001
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“!
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June 30th, 2001
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.”
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June 10th, 2001
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.
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May 15th, 2001
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.
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April 29th, 2001
Internet-connected coffee pots are useful after all!
The i-Pot keeps an eye on elderly relatives by monitoring their tea-drinking!
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